The Mount Vernon Monster

[FSogol]

It screamed again in Mount Vernon early yesterday morning. Ralph Stickman, the Fairfax County game warden who had been waiting for it in the woods, had just given up and started for his car when he heard that eerie, muted wail-like someone being strangled in the shower.

For the last nine months, nocturnal screaming has come from a patch of woods about one mile from the historic home of George Washington. In freezing rain, driving snow and on hazy summer nights, it has echoed through a neighborhood of $150,000 houses. Children have been frightened. Dogs have barked.

This week the Fairfax County police had had enough. They brought out a Park Police helicopter with searchlights to hover above 100 acres of woods. Six policemen equipped with portable radios were told to stand in the woods and signal to the chopper if they found the screamer. They found nothing.

"I suspect it frustrates the police because they have not been able to catch it," said Dr. William Hark, a physician who specializes in aerospace medicine and lives near the howling in the woods.

Rest of the 1979 Washington Post Story at:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/05/12/the-mount-vernon-monster/e50bffea-9cbf-4414-b9a4-f9d89b80c73f/?utm_term=.8c668a092c98

[Fla Dem]

1. Follow up. Never found out what it was.

[FSogol]

2. As someone who spent a lot of time in the woods, I always thought that was just a fox yelling.

This was one of the stories from my youth and was a big deal in jr high school.