Around 2020 stories emerged on social media of a cryptid that was being sighted in the Appalachian forests of the Eastern U.S. Witnesses say they thought it was a deer at first until it revealed itself as acting or looking like no deer they had ever seen. The contemporary legend of the "Not-Deer" was born and began migrating online. That's coming up right now on Skeptoid. You are listening to Skeptoid. I'm Sharon Hill, guest hosting for Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The Not-Deer and Weird Appalachian Lore. This episode was sponsored by Jay and Carrie from Middleton, Wisconsin. To sponsor your own episode, come to skeptoid.com/sponsor. Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not. The white-tailed deer of North, Central, and South America is a very common large mammal.
It's so populous that it becomes a nuisance for farmers and gardeners, but also a well-known hazard for drivers. In other words, everyone knows what this deer species looks like and generally has an idea of how it behaves. Around 2019, descriptions of deer that did not behave as expected, began to spread on the internet.
Witnesses, particularly in the Eastern U.S., reported encounters with animals that they initially observed as just another deer, when suddenly the animals exhibited uncanny and bizarre characteristics. These deer were seen making jerky movements or they had out of proportion body parts, particularly the head or legs. Some were observed to be walking on their hind legs as if their front legs were arms. Their skin, eyes, and teeth were wrong.
People reported that the deer made clicking noises or other unnatural sounds. These encounters unnerved the witnesses, and this phenomenon acquired the name, the "Not-Deer." These stories expanded and spread on social media. The Not-Deer appeared on the Tumblr web platform in 2019 and eventually became a popular subject on TikTok and Reddit. As the story spread, the Not-Deer quickly gained a spooky reputation as something menacing and evil.
The Not-Deer stories were situated primarily from the Appalachian region of the U.S. Eventually, the stories morphed and the Not-Deer was described as a malevolent spirit in the form of a deer. This framing was certainly influenced by the increasingly popular thematic and media genre of "weird Appalachia."
Before I unpack that concept, as a lifelong Pennsylvanian and geologist, I have almost exclusively heard the name of this U.S. region pronounced as Appalachia and the mountains as the Appalachians. However, the pronunciation varies regionally with the states south of Pennsylvania border using Appalachia and the Appalachians. You will find content expressing a strong preference for using the latter Appalachia as the only right way.
Correlated with that is the perception that the heart of Appalachia is West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Because many of the video and audio content about the Not-Deer and other weird phenomenon is focused on these areas, I will use the preferred pronunciation. Appalachia is the mountain and valley region inland from the east coast of North America that stretches some 2,000 miles from Alabama to the Canadian maritime provinces. It is geologically and culturally complex.
Formed from multiple mountain-building events beginning about 1 billion years ago and ending about 300 million years ago, tectonic events created ridges and valleys. The region includes well-known mountainous areas, such as the Great Smoky Mountains, Blue Ridge Mountains, Green Mountains, White Mountains, Catskills, Poconos, and the Alleghenies. The location of the mountain chain makes it a natural route for migrating animals. Several large river valleys are sourced there.
The land supports huge tracks of deciduous and coniferous forest land. It was the homeland of many indigenous tribes. The isolation of the mountains and valleys led the later immigrant settler populations to develop their own unique folk culture and they were derogatorily known as "hillbillies," who were often stereotyped as backwards and superstitious. In her 2024 book, The Age of Deer, Erika Howsare expands on the long history between people and deer.
The deer are all around us, yet usually at a middle distance away. They are familiar, yet often hidden, surprising us by their appearance. Deer are too large to ignore, so we will make a point to state that they are there. Howsare also points out something particular about the deer. She says, there's something about how a deer looks back at us. While many animals do not acknowledge people except to flee, the deer sees us, observes us before moving on.
They represent nature, but is beings that are also aware of us. Complex stories and lore about the deer exist as well. In the Americas, the indigenous peoples were reliant on deer for life needs and myths and legends include them as a regular part of life and death. Some unsourced online media claim the idea of the Not-Deer is rooted in the legends of forest spirits of North America, Europe, and Asia, or that the Not-Deer is a part of Appalachian folklore. This is inaccurate.
Deer have a long, varied, but almost entirely benign association with magical concepts worldwide. The horror theme of the Not-Deer stories, was developed only within the past five years or so and have an uncanny and evil tone. The usually timid herbivore, symbolic of nature's beauty we admire, is turned into an unnatural threat. The Not-Deer tales serve as a warning that the wilderness still holds secrets and perils we need to respect.
That overall theme has lately become associated with the Appalachian land itself. "Weird" or "strange" Appalachia is the contrived concept that these forests are haunted and dangerous, hosting supernatural beings.
The lore portrays the woods as enchanted with an ancient magic, as old as the land itself, far older than humans, and that the creatures who dwelled here before us still inhabit the woods in their eldritch forms as monsters, witches, ghosts, and fairies, or may manifest as bizarre sound or lights. The genre of Appalachian folk horror wasn't new. But it ramped up, particularly around 2020 when people began to share experiences.
People told of creepy incidents that occurred while living in the Appalachian woods or while hiking or staying at vacation rentals. Locals would matter of factly state that the woods have always been haunted, leading to the pop cultural idea that it is not unusual for weird things to be observed in these eastern forest lands. Google search shows that Not-Deer related to Appalachia increased as a term of interest, particularly in 2020 and 2021.
The search location most associated with them was West Virginia. Content creators repeated and embellished stories of the Not-Deer in the context of "weird Appalachia" as often seen with cryptids. The descriptions of the Not-Deer morphed and merged with other monster stories.
Thanks to creative license as well as misappropriation of indigenous lore, we see the Not-Deer concept merging into a corrupted version of the Algonquin cannibal spirit of the north, the Wendigo, now erroneously depicted with antlers. Another dramatic take on Not-Deer is that they're not the well-known timid forest creature, but supernatural shapeshifters: humans that have imperfectly taken the form of a deer.
In this sense, the modern Not-Deer followed the creation of "creepypasta" creatures like Slender Man. These are tales spawned from scary made up stories or images spread online by copying and pasting and adding your own flourishes. Copy/pasting of scary tales became the term creepypasta.
Developed and spread artificially fast, unlike regular folklore, these stories are called "folkloresque" and may become so widespread that they enter into our lived culture and become indistinguishable from genuine folklore. Reports of strange deer behavior are common. It's just within the last five years that the theme has gained an association with
cryptids and named the "Not-Deer." I found a reference written in 1975 relating two incidents of strange deer-like creatures that were from the plains, not Appalachia. This came secondhand to Jerome Clark, former editor of Fate Magazine. Clark later wrote in Fortean Times Magazine about these reports. The first was from Mrs. Laub of Calumet, Oklahoma.
She said that around 1951, she saw a creature in her farm field that looked like a cross between a wolf and a deer that stood on four thin deer like legs, but with huge pads for feet. It had long hair, pointed ears and a bushy tail. Then soon after, before Mrs. Laub's account appeared in Fate, Clark's father told him of a weird animal he had encountered along a road in Canby, Minnesota that looked like a small deer, but with a horse-like tail.
He shot at the animal to scare it, but astoundingly it didn't react. Both witnesses noted that they were not like any other animals they'd ever seen. These tales precede the Not-Deer concept by almost five decades. Reports of unnatural animal encounters go back long before that. As you might have anticipated, there are some natural explanations to account for Not-Deer reports in Appalachia. Deer rearing up on their hind legs is not that abnormal.
Deer may take a bipedal stance in several normal situations to see, hear, sniff, or reach food from trees. They also do this to intimidate, fight or play, or even as a surprise reaction to people or objects. Game cameras have caught deer in these positions innumerable times. Deer do not have an easy life in the wild. They're susceptible to injuries, parasites, viruses, bacterial infections, and endangered by humans, their main predator.
Current encounters with Not-Deer are at least somewhat attributable to wildlife diseases that are rampant in white-tailed deer populations resulting in distressing appearance and bizarre behaviors. Diseases associated with coughing and labored breathing, uncoordination, swollen body parts, skin lesions or growths, hair loss, overgrown or misshapen hooves or antlers. And secondary unusual behaviors such as approaching humans, repetitive or unusual motion, and desperate seeking of water or food.
Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease also affects deer and related animals causing pathological behavior. The animal dies within a few days. Chronic Wasting Disease is likely a major cause of people reporting anomalous deer behavior and appearance. CWD is a disease related to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, also known as "mad cow disease." Abnormal proteins called prions are produced in a chain reaction affecting the brain and damaging the nervous system.
It's spread through the population through direct contact and is always fatal. First discovered in Colorado in 1967, it spread east of the Mississippi in 2002, and now has spread across North America. Prions can persist in the environment for years. CWD causes emaciation, drooling and desensitization to threats like people in cars. It can cause tremors, stumbling, and repetitive movements. CWD-infected deer are sometimes referred to as "zombie deer," an unfortunate and inaccurate label.
The deer do not normally attack or bite people. As far as we know, CWD is not transmissible to humans, however, various precautions regarding contact with deer, reporting, and disposal of certain carcass parts, such as the head and spinal column, are employed in areas where the disease is known. Community feeding and watering of wild deer spreads this disease. In some reports related to the Not-Deer, the animal is described as having a bovine or swollen face that makes its appearance unnatural.
The National Deer Association published information on a chronic infection that causes facial swelling. The syndrome has been named "Bullwinkle Deer." Animals with this or other conditions can be startling and confusing to witnesses.
We can conclude that the modern legend of the Not-Deer was heavily influenced by an assemblage of factors that came together beginning around 2019: the cultural appetite for weird Appalachia tales of magical places and their monsters; human encounters with deer both usual and unusual; an expansion of terrible behavioral-altering diseases; and the prevalence of social media that encouraged the spread and embellishment of these stories.
We continue with more on the infamous spooky phenomenon reported in "weird Appalachia" in the ad-free and extended premium feed. To access it, become a supporter at skeptoid.com/gopremium. This has been guest host Sharon Hill. You can find my work on popular cryptids, spooky geology, and anomalous natural phenomenon at my website sharonahill.com.
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