The town of Brevard, North Carolina, is filled with white squirrels. They are not native to the area, but rather are believed to descend from a pair of squirrels that escaped when a carnival truck overturned all the way in Florida.
Today, the white squirrels are celebrated in Brevard with an annual festival, where some are even said to have psychic abilities…
The squirrels found in Brevard are the white variation of the common eastern gray squirrel. They are not albino, but a rare alternative that first came to the area of Transylvania County, North Carolina, around 1950, though their freedom originally began much further south.
The story goes that in 1949 a carnival truck was driving through Madison, Florida, when it flipped over. Among the chaos, a pair of white squirrels escaped and a local man known only as Mr. Black found them in his pecan grove.
They made the journey to North Carolina after Mr. Black gave them to his brother-in-law, H.H Mull, and Mull then giving them to his niece, Barbara Mull, in 1951. She lived in the Brevard area, and initially tried to breed them, without success. It was only when squirrels escaped and began breeding on their own that the white species began showing up across the county.
Recent counts suggest nearly a third of all the squirrels in Brevard are now white. Most of the existing white animals share a similar dark patch on their heads and shoulders. They have been protected since 1986, when Brevard City Council voted to approve “an ordinance declaring and establishing a sanctuary for squirrels”. It further stated that it “shall be unlawful for any person to hunt, kill, trap, or otherwise take any protected squirrels within the city by this section.”
Brevard holds an annual White Squirrel Festival, held in the week after Memorial Day each year. For years, the star of the show was a white squirrel called Pisgah Pete, who had a famous knack for predicting Super Bowl winners and forecasting Brevard’s weather for the coming year.
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In 2022, Pisgah Pete took his well-earned retirement. He was replaced by his niece, Pisgah Penny, said to have inherited the Pisgah family’s prediction gene. These predictions are made at the festival each year.
If you like these cute, rare squirrels, we think you might like some of the animals in the video below!
