The Mountain Wampus
Regarding the spelling wampus: It has been said that wampus is a corruption of the word "wumpus" in the game "Hunt the Wumpus." However, it has recently been brought to my attention that the spelling "wampus" is the original spelling. The Auger-Tail Wampus was a mythical animal of the old American wild west. It had longer legs on one side of the body so it could walk up hill sides standing level, and had an auger type tail so it could drill holes with its tail. The wampus appeared in some Gene Autry stories many decades before the game M.U.L.E. appeared.
Pogo Was a Wampus
There is a Wampus Pond in Westchester County in New York state. A tourism website has this to say about the pond:
"The pond was named after the Indian from whom Caleb Heathcote bought the land in 1696. Wampus means 'opossum'."
This must be where Gene Autry got the name.
This means that the late, great Pogo Possum of the comic strip was a wampus. Of course, Pogo was not an Irata Mountain Wampus, but he was an intergalactic cousin, a Swamp Wampus of the Okeefenokee Swamp on Earth. Or, did the Wampus have space travel hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years ago?
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