In 1959, a husband and wife were traveling a lonely mountain road outside Saltville, Virginia, in the darkest hours before dawn when something began moving alongside their car.
At first, it was little more than a shape in the darkness. But as the road twisted through the mountains, the couple realized whatever they were seeing wasn’t staying behind them.
It was following them.
And eventually, it came after their car.
The creature was described as having light-colored hair, powerful hind legs, shorter front limbs, and no visible tail. It moved fast enough to keep pace as the couple tried to get away, eventually getting close enough to make contact with the passenger side of the vehicle.
When they finally made it home, there were long scratches along the metal marks that looked almost like claw marks.
But apparently, theirs wasn’t the only strange encounter being talked about around Saltville.
Around the same period, another story began circulating involving two nurses traveling to work for the graveyard shift in a convertible. According to the story, they too were chased by a strange creature. This time, it supposedly leapt onto the back of their car, tore into the convertible top, and became caught in the fabric as the driver accelerated and tried to shake it loose.
Eventually, the women escaped.
But the damaged convertible top remained as a reminder of what they claimed had happened.
Decades later, creatures matching descriptions like these would become associated with a strange piece of American cryptid folklore the Devil Monkey.
So what was supposedly roaming the roads outside Saltville in 1959?
Was it an ordinary animal seen under extraordinary circumstances? An escaped exotic animal? A story that grew stranger with every retelling?
Or was it something that has never been explained?
And there’s another reason Saltville makes an interesting setting for a story like this.
Long before people built roads through this Southwest Virginia valley, ancient animals once gathered around Saltville’s salt marshes. Mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, ancient bison and other creatures once walked across a landscape that looked very different from the one we know today.
Their remains are still part of the history buried beneath Saltville.
That’s the root of this story.
The shadow is what supposedly happened on those mountain roads in 1959.
This week on Roots & Shadows: The Real Appalachia Podcast we travel into the folklore of Southwest Virginia and revisit one of the strangest creature encounters ever associated with Saltville.
Something Chased Them Home: The Devil Monkey of Saltville
Where every root tells a story, and every shadow hides one.