Last summer, American Horror Stories premiered on FX. A spinoff of the network's wildly popular American Horror Story, the new anthology series is truer to the traditions of classic horror shows like The X-Files and Night Stalker than the flagship series.

While borrowing motifs from American Horror Story, American Horror Stories' seven episodes are still largely independent of the original. And most of them seem like they could have been adapted from legends or folklore. I don't know that to be the case, but one, in particular, did ring true. It was an episode called "Feral" in which a family of three goes camping in California's Kern River Canyon National Park. During a fishing trip, the couple's three-year-old son goes missing. Ten years later, the now-divorced couple returns to the area in a last-ditch effort to find their son, only to learn the terrifying truth about his disappearance.

Looper.com asks if the episode is based on a true story when the more appropriate question might be, "Is the true story on which this episode is purportedly based actually true, or is it creepy American folklore?"

In my searches, I have found no connection between the story's supposed inspiration and the Great Smoky Mountains, but the Smokies are why I did that search in the first place.

There is a legend that "feral humans" live in the mountains of East Tennessee and that they are cannibalistic. And since the Smokies/Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge area never seems to hurt for tourism dollars, I'm on the side of, "Yeah, this is just a legend." But not EVERYONE agrees with me.

So what IS the basis for this wild and crazy tale? Well, it might trace back to the story of a 6-year-old boy who went missing in 1969 and whose disappearance came to be attributed to a group called the Wild Men--feral humans living deep in the woods of the Smoky Mountains. But attribution and proof aren't the same things, and there are those who even say the Wild Men aren't even that feral. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hnMdR-LVMc TheSmokies.com also wonders about the possibility of people being able to live undetected and off the grid for an unusually long period of time before suggesting that maybe a bear had something to do with the boy's disappearance.

But it isn't just the Smoky Mountains; stories about "feral humans" living deep within our national parks have been shared for years.

I can't remember where I saw this, but there's been the suggestion that sightings of Bigfoot might actually be sightings of human beings that, I guess, could be described as feral.

But since THAT'S also a legend, we may never arrive at the right conclusion...if there IS a right conclusion.