BLASTS FROM THE PAST

The wolf woman of Mobile, Alabama

One scene in the Seventies remake of Invasion of the

Body Snatchers is especially memorable. Towards the end of the film, a dog with a human face briefly walks into view. It is an unexpected sight, lifted out of a surreal nightmare and certain to shock viewers. Something eerily similar once stalked the streets of the city of Mobile, Alabama, at night – but seven years before the film was released.

In April 1971, local newspaper the Mobile

Register asked its readers: “Does a ‘wolf woman’ exist in Mobile?” Its editorial office had been deluged with phone calls, 50 in a week it said, during the day and even at night. Patiently listening to the frantic callers, the newspaper staff began to wonder if there was something out there after all.

Dozens of frightened residents of Davis Avenue and the Plateau neighbourhood told the same story. When night fell, a strange creature, half woman and half wolf, began prowling their streets. It had made its unexpected debut about a week earlier, in the area around Davis Avenue. “It was like a woman and wolf, pretty and hairy,” said one witness. “The top half was a woman and the bottom was a wolf. It didn’t seem natural,” another resident explained.

Local police refused to comment officially on the sightings but indicated that they had launched an investigation. “Apparently the fears are real, regardless of the status of the phantom or whatever,” the newspaper bemusedly concluded, and it remembered a previous monster scare that had hit Mobile back in the 1930s.

If the newspaper report was meant to quell the unrest, it failed. Two days later, the paper admitted that at first the news staff ignored the telephone

One night, officers went out to meet a man who claimed to have cornered the wolf woman, but upon arrival they found only a frightened collie dog.

calls about a mysterious wolf woman or dog woman reported in certain parts of the city. But after the initial newspaper report was published, the calls only increased: “It was evident that some of the people were genuinely frightened.” Treating the panic in a tongue-in-cheek fashion had seemed the best editorial approach at the time, but that had backfired, the newspaper admitted. As a result, the panic became even more intense: “The phone calls rose to a crescendo…” But the newspaper could only speculate about where and how the scare had started. Perhaps it began as a friend-of-a friend story, or foaftale, it suggested: “We don’t know how the wolf woman stories got started. Maybe somebody got scared by some little thing and told a friend. The friend told two more and pretty soon a lot of people were looking over their shoulders. You know how it is when someone starts telling ghost stories.” 2

Two weeks later, the scare had abated and disappeared from the pages of the newspaper. At a talk, Dan T Davis, the chief of the Pritchard Police Department, reminisced about how his officers had received many telephone calls from residents who claimed to have seen the wolf woman. One night, officers even went out to a man who claimed to have cornered the wolf woman, but upon arrival they found only a frightened collie dog. 3 At the end of April, the wolf woman had not been featured in the local newspaper pages for days. The whole thing ended unceremoniously as an attention grabber in a publicity campaign when two drive-in cinemas in Mobile screened the film Bigfoot. Newspaper ads tried to whet the appetite of