HAUNTED COLUMBUS SERIES: The Talbot County Werewolf Girl

TALBOTTON, GA: The Columbus-area is rich in history and with its rich history the city is also home to a great number of ghost stories. The stories continue outside of the city limits in the surrounding communities. Those stories include one that is not a ghost story but more of a legend that seems like something out of a movie during AMC's Horrorfest and one of the most popular legends in the state of Georgia and it has to do with a werewolf in neighboring Talbot County.

Talbot County is a small community located to the east of Columbus. The county is home to a little more than 6,200 residents and a rather quiet place for the most part. Parts of the county were devastated this March when a powerful tornado tore through areas of the county including the city of Talbotton. However, more than a century ago a story came out of Talbot County that seems as though it was the inspiration for many Hollywood horror movies.

The Burt family was a very prominent and well off family in Talbot County. The family had several children and lived in a home in the Plesant Hill-area located near Talbotton. The children included one daughter by the name of Emily Isabella Burt. Emily's father died at the age of 37-years-old and her mother inherited the family's 300-acre estate.

Shortly after the death of her father, Emily's mother sent her to boarding school in Paris, France. The legend says that while in Europe Emily contract Lycanthropy, a supernatural transformation of a person into a wolf or a mental disorder where a person has a delusion of being an animal, usually a wolf.

After attending boarding school Emily returned to Georgia. When she returned her behavior was oddly different. The legend says that Emily was usually appearing sickly and distant. She often stared off into space and was known to sleepwalk.

Shortly after her return to Talbot County, there was a rash of killing and slaughtering of wildlife including sheep in the area. Many of the residents believed that a wolf may be to blame for the deaths. One night local residents formed a posse and armed themselves to seek and hunt down the wolf responsible for the killings. The legend says that an elderly man in the area who was a native of Eastern Europe told the members of the posse to meltdown anything silver because it was a werewolf they were dealing with and not a regular wolf.

The posse armed with their silver bullets descended into the countryside seeking to find the beast. The story says that one of the members of the posse came across the wolf and it was indeed a werewolf. The hunter shot the werewolf wounding it and the wolf fled into the woods and escaped the posse.

Oddly, the legend says that the next day Emily's mother found her suffering from a gunshot wound. A local doctor treated Emily's wound and shortly after her mother sent her back to Europe for treatment of Lycanthropy by a specialist. The legend says once Emily was shipped off to Europe the killing of livestock stopped in Talbot County.

After an undisclosed amount of time in Europe, Emily is said to have returned to Georgia and was cured of the disorder she suffered from. She lived her life out and became a respected member of the community and inherited the family property which included land in Talbot, Muscogee, and Meriwether Counties.

Emily died on June 18, 1911, and was buried at a cemetery in Woodland, Georgia. She was 69-years-old when she died. While no one knows for sure if there was any truth to the legend of the Werewolf Girl of Georgia the story is one of the most popular legends in the state.