Grizzly Woman is the most feared of the Clackamas ogresses, a being who carries the grizzly's ferocity into human form. Across the tales recorded by Melville Jacobs she attaches herself to a household as wife, sister, or companion, murders the woman whose place she takes, and turns on the rest, pursuing survivors with implacable violence until she is finally outwitted and killed. Jacobs treated her as a keystone of Clackamas oral literature, a figure through whom the narratives probe the terror of the intimate relation gone monstrous. Her destructiveness is repeatedly bound up with disguise and the theft of another's identity, and her defeat restores the social order she had violated.