Tailypo

Also Known As: also Taily-Po, Taileypo, Tailipoe, Taileybone, Tailybone, Tater Toe; in the older tellings the creature has no name of its own and “tailypo” is its word for its severed tail
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: African American Folklore, Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A patient nocturnal animal that speaks and sings, and that cannot be deflected from recovering the tail cut off its body.
Role in Mythos: It is the avenging half of a Southern jump tale, hunting the hungry man who maimed and ate part of it.
Relation to Humans: It enters human houses to scavenge and becomes lethal only after a person cuts it and eats what was cut. It kills the household dogs first, one by one, and then the person, unless the stolen tail is still whole and can be handed back.

The scratching starts at the top of the door, where the boards have shrunk apart over a hard winter. It is not a knock. It is a slow working of claws in the gap, and under it a voice, thin and patient, singing the same four words the way a child sings them, over and over, until the man in the bed understands that it is not going to stop.

The story is always the same in its bones. A man lives alone in a one-room cabin deep in the woods, with three dogs and not much else. Game is scarce. He is hungry in the way that makes a person stop being careful. Something comes into the cabin after dark, something with a long heavy tail, and he takes an axe or a gun to it, and what he ends up holding is the tail. The rest of the animal goes out into the night screaming. He cooks the tail. In most tellings he shares it with the dogs.

Before any of that, though, there is the moment the thing is simply doing what it does. It comes in low through a gap in the floorboards or a hole where the chinking has fallen out, and it works through the cold kitchen with its nose down, turning over what it finds, taking scraps nobody bothered to put away. A pan shifts. A pot rocks on its base. It is not hunting him. It is scavenging, the way a possum scavenges, and it would have been gone before dawn with nothing worse than a stolen rind.

What it looks like depends on who is telling it, and the descriptions converge on something wrong-shaped rather than something enormous. About the size of a dog. Dark fur that takes the dark with it. Eyes that catch firelight and hand it back red or yellow. Ears pointed and tufted like a bobcat’s. And then the tail, long and thick and heavy and far too much animal for the body it is attached to, which is the whole trouble. The most repeated description splits the difference between a wildcat, bobcat or mountain lion, and an opossum, which is a fair account of what a person actually sees at night in the woods when the eyes are shining and the shape will not resolve. It fights with claws and nothing else. No fire, no venom, no shapeshifting. Claws and time.

The nights afterward run to a pattern. The first visit brings the voice to the door, and the man sets the dogs on it, and they drive it off into the trees and come back. On the second visit one dog does not come back. On the third, none of them do. By the fourth there is nothing between the man and the thing at the foot of his bed except a quilt he has pulled over his head, which he knows is useless and pulls up anyway. Then the weight arrives on his chest, close enough that he can feel the words, and it asks him one more time for its tailypo. Most tellers leave what happens next to the listener. The ones who do not say that in the morning there was nothing left standing but the chimney.

The tale ends on a coda rather than a moral. On nights when the moon shines and the wind blows, the thing can still be heard out in the timber, saying that now it has got its tailypo back. This is a jump tale, built to be shouted at the last line, and generations of children have been grabbed by the arm at exactly the right second.

The variants are where it gets strange. In one Appalachian line the victim is a boy of about eleven, left as man of the house while his father is away, and the creature lives in the chimney rather than the woods, and what the boy finds and drops into the family pot is a piece of meat hanging in the flue. That version, called “Chunk o’ Meat,” runs so close to Raw Head and Bloody Bones that the two look like branches off one stock. Elsewhere the tail is not a tail at all. In “Tater Toe,” and in “The Devil’s Big Toe,” which Leonard Roberts collected from a mountain family in eastern Kentucky, a couple digging potatoes turn up something lumpy that bleeds when they cut it free, and they cook it, and the owner comes down the chimney to ask where his toe went. A toe pulled out of the ground belongs to a body in the ground. The story knows what it has just implied and declines to say it out loud.

The oldest version anyone can point to on paper is stranger still, and almost nobody tells it. It ran in Metropolitan magazine across 1905 and 1906 and was gathered into a book in 1918 as “Taily-Po,” and in it the monster is manufactured. Brer Rabbit, deep in a quarrel with Mr Man about garden peas and goobers, goes off to the swamp witch Mammy-Bammy Big-Money, who takes a cured hide down off her wall, lays it on the floor, throws salt on the fire a little at a time and sings it awake: rise, skin, rise, open your big red eyes, sharpen your long black claws. What gets up off the floorboards and rubs against her leg is a great double-jointed wildcat. Mr Man takes its tail off in a slammed door that same night, throws the tail into his hearth because it will not stop thrashing against his legs, and wakes to the singing. His dogs are Ramboo, Bamboo and Lamboo, and they go the way the later dogs go. The creature claws its own tail back out of the embers and carries it off, the scattered coals take the cabin, and away in the swamp the old witch lifts her head and remarks that she smells meat frying.

That text comes with a warning label. It reaches print through Joel Chandler Harris, a white Atlanta journalist who built his career framing Black oral tradition inside a plantation fiction of his own devising, and he is a channel rather than a source. The tale was already moving among African American storytellers in Georgia before he wrote a word of it down, and among Appalachian and Ozark tellers who had no connection to him at all, in versions with no rabbit and no witch anywhere in them.

Something else is worth noticing about the name. In the older tellings the creature does not have one. It is the critter, the varmint, the thing at the door. Tailypo is not what it is called. Tailypo is its word for its own tail, the noun it keeps shouting through the boards. The monster got its name the way a stray gets one, from the only sound it made.

The shape underneath is much older than Appalachia. Folklorists file it beside the tale of the man from the gallows and beside “The Golden Arm,” stories in which somebody takes a piece of something that was not theirs to take, usually off the dead, and the owner comes back for it and cannot be reasoned out of it. What the Tailypo has instead of powers is that narrowness of purpose. It does not curse, it does not possess, it does not turn up in mirrors. It removes the dogs first, in order, and then it comes inside. It does not need magic. It needs the dogs gone.

Its limits are the same fact seen from the other side. It wants one object, and it will take the object over the revenge if the object is still there to be taken. In a rare African American telling the man never eats the tail at all. He keeps it, and when the creature comes he hands it over, and it leaves, and it does not come back. Everywhere else he is starving, and it is winter, and the tail has been in the pot since the first night, and by the time the scratching starts at the top of the door there is nothing left to give.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Tailypo?

The Tailypo is a monster from Southern American folklore, told mainly in African American and Appalachian storytelling traditions. In the standard tale a hungry man in an isolated cabin cuts the tail off a strange animal that gets into his kitchen at night, then cooks and eats it, and the animal returns night after night demanding its “tailypo” back. It is one of the best-known campfire jump tales in the American South.

What does the Tailypo look like?

Descriptions vary between tellers, but the Tailypo is usually about the size of a dog, covered in dark fur, with pointed tufted ears like a bobcat and eyes that shine red or yellow in firelight. Its defining feature is a long, thick, heavy tail far out of proportion to its body. Several versions describe it as something between a wildcat and an opossum, and it attacks with its claws alone.

What happens to the man’s dogs in the Tailypo story?

The three dogs are the only thing keeping the man alive, and the Tailypo removes them one at a time. On the first night they chase the creature off and all return. On the second night one dog fails to come back, on the third night none do, and only then does the Tailypo come inside.

Can anyone survive the Tailypo?

In most versions no, and the man is killed in his own bed. There is a rare African American telling in which he never eats the tail but keeps it, and when the creature comes for it he simply gives it back, at which point it leaves and never returns. The Tailypo wants the tail more than it wants revenge, so survival depends entirely on the tail still being intact.

Where did the Tailypo story come from?

The tale circulated orally in the American South long before it was printed, with distinct Appalachian, African American and Ozark versions and no single point of origin. Its earliest known printed form is “Taily-Po,” published in Metropolitan magazine in 1905 and 1906 and collected in book form in 1918 by Joel Chandler Harris, whose version has Brer Rabbit conjuring the creature to punish a farmer. Folklorists group the story with “The Golden Arm” and other tales in which a stolen body part is demanded back by its owner.