Dolly Parton grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee, the perfect backdrop for scary stories. She remembers being told her fair share of terrifying tales as a kid. Here are a few of the stories that scared the “Coat of Many Colors” singer.
Dolly Parton was scared to get out of bed for fear that Raw Head Bloody Bones would get her
Parton’s mother, Avie Lee, used to tell her kids stories about “ol’ Scratch Eyes” and “Raw Head Bloody Bones” to scare them into getting into bed at night.
“Mama would tell us that Raw Head would get little children who didn’t go to bed when they were supposed to,” Parton wrote in her first memoir, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “Even those among us who were old enough to suspect she might be making all of this up didn’t want to risk it.”
If the kids were ever slow to get to bed, their mother would sneak out back and scratch on the window—”we would all hit the covers like ground squirrels diving into their burrows.”
It’s no wonder that Parton and her siblings would often wet the bed. They were too scared to get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night!
“In all my life I have never seen or heard of anything more horrifying than the image I used to have of Raw Head Bloody Bones,” wrote Parton.
Haints and bobcats
Avie Lee wasn’t the only person telling Parton and her siblings scary stories. Living in the mountains lent itself to scary tales.
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“I can remember hearing some of the old folks talk about ‘haints’ and tell some of the old tales that had been passed down through generations,” wrote Parton. “Maybe parents always had trouble getting their kids to go to bed. Or maybe it was just human nature to create horrifying stories so the real horrors of survival in such a place didn’t seem quite as frightening.”
Though not all the stories were made up. People quietly, cautiously spoke of the bobcats in the woods letting out blood-curdling screams in the middle of the night.
“I later learned that those screams are quite often a part of the bobcat’s lovemaking,” wrote Parton. “Of course, knowing that gave them a completely different kind of fascination for me.”
Parton recalls the ‘painters’ who’d steal children
In addition to the bobcats were the panthers, or as “mountain folk” would call them, according to Parton, “painters.”
“I don’t know how many of them actually exist, especially these days, but there were stories of how they had reached through cracks in the wall and grabbed babies from their cribs,” wrote Parton. “Certainly some of the old houses had cracks in the walls big enough for that.”
Even the grow-ups seemed scared of the panthers in the mountains, which made them all the more scary to young Parton and her siblings.
The “Down From Dover” singer doesn’t know how many of the scary stories from her childhood were true, if any. But they sure kept her on her toes.
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