Endless Thread - Encore: Owl pursuits

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

This episode was originally published on March 10, 2023.  In 2022, freshmen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill got a new neighbor: an owl. What wasn't clear was whether the owl was trying to befriend them, or catch them. Sometimes the owl seemed to be chasing students. Other times, it seemed to come in peace. A popular campus Instagram account reported that a woman had actually raised the owl herself. After she was spotted feeding it, the owl sightings stopped, much to the disappointment of students who'd come to consider it as a sort of mascot. Where had the owl come from, and where did it go? Endless Thread host Ben Brock Johnson and producer Grace Tatter talk about how the owl gained online campus fame, and get a surprise update from the person who knows the owl best. Show notes "Animal Instincts" (Criminal) "The Real Killer in The Staircase Might Be … an Owl?" (Vulture) "Column: Hinton hears a hoot — the Class of 2026 vs. the HoJo Owl" (The Daily Tar Heel) Instagram post of owl chasing student Kaleigh Wilhite (UNC Chicks) Instagram post of owl confrontation at a basketball court (UNC Chicks) Instagram post with other campus owl sightings (UNC Chicks) Instagram post of Barb with the owl (UNC Quirks) Reddit post on r/wellthatsucks about an owl attack "An owl twice attacked a Washington woman. A biologist says it's becoming more common" (NPR) This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know, the same way you can skip an ad?

I get it. I'm Siyaya and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today, I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem.

Hello, mid-sized business. We see your big ambitions, but how do you achieve the wins you want when your technology is holding you back? SAP Grow is built to grow with your business, no matter its size, with AI embedded at its core, working across every system, all ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow. AI Cloud ERP for any size business. Hey, endless threadheads. It is a holiday weekend and one where a lot of people. people are headed back to college or arriving for the first time.

Freshman? Well, we've got a story about college, but no matter who you are, it's not your usual story. This one's a bit of a throwback, like an old yearbook maybe, or freshman Facebook. Remember when that was actually a thing you could hold in your hand and not a massive, terrifying tech company? Anyway, there's a story we did a few years back about a mysterious creature haunting the freshman dorm at UNC Chapel Hill. It comes via lots of help from a Chapel Hill grad, our own Grace Tatter. It's an oldie but a goodie. Enjoy.

WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Grace Tatter. Yes, that's me. Ben Brock Johnson. That's you. Who are you again? I'm a producer for Endless Thread. And this is a two-for-week. It was a Grace Week last week, and it's a Grace Week this week. I love it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so hopefully people aren't getting tired of my Jolset Tones. How could they ever? One thing I know about you is you're the person who introduced the HBO show The Staircase to me. My wife, she had the accident.

What kind of accident? She fell down the stairs. No, she's not breathing. Really? Is that true? And one of our highlights and listens? Yeah. It wasn't anyone else up the... millions of people on Twitter talking about it? No, no, it was you.

It was you who, uh, endless thread folks listening out there, endless thread and our podcast department gets together once a week. And we tell each other what our high was for the week and our low and also our listen. And grace hit us with the listen. This was months and maybe years ago now. Months ago. Yeah. Months ago with the HBO show, The Staircase, which involves some owl action.

Yes, at least an owl theory. Now I can't remember if the owl theory ended up in the HBO version, but definitely in the real-life case, the real-life murder case that the HBO was based on. There's plenty owl content in the HBO. But you come to us today with more owl content. Yes, from that same part of the country, from the triangle of North Carolina. For people who don't know the staircase, the theory, it appears that this woman, Kathleen Peterson, was murdered by. her husband, but some people think that she was actually killed by an owl. And that always seemed pretty far out there to me because I've lived in the Piedmont of North Carolina

for most of my life and really hadn't encountered that many owls at all, much less any killer owls. But, um... Owls be out there, though. Yeah, they do. And I was talking to a friend recently and she was telling me that in Chapel Hill, where I went to school, there was a lot of chatter about a pretty, I think, violent, would be the word, violent owl. I'll send you, actually, some of the Instagram videos that were going around.

Okay. I'm going to slack them to you. Oh, God. Oh, my God. Whoa, this owl is, like, cruising very close to the ground in a parking lot. You know what, good night. I don't blame him for, it's very funny, whoever this person is. I don't blame them for, you know,

going home after this because they seem to be dive bombed by an owl except it's not really dive bombing because the owl is like flying so close to the ground in this parking lot like maybe a foot off the ground and then just like careening into the person shooting the video the caption says this hojo owl got me fucked up back to north campus i go yeah so some context because that probably doesn't make any sense to you right this is very i feel like this is very Chapel Hill, like, you know, people who know the campus, this makes sense to them. Exactly. Yeah. So Hinton James is a dorm, I think a thousand freshmen live in Hinton James. It's one of the biggest dorms, definitely, on campus. And it's also kind of the shittiest storm. Like when you get your housing assignment, going to your freshman year, if you get Hinton James, you're bummed out because it's the farthest away from the rest of campus. Somehow it's uphill both ways a mile. I don't know how that would. works. But it's definitely true. I did live there. And for nickname, we call it Hojo.

The North Campus, what he's referring to, are where, like, there's these beautiful, historic buildings with, like, the dorms have, like, pianos in the lobby. That is not at all the case with Hinton James. It's rough. Hinton James got owls in the parking lot. North Campus has pianos in the lobby. Exactly. It's always been character building to live in Hinton James. But when I lived there, we did, we did not have any dive-balling owls. I'm going to send you one more video of the owl.

This video is hilarious. So yeah, this one is a girl. Or tell you, tell them about this. It's like, this should not be funny, but it's very funny. It's very funny. It's like, I

don't know, really know how to describe it. because it's such a chaotically shot video, but it's like, you see like an owl again, like flying around sort of like close to the ground and like all over the place in this video. But then you see this woman kind of like nope out. Like she just like turns and runs and screaming. And the owl and the owl gives pursuit right behind her. And it's like very funny, although I imagine in the moment it would be absolutely terrifying.

But like when I watch the video, I'm like, this is hilarious. She's just getting owl chased. It's really good. As if it's not hard enough to be a college student. Poor girl. Oh, God. I know. I know.

But I actually, so I have more context about her specifically. So I heard about this owl living outside of my old dorm. And I did a Google to see what else was about it. And I found this column in the Daily Tar Heel, which is the student newspaper at Chapel Hill from a first year who was writing in defense of this owl. He says, yeah, that it's collectively harassing all the freshmen and that it's kind of scary. Is it freshman only? Yeah, because it's only, it lives outside the storm. That's only freshmen.

It's like hazing, ma'am. There's something truly delicious about that to me. I'm not sure why. Okay, sorry. Go ahead. So, yeah. So this guy, Alan Chen, who's also first year, he lives in the dorm that's slightly up the hill, so it's also crappy, but it's a little less crappy because it's a little bit closer to everything. But he writes this column saying that he thinks this owl is a good thing, that it's character building, that it's bringing people together. So I was intrigued by that.

So I called him up, and I asked him how he originally became introduced to the owl if it was like through these Instagram videos that were all being posted on this account, UNC Chicks, which is like a meme account that's affiliated with chicks, which is something Barstool-related. And his first encounter with Yowl was actually courtesy of that girl who we just saw. Do we have a name for that girl? Oh, we do. And sorry, that girl, Kaylee. I don't want you to start referring to her as like a UNC chick.

That's true. Yeah, because it turns out even though the meme account, is named U.N. Sea Chicks, it's usually bird content as an outlier. Kaylee. Okay. Yeah. So, Alan was introduced when Kaylee came running into a suite because he lives with her boyfriend. She just sort of came running in frantically one day. She was like, Alan, the weirdest thing just happened. I was chased by an owl for 30 minutes. And I was like, what? An owl? And she was like, yeah, an owl. So naturally, I was like, I want to go see this owl, which is when I went out and, you know, tried to talk to the owl. And I sort of implanted myself in the mythos of the owl from that day on. I sort of became really fascinated by it. And I was reaching out to people who had owl encounters on Instagram and whatnot. Yeah. So Alan then went to talk to lots of the people who have

submitted some of these videos. Oh, I didn't even show you the video. Like, there's a video of someone giving the owl a cigarette. What? Yeah, I'll show it to you. Actually giving the owl of a cigarette? Yeah. You want to smoke?

Oh, my God. Don't give the owl of the cigarette. No. Come on. It's also, like, such a, it's a... It looks so sweet there, right? I know. Owls are so, God, what amazing creatures they are.

Yeah, so this owl did become, it became kind of online famous because people were submitting videos to this meme account. And yeah, and lots of people are talking about it in real life too. So because of all of its online fame, it became something that people were excited to, like, have their own spotting. So Alan. This person's shooting it. Like, it's like, it's in a tennis court. Now it's in a tennis court. Now it's like lit up, lit up at night by the headlights of a car like it's in some kind of crime movie.

Oh, man. I'm sorry. It's just, it's truly, this owl is clearly like it's a mascot. It's becoming a mascot on Instagram and like people clearly love this. Yeah, exactly. And Alan told me that like people would just gather and go watch owl watching or like, you know, like call people over who. higher floors of this huge dorm would like come out and all like watch the owl together. People would bring snacks and and it gave them something to talk about.

It was like a bonding experience for people. Sure. Yeah. Which like when you go to a huge school, like I feel like it could be really helpful. Like I remember what it was like to be like one of a thousand kids in a huge dorm. It's like nice to have something to talk about before basketball season. Common experience. Yeah. Common experience where like everybody can kind of be like on the same. side.

You know? Everybody's like, oh, check out the owl. You know, like, it's not like a, this is not like an othering experience except maybe for the owl. Exactly. Exactly. So here's another thing that's coming up for me that I haven't really said yet, which is like, knowing nothing about this owl, this is a piece of wildlife that's living outside in a

environment that has been completely taken over by a massive university. and so like I guess I would keep my distance but out of respect for the animal. Like I might sort of get closer to an animal so I can get like a thrilling view of it. Like I do that, you know, like when I see, I get bobcats where I live. And if I see a bobcat, I'm definitely trying to like get a better vantage of the bobcat. But I ran into a bear the other day. Oh my gosh. And it had its babies with it.

And I was like, I noped out of there real fast. So I think, like, I would keep my distance out of respect for the animal and out of, like, wanting it to have its own space in the environment that we share. I admire your respect for wildlife. I think I would probably have steered clear of it just because I would be scared. But anyway, it turns out that Reddit loves an owl attack story. So this has been mostly confined to the U.S. community, but around the same time that this was happening, there was a post on the subreddit R slash, well, this sucks from a woman who got attacked by an owl in her neighborhood twice.

And this actually got picked up by NPR because this Reddit post had so much attention. So you can see some pictures there of what owls can indeed do if they get you. And we already talked about when I was in college, the podcast criminal. did an article about Owls in Chapel Hill because of the owl theory about the staircase, which was in Durham, which is like eight miles away. So they like started that episode

with stories about owls swooping down. So I'm running and I actually lowered the brim of my hat and about 20 seconds later I felt a scratch on my head and then my hat disappeared. So there is precedent

for this happening, especially in the fall, apparently, barred owls feeling territorial for a lot of the reasons you just said. I mean, this part of North Carolina has just developed an insane amount in the past couple of decades. So there are a lot of houses being built, which means a lot of trees are being cut down. All sorts of critters are running out of the woods. And you can't blame them because wild animals are going to be wild animals, to your point earlier. Except for this owl actually might not be totally wild. Grace, you do have, as I understand it, a kind of conclusion to this story about this mysterious owl.

But folks will have to wait for another minute while we take a break. We'll be right back. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, joined thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.

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I'm Siyaya and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. All right, Grace, I'm loving this story.

I need to know more. What's next? So I'm going to send you one last Instagram post. So this is from an account called UNC Quirk. So people submit pictures of quirky things around UNC. And, yeah, a student saw this woman feeding this owl, a dead mouse. And the woman said that she'd raised the owl from an egg. So it turns out this owl was perhaps not a wild.

owl, but a pet owl. What? Which is somehow makes the story all the news on. Yeah. And then after this encounter, after this freshman named Izzy, saw this encounter, the student stopped seeing the owl, at least for a while. So wait, does that mean that she, like, took the owl back home? Unclear.

Like, if she just, like, rescued it. Oh, my God. Yeah, if you, like, go to the next one, you can see her, like, kind of kissing the owl. Yeah. Well, they're kissing each other. Yeah, they clearly love each other. So, like, unclear, did she take it back home, or did she just, like, rehabilitate it? I saw one comment on TikTok saying that the woman was the commenter's mom. So I did reach out to that person on TikTok to be like, is this really your mom?

But she did not get back to me. She didn't get back to me. Yeah, so the identity of the little owl owner is a mystery. What an interesting and strange tale of this mysterious owl and its mysterious owner and its mysterious behavior. Thank you, Grace, for bringing this story. Thanks for listening. And that is where our short episode would have ended, except that woman Grace reached out to on TikTok, hoping to talk to her mom. Yep, on Monday morning, I received a text from the

woman who helped raise the hojo owl. Hojo mom. And she was a hoot. She sure was. Oh, come on, Grace. Give me one chuckle. Geez, God. All right, Grace, what did she have to say?

Well, she started out with the important stuff. You know, I'm not a crazy person. Barb told me that she's been rehabbing wildlife in the Chapel Hill area for decades. She asked us not to use her last name because in North Carolina. Carolina, you actually need a special license to rehab raptors. Last March, a friend from Durham, which, again, basically the town over from Chapel Hill, called Barb about a baby owl that had fallen out of its nest. You know, you could fit her in the palm of your hand.

You know, she was just a tiny little thing. Barb took the baby owl home, and her son-in-law bestowed it with the name Owlinson, like Allison, but, you know, with an owl. And over the next few months, Barb fed Allison a steady diet of frozen mice. Her family got used to having Allison around and Allison got used to them. We would have a bonfire in the backyard at night and she would fly and she would be on the back of my chair. And she just sit there and piddle with my hair, believe it or not. And so she just didn't have that fear, I guess, that she needed to have.

So that's the one thing I did wrong. I imprinted too much, as they say. In the fall, Barb said they started seeing Allison less and less until finally she'd been gone for three or four days. I said, well, maybe this is the time. You know, maybe she's found other owls. You don't know. It's a wild animal.

And then she would come home. You know, so we never went very long without seeing. her. And the last time she flew off, and I hadn't seen her the whole week. And then I got a call. The call came from someone who lives or works in a student apartment complex on South Campus and who knew about Barb's passion for wildlife. Barb realized that the owl he was calling about was probably Allison. I guess she just liked the people. He said she would sit on the windowsill and look in at the students, you know, when they were in their rooms, and that's when I knew. Uh-oh.

Even though Barb had heard that the students really liked Owlson, she was worried that the owl might accidentally hurt someone. So she took Allison home for the night and then to a wildlife rescue near Pittsburgh, North Carolina. She told me that she always planned to release Allison into the wild eventually. Barb is still able to keep tabs on her owl friends. The folks who work at the rescue will send Barb pictures of Owlson from time to time. She has hundreds of acres to fly around in.

So she's doing what ever owls do. Indeed, whatever owls do, which is maybe dreaming about her checkered past of terrorizing freshmen. Maybe, although I have to admit, Ben, after talking to Barb, I felt a little bit guilty about calling Allison possibly violent. I think she was just friendly. She was just trying to play with some people's hair. Exactly. She was just trying to like come over and hang out. Exactly.

I think she was misunderstood. So misunderstood. I was like trying to figure out how to make a joke about like, you know how owls don't poop? I did not know that. You didn't know that? No, wait. No, they do. Oh my God, Ben.

I almost put a cut in about this owl wearing a diaper. They do poop. And I have a plan to prove it. They do. They don't poop, Grace. I'm going to make you the sound. Grace, I hate to tell you. I have.

Owls don't poop. How much would you like to bet, Grace? How much would you like to bet? I literally have tape about an owl wearing a diaper to play for you. Hey, you don't, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean the owl's poop and if the owls wearing a diaper. No, I think she talked about poop. What should we bet?

Oh, this is tough. This is tough. dude what would you like to bet i don't know ice cream ice cream sandwich and a drink ice cream cone all three all right you're on okay i well how are we going to prove it though because barb who seems like an owl expert to me told me that this owl i think we need to go for the internet for this one are you googling okay here's this is tough this is tough oh they palates pellets you i knew that because we've all dissected did you dissect an owl pellet in school Yes, I did.

I think that counts as poop. No, it doesn't because they regurgitate them. That's not poop. Okay, but also why did this? If it comes out of your mouth, I'm pretty sure it's not poop. We don't describe it as poop. I'll go into the next most relevant popular Google search, which is do owls have buttholes? In spite of common misconceptions, yes, owls do.

have butts. Well, obviously. According to Alexa answers, owl pellets are coughed up from the mouth because they eat food whole, so they have to emit the bones and fur. They still pee. They still pee and poo. Yes, thank you.

Okay, you owe me. Because bird poop, look about bird poop. It's just like the white, like it's like liquidy stuff. It's a kind of ice cream like when you think of ice. Anyway, I think that. I guess I lose. I guess I lose. But I'm just going to say, I hope an owl never poops on either of us.

I hope that too. Or pellets on either of us because that shit's just gross too. That's all so gross. Grace, thank you for never giving up on solving owl mysteries. Oh my gosh, you're welcome. Got to keep it real for my alma mater and for Endless Thread. See you next week, Owl fans. Bye.

Endless Thread is a production of WBUR and Bob. This episode was produced by me, Grace Tatter, and co-hosted by... Me, Ben Brock Johnson, who just lost a bet about whether owls poop or not. Mix-in sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Amory Severson, Quincy Walters, Dean Russell, Norris Sachs, Amy Gorell, Matt Reed, and Paul Vikis, and yes, owls do poop. And vomit, apparently. So we leave you with that, folks. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer.

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