Wild Girl of Catahoula

In the late nineteenth century, newspapers in Louisiana and far beyond followed the doings of a mysterious figure the press called the Wild Girl of Catahoula. The first stories appeared in the early 1880s and were most intense in 1888. Witnesses described a young, barefoot girl who ran faster than a deer, uttered only gibberish, sometimes carried a knife and carried off a goose and a pig, and always vanished into the woods before anyone could catch her. Her identity was never established.

Historian Terry L. Jones of the University of Louisiana at Monroe, who has written about the case for regional magazines, traces the reports to local newspapers. In July 1888 the Harrisonburg Catahoula News reported that the girl was causing “a great deal of excitement” about fifteen miles west of town, where the Swilley family said she had snatched a goose and escaped several search parties. A month later two men saw her near Hemp’s Creek in LaSalle Parish; the St. Paul Daily Globe repeated that she looked “one of the most ferocious-looking beings that the human eye was ever cast upon.” The men judged her to be about sixteen, around four and a half feet tall, with long brown hair, and said she limped. Three months after that, the St. Martinville Weekly Messenger announced she had “turned up again”: two fishermen on Clear Creek, near Little River, said they saw a hairy, unclothed girl on a log holding a pig and a short knife, and she showed less fear of them than they did of her.

The Clear Creek story made some people suspect a hoax. Jones reports that the Lake Charles Echo claimed Alexandria businessmen had hired J. C. Goulden, one of the fishermen and an artist, to invent the tale so that her image could be used in advertising. But respectable citizens kept reporting encounters for years: by Jones’s account a Pineville merchant and his daughter said they saw her in October 1890, and in 1891 a hairy, powerfully built woman believed to be the same person was reported in upper Franklin Parish, where she was said to have attacked a boy before armed men with dogs failed to catch her. What happened to her is unknown.

Period speculation held that she was the abandoned child of a Romani (then called “Gypsy”) woman who had lived in the area, and one of that woman’s daughters was said to have been deformed, which would explain the footprints suggesting a club foot. Whatever the truth, it is likely that a real child or young woman living in extreme hardship, or possibly several different people, lay behind some of the reports, which makes this one of the more poignant entries among Louisiana’s legends. The story lives on in Louisiana media and in a children’s book by singer and author Yvette Landry, published by Pelican.

Described as a girl of about fourteen to sixteen, around four and a half feet tall, with long brown hair, bare feet and little or no clothing. Some accounts say she was covered with body hair, limped, carried a knife and spoke only gibberish. She was reported to run as fast as a deer.

Wooded creek bottoms, farms and swamps across Catahoula, LaSalle, Franklin and nearby parishes of central and northeastern Louisiana, from Harrisonburg to Hemp’s Creek, Clear Creek and the Pineville area. The reports are concentrated in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

The Wild Girl of Catahoula is a staple of Louisiana history columns and local-legend lists and the subject of magazine essays by historian Terry L. Jones. The story inspired a children’s book, The Wild Girl of Catahoula, by Yvette Landry (Pelican Publishing).