The moon-eyed people

Bigfoot is a fun and famous legend, but only a few people have heard about the moon-eyed people of the smoky mountains! A Cherokee legend tells of a race of pale bearded men who lived along the little Tennessee river to Kentucky. They were blind during the day and emerged only at night to hunt, wage war, and build homes and forts made of timber and wood. They supposedly had a line of fortifications along the river and mountains, and lived in rounded wooden huts. They had giant blue eyes and fair white skin, leaving conspiracy theorists to believe that they were descendants of welsh settlers who arrived in the area even before the Spanish did somewhere around 1170 AD. They were supposedly run out of their home either by the Cherokee or some unknown force, or they simply migrated west.

Creek legend on the other hand describes them as being blind during certain phases of the moon, and it was during one of these phases that the creek used to wipe them out entirely.

Whatever happened, they were never seen or heard from again. The legends behind these folk come from native American stories, and there is even some evidence to their legend being real! In the Cherokee county historical museum, there is a statue of the moon eyed people from the Cherokee.

Descriptions of the moon eyed people also differ depending on the native American tribe that supposedly encountered them. The Cherokee describe them as people with fair skin, blonde hair and blue eyes that lived in the mountains until the Cherokee invaded, and other legends describe them as a group of albino folk that hid in caves and away from sunlight.

The most interesting of these legends would be that of the Delaware

and Iroquois Indians when they migrated east. They have said to have encountered a race of tall, fair skinned men with light hair and grey eyes who carried strange weapons with them. They called them the Allegewi, which attempted to stop the migration along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The two tribes prevailed and the Allegewi were driven into Cherokee lands where they are remembered as Tivni Kula, the moon eyed people.