It wasn't common, of course, for a human body to be found torn to shreds or the clothing badly torn and the body severely lacerated. However, there were some common threads sometimes, when these things did happen, when accounts of some such deaths were compared.

If the local police agencies couldn’t solve the mystery they might offer bear attack or wildcat attack as possibilities. Often the deaths went unexplained, except by those who knew of the horrible creature said to roam the woodlands of East Tennessee. Those who knew had no doubt about the meanings of the common threads in the deaths.

And in those deaths, there were indeed common pieces of evidence:

Always, there were very few signs of a struggle; as if the victim had been immediately overwhelmed and unable to fight the attacker with any prowess.

The scene of the attack indicated that the beast or attacker had slung and dragged and thrown and whipped the victim around over the ground in the killing, in perhaps a ten-foot circular area, in a violent rage of attack.

Furthermore, the torn body and the attack scene usually reeked of a terrible odor; some say a "sulfur-like", almost acrid stench. Some say the odor was like that of highly concentrated skunk spray.

Also, if any humans had been anywhere in the general area, there were usually reports, after the fact, that low, guttural, moaning sounds had been heard, off somewhere in the woods during the night of the killing. Not screams, not loud wails, but powerful as to be easily heard in the quiet nights. Grunting as from a wild hog, but maybe more like the low growl of a huge lion, eerily close but at once somewhere off in the distance. Usually, those who reported hearing the sounds said they had not related the sounds at the time to an attack or anything like that, but having been told later that an attack had occurred, they suspected the legendary creature had been in the area and then they began to think aloud that it had done the killing and that that is what they had heard.

The common threads of evidence in these killings always matched tales of a mysterious creature sworn to exist and sworn to have been seen from time to time by most of the people living in the valley, up and down the river along the River Road, now known as “Big Elm Road”.
The creature was legendary even before the first white settlers moved into the area.

Cherokee Indians called the creature “Oolonga-daglalla”, roughly translated as “spirit with knife teeth” and knew it as a ghostly, spirit-like creature that roamed the river valley at night, moaning and bellowing and sometimes killing solitary natives at random. Over time, the name was corrupted by the white man into “The Long Dog”.

The name “Long Dog” was fitting, in the minds of the white people, because of the common description of the creature by those who had seen it but escaped attack.

The creature was said to lope when it ran, much like a wolverine moves. That is to say, it’s leaping movement brought its hind legs up under its front legs and its back arched at each stride, not unlike the movement of an inchworm. The creature moved this way at slow movement or on the run. The scariest, most terrifying sight was to see the creature moving along in its hideous lope, off to the side, parallel to your path but gaining on you even as you stepped faster and faster to get home before it caught you.

Also, the creature was quite long; some say as long as five or six feet long, fully outstretched. So that seemed to fit the corrupted Cherokee name. It had perhaps the length of a large, stout panther, but did not look like a panther and with a much shorter tail. This creature was said to have yellowish-red, glowing eyes that were clearly fiery looking, glowing in the night. Its breath, and it’s difficult to know how someone smelled its breath and survived, was said to have the acrid smell of burning sulfur. Its hair was not sleek and shiny like a panther; rather it was matted and oily. Tracks found along the riverbank showed great, long, sharp claws.

Yet, even though signs and evidence ascribed to the creature were like those of a living beast, it was known to appear and disappear; to take the form of the “Long Dog” sometimes and yet sometimes transform into a spirit-like, ghostly shape; like that of a “living dead zombie”, or vice versa, for lack of a better description.

Sometimes, a person would come up missing and never be found except that a smelly, torn-up attack scene would be found. Legend told in stories by the people along the River Road said that some victims were transformed into zombie-like creatures that also roamed the night, although that was probably just local folklore. They said that when someone encountered and somehow escaped the clutches of one of these zombie-like creatures, they sometimes reported that the spirit or zombie had a face very familiar, sometimes resembling that of one of the missing victims. Also, many reported sightings of these “things” often matched descriptions of sightings reported in and around the Arch (later named Sensabaugh Tunnel by area ghost story thrill seekers).

Reports of these transformed “zombie-like” creatures were rare, however. Most reported sightings described the oolonga-doglalla, or Long Dog creature.

We knew of the Long Dog’s existence when we lived on the River Road in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I had heard the sounds of the creature at night; my older brother Ed had told me what it was and the sounds scared me so badly that I would cover up my head in bed and shudder and cry, even get sick from the fright. I know that local adults were terrified by its possible nearness too, but my parents would seek to comfort us and assure us that it was just the pigs rooting out in the hog lot but we were never allowed to be outside the yard after dark and we were kept inside when the sounds or odor were sensed.

Ed was either brave enough or crazy enough to walk home from Kingsport late at night sometimes and often told of having seen, heard or even been confronted by the Long Dog. He swears he barely escaped the creature one night as he ran home.

Ed was a teenager, about sixteen years old. He was a bit of a rambler and out of the house lots of days and evenings. We had lived many places before we moved to the River Road, including the Long Island neighborhood, downtown Kingsport, Cherokee Village, Old Kingsport, Howard Hill, Bear Town, Nelson Town and other areas. He could easily walk back to those neighborhoods and pal around with his old buddies all of a long Summer’s day and, as might be expected, he would often stay too late in the day and be forced to walk back home as it was getting dark and end up walking all the way up the River Road in the almost pitch black darkness of night along the river.

Sometimes he would go to see a movie at the Gem Theater in Kingsport and if he still had a dime he would ride the city bus out of Kingsport, out Highway 11W to the Rotherwood Mansion, which was there over the west side of the river and just south below the highway, where the River Road took off from the highway and led up the river a couple of miles to our house.

It would be dark and tales of the ghosts of Rotherwood would haunt him and make his hair stand on end and he got off the bus and walked home. He could hear the wailing of long-dead slaves being tortured in the old manse. In his heightened fear he could swear he was seeing the wisps of the ghost of Rowena Ross approaching him, beckoning him. He couldn’t run; the graveled road was full of ruts and chuckholes and he would fall down. He couldn’t run because the road was pitch dark and so he literally had to feel his way along the road.

He said he heard the Long Dog may times, smelled the sulfur of its breath; even saw glimpses of its undulating form breaking through the trees along the river, and its glowing eyes, sometimes getting closer and closer to where Ed was trying to rush along the dark road home without being heard of seen by the creature. He tells about it being after him one such night and almost had him but Ed was close enough to the first house of our settlement, the Nards, and some of that family had a fire going down by the river and were cooking some food over the fire and spotted Ed and as Ed ran up to them the creature turned back down the road toward the Arch and Ed made it in safely that night. Ed was lucky.

Knowing what I do now about the Long Dog, I am stunned that Ed was never one of its victims.

But, the creature somehow would not come near homes and settlements but it would get as close as the nearest woods or where thick underbrush grew and attacks occurred there, not on peoples’ clearings. It came close enough though, as one of the more notorious attacks is said to have occurred at or not far from the mouth of the Arch (now erroneously called “Sensabaugh Tunnel” by thrill seekers). Present-day ghost story enthusiasts say that you can hear the screams of the man who was killed by the Long Dog there, if you stop there just after twilight in the dark stillness.

People outside the River Road area made fun of us for our beliefs, and the fact is that county lawmen never believed the tales and usually would not respond to them, so little or no investigation ever happened.

I do believe that because they were constantly fearful, that was the reason Mom and Dad moved us away from that settlement and back into Kingsport as soon as they could sell our house and property.

If you are silly enough to want to risk your life, walk down the River Road just after twilight some summer night, from Rotherwood and on up past the Arch (“Sensabaugh Tunnel”). See if you can brave the odd happenings around Rotherwood, and along the River Road, and by the Arch. But don’t stay too long; maybe that moan, somewhere near but maybe just off in the distance, isn’t a farm animal in a nearby barnyard. That rustling through the brush and, that feeling of something lightly brushing your cheek … maybe that isn’t the wind. And that faint figure you thought for a moment you saw approaching; maybe that is more than a warm mist rising from the stream running through the Arch and maybe that form you see isn’t that of a mortal being. Maybe the Long Dog will get you if you don’t watch out.

I can tell you that I return to my childhood home in East Tennessee from my present-day Indiana home, every couple of years. As I have grown older, I have given up the thrill of folklore ghost stories. I don’t believe ghost stories or in the supernatural, or the so-called “paranormal”. Yet, I often wonder as I travel back in time and space; “How did the Cherokees know the same creature centuries before we heard sober white men relate its existence? And, when I do go back, should I ever let myself be alone at night, along that dark, gravel road, along the river, near the Arch?

Finally, you don’t have to take my word alone, as to the haunts of the River Road (“Big Elm Road”). Go on the Internet and use such keywords as wordridden.com, then go to the top of the screen and click on "The Scribe” and go down the page to: “L.D; Scaring Myself as a Kid”. I don’t know who wrote that article but it sure is about the same creature. Or, go to “Rotherwood Mansion” or go to “Sensabaugh Tunnel”. At these sites you will see why my brothers and sisters and I still shudder when we remember that, fifty years ago, as small children, we lived within the haunting.-- DAVO. "

Of course, there are hundreds of subjective accounts of people hearing voices, seeing shadows and even being attacked, of their car engine dying and not starting and even, of having handprints appear on their car or seeing a terrifying man sized apparition with red eyes.

Whenever you hear these tales, know they are untrue and that the real mystery of Sensabaugh Tunnel and River Tunnel, yet remain unsolved and beckon for us to probe the dark corners of history, to find the truth, for here, in the mist mountains and in the land of Haints, we must always know our own past...lest we repeat the mistakes we made and forget our heritage of myth and wonder.