His grandmother told him that these mountains held things older than the Cherokee people. Older than the trees, older than the rivers that carved the valleys where they grew up. And she said that among them all, there was only one he truly needed to fear. One that could take from you something no healer could ever get back.
She called it “Kulona Ayliskay. ” In English, “Raven Mock. ” She said it came when someone was dying. Not to comfort them.
Not to guide them. It came to steal the remaining years of their life and add them to its own. That was why the oldest witches in Cherokee stories lived for centuries. They were not gifted.
They were thieves. He was seven years old, sitting on the porch of a wooden house in the hills outside Cherokee, North Carolina, when she told him all of this. He thought she was trying to scare him into being good. He thought it was just a story.
Then, two winters later, his grandfather began to die. On the third night of his illness, he heard something on the roof of the house that he could never explain. Something that sounded like a bird but was not a bird. Something that scratched the roof, then laughed, then fell silent the moment his grandmother began to sing.
His grandfather lived four more days after that. His grandmother said those were four days longer than he was supposed to have. She said she drove it off but only with great difficulty. And she said it would remember her.
She said it would come back for her when her time came. To understand the Raven Mock, you have to understand something about the Cherokee first. The Cherokee did not divide the world into good and evil the way European traditions did. There was no devil.
There was no hell. There was no single absolute darkness with a name and a face. The world was a balance. There was the Upper World, cold and ordered and full of ancient beings.
There was the Under World, hot and chaotic and full of monsters and dreams. And there was this world, the middle place, where humans lived on a great flat island suspended from the sky by four cords, one at each cardinal direction. Everything that happened in this world was a negotiation between the forces above and the forces below. Sickness was an imbalance.
Health was a balance. Death was a transition. Most of the beings that inhabited the dark edges of Cherokee cosmology were not purely evil. They were simply not human.
They had their own needs, their own hungers, their own rules. And if you knew the rules, you could live alongside them. There were the Nunnehi, the immortals who lived under the mountains and sometimes helped lost travelers. There were the Yunwi Tsunsdi, the Little People who could bless a child or curse a hunter depending on how you treated them.
There was the Uktena, the great horned serpent who lived in deep waters. There was Tsul’kalu, the giant hunter with the slanting eyes who owned all the game of the forest. But among all of these, there was only one the Cherokee truly feared. The Raven Mock.
Not because it was the strongest. The Uktena was stronger. Not because it was the largest. Tsul’kalu was larger.
Not because it was the oldest. They feared it because it was the only one that hunted them personally. The only one that entered their homes. The only one that took something from them that could never be replaced, and gave that thing to itself, growing stronger with every feeding.
In the old stories, the Raven Mock was described as a witch, but that word does not translate well. In the Cherokee language, the closest term is “adawihei,” which means something closer to a person of great spiritual power. Some adawihei used their power to heal. Some used it to fight.
And others, the oldest and hungriest among them, used it to feed. According to his grandmother, a person did not become a Raven Mock through study. They became one through choice. There was a moment in the life of every person with great medicine power when they had to decide what to do with what they knew.
Most chose service. A few chose theft. And those who chose theft, over the years and decades, stopped being human entirely. They could take off their skin at night and fly through the air on wings that were not wings, traveling great distances in search of the dying.
They could see the faint glow of a life about to end from miles away. They could smell it the way a shark smells blood in the water. They came in the form of a great dark bird, landing on the roof of the house where the sick person lay, and they began their work. They pulled the dying person’s heart out.
Not the physical heart, for the physical body remained untouched. The life, the essence, the years that remained for that person, they drew it all out through the mouth or the chest and swallowed it, taking it into themselves. Then they flew away, and the person died in their bed sooner than they should have, and no one in the family ever knew what truly happened. Unless there was another adawihei in the house, someone with the training and the courage and the songs, because the Raven Mock could be seen.
The Raven Mock could be named, and the ones who were named, according to the old teachings, died within seven days. That was its only weakness. That was its only rule. His grandmother, who was among the last generation trained in the old songs, had spent her life waiting for the moment she would need them.
That moment came twice. The first time, she saved her husband for four extra days. The second time, she could not save herself. The Raven Mock is not just folklore.
It was carefully documented in some of the earliest written records of Cherokee culture by people who had every reason to be skeptical, and yet wrote down what they were told. The most important of those records was written by a man named James Mooney. He was an ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution. In the 1880s and 1890s, he lived for years among the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina, learning their language and recording their stories.
His book, published in 1900, was titled Myths of the Cherokee. In that book, Mooney devotes an entire chapter to the Raven Mock. He describes it, in his own words, as the most terrible of all the Cherokee witches. He writes that it takes the form of a withered old person, ordinary in daylight, but at night rises and flies through the air like a meteor, making a sound like a raven’s cry passing overhead.
He writes that its hunger is not for food but for life itself, and that it targets the dying especially because they are the easiest prey. When Mooney compared his findings with the folklore of other southeastern tribes, he found something he did not expect. The Choctaw had a similar figure. The Creek had a similar figure.
The Chickasaw had a similar figure, with different names and different details, but the same essential creature. An old witch, human by day and something else by night, coming to the homes of the dying and stealing what remained of their lives. The tribes to the north had it too. The Haudenosaunee, the Lenape, all the way up into what is now Canada, there were versions of the same story.
A shapeshifter, a life thief, something that had always been there. Cross the ocean and you would find it in the folklore of the Sami people of northern Scandinavia. You would find it in the stories of the Ainu of Japan. You would find something like it in the Slavic countryside, in the tales of the vieshtitsa.
Almost every culture that lived near death, sat with the dying and watched the moment the soul left the body, developed a story about something that comes in the dark and takes more than it should. His grandmother believed every culture on earth had a story about the Raven Mock because every culture on earth had encountered the Raven Mock. Not the same individual creature, but the same type, the same category of being, something old and hungry and everywhere. The physical description is remarkably consistent across the accounts.
In human form, the Raven Mock is described as extremely old, withered, shrunken, skin like paper stretched tight over a very small frame, eyes sunken into their sockets, hair thin and pale and often falling out, fingers too long for a person that size and jointed in a way that seems unnatural. The Cherokee said the Raven Mock never looks its true age. Even if it stole a century of years, it still looked seventy or eighty, because the life it took was not for its body. It was for something inside of them.
The body was just a vessel. It aged. It withered. It looked at all times like it was about to die.
But it never died. When it hunted, it changed. It left its home at night, usually through a window or a chimney. It rose into the air, and as it rose, its shape began to transform.
The body elongated. The arms stretched and darkened and became covered in something not quite feathers but like them. The face pushed forward, and the mouth opened and opened and opened wider than any human mouth could open. By the time it was fully aloft, it looked like a great dark bird, but not a natural bird.
The wings did not move quite right. They did not flap so much as beat with a slow, heavy rhythm that produced a sound the Cherokee compared to the deep drumming that opens certain sacred ceremonies. Behind the bird, trailing across the sky, was a line of pale light, like a comet’s tail, or a fire that does not burn. The Cherokee said when you see the Raven Mock flying in the distance, it looks like a bright star moving in the wrong direction.
Traveling the wrong path across the sky, not falling, but traveling. The sound it made was the second identifying feature. It was described as a raven’s cry, but higher and deeper and drawn out longer than any real raven could produce. It was a sound that carried for great distances, and it always came from directly above you, no matter where you stood.
That was one of the ways you could tell it was not a real bird. A real bird’s cry comes from one direction. The Raven Mock’s cry seemed to come from every direction at once, always directly overhead. The old stories said hearing the cry was an ill omen in itself.
It meant the Raven Mock was hunting somewhere in your area that night. The final identifying feature is the way it moves across rooftops. When the Raven Mock lands on the roof of a house where someone is dying, it does not just stand there. It walks slowly, in a specific pattern.
Around the outer edge first, then toward the center. The Cherokee said it was sweeping the house, locating the exact position of the dying person. The sound of that walk across a wooden, metal, or shingled roof was described as scratching. Not hard scratching, but soft scratching.
Like claws slowly dragging across the surface, testing it. His grandmother said you could always tell the difference. A raccoon’s steps were random. It went where it wanted.
It stopped when it wanted. The Raven Mock’s steps followed a pattern. Around the edges, then toward the center. Always the same.
Always slow, and always silent for long stretches while it listened to the breathing in the house below. She said the best way to tell was to hold your breath and count. If the scratching stopped when you stopped breathing and started again when you breathed, then whatever was up there was aware of you. And whatever was up there was listening.
She said, “If that ever happens, don’t run. Don’t scream. Don’t go outside to look. Go straight to the sick person in the house.
Sit by their bed. Hold their hand. And start to sing. ” The song mattered less than the act of singing itself.
What mattered was that a voice was raised in the room where the dying person lay. Because the Raven Mock, according to the old teachings, cannot enter a room where someone is praying, or singing, or speaking the name of the dying person aloud with full love and attention. Its power lies in silence. Its power lies in the moment when the family in the sickroom has fallen into exhausted silence, and everyone watching has dozed off, and the person in the bed is left alone in their final hours with no one speaking on their behalf.
That was when the thing came. In the old Cherokee houses, when someone was dying, there was always someone awake. Always someone talking, or singing, or praying, or reading aloud, around the clock, for as long as it took. Because silence was the gateway.
And silence was what the thing on the roof was waiting for. His grandmother did this for his grandfather. She sat by his bed for six days and six nights, sleeping only in short twenty-minute stretches when his aunt or mother took her place. She sang softly without stopping in the old language, songs she learned from her grandmother.
On the night the scratching began, the third night, she did not stop singing. She sang louder. She reached out her free hand and gestured for the nine-year-old boy to come to her. He stood at the door of that room in his pajamas, staring at her.
He remembers the fear on her face, not fear of the thing on the roof, but fear that he would not come. He did not run. He entered the room. He knelt beside her chair, she placed her hand on the back of his head, and she whispered in English so he would understand: “Sing with me.
Sing anything. Just make noise. ” He did not know any Cherokee songs. He was nine.
He sang the only songs he knew, children’s songs, old hymns, Christmas carols in September. She did not care. After a while, he noticed the scratching on the roof became quieter, then stopped, then started again but farther away, on the other side of the roof, and then disappeared. His grandfather lived exactly four more days.
He died on the seventh day of his illness. His grandmother said those were four days more than the Raven Mock had planned to give him. She said the four extra days were not just for him. They were for all of them, so they could sit with him and hold his hand and tell him they loved him and let him go gently, instead of having his life torn from him in the dark by something they could not see.
That was the first time he saw the old ways work. It was the first time he realized that what his grandmother did was not just a story. It was a job. It was a responsibility.
It was a form of protection that her family had passed down for generations, grandmother to granddaughter, in an unbroken chain reaching back to a time long before any of this was written down. And she told him later that the chain was about to break. Because none of the girls of the next generation had cared to learn it. Not his cousins, not his sister, not him.
They went to public school. They would move away. They would grow up in a world where the old songs were something you learned about in a book, if at all, and where the sound of scratching on the roof was always just a raccoon. She understood.
She was not angry, but she was sad. Because she knew that when she left, there would be no one in the family capable of doing what she had just done. And she knew that meant everyone who came after her, when their time came to die, would die alone in the silence with something above them waiting for the last breath. She was right about that in the end.
Because when her time came twenty-two years later, there was no one who could sing for her. There was only him. And he did not know the songs. In her final illness, she was ninety-one years old, lying in the same house, in the same bed where his grandfather had died.
The family set up a rotation so someone would always be with her, around the clock, just as she had taught them, although none of them knew exactly why. She was in and out of consciousness for the first two weeks. At one point she told his aunt, “They’re coming to take me. Be ready.
Sing. ” His aunt, who had grown up in that house where the old songs were sung every night, looked into her mother’s eyes and said in a very small voice, “I don’t remember the songs. ” His grandmother closed her eyes and was silent for a long time. Then she said in a very calm voice, “Then just make noise.
Just be there. ” He believes those were the last full sentences she ever spoke. On the third night after a hospice nurse estimated she had forty-eight to seventy-two hours, it was his shift, from midnight to six in the morning. The rest of the family was asleep or traveling.
It was just him and his grandmother in her room. At one in the morning, he was reading to her. At about one-thirty, he heard something on the roof. He stopped reading.
He sat very still and listened. It was moving slowly around the outer edge of the roof first, then toward the center, toward the room where he was sitting. He wants to say he was ready for this. He wants to say he remembered everything his grandmother taught him.
He did not. He froze. He could not remember a single song in any language. His mouth was dry.
His hands were trembling. The scratching stopped directly above her bed. He looked up at the ceiling and saw the plaster bulge slightly downward, as if something on the roof was pressing hard enough to distort the wood beneath it. He did not scream.
He did not run. But he could not sing either. What he did was speak her name. He said her name out loud, her full name, her Cherokee name and her English name, one after the other, and he kept repeating it.
He said it and said it and said it. He did not stop. He did not look at the ceiling again. He looked at her face, held her hand, and said her name over and over for what felt like an hour, though it was probably about ten minutes.
The scratching started again, but moved away from the center of the roof back toward the edge, slower this time, almost hesitant. Then he heard, faintly from somewhere far above the house, the sound of something very large moving through the air, a slow heavy rhythm, like a wing, like a drumbeat, like the deep drumming that opens certain sacred ceremonies. Then it faded. He kept speaking her name for twenty more minutes, just to be sure.
When his cousin arrived at three in the morning, he was still saying it. She came in, looked at his face, and did not ask what had happened. She just sat on the other side of the bed, took his grandmother’s other hand, and began saying her name too. Both of them together, speaking their grandmother’s name in the quiet room for the rest of the night until sunrise.
His grandmother lived four more days, exactly like his grandfather. Four extra days. His mother arrived that evening. His uncles flew in the next day.
In the end, there were fourteen people in that house. They took turns sitting with her. They took turns holding her hand. They took turns saying her name, telling her stories about her life, reading to her from her Bible, singing her the hymns she taught them as children.
There was always someone talking. There was always someone making noise. The room was never empty of the living, not for one second, for ninety-six straight hours. She died on the fourth day at four in the afternoon, in broad daylight, with eight of her children and grandchildren in the room holding her hands, saying her name, and singing the old songs or whatever any of them could remember of them.
By any measure, it was a good death. A quiet death. A dignified death. He has thought about that third night many times since.
He has wondered sometimes whether what he heard on the roof was real. But here is what he always comes back to. Whether the Raven Mock is real or not, the four instructions worked. The room was full of voices for four extra days.
His grandmother did not die alone. She did not die in silence. She did not die in fear. She died surrounded by her family, hearing her name spoken with love, hearing the old songs sung poorly by her grandchildren who had forgotten most of the words.
Whatever that is, it is a kind of protection. It is a kind of watching. It is a kind of victory over something, whether you can name that something or not. An old woman he interviewed once, in her nineties, sitting on her porch in Cherokee, North Carolina, looking at the mountains, said this when he asked her what she thought the Raven Mock really was: “It’s the thing that comes when you’re not there.
When you love someone and they’re dying, and you’re with them holding their hand and saying their name, there’s nothing else in the room. There’s only love. There’s only presence. There’s only the two of you.
And in that space, there’s no room for anything else to enter. But when you’re not there, when the family is exhausted, when everyone falls asleep, when the dying person is alone in the room in the dark and no one is holding their hand, no one is saying their name, there is a space. There is an emptiness. And in that emptiness, something comes.
Every time. In every house. In every culture. Since the beginning of the world.
You can call it the Raven Mock. You can call it whatever your people call it, in your language, in your tradition. The name is not the important part. It will come.
And we know how to stop it. You just have to be there. You just have to be there. ”
She died about a year after that conversation.
He does not know who was with her in her final moments. He hopes someone was there. He hopes someone said her name.