Mysterious Night Screamer Remembered

I listen to the radio as I travel back and forth to work and the announcer was asking for funny animal stories. Now, since I was driving, I declined to actually call in but it reminded me of something I wrote as part of an assignment for writing school. I was to write an article which included a personal anecdote.  It of course had to be related to my childhood since it was for children’s literature.  I had to think really hard on what would have happened that would transfer over to a small article. When I eventually came up with something the instructor loved it. I called it “The Mysterious Night Screamer.”

Growing up in rural Florida in the late 1960s we ran across a lot of wildlife. (Example: Once we got to the tree where we waited for the school bus and there was a huge dead alligator. A poacher who was being pursued by the wildlife agent dumped it there. Yes, it scared the daylights out of me. I didn’t know what it was, much less that it was dead.) When I was six or seven I kept getting awakened late at night by what sounded like a woman screaming. I watched enough detective shows that I figured it sounded like a woman being beaten. (What a thing for a little kid to come up with, right?) My parents who apparently were heavy sleepers hadn’t heard it, and it sounded as if it was right outside the window sometimes. I was more curious than scared and, oddly enough, concerned for the poor lady. There were no houses behind our house; just woods and a cow pasture so it was very strange.

Having a large family, my mom often cooked in a large pressure cooker pot – I never did see the lid so perhaps that’s all she had left of it. My older sister and I often got the task of dumping out the few leftovers that remained and it took both of us to haul that pot. One day we each grabbed a handle and headed to those woods behind the house. As we drew closer I spotted something in the trees. “Wow, look at that.” I said to her, pointing to the tree several yards into the woods. “It looks like the shadow of an Indian sitting on the limb with feathers on his head (there were two).” She looked closer, but because the figure was so dark she couldn’t make out what it was either. Shrugging, we just went on about the business of emptying that pot before we got into trouble for dallying. Just as we got inside the tree line we heard something - that scream. Both of us looked up and then we screamed. The pot went flying and we went running out of the woods as fast as our legs would carry us, she in the lead because she was older and taller and ran faster. The pot got left behind for my brothers to retrieve later. That critter lit out the other direction deeper into the woods. We had watched enough Wonderful World of Disney to recognize something that was on the verge of extinction in Florida – a rare black panther.

It must have moved on to different territory because I never heard it again. As an adult, I think it was more scared of us, two very high-pitched screaming girls, than we were of it, but you couldn’t prove it by us at the time.