Don't Whistle After Dark: An Eerrie Appalachian Rule

The Fox Is Still On Fire, Episode 1: Don't whistle after dark.

Where I grew up in  West Virginia, that wasn't advice. It was a rule — and the old people who passed it down couldn't always tell you where it came from. They only knew you followed it.

In this  episode, Wallace Cole reads Chapter 1 of his book, The Fox Is Still On Fire, a book of warnings common across Appalachia. What he finds isn't a simple superstition. It's a pattern — one that stretches across cultures, across continents, and across centuries, carried by people who had no way of knowing they were all saying the same thing.

Why did so many unconnected communities arrive at the same warning?

What were the old people trying to protect their children from?

And why does the rule survive long after the explanation has been forgotten?

The story begins with a whistle in the dark.

In This Episode

• The rule Wallace heard before he was old enough to question it
• Why Monroe County grandmothers repeated it — and why they couldn't always say why
• The night Wallace whistled in the woods and something answered
• Appalachian oral tradition and the difference between explanation and instruction
• Strikingly similar warnings from cultures that never had contact with one another
• Why some warnings outlast the civilizations that created them

"The story may disappear. The warning remains."

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New episodes are coming. If you love Appalachian storytelling, folklore, and the questions that linger in old places, follow the show so you don't miss what's next. And if you know someone who grew up hearing rules nobody could explain, send them this episode. They'll know exactly what Wallace is talking about.

Pay attention to what is paying attention to you.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Chapter one Don't Whistle in the Woods After Dark The Rule Don't Whistle in the Woods After Dark Of all the warnings I grew up with in West Virginia, this one has never stopped bothering me. Not because it was the strangest, because everybody seemed to have an explanation for it, and the explanations were all surprisingly similar. I have spent years collecting warnings like this one, rules that people follow without remembering why. Instructions passed from grandmother to grandchild, hand on arm, voice low, no discussion. Over time I began to notice something I had not expected. The same rules kept appearing in places that had no way of comparing notes. Different hollows, different counties, different states, sometimes different centuries. The explanations varied or were missing entirely. But the rules were the same. That pattern has become the subject of this book, not whether the warnings are true, why they survived, why practical, intelligent people carried them across oceans and over mountain ranges, and handed them down through generations of hard living without ever stopping to ask whether they still made sense. This is the first warning I remember. It is the one that started this investigation. My grandmother said it the way she said everything that mattered, plainly and without much interest in discussing it further. I asked her why not. She didn't tell me what was out there, she just said Well, Wallace, why do you whistle to a dog? To call it to you. So what is it that you want to call to you from out of the woods? What do you want following you home? I didn't have an answer for that. The story. The woods behind my grandmother's house in Monroe County, West Virginia go up a ridge. It's not a steep climb, just a steady sloping hill that takes you from the mowed yard, around a grape arbor, past the long garden, through a band of old fence posts with wire long since gone slack, and then up into dense hardwood forest that closes in fast enough that the darkness just drops on you. On a summer evening you notice it most. The sinking sun casts long shadows from the mountains and the trees, and evening fog begins to gather. The valley below, where my grandmother's place sits, still holds some light when the ridge is already dark. I want you to understand what that hollow looked like in the last hour before dark, because it matters. The mountains on either side faded from green to blue to purple in the distance. Lightning bugs were already working the lower meadow, those slow cold pulses of light hanging in the damp air over the grass. The smell of whatever my grandmother had been cooking for supper was still in the air. Biscuits, I think, and something on the stove that smelled like chicken or maybe pork chops. The porch light was on behind us. The yard was mowed tight. The grape arbor stood between us and the house, and the white hydrangeas on either side of the porch were big enough that summer to almost hide the porch rail. It was the kind of evening that makes you feel like nothing bad has ever happened anywhere. The Katy Dids had started up in the trees along the fence line. I don't know if you've ever heard the song of the Katy Dids. Their name is their song, but the way they sing it is unexpected. The first two syllables are midrange and the final syllable goes to a higher pitch. Katie did Katy Did. Can you hear that in your mind? It's the steady, insistent late evening and nighttime rhythm that defines how a summer night should sound, the sound of an evening that still has hours of warm air left in it. Then over at Capaldo Pond, the Capaldos were longtime neighbors of my grandmother, the bullfrogs kicked off with their deep, loud booming rum rum juggerum rum rum juggerum and er The air was beginning to cool the way mountain air cools in summer, not cold, just different. The heat going out of it the way heat goes out of a stone after the sun moves past. You could feel the damp beginning to settle. Fog was already collecting in the low places, thin white ribbons of it lying in the bottoms, not yet thick enough to hide anything, but thick enough to soften the edges of the dark coming on. Peter's mountain had gone blue against the eastern sky, that deep, hazy blue that mountains turn when the sun drops behind the opposite ridge and the light leaves them from the top down. The cattle in the far pasture were still grazing. You could see their heads down, cropping grass, dark shapes against the darkening field. They would fall asleep soon, standing and sleeping through the night. Somewhere down the valley somebody had been cutting hay that afternoon, and the sweet, green smell of it was still in the air, mixing with the honeysuckle along the fence and the faint wood smoke from a neighbor's chimney. That is what it felt like to be twelve years old in Munroe County on a summer evening, with nowhere to be and nothing to do, and summer vacations stretching before you like a slow jog. It was as if the whole hillside was leaning back with a slow exhale as it settled down to relax. You didn't think about danger. You didn't think about rules. You thought about the fact that the evening was wide and warm and still going on, and that you were in it, and how long you could pretend not to hear your grandmother calling you to get in the house. I was twelve years old. My cousin came out there with me after supper. He was a year or so older, had spent more time at grandmother's than I had, and knew the property better than me. We weren't doing anything particular. That's what you do when you're twelve and it's summer and it won't be dark for another hour. You go out and you drift toward the woods. I don't remember what we were talking about. I don't remember much of the walk in. What I remember starts at the moment the birds stopped. I didn't register it immediately. That's the thing about silence in the woods. It doesn't announce itself. It just falls. The thrushes had been going the whole time we were walking, that evening song they do, and somewhere up the ridge a woodpecker had been working a dead tree. And then at some point those sounds were simply gone. And I don't know exactly when they stopped because the absence was gradual enough that I only noticed it after the fact. What I noticed first was that the woods had changed in quality, gotten attentive to us somehow, oriented toward us in a way they hadn't been a few minutes before. I should have said something. I didn't. I don't know what made me whistle. Maybe something in me just wanted to fill the silence. And wasn't a tune, just a two note whistle up into the trees, the way you'd call a dog or announce yourself in a hallway. The kind of thing you do without thinking about it when you're walking through the woods and feeling comfortable about where you are. I had no business feeling comfortable. The trees answered. I know this sounds like I'm about to tell you a ghost story, but I'm not. I'm telling you exactly what happened. I mean that something actually answered my whistle with the same frequency that my whistle had used. It wasn't an echo. An echo comes back flat. It copies what went out, and the delay and the direction are what tell you it's an echo. This wasn't that. This came back from about eighty yards further up the ridge, and it arrived with the quality of a thing that had listened first and was now responding. There was a gap between the whistle and the answer. A gap of the right length to be a living thing considering, not sound bouncing off hardwood. I am aware that mountain terrain does strange things with sound. Ridges act as walls. Hollows channel sound from a distance and make it seem close. On summer evenings when the air is cooling and humidity settles into the low places, sound travels in ways that will surprise you if you don't know the ground. I know all of this. I have known it since I was old enough to know anything about mountains. The answer I heard did not come from a distance. It came from maybe eighty yards up the ridge in the direction my whistle had gone, and it used the same frequency my whistle had used. Not the same sound, the same frequency. I want to be accurate about the difference. A mocking bird uses frequencies it has pulled from somewhere else. This wasn't that either. It felt and I'm reaching a little here, trying to describe something I have turned over in my mind for a long time. Like something that had heard what a whistle was and was demonstrating that it understood. Demonstrating intelligence. I didn't think that then, at that moment, but since then, as I've thought about this event, that's what I came up with. That's as accurately as I can say it. What made it? I don't know. I'm telling you what I heard, and I'm telling you what it was not. The rest you'll have to figure out for yourself. My cousin grabbed my arm hard. He didn't say be quiet. He didn't say what was that? He said one word, whispered it urgently. Don't. He didn't ask what it was. His expression at that moment told me that he already knew something, understood something, although not everything. That was all. We were already moving back down the ridge by the time he said it, and we kept walking, and neither of us said anything else until we cleared the fence line and were on the mowed yard again. I don't know if I was scared exactly. I know I didn't argue. I know I didn't ask what he meant by don't. I knew what he meant. I did wonder why, though. There's a thing that happens when you're twelve years old walking back out of the woods after your cousin grabbed your arm like that. And the light is still in the valley, but the hillside above you is already dark. Your feet do what they need to do, and the rest of you goes very quiet, and pays attention to the sights and sounds around you in a way you don't usually bother to crickets wind through the canopy. I was cataloging, I think, not on purpose, just tallying what was normal, looking to see if things were normal or not. Nothing else answered. Nothing followed us down. The normal sounds returned and held all the way to the fence line, and by the time we were on the grass again, the woods had closed like water over a rock, over the place we'd been standing. As we came around the grape arbor and walked up into the yard, my grandmother was sitting in her glider on the back porch. It sat the left as you come out of the house, facing down toward the garden. It was green and white metal kind, common in the sixties and seventies. Big white hydrangea bushes billowing up on both sides. She looked tired after working around the house all day. A day of cooking and gardening and keeping track of two grandsons will do that. Short dark hair mixed with grey and curled glasses. She was the kind of woman who was on the porch in the evenings because the kitchen hadn't cooled yet from the day's cooking, and the evening air was better. She didn't need to be doing anything to be comfortable being there. She had the glider, she had the cool air, and from where she sat she could see over the arbor and down the slope to the garden and the ridge beyond it. She had probably forty years of knowing exactly what that hollow looked like at this hour, how the light went out of it, how the ridge darkened first. She had been watching the transition from day to night for a long time, and she knew all its phases. She looked at us when we came up. Just looked, in the way she had of taking stock of a thing before she said anything about it. Then she said You didn't whistle out there, did you? I thought I heard a whistle. It wasn't really a question. She didn't say did you with the inflection that wants information. She said it with the inflection that already has the information, and is giving you an opportunity to come clean. I just looked at her, saying nothing. She nodded, she knew, and then she looked back out at the hollow. You don't want to whistle in the woods, boys, not around here, especially at dusk or after dark. Why not, granny? I asked, a little unsettled by her statement. Well, Wallace, why do you whistle to a dog? To call it to you? That's right. So what do you want to call to you from out of those woods? That question was unsettling too. What might come? I asked. Well, no tellin'. A catamount, maybe a heaper. Sometimes things will whistle back, she said. Whistle back? I said in a loud whisper. Ain't nothing out there that you want comin' down here this time of day, she finished. I looked at her. Something did whistle back, I said. She looked at me for a long moment, saw the truth in my eyes. Then she looked at my cousin and saw the agreement there. Then she lifted her eyes and examined the tree line and the woods above for a long minute. She stood. Let's go in, boys. Time for baths. That was the end of it. My cousin and I took baths. Granny watched out the back window for maybe ten minutes, and nobody said anything else about what had happened in the trees. I have thought about that evening a great deal over the years. What bothers me is not the thing on the ridge. What bothers me is that she already knew. She did not ask what did you hear out there or why do you boys look like that? She went directly to the act, the specific act, the whistle, before either of us had said a word. She named the thing I had done, and she asked about it in a voice that already contained the answer. She knew the rule. It was in her before we walked out of the yard that evening. Not a rule she'd made up, a rule she'd received, the way you receive things from people who received them from people before them. She had known for a long time that the whistle had an answer, and she had known long enough that she didn't need to tell me why the answer was a problem. She just needed to know if I'd done it. I still carry both sides of it, what I heard on the ridge, and what she knew on the porch. What the record shows. I grew up with this rule. I thought it was a Munroe County thing, something particular to our hollow, our family, our ridge. It took me a long time to find out how far it actually reaches, and once I started looking, the pattern that emerged was the thing that changed me from someone who collects old stories into someone who investigates them. It's in the Foxfire material out of Raybun County, Georgia. If you don't know Foxfire, in nineteen sixty six a high school teacher named Elliot Wiggington started sending his students up into the North Georgia Mountains to talk to the old people before the old people were gone. They wrote down everything how to build a cabin, how to run a still, how to dress a hog, and right there alongside all of it, said in the same voice as everything else, the old people talked about what you did and didn't do after dark. The whistling rule was in there, not treated like a ghost story, treated like knowledge. A man named Frank C. Brown spent decades collecting folklore from North Carolina mountain communities, Watauga County, Ash County, Madison County. These are places where a ridge between your house and your neighbor's house meant you might not see each other for weeks. Brown found whistling prohibitions all through that material. Whether the exact form I grew up with don't whistle in the woods after dark because something may answer, is sitting in Brown's collection at a specific page number, I haven't confirmed yet. What I can tell you is that wherever somebody went and asked the old people, this rule kept showing up. Now here's where it gets interesting. The Scots Irish who settled these mountains didn't just bring recipes, songs, and family names. They brought an old way of looking at the world. In Irish tradition, the old ones, the people of the hills, were believed to inhabit lonely places, ancient mounds, forests, and the places in between. The old stories repeatedly warn against drawing their attention. People often refused to speak their proper name at all, calling them simply the good people or the other crowd, because names and attention were thought to matter. One Gaelic tradition tells of the fairy wind, a sudden whirlwind believed to conceal or carry the fairy folk. The warning wasn't about whistling specifically. It was broader than that. When something unusual happened after sunset, the safest course was often to leave it alone. The old Irish stories rarely begin with someone whistling. They begin with someone crossing a boundary they didn't recognize until it was too late. A man cuts trees in a ferry fort. A traveller follows music into a hill. Someone speaks too boldly where they should have stayed quiet. The details change. The lesson doesn't. Don't announce yourself unnecessarily. Whistling was simply one expression of a much older idea. Don't deliberately attract the attention of whatever means. May be listening. The inheritance is real. The exact road it traveled to Appalachia still needs tracing. The Cherokee had been in these mountains for a very long time before any of that. James Mooney spent years with the Eastern Band in the eighteen nineties and wrote down what he found. Among it was a night figure called the Raven Mocker, something associated with darkness and uncanny sound, and the stealing of life. The connection between night, dangerous sound, and something that should not be attracted is there in Cherokee belief. Whether that maps exactly onto the whistling rule, whether the Cherokee warning and the Appalachian warning are pointing at the same thing from different sides, I haven't nailed down to the standard this book needs. The overlap is real. The exact match still needs work. I could make this simpler, I could hand you four clean statements. The Cherokee knew it, the Scots Irish knew it, the Germans knew it, the Africans knew it. It would sound definitive. It would also be me telling you more than I've proven. And I'm not going to do that. This book doesn't work if I get out ahead of the evidence. Here's what the evidence does say plainly. The whistling rule is old, older than anyone alive. It's spread across Appalachia and communities that had no regular way of talking to each other. And every tradition that came together in these mountains, Scots Irish, Cherokee, German, African, had already figured out on its own, in its own country, that you needed to be careful about what you called to you in the dark. Think about the geography for a minute. Before the roads, before telephone lines, before radio. The people up in the hollows of Munroe County had no way to compare notes with the people in the hollows of Madison County, North Carolina. The Cherokee towns in the Smoky Mountain foothills weren't in regular conversation with the Scots Irish homesteads up in the Virginia Highlands. These people were not talking to each other. And they all had the same rule. Not similar rules, the same rule. One community could be wrong, one valley could be superstitious. One family could be eccentric. But when people who could not have copied each other, separated by mountains and rivers and generations of isolation, develop the same specific instruction for the same specific danger, that is not folklore. That is a pattern. And patterns, in my experience, deserve to be taken seriously. This rule didn't come from fear. It came from paying attention to the present and remembering the past. My grandmother had the rule. Her grandmother had it before her, and so on back. What we don't know I was twelve. I went up a ridge after supper, and whistled without thinking. Something answered. My grandmother was on the porch when I came back. She already knew. I can tell you what was not on that ridge. It was not an echo. It was not a bird. It was not something I can explain away with the acoustics of the hollow. I know enough about all three to rule them out. What I can't tell you is what's left after I rule those out. I asked my grandmother later, about heapers and catamounts and things that whistle back. She didn't say much more than she'd already said that evening. That's how it worked. You got the rule. You didn't always get the reasons. The rule was supposed to be enough. Here's what I keep coming back to. My grandmother had this rule before I walked into those woods. Her grandmother had it before her. Someone, way back in the long chain of people who passed it along, stood on some mountainside in the dark and whistled. Something answered. And that person came home and told somebody don't do that. And somehow, without telephones, without newspapers, without any way at all of comparing notes across the ridges, the same thing kept happening in Georgia and North Carolina, and Virginia, and Tennessee, and Kentucky, and right here in West Virginia. And the same rule kept coming out of it. I don't know what's on that ridge. I've spent a long time thinking about it, and I am not closer to an answer than I was when I was twelve years old standing on the mowed grass in the dark, looking back up the hill at the tree life. But I know this. When I was twelve, I assumed there was an ordinary explanation, and I just hadn't found it yet. I'm not twelve anymore. I've looked. I've read the folklore. I've talked to the people who still carry the old rules, and what I've found is not an answer. What I've found is a pattern so consistent across so many places and so many years that I am no longer comfortable dismissing it simply because it sounds impossible. I don't whistle in the woods after dark. Not in these mountains. Not anymore. And on summer evenings, when the Katy Dids are going, and the light is leaving the ridge, and the dark is settling into the trees the way it has settled every evening for as long as anyone can remember, I still listen. Not for the echo, for the answer. The one that comes back with a gap in it. The one that sounds like something that heard you, and is considering what to do about it. This all raises a question I have never been able to answer. If the old warnings were meant to keep us from initiating contact, does whatever is out there ever initiate contact first? And if it does, what are you supposed to do then? The warning remains.