Jackalope

Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Cryptids
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A jackrabbit crowned with antelope or deer antlers, credited with mimicking human voices and a vicious turn of speed when cornered.
Role in Mythos: The jackalope is the emblem of American tall-tale humor, a frontier hoax that hardened into a genuine regional folk icon.
Relation to Humans: Cowboys and travellers traded stories of the creature around campfires, and towns like Douglas, Wyoming built whole identities around hunting it. It is reckoned shy and elusive, dangerous only when cornered, and easily fooled by whiskey left out as bait.

The campfire has burned down to coals, the singing has stopped, and somewhere out in the sagebrush a voice picks up the last verse of the song. It carries the cowboy’s own cadence, his own cracked tenor, and it comes from no throat that anyone can find. Old hands on the Wyoming range claimed to know what it was. Out in the dark a jackalope was listening, and answering.

To look at, the creature is almost mundane. It is a jackrabbit, long in the ear and heavy in the hind leg, the kind that can outrun a horse across open ground. What sets it apart sits on its skull: a rack of antlers, sometimes the pronged crown of a pronghorn, sometimes the branching tines of a young deer, grown up out of the fur between the ears. The bone is pale and hard. The rest of the animal is dust-colored and unremarkable, which is part of the joke, because a thing this strange has no business looking so plain from the neck down.

On an ordinary evening it does what any hare does. It comes out at dusk to feed, nose working the cool air, cropping sage and dry grass while the light goes orange and then gray over the high plains. At the crunch of a boot it freezes, ears swivelling, and then it is gone in a spray of dust, antlers and all, faster than the eye can hold it.

The stories the West tells about itself rarely have a single father, but this one nearly does. In 1932, near Douglas, Wyoming, a young man named Douglas Herrick came back from hunting jackrabbits with his brother and tossed a carcass down in the family taxidermy shop. It slid to a stop against a pair of mounted deer antlers on the floor. Herrick looked at the accident and saw something worth selling. The brothers had studied taxidermy by mail order as teenagers, and they knew how to make the graft look like it had grown that way. The first one went to a man named Roy Ball for ten dollars, and Ball hung it on the wall of the La Bonte Hotel. From there the horned rabbit multiplied across curio shops, filling stations, and barrooms until it became something close to a state animal.

The idea, though, was older than the Herrick brothers by centuries. Horned hares hop through the natural histories of Europe from the 1500s onward, catalogued in all seriousness as Lepus cornutus, a species that naturalists took to be real for more than two hundred years. A murderous horned rabbit with a single spike appears in a thirteenth-century Arabic book of wonders as the al-mi’raj. Bavaria kept its own version, the wolpertinger, a horned hare fitted out with wings and fangs. The West did not invent the horned rabbit. It gave it a cowboy’s sense of humor.

There is even a reason the shape keeps recurring. A virus, later named for the researcher Richard Shope who identified it in the 1930s, infects wild rabbits and raises hard, dark growths from their heads, branching keratin exactly where a jackalope’s antlers would sit. A hunter who stumbled on a rabbit wearing those growths would have seen, near enough, the thing the tales described. The legend and the disease kept pointing at each other.

What the tall tales added was a personality. The jackalope sings, or rather it throws the voices of others: coyotes, meadowlarks, owls, and on a bad night a chainsaw. Cowboys swore it would harmonize with them from the brush, holding the tenor line while they sang. It is supposed to be quick enough to be all but impossible to catch and mean enough to earn the name warrior rabbit, dropping its head to drive those antlers into anything that corners it. Its milk, collected at obvious peril, was said to cure whatever ailed a man, and the animal was reckoned to have a serious weakness for whiskey.

That weakness is how you are meant to take one. Leave out whiskey, or a strip of bologna soaked in it, and wait for the creature to drink itself slow. The town of Douglas leans the whole way into the fiction. Its chamber of commerce prints thousands of jackalope hunting licenses a year, valid only between midnight and two in the morning, and only for hunters whose measured intelligence falls below a fixed and unflattering line.

None of it is real. That was always the point. The jackalope was built to be believed just far enough for the believing to be funny, a snare for the credulous tourist and a private handshake among the people telling the story. Even its future is a joke at its own expense. The animal is said to breed only in the flash of a lightning storm, and its antlers make the act awkward, so the species stays conveniently, permanently rare. It is a thing designed never to be pinned down: too fast to catch, too scarce to breed, real only in the seam between a good story and a straight face.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a jackalope?

A jackalope is a mythical creature of North American folklore, a jackrabbit with the antlers of a pronghorn antelope or young deer growing from its head. It is a tall-tale animal of the American West, most closely tied to Wyoming, and is celebrated as a piece of frontier humor rather than a genuine species.

Who invented the jackalope?

The modern American jackalope is credited to Douglas Herrick of Douglas, Wyoming, who with his brother mounted deer antlers onto a jackrabbit carcass in 1932. They sold the first one to a local hotel for ten dollars, and taxidermists have manufactured horned rabbits ever since. The broader idea is far older, appearing in European natural histories as the horned hare Lepus cornutus and in other cultures’ horned-rabbit legends.

Are jackalopes real?

Jackalopes are not a real species; they are a hoax and a folk joke, most famously created through taxidermy. There is a grain of biological truth behind the image, however: a virus called the Shope papillomavirus causes real rabbits to grow hard, antler-like tumors on their heads, which likely inspired some sightings of “horned” rabbits.

What can a jackalope do?

According to folklore, the jackalope can mimic human voices and other sounds, and was said to sing along with cowboys around the campfire in a tenor voice. It is also described as extremely fast and aggressive when cornered, using its antlers to defend itself, which earned it the nickname “warrior rabbit.”

How do you catch a jackalope?

Folklore says a jackalope can be lured with whiskey, since the creature supposedly has a fondness for it, sometimes using whiskey-soaked bait to slow the animal down. The town of Douglas, Wyoming plays along by issuing novelty jackalope hunting licenses valid only between midnight and 2 a.m.