Published 1991 in Great Britain by

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Copyright© 19R2 by Daniel Cohen

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may he reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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mechanicaL photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
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British Library.

ISBN 0-948397-94-2

Printed and bound in Colombia

e !l'dltOfiol printqr COIOmbiana ltc.lo.

PICTURE CREDITS

The illustrations that appear in this book are courtesy of:

Dover Books for Animals: A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Cenlllry Sources, by Jim
Harter, pages42, 93, 96, 120, 173,226,256,267,270,278. Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful
and Real Beasts, by Konrad Gesner, pages 59, 78, 229, 231, 269; North American
Mammals, by James Spero, pages 113, 186; Treasury of Fantastic and Mythological
Creatures, by Richard Huber, pages 57, 179,217,232,265.
United Press InternationaL pages 5, 16.
The American Museum of Natural History, page 63.
Penticton Herald, page 137
August Roberts, page 199.
The Flying Saucer News, page 201.
Illustrated London News, page 52.
The Age of Monsters, by Augusta and Burian, Courtesy Artia, page 89.
Illustration by Kathy Hirsh (after Metcalf) reproduced from Searching for Hidden
Animals by Roy P. Mackal. Copyright © by Roy P. Mackal. By permission of
Doubleday & Co., Inc., page 76.
 Introduction, ix

1. HUMANOIDS
Abominable Snowman, 3
Alma, 9
Bigfoot, 13
Chinese Wildman, 20
Goatman, 22
Lake Worth Monster, 24
Minnesota Iceman, 25
Mo-Mo, 27
Nondescript, 28
Orange Eyes, 30
Orang Pendek, 31
Skunk Ape, 32
Wild Man, 34

2. LAND MONSTERS
Acambaro Monsters, 41
American Elephant, 42
v
Contents vi
Beast of Le Gevaudan, 43
Beast of Truro, 46
Behemoth, 48
Bunyip, 49
Buru, 51
De Loys's Ape, 54
Dragon of the Ishtar Gate, 56
Giant Anaconda, 58
Giant Sloth, 62
Iemisch, 65
Minhocao, 66
Mngwa, 67
Mokele-Mbembe, 68
Nandi Bear, 74
Okapi, 75
Su, 77
Tasmanian Tiger, 78
Tazelwurm, 79
Waitoreke, 81
Woolly Mammoth, 82

3. MONSTER BIRDS AND BATS

Athol, 87
Moa, 88
Roc, 91
Thunderbird, 92
Vampire Bat, 95

4. PHANTOMS
Berkeley Square Horror, 99
Black Dogs, 100
Devil's Footprints, 103
Gef-The Talking Mongoose, 106
Hairy Hands, 108
Phantom Kangaroo, 109
Phantom Lions, 112
vii Contents
5. RIVER AND LAKE MONSTERS
Beast of 'Busco, 119
Champ, 120
Chessie, 122
Flathead Lake Monster, 123
Giant Boa, 124
Loch Ness Monster, 125
Manipogo, 134
Ogopogo, 136
Silver Lake Monster, 141
Slimey Slim, 142
Storsjon Animal, 143
White River Monster, 145

6. SEA MONSTERS
Coelacanth, 149
Daedalus Sea Serpent, 151
Giant Octopus, 153
Gloucester Sea Serpent, 161
Kraken, 163
Leviathan, 169
Lucsa, 171
Plesiosaur, 172
Pseudoplesiosaur, 174
Sea Ape, 176
Sea Serpent, 178
Steller's Sea Cow, 185
Zeuglodon, 187

7. VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES

Aliens in the Freezer, 191
Alien Kidnappers, 193
Deros, 195
Dover Demon, 196
Flatwoods Monster, 198
Hopkinsville Goblins, 200
Contents viii
Little Green Men, 203
Mad Gasser of Mattoon, 206
Men in Black, 206
Mothman, 211
Oannes, 216
Pascagoula Creatures, 217
Spring-Heeled Jack, 219

8. WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE

Alligators in the Sewer, 225
Basilisk, 226
Dragon, 228
Fairies, 235
Fearsome Critters, 239
Fur-Bearing Trout, 244
Giants, 245
Griffin, 252
Hydra, 252
Jackalope, 254
Jenny Hanivers, 255
Jersey Devil, 258
Mermaid, 260
Oriental Dragon, 264
Unicorn, 266
Vampire, 271
Werewolf, 276
Zombie, 281

Annotated Bibliography, 285

Dr~TROIDUCTDOitl

The subject of monsters lies somewhere in a misty realm between

zoology and folklore. Much of this book concerns what has been called
cryptozoology-that is, the study of animals that may, or may not,
exist. Others would suggest that the subject is Fortean, a word coined
from the name of the American writer Charles Hoy Fort (1874-
1932), who collected odd information, bits and pieces that didn't seem
to fit in with the orthodox scientific view of the world. Some of the
creatures discussed in this book are pure folklore-we know that
now-but a while ago we were not so sure. And there are some
acknowledged hoaxes and frauds, but significant and influential ones.
All of this-cryptozoology, Fortean phenomena, folklore, and
fraud-goes to make up the subject of monsters.
Monster is not a clearly defined word like cat or frog. One of the
definitions in my old Webster's Collegiate is, "an animal of strange
or terrifying shape," and that is a description which applies to most
of the creatures in this book. But I've had to expand and bend that
definition a bit.
Not all of the creatures in this book are truly terrifying. Even the
Loch Ness monster is not really frightening, and the man who first
ix
Introduction x
applied the label monster to Nessie said he did so because he just
didn't know what else to call it. In popular usage, practically any large
unknown animal is called a "monster." In general, I have followed
popular usage. I have also found it necessary to include information
on several creatures that are neither unknown nor particularly mon-
strous in any way, but whose histories have had an influence on the
general study of monsters.
Not all of the creatures discussed here are animals, at least not
"lower animals." There is, for example, considerable debate as to
whether Bigfoot and its kin are advanced apes or primitive humans.
It matters little, for they are both monsters here.
Some of the space creatures are apparently not human, but they
certainly are not animals. Generally, people refer to them as monsters,
and that is why they have been included. At one time, persons with
extreme physical deformities-Siamese twins, the Elephant Man-
were labeled "monsters." It was a cruel definition, and you will find
none of it in these pages. More appropriately labeled human "mon-
sters"-Hitler, Gilles de Rais-are also excluded.
I have tried to stay away from ghosts, spirits, and other strictly non-
material monsters, but the barrier admittedly becomes a bit fuzzy in
spots, what with phantom lions and dogs. Even Bigfoot is sometimes
invested with a somewhat supernatural or otherworldly aura.
Another criterion to be considered is that of belief. While there are
a few clearly labeled exceptions to this rule, the vast majority of crea-
tures in this book either command a considerable body of belief today
or did so in the fairly recent past. Granted, few today believe in the
reality of vampires or werewolves anymore, but there is still confusion
about the existence of a "real'' Dracula. Besides, how can you do an
encyclopedia of monsters without covering vampires and were-
wolves?
Vampires and werewolves are genuine products of folklore, even
though the original lore has been changed and expanded by books and
films. Frankenstein's monster is a purely literary creation, the product
of the imagination of Mary Shelley. Godzilla is the product of the
Japanese film industry. Mummies are real enough, but "the
xi Introduction
mummy," the one that walks around strangling people who violate its
tomb, is a Hollywood creation. The ancient Egyptians never thought
their mummies were supposed to get up and go anywhere. Thus
Frankenstein's monster, Godzilla, and the mummy will not be found
in these pages. The zombie will, because some Haitians did and still
do believe that corpses can be made to get up and walk around.
Even given these limits, the number of monsters that might be
included in such a book is vast, and a book is finite. I have concen-
trated on monsters that are familiar to the English-speaking world,
not that the Japanese, the people of Kenya, the Russians, and others
in all other parts of the world do not have a rich lore of their own
national monsters; it is simply that an investigation of that scope is
way beyond the limits of a single volume. So too is an exploration of
all the local examples of monsters even in the United States. There
are scores of variations on the lake monster and Bigfoot theme. In
each case, I have given separate listings to a few of the major varia-
tions, but if your favorite local monster is not mentioned, I'm sorry.
No slight was intended.
What I am saying, in perhaps too many words, is that the selection
of the items in this book is an entirely personal one. I tried to stick to
certain general criteria, but in the end I relied on an instinct devel-
oped through a lifelong interest in monsters and nearly twenty years
of professional involvement with them.
No writing and research project of this size (or of any size for that
matter) is pure pleasure. But this one has afforded me, along with the
usual headaches, a great deal of fun. It was a bit like meeting a lot of
old friends and finding out what has happened to them in the past
five or ten years. And I ran across a few new monsters-new to me
at least.
I sincerely hope that as you dip into the following pages, you will
find not only exotic and interesting information, but that you will also
feel some of the mystery, excitement, and romantic joy of the quest
for monsters, even if it is only an armchair quest.
ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN The Abominable Snowman,
or yeti, is one of the truly great unknown animals of the twentieth
century. It is a large hairy biped that lives in the Himalayan region
of Asia. Interest in the Abominable Snowman in this century has
rivaled the nineteenth-century interest in the great sea serpent, or
eighteenth-century interest in the dragon.
The story of the Abominable Snowman is filled with mysteries great
and small, and one of the most difficult of all is how it got that awful
name. The creature is neither particularly abominable, nor does it
necessarily live in the snows. Yeti is a Tibetan word which may apply
either to a real, but unknown animal of the Himalayas, or to a moun-
tain spirit or demon-no one is quite sure which. And after nearly
half a century in which Westerners have tramped around looking for
the yeti, and asking all sorts of questions, the original native traditions
concerning the creature have become even more muddled and
confused.
Early accounts of sightings of the Abominable Snowman are so
vague, untrustworthy, or far removed from their original source as to
be virtually worthless as evidence. The modern story of this creature
must really begin in 1925 with the experience of N. A. Tombazi, a
Greek photographer who was serving as a member of a British geo-
graphical expedition in the Himalayas. Tombazi was camping at an
altitude of some fifteen thousand feet in the mountains of Sikkim,
when his porters pointed to something odd moving across the lower
slopes.
3
HUMANOIDS 4
"The intense glare and brightness of the snow prevented me from
seeing anything for the first few seconds," Tombazi recalled. "But I
soon spotted the 'object' referred to, about two to three hundred yards
away down the valley to the east of our camp. Unquestionably, the
figure in outline was exactly like a human being, walking upright and
stopping occasionally to uproot or pull at some dwarf rhododendron
bushes. It showed up dark against the snow and, as far as I could make
out, wore no clothes. Within the next minute or so it had moved into
some thick scrub and was lost to view.
"Such a fleeting glimpse, unfortunately, did not allow me to set the
telephoto-camera, or even to fix the object carefully with binoculars,
but a couple of hours later, during the descent, I purposely made a
detour so as to pass the place where the 'man' or 'beast' had been seen.
I examined the footprints which were clearly visible on the surface of
the snow. They were similar in shape to those of a man, but only six
to seven inches long by four inches wide at the broadest part of the
foot. The marks of five distinct toes and the instep were perfectly
clear, but the trace of the heel was indistinct, and the little that could
be seen of it appeared to narrow down to a point. I counted fifteen
such footprints at regular intervals ranging from one-and-a-half to
two feet. The prints were undoubtedly of a biped, the order of the
spoor having no characteristics whatever of any imaginable quad-
ruped. Dense rhododendron scrub prevented any further investiga-
tions as to the direction of the footprints .... From inquiries I made
a few days later ... I gathered that no man had gone in the direction
[of the footprints] since the beginning of the year.
"When I asked the opinion of the Siddar and the coolies they nat-
urally trotted out fantastic legends of 'Kanchenjunga demons.' With-
out in the least believing in these delicious fairy tales myself, notwith-
standing the plausible yarns told by the natives, and the reference I
have come across in many books, I am still at a loss to express any
definite opinion. However, I can only reiterate with a sufficient degree
of certainty that the silhouette of the mysterious being was unmistak-
ably identical with the outline of a human figure .... "
Tombazi's account is quoted at length, for in the opinion of many
 ~',,ri-'iJ;,ifilliiJ"''
~ 1

Abominable Snowman footprint

HUMANOIDS 6
who have followed the Abominable Snowman phenomenon, it is' sim-
ply the best firsthand sighting available. Tombazi's honesty has never
been questioned; he was an experienced observer, and his "fleeting
glimpse" was combined with a close-up examination of footprints.
One can only be sorry that he did not decide to take photos of the
footprints.
Tombazi himself did not forget the incident. In 1964 he wrote,
"Although nearly forty years have passed, I still carry a vivid impres-
sion of the glimpse I caught at the time and I am convinced that the
yeti in the form of a biped and not a quadruped is in existence."
There are, however, a number of points in this narrative which
deserve additional comment. First, while forty years after the event
Tombazi talks of the yeti, in his original account he speaks only of
"demons" which he calls "delicious fairy tales." More important are
the footprints. Traditionally, the Abominable Snowman makes huge
footprints, much larger than those of a man, but those described by
Tombazi are actually smaller than would normally be made by a
human foot.
Then there is the general appearance of the creature-it was
"exactly like a human being," not at all the lumbering, apelike mon-
ster that comes to mind when the word yeti is mentioned. Tombazi
says the thing wasn't wearing any clothes, but he gives no indication
if it was covered with hair, though admittedly he probably could not
tell under the conditions.
So what did Tombazi see? Forty years after the event, he spoke of
the yeti. But immediately after he made his sighting, he had another
theory. "I conjecture then that this 'wild man' may either be a solitary
or else a member of an isolated community of pious Buddhist ascetics,
who have renounced the world and sought their God in the utter des-
olation of some high place, as yet undesecrated by the world. How-
ever, perhaps, I had better leave these conclusions to ethnological or
other experts. "
There are Buddhist and Hindu ascetics who seek out the desolation
of high places. They can live at altitudes of fifteen thousand feet and
can train themselves to endure cold and other hardships that would
7 Abominable Snowman
kill the average person. They can and do walk about naked or nearly
so in the frigid mountain air. So Tombazi might really have seen a
wandering ascetic, as he first thought.
That is a disappointing beginning to the Abominable Snowman
story, but it is also quite typical, for the evidence that supports the
existence of this creature has frequently been less solid than it first
appears.
The best piece of material evidence are photographs of footprints
taken in 1951 by mountaineer Eric Shipton on the southwestern slopes
of the Menlug-tse in the Himalayas. Shipton believed the prints he
found to be those of the yeti, and he followed the trail for about a
mile until it disappeared on the hard ice. Unlike Tombazi, he took
photos of the footprints.
One of the pictures Shipton took shows a five-toed print compared
to the head of an ice ax. Another shows the print as being about the
same size as a climbing boot, and thus much larger than the ordinary
human foot.
The Shipton photographs have been reprinted many times, often
accompanied by another photo which shows a trail of prints. This was
always assumed to be the trail of yeti prints, but in 1973 primate
expert John Napier revealed that the photo showed the trail made by
a mountain goat. The picture has nothing to do with the yeti-footprint
photos. It was simply taken by Shipton earlier on the same day he
found the yeti prints. The negatives were presumably filed together:
and that is how the confusion began. For years, no one had bothered
to correct the mistaken impression.
The close-up footprint, the genuine yeti print photo, has been the
subject of a great deal of investigation and speculation. It certainly
does not look like the footprint of any known animal, but footprints
in the snow can be confusing. A print can melt, refreeze, and melt
again, so that the shape and size of the original print can be greatly
altered. Some have suggested that the prints were made by a group
of small animals moving in line through the snow. The leader breaks
the trail and the followers jump into the footprints of the lead animal,
enlarging the original indentation. Melting and refreezing would
HUMANOIDS 8
make the numerous small prints look like a single big one. This theory
is rejected by most monster enthusiasts, but it is not entirely
implausible.
There were stories and even photographs of yeti "scalps" that were
kept in Tibetan monasteries and treated as sacred objects. The scalps
had an odd peaked appearance, and that led to the theory that the
Abominable Snowman had a ridge running down the middle of its
skull. It was often said that the lamas who had charge of these "scalps"
would not allow them to be handled by outsiders, thus they could
never be examined closely. This was not the case, and close exami-
nation proved to be the downfall of the "s.calp."
In 1960 Sir Edmund Hillary, "the Conqueror of Everest," led a
large expedition into the Himalayas. One of the announced purposes
of the expedition was to search out information about the Abominable
Snowman. Naturally, this sensational goal got a great deal of
publicity.
Not only did Sir Edmund fail to find the yeti himself, his expedition
destroyed what had up to then been one of the most intriguing bits
of evidence, the "yeti scalps." Hillary was not only allowed to exam-
ine one of the yeti scalps, he was able to bring it back with him to be
examined by Western scientists. It didn't take long for the scientists
to decide that this "scalp" didn't come from an unknown anthropoid,
but that it was a fur hat made from the pelt of a rare Himalayan goat,
the serow. A close examination of the three "scalps" considered to be
most genuine indicates that one appears to be a hat several hundred
years old. Holes in it indicate where tassels or prayer flags were once
attached. The other two "scalps" are of fairly recent vintage; they are
either deliberate fakes or simply fur hats that have been the subject
of a case of mistaken identity.
Sir Edmund Hillary, who is known for his outspokenness, roundly
denounced the whole idea of the yeti as nonsense. Monster buffs
fought back, saying that Hillary's investigations had been slipshod,
that they had known the scalps were fake all the time, and that Hil-
lary was just jealous he had not found the creature. But there is no
doubt that Hillary's denunciation hurt the international reputation of
9 Alma
the Abominable Snowman. After the 1960 expedition, interest shifted
to other monsters, particularly Bigfoot in the United States and Can-
ada. What made Hillary particularly difficult for monster enthusiasts
to handle was that monster skeptics are generally scientists tied to lab-
oratories or universities. Sir Edmund Hillary, the great mountain
climber, could hardly be criticized as being an armchair critic.
Still, the case for the Abominable Snowman is not a negligible one.
There are dozens of reported sightings by Westerners of the creature,
and at least some seem quite credible. There are also many encounters
reported by the natives of the Himalayan region, but these are diffi-
cult to evaluate, for the people of the Himalayas often do not make
the same distinction between the material and spiritual worlds that is
so important in the West today. On such matters, their thinking is far
closer to that of a medieval European. A demon-even though it is
not a material being-may be quite as "real" as an ape or a goat.
Mountaineers have from time to time come across puzzling foot-
prints like those shown in the Shipton photographs.
Aside from the current yeti legends, there are a large variety of
legends from mountainous regions throughout Asia of a hairy wild
man. In China paleontologists have found the fossil remains of a giant
ape, Gigantopithecus, possibly the largest ape that ever lived. Such a
creature, if it survived into fairly recent times, could easily have given
rise to Abominable Snowman stories.
And finally there are the Himalaya Mountains themselves. They
are among the most inaccessible places on earth. If an unknown crea-
ture were to survive anywhere on land in the modern world, the
Himalayas would be as good a hiding place as any.
See also: ALMA, BIGFOOT, CHINESE WILDMAN

ALMA The alma is one name given to the Soviet version of

the Abominable Snowman, or Bigfoot. Like their more famous coun-
terparts, the almas are hairy bipeds that generally live in mountain
HUMANOIDS 10
areas, in this case the mountains of Soviet Asia. The bulk of the alma
stories indicate that the creature is more human, more of a true wild
man than either the Snowman or Bigfoot.
The most celebrated encounter with this Soviet wild man took
place in August 1957, and the witness was a scientist, Alexander G.
Pronin. Pronin was not looking for wild men; he was a hydrologist on
an expedition to study the water resources of the Pamir Mountains.
"On August 12th at mid-day, I am following up a course of the
valley of the river Balyandkiik, and I suddenly notice a strange sight.
On the southward slope of the valley, at a distance of approximately
500 metres, up on the permanent snow, a being of unusual aspect is
moving-reminiscent of a man's figure, but with a strongly hunched
back. Against the white background it could be seen clearly that he
was standing with his legs wide apart, and that his arms are longer
than in the ordinary man. [In another account Pronin describes the
creature as being covered with reddish gray hair.] I stood there not
moving. And so five minutes elapse. The figure then vanished, hidden
behind a rock."
Three days later Pronin saw the same figure again for a few min-
utes. A week later one of the expedition's rubber boats disappeared
mysteriously, and just as mysteriously was found a few miles
upstream. The local inhabitants spoke vaguely of a wild man, and of
how common household utensils would sometime disappear from
around their homes and be found in the mountains. "Are these facts
not linked with the loss of our boat?" asked Pronin.
Stories of the alma or wild man extend from the Pamirs and Cau-
casus in the West all the way to China, and they have been recorded
for at least a century. N. M. Pzewalski, discoverer of the Mongolian
wild horse, collected stories of a wild man in his travels in Mongolia
in 1881. In the early years of this century, a zoologist named Khaklov
who had traveled widely in the regions of Dzungaria, between the
Altai Mountains in the north and the Tien Shan range in the south,
heard many wild-man stories from the Kazakh herdsmen. One man
who claimed to have taken part in the capture of a wild man
described the creature. This description has obviously been freely
11 Alma
translated from the herdsman's original story:
"A male of less than average human height covered with brown to
reddish hair, long arms reaching below his knees. Shoulders which are
stooped with a narrow, hollow chest. His brow was sloped backwards
from the bony crest projecting over his eyes. His lower jaw was mas-
sive, and he was chinless. The nose was small and the nostrils wide
and flared. The skin on his forehead, forearms, and knees was horny
and calloused. His legs bent and bowed at the knees. His feet resem-
bled human feet and were one and a half times as broad. The toes
were widely splayed and the big toe was shorter than in man and set
apart from the others. The hands had long fingers and were similar
to a man's hand."
While there have been a few reports of almas raiding farms and
being shot by local inhabitants, in general the attitude toward these
creatures seems to be one of tolerance-they are regarded as human,
if a somewhat degraded and inferior form of human.
There is, for example, the Central Asian report which tells of two
travelers who were being led into the mountains by a local herdsman.
Early one morning the travelers saw a strange figure lurking near the
horses. Thinking it was a horse thief, they took off after it and were
able to capture it easily with their lassoes. But what they caught was
not truly human.
The creature was about the height of an average man, but it was
covered with hair, "just like a young camel." It had an apelike face,
and the feet resembled those of a human being but were much larger.
The creature was not aggressive at all, and it squeaked miserably
when caught. The herdsman didn't seem very surprised at the strange
captive; he said it was a wild man, and that they were quite well
known in the area and harmless. The travelers set the creature free,
but followed it. They found the wild man lived in a sort of cave, a
hollowed-out space beneath a cliff, which contained a bed made from
straw and grass.
If the tribesmen of Soviet Asia take the wild man rather casually,
more sophisticated Soviet citizens have an ambiguous attitude. There
appears to be a general tendency to ridicule reports of the alma, and
HUMANOIDS 12
Pronin complained bitterly of the ribbing that he took from his sci-
entific colleagues after he described his sighting of the strange crea-
ture. On the other hand, a few Soviet scientists have taken a great
interest in the subject and have expressed strong opinions about the
existence of such creatures.
Professor Jeanne Josefovina Kofman has led expeditions into several
areas which are supposed to be populated by almas, and while she has
never come up with any tangible proof of the existence of such a
creature, she has collected hundreds of reports about them and has
lectured and read papers on the subject to gatherings of scientists.
The most outspoken supporter of the alma and the greatest expert
on the subject has been Soviet historian Dr. Boris Proshnev. Proshnev
headed a commission on the subject set up by the Soviet Academy of
Science. Proshnev too has .complained that he has faced a good deal
of ridicule and indifference from his colleagues, but he has had
enough support to publish some of his work on the alma, though in
very limited quantities. His work may be better known in the West
than in his homeland.
It is Proshnev's view that the almas are closer on the evolutionary
scale to humans than to apes. He speculates that they may be some
type of Neanderthaler.
In his works, mostly written in the 1940s and 1950s, Proshnev cites
as evidence skeletons, mummified hands, and other alma remains that
were supposed to exist but had not yet been examined by competent
scientists. Today most of these relics have been examined, and they
have without exception turned out to be something else. The "mum-
mified hand," for example, was the preserved paw of a snow leopard.
What we are left with are the stories of recent encounters with the
nearly human alma-but these are numerous enough to at least give
one pause.
See a/so: ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN, BIGFOOT, CHINESE WILDMAN
13 Bigfoot

BIGFOOT Bigfoot is much more than a monster; it is an

extremely complex phenomenon, with no definite starting point and
few geographical limits.
But we must begin somewhere, so it may as well be with the tale
of Jacko, an apelike creature that was allegedly captured outside of
the town of Yale, in British Columbia, in 1884. The story is given in
great detail in the Victoria, British Columbia, newspaper the Daily
British Colonist. The hairy biped was not called Bigfoot, or Sas-
quatch, the Canadian name for Bigfoot; it was named Jacko and was
described as being "something of the gorilla type."
Among monster enthusiasts it has always been assumed that the
Jacko story is a description of the capture of a young Sasquatch. How-
ever, since the creature sounds so much like a chimpanzee, it is pos-
sible that it was a chimpanzee. Perhaps a chimp a sailor brought back
from Africa as a pet, which escaped or was turned out when it got
big and unfriendly. A better possibility is that the story was a com-
plete hoax. Newspapers of the day regularly printed hoax stories that
were not considered dishonest; the hoax was practically a separate lit-
erary genre.
The name Sasquatch doesn't really become important in Canada
until the 1930s, when it appeared in the works of J. W. Burns, a Brit-
ish Columbian writer who used a great deal of Indian lore in his sto-
ries. Burns's Sasquatch was a giant Indian who lived in the wilderness.
He was hairy only in the sense that he had long hair on his head, and
while this Sasquatch lived a wild and primitive life, he was fully
human.
Burns's character proved to be quite popular. There was a Sas-
quatch Inn near the town of Harrison, British Columbia, and Harrison
even had a local celebration called "Sasquatch Days." The celebration
which had been dormant for years was revived as part of British
Columbia's centennial, and one of the events was to be a Sasquatch
HUMANOIDS 14
hunt. The hunt never took place, perhaps it was never supposed to,
but the publicity about it did bring out a number of people who said
they had encountered a Sasquatch-not Burns's giant Indian, but the
hairy apelike creature that we have all come to know.
One William Roe said he met the beast in October 1955, about
eighty miles west of Jasper, Alberta.
"My first impression was of a huge man about six feet tall, almost
three feet wide, and probably weighing somewhere near 300 pounds.
It was covered from head to foot with dark brown silver-tipped
hair ... the hair that covered it, leaving bare only the parts of the
face around the mouth, nose and ears, made it resemble an animal as
much as a human. None of this hair, even on the back of its head, was
longer than an inch."
Roe's account was more than matched by the story told by Albert
Ostman, who said that in 1924 he had been kidnapped by a Sasquatch
family and had spent several days living with them before he was able
to make his escape. The creatures that Ostman described seemed
human, but barely so. They lived extremely primitive lives. Their
food consisted of roots and berries that they gathered. They did not
know how to use fire, but did seem to possess a rudimentary language.
To this day, monster enthusiasts are divided over whether Ostman
accurately reported one of the most astonishing experiences in history
or was pulling their leg. Ostman died sticking to the truth of his tale.
Interest in this creature south of the Canadian border, where it is
::ommonly known as Bigfoot, really began in 1958, though there had
been tales of such a being long before that. But 1958 was the year that
bulldozer operator Jerry Crew found enormous footprints around the
camp in which he was staying, while working in the mountain wil-
derness area of Humboldt County in northern California. Crewmade
a plaster cast of one of these prints and had his picture taken holding
the cast. The footprint stretched from Crew's shoulder to his waist.
The picture and story were picked up by a local newspaper, and then
by newspapers all over the country. It was the picture of Jerry Crew
holding that enormous cast of a footprint that really brought the crea-
ture to the attention of the people of the United States, and made the
15 Bigfoot
name Bigfoot stick.
Crew's story seemed to jog a lot of memories, because all over the
Pacific Northwest, people stepped forward to say that not only had
they seen Bigfoot's big footprints-they had encountered the beast
itself in one way or another. There was one truly sensational account
of an event that was supposed to have taken place in 1924, ironically,
the same year as Albert Ostman's "capture" by the Sasquatch family.
Near Mount Saint Helens in the state of Washington there is a place
known locally as "ape canyon." There, so the story goes, a group of
miners was attacked by a party of seven-foot apes. Earlier in the day,
a miner had shot one of the "giant apes," and in the evening a gang
of them bombarded the miners' windowless cabin with rocks and
boulders. The miners crouched inside the cabin for hours while rocks
rained down on them. When the attack was over, the miners fled
down the mountain and back to town. They returned to the canyon
with a bunch of well-armed friends, but the apes had departed, leav-
ing behind only their giant footprints and a badly battered cabin. The
giant apes of Mount Saint Helens, if they were ever more than a tall
tale, are doubtless extinct today because of the eruption of the Mount
Saint Helens volcano. In 1982 a retired logger named Rant Mullens
claimed he and a friend started the Mount Saint Helens story by roll-
ing rocks down on the miner's cabin, as a joke.
But Bigfoot has been seen elsewhere in the region. According to a
typical Bigfoot report in the Oregon journal, "Three persons driving
along a remote mountain road east of the Cascade wilderness area
early Sunday say they saw a ten foot, white, hairy figure moving rap-
idly along the roadside. It was caught in the headlights as their car
passed, but they were too frightened to turn around to investigate.
Another Portland woman and her husband fishing on the Lewis River
south of Mt. St. Helens saw a huge beige figure, 'bigger than any
human,' along the bank of the river. As they watched, it moved into
a thicket 'with a lumbering gait.'"
Interest in Bigfoot soared to new heights in October 1967, when
Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, a couple of veteran monster buffs,
rode out of a wilderness area northeast of Eureka, California, with the
HUMANOIDS 16
astonishing story that not only had they seen Bigfoot, but that they
had filmed the creature in living color.
Here is the story as Patterson and Gimlin told it. At 3:30 P.M. on
October 20 they saw "a sort of man-creature ... about seven feet
tall," walking through the woods about one hundred yards from
where they were standing. "Gosh darn it. ... And for pity's sakes she
was a female!" Patterson exclaimed. The thing, whatever it was, had
"big droopy breasts," and was covered with "short, shiny black hair."
Patterson and Gimlin had set out deliberately to find, and if possi-
ble photograph, Bigfoot, and therefore they had the camera equip-
ment handy and were able to capture a short sequence of the thing
before it disappeared into the dense woods.

• • ,,. +.,
The Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot photograph

-
~
.. ,
,J/111' • 't
.•

.
17 Bigfoot
The films are not as clear as one might hope, but they are quite
clear enough to rule out any chance of mistaken identity. The thing
is not a bear or a cloud of dust or a strangely shaped rock. It is either
America's Abominable Snowman or a man in a monkey suit; there
are no other alternatives.
Unlike many who have claimed to have photographed this or that
monster, Patterson and Gimlin did not become secretive about what
they had. Argosy magazine, which published the monster hunters'
story and photos from the film first, gathered a panel of scientists to
view the film. The general attitude of the scientific panel was non-
committal. "I couldn't see the zipper," quipped John Napier of the
Smithsonian Institution, "and I still can't."
The walk bothered some viewers-the stride seemed too wide,
almost as if a bad actor were trying to simulate a monster's walk. But
no one could prove the film was faked, and so it has become an
accepted classic in the field of Bigfoot lore.
There is a modest Bigfoot industry in the Pacific Northwest-there
is at least one Bigfoot motel, and Bigfoot burgers have been served at
some diners. There are regular Bigfoot expeditions for tourists:
"You search for Bigfoot with a scientist, naturalist and tracker in
southwestern Oregon and Northwestern California. Unforgettable 22
day wilderness expeditions search.... You help solve a scientific mys-
tery and keep safe an endangered species."
Bigfoot has been declared a protected endangered species by Sis-
kiyou County, California. No one, however, has ever been prosecuted
under that law.
The Humboldt State College Library at Arcata, California, in the
heart of California's "Bigfoot country," collects material on the sub-
ject, and put on a special Bigfoot display in 1969. At Willow Creek,
California, there is a "life-sized" Bigfoot statue lovingly carved out of
redwood by a prominent monster buff.
Aside from the regular tourist runs, there have been reasonably
serious Bigfoot expeditions, including one financed by Tom Slick, the
late Texas oilman, who had also spent a lot of money pursuing the
Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas. On the expedition, there
HUMANOIDS 18
were a few possible Bigfoot sightings, though perhaps what the expe-
dition members had really seen was a bear. There were footprints,
odd noises, and many, many tales of eerie feelings of "being
watched," but no Bigfoot dead or alive was brought out of the wil-
derness by Slick's party. Lee Trippett, an electronics engineer from
Eugene, Oregon, who claimed that he could capture Bigfoot by influ-
encing the creature's mind through extrasensory perception, was no
less successful, but no more successful, either.
There is a certain elegant logic behind a belief in Bigfoot. Tales of
hairy bipeds can be traced from the mountains of Soviet Asia, across
the mountains of Tibet, and almost to the Bering Strait, which nar-
rowly separates Siberia from Alaska. The tales pick up again in west-
ern Canada and carry into the mountains of Washington, Oregon, and
northern California. In theory, the creature could have evolved in
Asia, then crossed over the Bering land bridge during the Ice Age,
and taken up residence in similar high country in the Western Hemi-
sphere. The ancestors of the American Indians came to the Western
Hemisphere in just that way.
The major problem with this theory is that while many of the
mountains of Asia in which Bigfootlike creatures are supposed to live
are sparsely populated, Washington, Oregon, and northern California
are not. The mountainous areas of the Pacific Northwest are indeed
rugged, but they are regularly traversed by hunters, hikers, and forest
rangers. Could such a large and singular-looking creature escape con-
clusive detection for so long? Why have no remains ever been found,
where are the carcasses, where are the bones? Surely the creatures die.
We have plenty of footprints, but footprints, as everbody knows, can
easily be faked. Indeed, big plastic feet that you can strap to your
boots and run around in the snow with, in order to fool your friends
and neighbors, have been frequently sold as novelty items. The only
evidence we have are the sightings-and the sightings alone.

Bigfoot, which was once believed to be limited to the Northwest,

has become a nationwide phenomenon. Hardly a month goes by any-
more without some wire service or newspaper syndicate coming up
ft m~~
with a Bigfoot story from somewhere in the country. A November
1981 UPI dispatch from Yale, Michigan, is typical:
"Cindy Barone says it is not the torn down fences or the barn doors
that have been ripped off the hinges, nor is it the high pitched screams
her family often hears at night.
"'It's the unknown that scares us,' she said. 'If I knew what it was
I could deal with it.'
"The rural St. Clair County woman is referring to a large hairy
creature that she and her family is convinced is a Bigfoot, a creature
that is said to walk on two legs and roam wooded areas from Maine
to Washington."
The story goes on to describe how in the latest encounter the Bar-
one's two daughters literally ran into the thing in the barn. The barn
was dark, and Tina, a thirteen-year-old, reached for the light switch
but instead felt something furry. Said the girl, "All I know is that its
fur was about one inch thick and all matted and dirty."
Bigfoot encounters of one sort or another have been reported in
virtually every state. Sometimes the reports have been persistent
enough for the creature to rate its own local name, such as Mo-Mo,
the Missouri monster; or the Fouke monster, from the state of Arkan-
sas. This monster was also the subject of the motion picture The Leg-
end of Boggy Creek. In Florida, Bigfoot is called the skunk ape, and
in Texas, the Lake Worth monster. The stories about these creatures
run from the fairly ordinary-a person driving along at night sees a
strange apelike creature along the side of the road, but it disappears
before he can get a good look at it-to the quite bizarre. A tale was
told by two girls from Illinois about how the monster reached through
the window of their parked car and battered the head of one of the
girls against the inside of the windshield. In the vast majority of these
cases, there is not a shred of material evidence, not even a footprint
to back up the story. But such stories can start a "monster mania" that
sends scores of armed men into the woods on a monster hunt.
What appears to have happened is that the idea of Bigfoot has
merged with two older folkloric traditions in the United States-the
monster animal, and the monster of lovers' lane. The monster-animal
HUMANOIDS 20
tradition is a very general one; it holds simply that there is some sort
of monster animal living in the woods or some other deserted place
outside of town. The animal was given a variety of descriptions,
depending on where the stories originated. From time to time, these
monster-animal tales would reach the newspapers. After about 1960
almost all of the monster-animal descriptions tended to make it sound
like Bigfoot.
The monster of lovers' lane tradition holds that when couples go
out and park at a deserted spot often used as a lovers' lane, they will
be attacked by a "monster." It could be some sort of animal, or a
"maniac." Today the monster of this tale, which is most frequently
told among teenagers, is a Bigfoot type of animal.
Bigfoot has also become part of the newer lore of UFOs. A number
of stories hint that Bigfoot and UFOs are connected in some unspec-
ified way.
All of this, plus the fact that no material evidence of Bigfoot has
been found, even in areas where it allegedly has been sighted fre-
quently, has led some monster enthusiasts to the theory that Bigfoot
is not a material creature but some sort of "psychic projection" or a
visitor from "another dimension"-a real but not a material monster.
See also: ALMA, ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN, CHINESE WILDMAN, LAKE
WORTH MONSTER, MINNESOTA ICEMAN, M<J-MO, ORANGE EYES, SKUNK APE

CHINESE WILDMAN Though China is a densely populated

country, there are still some forested areas that remain relatively free
of human habitation. From the thick forests of the Shennongija region
of Hubei Province in central China come reports of a hairy apelike
creature-generally referred to as a "wildman." It is sort of a Chinese
version of the Abominable Snowman or Bigfoot. There are inevitably
a large number of ancient legends and stories that refer to some sort
of an anthropoidlike creature in China. But the most interesting evi-
dence comes from modern times. Much of this evidence is presented
21 Chinese Wildman
in a paper by Yuan Zhenxin and Huang Wampo, originally published
in the Chinese journal Fossils, and translated and printed in English
by the Fortean Times.
The Chinese authors report dozens of sightings and even closer
encounters with this hairy wild man. The most startling was the tale
of one Wang Zelin. Wang had been viewing a model of Peking man
in a museum when he astonished his companions by saying that he
had seen the "ape man." It happened in 1940: as Wang was traveling
along a road in the Shennongija region, he heard gunshots in the dis-
tance. He got to the place where the shots had been fired and found
a crowd surrounding the corpse of a wild man, or in this case a wild
woman. "The body was still supple and the stature very tall .... The
whole body was covered with a coat of thick greyish-red hair which

Chinese wildman
HUMANOIDS 22
was very dense .... Since it was lying face down, the more inquisitive
among the passengers turned the body over to have a better look. It
turned out to be a mother with a large pair of breasts.... The face
was narrow with deep-set eyes, while the cheek bones and lips jutted
out. ... The appearance was very similar to the plaster model of a
female Peking Man. However, its hair seemed longer and thicker than
that of the ape-man model. It was ugly because of the protruding
lips."
The Chinese report goes on to state that an investigation team was
set up to collect accounts of meetings with the wild man, and had
found over a hundred of them, from people in all walks of life. The
team also collected specimens of hair, droppings, and footprints that
were all supposed to be from the wild man. An analysis of this evi-
dence, however, proved inconclusive.
But the Chinese authors of the wild-man paper are convinced that
the creature exists, and moreover that it is the descendant of the fossil
giant ape of China, Gigantopithecus:
"Some people claim that Gigantopithecus has been extinct for a
long time. Not necessarily so! It is known to all that the giant panda,
who was sharing weal and woe with the Gigantopithecus for a few
million years, is still very much in existence. [The giant panda was not
discovered untill869.] There is no reason why Gigantopithecus could
not have overcome the environmental hazards and after having gone
through the utmost sacrifices, left behind a generation to continue to
accompany the giant panda."
Of the many tales of hairy bipeds, of unknown species that are
reputed to inhabit the mountainous regions of the world, the Chinese
wild man is the least known in the West.
See also: ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN, ALMA, BIGFOOT

GoAT MAN The tradition of the "monster of lovers' lane" is

a persistent one in the United States. It is repeated, with local varia-
tions, all over the country. The basic theme runs like this: A teenaged
23 Goatman
couple drives out to some quiet dark spot that is often used as a "lov-
ers' lane." They park the car and turn off the lights, but suddenly they
are attacked by some sort of creature that bangs on the hood of the
car, throws things at them, reaches through the open window with a
hairy hand, and generally scares the hell out of them. They drive off
in a panic, and others who are tempted to use that particular quiet
dark spot for parking are warned off.
Usually the "monster of lovers' lane" is vaguely described as a Big-
foot type of creature. But in Prince George's County, Virginia, the
monster of lovers' lane has very definite and unusual characteristics.
It also has its own name; it's called Goatman.
Goatman is described as having the upper body of a human being
and the legs of a goat, legs which end not in feet but in cloven hooves.
Thus Goatman looks like the satyrs and the god Pan of Greek mythol-
ogy, and bears a close resemblance to the traditional image of the
Devil.
Opinions differ as to where Goatman came from. Some think he is
some sort of primeval creature that has always lived in the area. A
more popular idea is that he was once a scientist who worked at one
of the many large government biological laboratories located in the
region. The area is close to Washington, D.C., and is the home of
many government-related research facilities. The scientist, so the
story goes, was doing experiments on goats when something went -seri-
ously amiss, and he was turned into a half-goat, half-human monster.
Horrified by his appearance, the unfortunate scientist fled into the
woods near the laboratory. In his years of isolation, he has come to
hate the human race that now scorns him. And so when a young cou-
ple parks on the lonely road near where he lives, he attacks their car.
Some stories say that he hits the car with his bare fists, others contend
that he beats on the car with an axe. Whatever he does, he usually
scares people badly and drives them away.
Goatman is also blamed for killing dogs and other domestic ani-
mals. For a time, teenagers in the region would scrawl "Goatman was
here" on sidewalks and walls.
Just exactly what road Goatman is supposed to frequent is never
HUMANOIDS 24
entirely clear. Several different locations have been given, and in gen-
eral Goatman, in common with most of the other monsters of lovers'
lane, seems to haunt whatever road it is that you plan to park on.
See also: ORANGE EYES

LAKE WORTH MONSTER In July 1969, the sighting of a

huge hairy "something" at Lake Worth, just outside of Fort Worth,
Texas, set off what may have been the biggest monster hunt in Texas
history. The creature was described as a biped, about seven feet tall,
covered with short dirty white fur, and possessing a white goatlike
beard.
Since Lake Worth is so accessible to the city of Fort Worth, the
monster, whether it exists or not, became a menace. Hundreds of
monster hunters, most of them gun-toting teenagers, turned out to
look for the thing. One tall teenager, who happened to be wearing
white coveralls, was actually shot in the shoulder by an enthusiast who
thought he had the "monster" in his sights.
During the height of the 1969 excitement there were rumors of
cattle and dogs killed and mutilated mysteriously, presumably by the
monster. And there were stories that the monster was not a recent
arrival, indeed, that in Indian times there had been legends of a mon-
ster in the Lake Worth region. The antiquity of the legends, however,
has not been verified.
Sightings of the Lake Worth monster have continued on and off
since the July 1969 flap. One very indistinct photo of what is supposed
to be the monster exists-but it might be anything. A play called The
Lake Worth Monster, written by a Fort Worth playwright, was suc-
cessfully performed at a regional theatre. The play was very sympa-
thetic to the monster.
See also: BIGFOOT
25 Minnesota Iceman

MINNESOTA ICEMAN A thoroughly embarrassing but

rather humorous episode in the history of cryptozoology took place in
1968 when two of the world's leading authorities on unknown animals
were suckered into endorsing a carnival promoter's model as a gen-
uine unknown animal.
Ivan Sanderson was the first to be told that a Bigfoot-like creature,
frozen in a block of ice, was being shown at carnivals throughout the
Midwest. The fee for getting a look at the thing was a mere thirty-
five cents. Sanderson traced the exhibit down to a Minnesota farm,
where its owner, Frank K. Hansen, a small-time carnival showman,
kept it stored during the winter months.
Sanderson asked Bernard Heuvelmans, the Belgian cryptozoologist,
who happened to be in America at the time, to travel to Minnesota
with him to examine the thing in the ice. The two men were not
allowed to get a close look at the animal. They had to examine it
through the foggy surface of the ice in which it was kept. But they
were so impressed with what they saw, or thought they saw, that both

Ivan Sanderson
HUMANOIDS 26
men rushed into print with articles proClaiming the genuineness of
the beast. The thing looked rather like a creature halfway between
ape and human, and that is what both Sanderson and Heuvelmans
proclaimed it to be. "Living Fossil" is how Sanderson's article in the
magazine Argosy was titled.
Very suddenly, what had once been an obscure carnival exhibit was
catapulted into worldwide fame. A lot of scientists were asked to com-
ment on the "Minnesota Iceman," or "Bozo" as the creature came to
be called. Most of them were reserved and cautious; they hesitated
endorsing the genuineness of the thing in the ice, but they could not
denounce it as a fake either, even if they thought it was.
John Napier, an expert on primates who worked at the Smithsonian
Institution, almost persuaded the Smithsonian to conduct an exami-
nation of the Minnesota Iceman. But at that point, Frank Hansen
began acting strangely. He insisted that he didn't own the thing, but
that it belonged to a mysterious millionaire who for his own myste-
rious reasons did not want to have it examined closely. Hansen told
different and contradictory stories about its origin. The Smithsonian,
fearing it might be sucked into the position of appearing to endorse a
hoax, or looking as though it had been fooled, withdrew the offer to
examine the Iceman. Hansen would never have allowed that anyway.
For once the ice was melted and the "body" examined, it would have
been shown to be a rubber model. Several Hollywood model makers
have claimed credit for the Iceman. The most likely candidate is the
late Howard Ball, who made figures for Disneyland. Ball's son Ken-
neth, who helped construct the fake, said: "We modeled it after an
artist's conception of Cro-Magnon man and gave it a broken skull
with one eye popped out."
Hansen does not exactly deny the model story. From time to time,
he will say that what people see is a "fabricated illusion," but that it
is modeled on a real Iceman corpse that he, for varied and confusing
reasons, has chosen to hide. Other times, he says that while he once
used a model he no longer does so.
When Hansen began changing his story, and the claims of the Cal-
ifornia model makers surfaced, both Sanderson and Heuvelmans
27 Mo-Mo
backed off from their earlier support of the Iceman. Hansen withdrew
it from display for a while, but he has brought the exhibit back, and
as late as 1982 it was being displayed in shopping malls throughout
the eastern half of the United States.
See also: BIGFOOT

Mo-MO In the summer of 1971 two girls were driving from

Hannibal, Missouri, to St. Louis along Route 70. Just north of the town
of Louisiana, Missouri, they pulled off the road onto a quiet and
deserted spot to eat a picnic lunch.
As they started to eat, they became aware of a horrible smell, "like
a family of skunks," one of the girls said. But it was to be something
far worse than skunks. There was a noise in the bushes behind them,
"I turned around and this thing was standing there in the thicket. The
weeds were pretty high and I just saw the top part of the creature. It
was staring down at me."
The girls were terrified. They ran back to their car and locked
themselves in, determined to drive away as fast as possible. Too late,
they realized that they had left the keys to the car outside with their
lunch, and the monster had stepped out of the thicket, and was stand-
ing between the car and where the keys lay.
The girls described the monster as being, "ape-like, except that it
was also human. It was half-ape, half-man .... It walked upright on
two feet and its arms dangled way down. The arms were partially
covered with hair but the palms were hairless. We had plenty of time
to see this because the thing came right over to the car and looked at
it. ... This ape-man actually tried to figure out how to open the
doors."
The girls were able to discourageAhe "ape-man" from examining
the car too closely by blowing the horn. It didn't like the horn, so it
wandered over to where they had left their lunch, ate a peanut butter
sandwich, and walked back into the woods. The girls retrieved the
HUMANOIDS 28
keys and drove away as quickly as they could.
The two witnesses admitted that they couldn't prove that the story
they told was true, "But all you have to do is go into those hills to
realize that an army of those things could live there undetected."
This alleged encounter marked the most spectacular appearance of
a Bigfoot type of creature that was to be dubbed the Missouri monster,
or Mo-Mo.
By mid-1972, a genuine monster mania had broken out in the area
of Louisiana. Reports, one wilder than the next, came in daily. A cou-
ple of boys said they met it in the woods and it growled at them. One
witness said he had seen the monster crossing the road carrying a dead
dog in its mouth, but another version of the same story held only that
the creature was carrying a dead dog or sheep under its arm. There
was even a story that the creature had tried to overturn a small car
by picking up its rear end, though that story was later denied.
On July 19, 1972, twenty-five men went on a monster hunt near
Louisiana. All day they tramped through the woods and hills where
the monster was supposed to have been seen so frequently-but they
found nothing, not even a footprint.
Historical monster hunters were more fortunate. Digging through
old newspapers, they found stories of sightings of a creature "some-
thing like a gorilla" living in the swamps of southeast Missouri as early
as the 1940s.
See a/so: BIGFOOT

NONDESCRIPT Charles Waterton was one of those wealthy

naturalist-travelers that Victorian England seemed to produce in such
abundance. In his popular book Wanderings in South America
Waterton says that during his final journey into the wilds of Guiana
he procured an animal "which has caused not a little speculation and
astonishment. In my opinion, his thick coat of hair, and great length
of tail, put his species out of all question; but then his face and head
29 Nondescript

The Nondescript

cause the inspector to pause for a moment, before he ventures to pro-

nounce his opinion of the classification. He was a large animal, and as
I was pressed for daylight, and moreover, felt no inclination to have
the whole weight of his body on my back, I contented myself with
his head and shoulders, which I cut off; and have brought them with
me to Europe."
In Waterton's book there is a drawing of this creature which its
owner called the Nondescript. It looks rather like an extremely hairy
man, or perhaps the Abominable Snowman. The head and shoulders
of this creature were put on display at Squire Waterton's home in
Walton Hall, and it was the most popular item among the squire's
unparalleled collection of stuffed birds and animals.
Almost from the start, people who knew Waterton suspected some
sort of trick, for the squire was known to be a master taxidermist, as
well as a diligent practical joker. It was the squire's friend the Rev-
erend J. G. Wood who revealed that the Nondescript had been
formed from the head and shoulders of a red howler monkey. The
features had been so manipulated by the squire that they looked
remarkably human, and rather familiar. It seems that the squire had
made his creature look like an old enemy of his, a Mr. J. R. Lushing-
HUMANOIDS 30
ton, a treasury official who had made Waterton pay a high duty on
his collection. Waterton had often complained bitterly of the fee, and
this was his revenge.
Peter Dance, zoologist and author of Animal Fakes & Frauds, calls
the Nondescript "probably unique in the annals of taxidermy, politics
and caricature."
See also: JENNY HANIVERS

ORANGE EYES This creature is a central-Ohio variation of

the ever popular monster of lovers' lane. As is traditional in stories of
encounters with this type of monster, a young couple goes out to a
dark and deserted road used as a lovers' lane. The parked and dark-
ened car is then approached or attacked by a monster of some sort.
In the orange-eyes variation, the creature is known mainly for its
bright, shining orange eyes. Sometimes people report that the monster
behind the eyes is a hairy Bigfoot type. Other times it is described as
being even more exotic. Here is what one twenty-year-old Milan,
Ohio, woman said about it:
"Orange Eyes is close to Ruggles Road. I think it is by a bridge that
goes across the road called Blue Bridge. It is an eleven-foot, hairy,
completely orange creature. And it is supposedly indestructible. Peo-
ple have tried to shoot it and kill it and it has no effect. ... "
Some people say that Orange Eyes is really some crazy hermit who
lives in the area, and that the monster illusion is created by a couple
of automobile reflectors nailed on a stick. Others say there is no mon-
ster, and no hermit, but that the story is kept alive by local practical
jokers, who use automobile reflectors, Christmas tree lights, or other
sources of illumination to create the illusion of glowing orange eyes.
See also: BIGFOOT, GOATMAN
31 Orang Pendek

ORANG PENDEK The people of the island of Sumatra have

long told stories of the orang pendek or "little man." The orang pen-
dek, according to the tales, is supposed to be a very shy biped that
stands somewhere between two feet six inches and five feet in height.
It is covered with short brown or black fur, and has a head of jet black
hair which forms sort of a mane down its back. The orang pendek
does not spend its time in trees like most monkeys and apes, but walks
on the ground (though according to some stories its feet are
reversed-with the heels in front and toes in back). Its arms are
shorter than those of apes, and it is supposed to have a language of its
own. It is more nearly human than ape.
There were relatively few who said they had ever actually observed
the creature firsthand, but the wise traveler in the jungle left an offer-
ing of tobacco outside his camp at night. If he did not, the orang
pendek would make life miserable for him by creating a continual
racket at night and pulling down his hut.
In 1923 a Dutch settler named Van Herwaarden said that he
actually saw one of the creatures and was about to shoot it but, "Many
people may think me childish if I say that when I saw its flying hair
in the sights I did not pull the trigger. I suddenly felt that I was going
to commit murder. I lifted my gun to my shoulder again, but once
again my courage failed me." Van Herwaarden dismissed the notion
that the creature ran with its feet backward.
Others have not been so tenderhearted, and the dried bodies of
what are called orang pendeks have occasionally been brought to
Europe and America. The most recent case occurred in 1932 when,
in response to a reward offer, four natives produced what they said
was the body of an immature orang pendek. It turned out to be the
shaved and altered body of a common form of langur monkey.
Apparently, the people of Sumatra had been given to this kind of
trickery for centuries. Marco Polo was indignant over the sale of dried
HUMANOIDS 32
"pygmies" that he knew were nothing more than shaved monkeys
which the natives "put into wooden boxes, and sell them to trading
people who carry them to all parts of the world." On his way back
from China, the great Venetian traveler had passed through Sumatra
and had actually watched the manufacture of these "pygmies."
Could the belief in the orang pendek be based only on such fakes?
Some think so.
The story of the orang pendek may have been strengthened by the
discovery of the first known fossil man on the neighboring island of
Java in 1894. Orang pendek stories became particularly popular after
1900. Java man was not a pygmy, but popular belief is not always
logical in such matters.
It is certainly possible that the orang pendek tales have no basis in
reality. No authentic tangible evidence of the existence of the creature
has ever been produced. But as Bernard Heuvelmans wrote at the
conclusion of his discussion of this creature, "Who knows?"
See also: WILD MAN

SKUNK APE The skunk ape is one of the many local variations
of the bigfoot phenomenon, this one from Florida. The creature
became more than a local story in 1973, when a rash of reports
brought it to national attention. The skunk ape was even covered by
all three national TV network news shows, though Walter Cronkite
looked as if he was having a hard time repressing a snicker as he nar-
rated the account.
The report that made a celebrity out of the skunk ape was one in
which a Florida man said that he had actually hit the creature while
it was crossing the road. The monster was obviously hurt, the man
said, but it managed to limp off the road and into the dense swamp,
where it disappeared. Police examined the man's car and determined
that he had indeed hit something-the fender was dented and there
were traces of blood and fur on the car. The police thought he had
33 Skunk Ape
hit a cow. The witness insisted differently, it was a large hairy biped
with an evil smell, he said. It was the creature known as the skunk
ape.
While a bad odor is a feature of many Bigfoot stories, the Florida
variety appears to possess a particularly awful smell-hence the name
skunk ape. When Ralph "Bud" Chambers reported spotting the thing
near his Elfers, Florida, home in 1966, he says that he particularly
remembers the creature's sickening odor. What Chambers saw was
big, hairy, over seven feet tall, and four feet wide. The thing vanished
into the swamp and when Chambers tried to track it with his dogs,
the dogs seemed so disgusted by the strong odor that they would not
follow the trail.
Chambers said that a year later the thing showed up in his back-
yard. This time the dogs attacked it, but the creature barely noticed.
According to Chambers, "The dogs kept biting at its ankles and feet."
But the thing turned away slowly and started walking down the road
that led back to the swamp:
A man named H. C. Osborn, an engineer and amateur archaeolo-
gist, said that he had been hearing skunk-ape stories for years, and he
was told they had been circulated among trappers and fishermen
since the 1920s. But Osborn insisted that he had never personally
believed any of the stories until one day in the spring of 1970 he and
four friends were digging up an Indian mound in the Big Cypress
Swamp, Florida, and the creature popped up right in front of them.
"It's made a believer out of me," said Osborn. He too said the creature
was seven feet tall, and he estimated that it must have weighed seven
hundred pounds.
The creature left footprints in the soft earth, and Osborn measured
them at 17~ inches long, llX inches across at the toes. "In later trips
we found smaller tracks indicating that there are at least three of
them in that section of the swamp."
One of the other members of Osborn's group, Frank Hudson, said,
"We have talked to many old-timers in the area. They say they are
afraid to talk openly about it. They thought people would laugh at
them or think that they were crazy."
HUMANOIDS 34
In June of 1977 a heavily advertised film called Sasquatch was
being shown in Florida. Commercials for the film appeared regularly
on television, and, as one might imagine, they seemed to stimulate a
rash of skunk-ape sightings. Three youths told the Charlotte County
Sheriff's Department that they saw the creature twice in one night.
The first sighting took place at 9:00P.M., the second around midnight.
They said the creature was about seven feet tall, had reddish brown
hair, and didn't seem friendly: it stood up and growled at them. Dep-
uty Carl Williams drove around the area where the sightings were
made. At a small pond he caught "something" in the beam of his
spotlight. "It was a big animal. . . . It was hunched over and seemed
to be drinking." It had long brown hair, and when hit with the spot-
light the creature lumbered off into the woods.
The deputy's first thought was that the creature was a bear, for
bears are fairly common in the region. "I couldn't say it wasn't a bear
for sure, but it just seems logical that it must have been," Williams
said. He did however, think it was a bit strange that the creature had
reddish hair while most of the bears he had ever seen were black
See also: BIGFOOT

WILD MAN Throughout the Middle Ages, a familiar figure

of European legend was the wild man or wodewose. The wild man
was generally depicted as a human of enormous strength and size,
covered with shaggy hair, and carrying a great club. This creature, it
was believed, lived deep in the forests or in other wild and uninha-
bited regions, and rarely came into contact with human beings, which
was a good thing because the wild man was reputed to be violent, and
occasionally devoured humans that it captured, particularly children.
Richard Bernheimer, a scholar whose book Wild Men in the Mid-
dle Ages is the basic study of the European tradition, says of them:
"About the wild man's habitat and manner of life medieval author-
ities are articulate and communicative. It was agreed that he shunned
35 Wild Man
human contact, settling, if possible, in the most remote and inacces--
sible parts of the forest, and making his bed in crevices, caves, the
deep shadow of overhanging branches. In this remote and lonely syl-
van home he eked out a living without benefit of metallurgy or even
the simplest agricultural lore, reduced to the plain fare of berries and
acorns or the raw flesh of animals. At times he had to be ready to
defend his life, for the inner forests teemed with savage beasts real
and imaginary, which were wont to attack him. If he was to survive,
he had to be the physical equal if not the superior of creatures such
as dragons, boars or primeval bulls.... "
Some wild men were fiercer than others. Those of the mountainous
portions of central Europe and of the Alpine regions were the fiercest
of all.
Writes Bernheimer: "As described by modern folklorists the Alpine
wild man is a formidable creature, huge and hairy and mute and
according to some so large that his legs alone have the size of trees.
His temper when aroused is terrible, and his first impulse that of tear-
ing trespassers to pieces."
Practically every medieval pagent had at least one figure in a wild-
man costume. In 1392 Charles VI of France and five other nobles
dressed as wild men for a court festival in suits covered in pitch and
flax. The suits were highly flammable, and when a torch was inad-
vertently brought too close, they all caught fire. Four of the noblemen
were killed, and although the king survived, he sustained painful
burns as a result of his masquerade.
At first the wild man was shown as being truly wild, but later the
image softened, until the onetime ferocious beast became almost a
romantic figure, a symbol of the natural man, and of the lost freedoms
of a theoretical primitive life. This change in attitude toward the wild
man came only after belief in the reality of the wild man had
disappeared.
What lay behind this popular and persistent myth? Some have sug-
gested that the wild-man stories were inspired by individuals suffering
from hypertrichosis, an exceedingly rare condition in which long hair
grows all over a person's body, including his face. The condition, how-
HUMANOIDS 36
ever, is so rare, appearing in about one in every billion births, that it
is exceedingly doubtful that it would have inspired so widespread and
persistent a legend. However, the appearance of an occasional hyper-
trichotic individual ce:rtainly helped to spread and sustain the legend.
In 1556 a hypertrichotic individual named Peter Gonzales was born
in the Canary Islands. The child was sent to King Henry II of France,
whose court was already home for a collection of dwarfs, giants, and
other malformed individuals who have always seemed to have
amused kings throughout history. Gonzales was apparently believed
to be a genuine wild man, and the king had a cave specially con-
structed for him so that he would not become homesick for his old
"wild" life. Gonzales became quite a favorite of the king, and was
permitted to marry. Several of his children showed the same hairy
characteristics, and they too became attractions at different European
courts. A number of pictures of the Gonzales family survive, and their
appearance is striking, particularly when dressed in formal finery, as
they were for the portraits.
A more popular explanation of the origin of the wild-man belief is
that it was a survival from pagan times-a distant and distorted mem-
ory of a former belief in forest gods like the Roman god Silvanus.
Silvanus was a rather vaguely defined deity, who seems to have had
power over all those lands which lay beyond the fringes of cultivation.
He was not an evil god, but he was unpredictable and could be dan-
gerous. Prudent farmers habitually made some sort of offering to Sil-
vanus before felling trees to make a new field or otherwise making
inroads in the wild god's domain.
A psychological theory holds that all of these creatures, Silvanus,
the wild man, and the rest are really personifications of civilized
man's yearning for freedom from the restraints of the society in which
he lives.
Another theory about the origin of the wild-man legends is that
they were inspired by contact with a real but unidentified hairy biped
very like the Abominable Snowman, Bigfoot, etc. This creature may
have once lived in Europe, or stories of it may have been brought to
Europe by travelers from Asia. The thirteenth-century scholar Roger
37 Wild Man
Bacon wrote of the existence of a hairy wild man in the "high rocks"
of Tibet and China. Bacon also described how the natives of Asia
would capture these creatures by getting them drunk. This is remi-
niscent of an old Greek myth about capturing the hairy god Silenus
by putting out a bowl of liquor for him. The god, a notorious drunk-
ard, emptied the bowl, fell into a stupor, and was tied up before he
was able to rouse himself.
A book of travel tales written in 1590 by the English adventurer
Edward Webbe tells of seeing a hairy wild man in the East. This was
a most ferocious creature that was chained to a post by its captors and
could only be fed on human flesh, usually the corpses of executed
criminals. Unfortunately, Webb said he saw this monster at the court
of Prester John, an entirely mythical Christian king of the East.
European traditions concerning a wild woman are much more con-
fused. She is described either as being very beautiful or very ugly, or
both, because she possessed the magical ability to change her shape.
The wild woman of European tradition is really more of a witch than
anything else.
There is, however, one bit of wild-woman lore that connects up
with more modern beliefs. In her ugly form, the wild woman was said
to possess huge sagging breasts which she often slung over her shoul-
der for convenience while walking or running. This odd habit also
comes up in connection with the behavior of the female Abominable
Snowman.
See also: ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN, BIGFOOT, ALMA
 2

LAND

MONSTERS
AcAMBARO MONSTERS The pre-Columbian Indians of
Central and South America were marvelous artists who depicted all
manner of strange and wonderful creatures in their paintings, carv-
ings, and particularly in their clay figurines and pottery. Most of the
creatures represented are either fanciful representations of known
animals or of creatures generally considered to be mythical. There is,
however, one group of figures that has raised speculation that genuine
unknown animals are being depicted.
A huge cache of clay figurines and pottery was found near Acam-
baro, Mexico, in 1945. Among the thousands of items uncovered were
many that appeared to be models of dinosaurlike creatures. There was
nothing quite like them in other Indian art. The figures resemble in
a rough way figures made by different pre-Columbian cultures, but
they can not be assigned to any particular known culture.
Some claim that the Acambaro monsters were made by an as yet
unknown ancient civilization that had firsthand experience with dino-
saurs. Most archaeologists have a quite different explanation. They say
that the figures are fakes, of fairly recent vintage. Faking pre-Colum-
bian pottery and figures is a major industry, and most of what unwary
tourists buy as genuine pre-Columbian art are modern fakes.
Why the unknown faker-if that's who made these figures-chose
so many dinosaurian shapes rather than more traditional Indian
motifs can only be speculated on.
41
LAND MONSTERS 42

AMERICAN ELEPHANT No one today seriously doubts that

several species of elephant once roamed the Americas, and that ele-
phants and human beings coexisted in the Western Hemisphere
(though such ideas were highly controversial a century ago). And
there is practically no monster buff no matter how enthusiastic and
uncritical who believes that native American elephants are still roam-
ing about today, with the possible exception of the woolly mammoth

Mammoth

in Alaska and the northern reaches of Canada. But between these two
generally accepted conclusions there is a vast area of disagreement as
to when the last American elephant gave up the ghost.
Conventional scientific opinion holds that both the mastodon and
mammoth, which were once so common in America, died out in the
great wave of extinctions that swept away the large mammals of the
world at the end of the Pleistocene period or Ice Age. Unconventional
scientific opinion suggests that the elephants survived until fairly
43 Beast of Le Gevaudan
recent times, probably becoming extinct sometime after the discovery
of the New World by Europeans.
Evidence for later survival consists of a few Indian legends which
might, or might not, relate to elephants, some travelers' tales recount
the sighting of huge beasts with long noses, Indian mounds and their
contents in North America, and Indian carvings in South America.
Throughout many parts of North America, Indians built ceremo-
nial mounds, often in the shape of an animal or bird. One of these
mounds in Wisconsin appears to resemble an elephant, yet the mound
itself was built long after the Ice Age ended. Did the builders remem-
ber elephants from ages long past? Were they building a mound to
resemble an animal they still knew? Or as many archaeologists
believe, was this mound originally built in the shape of a bear, to
which flooding or some other accident of nature added a trunklike
extension on the front end?
Some artifacts in the shape of elephants have been found in Indian
mounds, but it is widely suspected that these are faked. No piece of
elephant ivory has ever been discovered in a mound.
In South America, a few Mayan drawings show what appear to be
elephants, but the drawings of the Maya are too stylized to say with
any degree of certainty that the animal depicted is an elephant. In
one case, what looks like an elephant may in reality be a bird.
So, as far as the survival of the American elephant beyond the Ice
Age, we have no tangible evidence. We have only rumors and
shadows.
See also: WOOLLY MAMMOTH

BEAST OF LE GEVAUDAN In mid-July, 1764, a young girl

from the village of Saint Etienne de Lugdares in the rugged moun-
tainous region of south-central France known as Le Gevaudan was
found dead. Her heart had been torn out. This was the first recorded
killing in a three-year reign of terror by a creature that came to be
LAND MONSTERS 44
known as the Beast of Le Gevaudan. Within a few days there were
several more killings of children reported.
As was customary in those days, the children had been left in
charge of sheep and cattle grazing in isolated summer pastures high
in the mountains. The killings spread panic among the peasants, who
quickly gathered in their children and left their livestock to fend for
itself.
A few weeks passed without any additional killings, and life began
to quiet down and return to normal. Then, late in August, a peasant
woman from the village of Langogne reported that she had seen a
fantastic creature. It walked on two legs like a man, but it was covered
with short reddish hair and had a piglike snout. It was big as a donkey
and had rather short ears and a long tail. The woman said the creature
had frightened off her dogs, but had itself been frightened by her
cattle, which attacked it with lowered horns.
The description sounded so fantastic that even the most supersti-
tious among the peasants laughed at it. They stopped laughing within
a few days, however, when the monster was reported again. This time
the witness was Jean-Pierre Pourcher, a man known for his courage
and truthfulness. Pourcher fired at the creature with his musket, but
either he missed or it was unaffected by the bullet.
And the murders of children began again. Many of the children
who had been taken out of the isolated pastures after the first alarm
had been allowed to return. Now some fell victim to a creature that
killed and mutilated. Not surprisingly, rumors began to circulate that
the region was afflicted by the loup-garou, the werewolf.
Even the king became alarmed by the events in Le Gevaudan, so
he dispatched a company of soldiers to deal with the beast. The sol-
diers arrived in February of 1765, and almost immediately encoun-
tered the creature. They opened fire on it, but it ran off into the dense
underbrush and could not be located. However, the killings ceased.
The soldiers believed that they had mortally wounded the beast, and
that it had hidden itself somewhere and died. They returned to the
palace at Versailles and reported they had successfully accomplished
their mission. But the terror wasn't over yet.
45 Beast of Le Gevaudan
p--·

Beast of Le Gevaudan

As the weather warmed up and the children were again sent to the
mountains to tend cattle and sheep, the murders began anew. Once
again an appeal was sent to the King, but he seems to have lost interest
in the problems of Le Gevaudan, and there was no response from the
court until early the following year, 1766. A second military expedi-
tion set out, but this time instead of going directly to Le Gevaudan,
the soldiers marched to a nearby area where another "great wolf" had
been reported. They were successful in killing a large wolf, which
they declared to be the "Beast of Le Gevaudan." They marched back
to Versailles in triumph, and once again the king declared the emer-
gency was over. And once again he was wrong.
The beast continued to stalk Le Gevaudan, and several villages
were actually abandoned because of fear of the monster. Finally in
June 1767, nearly three years after the depredations had begun, a
local nobleman organized a huge party of hunters and declared that
they would not rest until the monster really had been killed.
On June 19 the beast was surrounded in a patch of woods at Le
Sogne d' Au vert. One of the hunters, Jean Chastel, had a gun loaded
with silver bullets, and when he saw the beast he fired two shots-the
 LAND MONSTERS 46
second struck the monster in the heart and it fell dead.
The carcass was then carried from village to village as proof that
the terrible monster finally was really dead. Unfortunately, the
accounts are not clear as to just exactly what the thing looked like.
Most descriptions make it sound like a very large but strange-looking
wolf, with close-cropped ears and unusual hooflike feet.
In the warm June weather, the carcass began to putrefy, and it had
to be buried. While no one seems to know where the remains of the
monster were buried, tourists are still shown the spot where Jean
Chastel is supposed to have felled it, and his gun can be seen at the
church in Saint Martin-de-Bouchaux.
What was the Beast of Le Gevaudan? Today many believe that it
really was just a large and exceptionally ferocious wolf, or perhaps
several wolves whose killings were all attributed to a single creature
by the panic-stricken peasants. The peasants are also thought to have
exaggerated the extent and nature of the killings, attributing every
death to the beast. One theory holds that there was an outbreak of
rabies among the wolves of Le Gevaudan, and the disease is what
caused them to behave in so vicious and uncharacteristic a manner.
Others think the beast was a homicidal madman who never really was
caught but died at about the same time Chastel shot the wolf. But
there are those who contend that the Beast of Le Gevaudan was
exactly what the peasants thought it to be, the loup-garou.-the were-
wolf. In any event, this is among the most intriguing and well docu-
mented of all werewolf accounts.
See also: WEREWOLF

BEAST OF TRURO In the fall of 1981, the people of Cape

Cod, Massachusetts, began to suspect they might have a monster in
their midst. The first evidence that there was some sort of unknown
creature roaming the Cape came in September 1981, when several
mangled cats were found in the vicinity of the town of Truro. Over
47 Beast of Truro
the next few months, the mysterious killing or mauling of other
domestic animals was reported.
At first the attacks were attributed to dogs or packs of dogs which
run wild and are known to attack deer. But then people began seeing
something that obviously was not a dog, and there were reports of
strange noises heard during the night.
The most complete description of the Beast of Truro was given by
William and Marsha Mendeiros of Truro, who said that they saw it
on the beach, about fifty feet from where they stood.
"It had a very definite long ropelike taillike the letter J. It hit the
ground and went up. We figured it was about as tall as up to our knees
and weighed 60 or 80 pounds.
"We were frightened and froze. He was in the path and didn't see
us at first. As we made some noise he turned and we saw his face with
short ears."
The creature made no attempt to attack or run, but just sauntered
easily into the nearby woods and was lost among the trees.
One theory is that the beast is an American mountain lion, also
called a cougar or panther. There are no mountains on Cape Cod,
much less mountain lions, for it is believed that the eastern mountain
lion is extinct, and has been for a long time. But if one survived, some-
how it might be able to hide itself in the undeveloped national sea-
shore area near Truro. Others think that the beast is a mountain lion
but not a wild one; rather it is someone's escaped pet-for mountain
lions sometimes are sold and kept as pets. So are ocelots, a smaller
wildcat, which has also been mentioned as a candidate for the beast.
And there are still others who believe that the beast of Truro is not
a mountain lion, ocelot, wild dog, or any other known animal-that
it is something else, something unknown.
See also: PHANTOM LIONS
LAND MONSTERS 48

BEHEMOTH In the Book of Job (40:15-24) there is a descrip-

tion of a creature called behemoth:
"Behold now behemoth, which I am made with thee; he eateth
grass as an ox.
"Lo now, his strength is in the loins, and his force is in the navel of
his belly.
"He moveth his tail like a cedar; the sinews of his stones are
wrapped together.
"His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of
iron ....
"Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not; he trusteth that
he can draw up Jordan into his mouth."
Most scholars believe that the animal called behemoth in the Bible
is a hippopotamus. However, in apocryphal literature and Jewish leg-
end behemoth became a monster of formidable strength. Behemoth
was often linked in legend with another unknown creature, which is
described in the very next chapter of Job.
In the apocryphal Book of Enoch, the two creatures are described
as follows: "And in that day will two monsters be separated, a female
named Leviathan to dwell in the abyss over the fountains of waters.
But the male is called Behemoth which occupies with his breasts an
immeasurable desert named Dendain." In other legends the two are
deadly enemies who battle at the beginning of time and must be
destroyed by the Lord before they destroy his creation. In still other
versions of these legends, the battle between the two monsters takes
place on the Day of Judgment. In the Middle Ages, behemoth became
the name for a demon.
Traditionally, however, any large, heavy, and otherwise unknown
animal might be identified as behemoth. The notorious American fos-
sil faker "Dr." Albert Koch put together an enormous skeleton,
mainly out of mastodon bones, and sold it to Frederick William IV of
Prussia as behemoth of the Bible. Other nineteenth-century showmen
49 Bun yip
exhibited mammoth and mastodon skeletons (often outrageously
reconstructed) as behemoth. Sometimes a traveling animal show
would exhibit a hippopotomus as behemoth. That identification was
probably a correct one, but the showmen didn't know it, or didn't
care.
Frozen mammoths found in Siberia were often first identified as
behemoth, simply because the Russians who found them had never
seen a mammoth, or any other kind· of elephant before. They didn't
know what else to call the large, heavy, unknown thing in the ice.
See also: LEVIATHAN

luNYIP "Why search for the bunyip?"

That is an Australian expression which means roughly, Why try to
do the impossible? Originally the word bunyip stood for some sort of
god, spirit, or demon in the language of the Australian aborigines. The
early white settlers in Australia took the word bunyip to mean some-
thing unseen, unknown, and inexplicable. Therefore whenever they
ran across some animal that they could not classify, there was a ten-
dency to call it a bunyip. There are a tremendous number of bunyip
stories from Australia, some apparently refer to known animals, others
to animals that are purely mythical. Most interesting are a large per-
centage of these stories that cluster about an animal of whose exis-
tence we are currently unsure.
In June 1801, a party of French explorers were traveling along the
bank of the Swan River, above what is now the city of Perth. They
heard a horrible roar coming from a bed of reeds in the river, and not
knowing what they might find, they fled. That was the first story to
connect the bunyip with an unknown lake or river animal.
Explorer Hamilton Hume actually saw something in Lake
Bathurst. He said it looked like either a manatee or a hippopotamus.
Other accounts of a similar-looking freshwater animal began to filter
in from lakes and rivers in other parts of Australia. Yet a generous
LAND MONSTERS 50
reward offered for the skin or skull of the unknown animal went
uncollected. A supposed bunyip skull was determined by one natu-
ralist to be that of a colt and by another to belong to a calf. What it
really was we shall never know, for it has long since disappeared from
the Australian museum where it was presumably taken for safekeep-
ing. Reported native drawings of the bunyip have also vanished.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, searching for the bunyip
had become a popular Australian pastime, though most of the search-
ers never really expected to find it and probably didn't even believe
in it. The name continued to be troublesome, for as it meant "devil"
or "spirit," every sort of strange and unexplained event or sighting
was attributed to the bunyip, thus confusing the issue.
Yet at the core of all of this confusion there is a body of evidence
which describes a quite ordinary, even mundane sort of animal. Aus-
tralian scientist Gilbert P. Whitley concluded that "apart from the
most extravagant fabrications, we must be struck with the compara-
tive uniformity of bun yip descriptions over a long period." These
descriptions are of a fur-covered animal, around the size of a large
dog or a bit larger, with a doglike face and head. It has fins for swim-
ming and lives in rivers, marshes, and inland lakes.
The known animal most closely fitting the bunyip descriptions is
the seal, and the seal, perhaps of some unknown variety, is an excel-
lent candidate for the origin of the bunyip legends. Seals have been
known to make their way up rivers and fairly far inland. The sight of
a seal in a lake would certainly startle anyone who was not expecting
it.
But many of the bunyip stories come from places where access to
the sea would be improbable. This brings up the suggestion that the
bunyip is some kind of freshwater seal, not an impossibility, for there
are freshwater seals in parts of Asia, and in Canada there are isolated
colonies of the common seal in some freshwater lakes.
Seals abound in the waters off Australia, but inland the dominant
animals are all marsupials, at least they were until the coming of man.
This has led some to speculate that the bunyip is an otterlike or seal-
like marsupial.
51 Buru
Bunyip sightings began to decline by the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, and in the twentieth, reliable reports are almost nonexistent.
This has led some to the sad conclusion that the bunyip, if it ever
existed, is now extinct.
See also: WAITOREKE

luRU Rumors of the existence of a lizardlike monster called

the buru, in a "lost valley" somewhere in the Himalayas, first began
to reach the West during the 1940s. One of the earliest reports came
from Professor Christopher von Furer-Haimendorf, an anthopologist
who had worked extensively among the tribes of the mountainous
regions of northern India. In 1947 Professor von Furer-Haimendorf
wrote of his visit to an isolated and virtually unknown valley inhab-
ited by a people called the Apu Tanis. Although located on a high
mountain plateau, the twenty-square-mile valley was swampy and
thickly forested.
Von Furer-Haimendorf's original article on the "lost valley" con-
tained only a sentence which referred to the possibility of an unknown
monster: "The bottom of the valley-according to local tradition
[was] once a marshy swamp inhabited by lizardlike monsters.... "
A somewhat later visitor to the valley of the Apu Tanis, one Charles
Stonor, gave a fuller description of the "monsters." Stonor, who visited
the valley in the company of an official of the Indian government,
had also heard rumors of monsters. When he asked the people about
the rumors, he was told that they were perfectly true, the valley had
been inhabited by lizardlike monsters, but that the monsters had all
been killed off in the fairly recent past.
According to the Apu Tanis, when their ancestors had first come to
the valley much of it had been a great swampy lake. The lake was
inhabited by large aquatic animals, the likes of which they had never
seen before, and to which they gave the name buru. From the
descriptions, the buru was clearly some sort of reptile, about fifteen
LAND MONSTERS 52

, I

Buru

feet long, including its neck and tail. The body was rather broad. Sto-
nor quoted his informants as saying, "A man could just put his arms
around [it]." The head was roughly triangular in shape, and the crea-
ture displayed a forked tongue much like that of a snake. Its teeth
were generally flat, except four sharp fanglike teeth, two in the upper
and two in the lower jaw. The stumpy legs ended in heavily clawed
feet. Perhaps the creature's most impressive feature was its long and
powerful tail. According to the Apu Tanis, the buru did "everything
with its tail." The skin was "fishlike," except for what appeared to be
a row of armored plates along the tail, and its color was a mottled
blue black above and whitish below. The creature did not lay eggs
like most reptiles: the young were born alive in the water.
The buru was a plant eater, and not considered dangerous to
human beings, despite its size and strength. There was, however, one
story about a hunter who had speared a young buru and then was
53 Buru
attacked by its mother, who coiled her tail around his legs and pulled
him to his death in the water.
Generally the buru kept out of the way of human beings. Even
those who lived by the lake rarely saw the creature, for it spent most
of its time in the deeper water. During the summer months, burus
occasionally crawled out of the lake to sun themselves on the shore.
When they appeared on the surface, they occasionally let out a bel-
lowing call, which may have accounted for their name. In the colder
months, they disappeared into the mud on the lake bottom.
At first the buru and the new human inhabitants of the valley had
little to do with one another. But as the human population grew, more
and more land was needed for growing rice, so gradually the swampy
lake was drained for planting, and the buru's habitat was reduced to
some of the deeper pools in the lake. The creatures had become a
nuisance, so the final burus in the valley were trapped in five of these
pools, where they were destroyed by hurling stones and rocks onto
them; the holes were then filled in, burying the remains.
Stonor's informants told him that the buru was now extinct, and
they pointed out the exact spots at which the last of these creatures
had been killed and where their remains presumably lay. All this had
taken place many generations ago, but just exactly when the burus
had become extinct was not entirely clear.
This then was the story told by Charles Stonor, and it is not an
implausible one. A fifteen-foot lizard is no dinosaur in size, indeed,
there is one nearly as large known to be alive today. It is the Komodo
dragon. The Komodo dragon lives only on four tiny and remote
islands in Indonesia. Though it is quite a spectacular and fierce crea-
ture, its existence was not definitely established until 1910, although
rumors of the creature had been circulating for many years. If one
great lizard could remain hidden on remote islands, why couldn't the
buru have been hidden in a remote valley in the Himalayas? Further
expeditions into the valley, however, have failed to turn up any con-
crete evidence of the existence of the buru. J. P. Mills, one of those
who visited the area, was also shown the four sites at which the last
of the burus were said to have been killed and buried. He noted that
LAND MONSTERS 54
the Apu Tanis told him they never dug in any of these sites-so that
the remains, if any, must still be there.
In 1948 a couple of London newspapermen led an expedition to
find evidence of the buru. They were going to the valley of the Apu
Tanis when they heard an even more intriguing rumor: that the buru,
while extinct in that valley, still lived on in a nearby valley known as
Rilo. Thus distracted, the expedition made for the second valley, but
the end result was disappointment. No living buru was found, nor did
the searchers come up with any concrete evidence that the buru had
ever existed in the valley of the Rilo. The natives of the area contin-
ued to insist that burus lived in the swamp, but that the searchers had
come at the wrong time of year, for this was the season when the
creatures were inactive, and thus very hard to find. The members of
the expedition, however, concluded that the creatures no longer lived
in the valley, and perhaps never had. The failure of the expedition at
the valley of the Rilo does not destroy the case for the existence or the
recent extinction of the buru in the valley of the Apu Tanis, and pos-
sibly other nearby valleys as well.
American cryptozoologist Dr. Roy Mackal, who has examined the
evidence, concludes, "Taken all together, the reports suggest that a
large unidentified species of aquatic lizard lived or lives in the
swampy lake regions of 'the outer Himalayas of Assam."

DE LOYS'S APE While there are a great variety of monkeys

throughout South America, it has been universally believed among
zoologists that there were no apes of any sort in the Western Hemi-
sphere. Therefore it was with considerable surprise, and not a small
amount of skepticism, that scientists received the story told by a Swiss
geologist Francois de Loys about an encounter that had taken place
during an expedition into the forests on the borders of Colombia and
Venezuela.
In 1920 de Loys and his little party had been in the jungle for
nearly three years. They were ill with fever, exhausted, short of sup-
55 De toys's Ape
plies, and anxious to get back to civilization, when they had an unfor-
gettable experience. To their complete surprise, they came upon two
apes walking through the jungle. The apes were angry and advanced
in a threatening manner. De Loys and his companions shot one of the
pair (the female) and the other fled. The dead animal's skull was
taken, but unfortunately it disintegrated, and the pieces were lost dur-
ing the expedition's return.
So far, a fairly typical story. Strange animal encountered in a
remote jungle. Evidence unfortunately, or perhaps conveniently, lost
before it can be examined by outside authorities, and so all rests on
unsupported testimony. And so the controversy is never resolved.
But the story of de Loys's ape has a different twist. After shooting
the creature, de Loys had it set up on a crate, its chin propped up by
a forked stick, and he took a picture of it. Unlike so many similar
stories, the camera was not washed overboard when the boat was
swamped, the film was not fogged, the creature was not too far
away-indeed, the picture is a remarkably good one. End of contro-
versy? Unfortunately, no.
The story and the picture were given to Dr. George Montandon,
who published a scientific paper on the creature in May of 1929. Dr.
Montandon declared that a new species of ape had been found and
named it Ameranthropoides loysi, "Loys's American anthropoid,"
after its discoverer. In Dr. Montandon's view, de Loys's evidence
showed that, contrary to what everyone believed, anthropoid apes had
developed in the Western Hemisphere, and at least one species still
survived.
Most scientists are more cautious, however, than Dr. Montandon,
and it takes more than a story and a single photograph to convince
them of the existence of a new species, particularly one as remarkable
as the American ape. In the very same publication in which Dr. Mon-
tandon endorses de Loys's ape, Professor L. Joleaud suggests that the
creature looks extraordinarily like a heavyset spider monkey. The spi-
der monkey is a common inhabitant of the jungles of South America.
And about this point a controversy has, if not raged, at least bubbled
ever since.
LAND MONSTERS 56
The most obvious difference between an ape and a spider monkey
is that the spider monkey has an enormous prehensile tail, and an ape
has no tail at all. Unfortunately, de Loys's ape in the photograph is
placed in such a way that you couldn't see the tail even if it had one.
If the creature was a spider monkey, de Loys was not guilty merely
of making an error, but of attempting to commit a deliberate fraud,
by hiding the tail.
Another difference would be size. A large spider monkey stood
upright is just over three and a half feet tall. De Loys estimates that
his creature was just under five feet. On this crucial point, the picture
is not very helpful, for there is nothing in it against which one can
accurately estimate size. Even the size of the crate upon which the
creature is sitting is a matter of dispute.
And so there the case must rest. No further evidence has turned up
since de Loys's photo. Ameranthropoides loysi is either the only
unknown animal for which we possess a good photograph, or it is an
exceptionally audacious fake.

DRAGON OF THE ISHTAR GATE In 1902 a German pro-

fessor, Robert Koldeway, was conducting excavations at the ancient
city of Babylon, when he uncovered an enormous semicircular arch
flanked by massive walls. It was the famous Ishtar Gate, known from
legend but now seen for the first time in centuries. The reliefs on the
gate were dominated by the representation of two types of animals.
One, whose name was translated as Re'em, is a bull-like creature iden-
tified with a now extinct form of wild cattle, the urus. The model for
the other creature, called the sirrush, has proved to be far more dif-
ficult to identify.
The sirrush is an odd-looking creature-long, scaly body and tail
and long, graceful scaly neck with a small snakelike head, and a very
prominent forked tongue. The head possesses a large horn and, most
out of place, what appear to be ringlets or curls. But it is the feet of
57 Dragon of the lshtar Gate

Dragon of the Jshtar Gate

the creature that are really remarkable. The front feet resemble those
of a cat, while the back feet are distinctly birdlike.
It would have been easy to dismiss the sirrush as another example
of mythological imagination, like the sphinx or the winged bulls, but
Koldeway didn't do that. At the time he made his discovery, there
were other very important discoveries being made in another scien-
tific field-paleontology-for it was a time of great discovery of dino-
saur fossils. The world had really gone a little dinosaur crazy.
"If only the forelegs were not so emphatically and characteristically
feline," Koldeway mused, "such an animal might actually have
existed."
After some years of brooding over the subject, Koldeway decided
that such an animal had existed, and he identified it with the iguan-
odon, at the time the best known of the dinosaurs. In fact, the sirrush
does not look the least like the iguanodon, and Koldeway's identifi-
cation appears to have been based on an early and incorrect recon-
struction of the iguanodon as a four-legged creature. It actually
walked about on large strong back legs like the tyrannosaurus.
About thirty years later, the story was picked up by Willy Ley, a
LAND MONSTERS 58
German-born science writer who became one of the most popular and
influential writers on science of his day.
Ley traced the history of the sirrush, the creature he called the
Dragon of the Ishtar Gate, in Babylonian art, and found it to be a
common feature for thousands of years. He pointed out that the com-
bination of a reptilelike body and birdlike feet did exist in dinosaurs;
this, said Ley gave the sirrush "uncanny biological credibility."
Ley then went on to review the rumors of the possible survival of
a dinosaurlike creature in central Africa, and speculates that it is pos-
sible that the Babylonians had heard of such a creature, and perhaps
even seen one. Professor Koldeway had stressed that the Bible spoke
of a dragonlike animal in Babylon that Daniel is said to have killed
by giving it a pill made of bitumen and hair. Did the ancient Baby-
lonians have in captivity one of the last living dinosaurs?
Paleontologists have been unimpressed by this argument, as they
have been unimpressed by most arguments about dinosaurian sur-
vival, and Ley himself never claimed to have proof of the survival of
dinosaurs, or of the existence of any creature that could have inspired
the sirrush. But he does conclude, "It merely points to the existence
of a zoological puzzle of fantastic dimensions; but as for conclusions
we have to repeat that we do not know yet."
See also: DRAGON, MOKELE-MBEMBE

GIANT ANACONDA How large can a snake grow? Listen

to this account.
"We were drifting easily along on the sluggish current not far
below the confluence of the Rio Negro when almost under the bow
of the [boat] there appeared a triangular head and several feet of
undulating body. It was a giant anaconda. I sprang for my rifle as the
creature began to make its way up the bank, and hardly waiting to
aim smashed a .44 soft-nosed bullet into its spine, ten feet below the
wicked head. At once there was a flurry of foam, and several heavy
59 Giant Anaconda
thumps against the boat's keel, shaking us as though we had run on a
snag....
"We stepped ashore and approached the reptile with caution. It
was out of action, but shivers ran up and down the body like puffs of
wind on a mountain tarn. As far as it was possible to measure, a length
of forty-five feet lay out of the water, and seventeen feet in it, making
a total length of sixty-two feet. Its body was not thick for such a colos-
sal length-not more than twelve inches in diameter-but it probably
had been without food. I tried to cut a piece of the skin, but the beast
was by no means dead, the sudden upheavals rather scared us. A pen-
etrating, foetid odour emanated from the snake, probably its breath,
which is believed to have a stupefying effect, first attracting and later
paralyzing its prey. Everything about this snake is repulsive.

Giant anaconda

"Such large specimens as this may not be common, but the trails in
the swamps reach a width of six feet and support the statements of
Indians and rubber pickers that the anaconda sometimes reaches an
incredible size, altogether dwarfing that shot by me. The Brazilian
Boundary Commission told me of one exceeding eighty feet in length!
In the Araguay and Tocantins basins there is a black variety known
as the Dormidera, or 'Sleeper,' from the loud snoring noise it makes.
LAND MONSTERS 60
It is reputed to reach a huge size but I never saw one. These reptiles
live principally in the swamps, for unlike the rivers, which often
become mere ditches of mud in the dry season, the swamps always
remain. To venture into the haunts of the anaconda is to flirt with
death."
That account was written by Colonel Percy H. Fawcett, formerly
of the Royal Artillery of the British Army. Colonel Fawcett was an
experienced surveyor, and during the early years of the current cen-
tury he spent nearly twenty years doing boundary survey work in
South America, particularly in Bolivia and Brazil. Fawcett was more
than a surveyor and explorer, he was a romantic and an adventurer.
He disappeared in Brazil's Amazon Jungle in 1925 while searching
for a "lost civilization" that he was convinced existed somewhere in
that unmapped region. An aura of mystery still hangs over his
disappearance.
So Colonel Fawcett was a romantic adventurer. Was he also a liar?
When Fawcett's report was first published in England, a lot of people,
particularly zoologists, thought he was. It is true that Fawcett occa-
sionally reported seeing animals that no one else had ever seen, a
large, toothless freshwater shark, for example. But then Fawcett had
been places where few if any other Europeans had ever been. The
zoologists had a point, however, for while the anaconda may be the
longest snake in the world, the longest known anaconda is only 33
feet, and there is a reliable report that a 37~-foot specimen was killed
in eastern Columbia, the longest snake ever, according to the Guin-
ness Book of World Records. It is quite conceivable that an occasional
anaconda might grow even larger, but not 62 feet, or 80 feet, as Faw-
cett thought possible. That was just too great a jump in size for zool-
ogists to swallow without seeing the snake itself. Fawcett's 62-foot
specimen can not be discounted as a mere observational error, for
while he didn't actually measure the snake, he was close enough to
get an accurate estimate of its length, something that, as a surveyor,
he should have been able to do fairly well. Either the anaconda grows
nearly twice as long as most zoologists think possible, or Colonel Faw-
cett was a liar.
61 Giant Anaconda

However, Fawcett was not the only South American traveler to

report the existence of a monstrous anaconda. Cryptozoologist Ber-
nard Heuvelmans tells of his conversation with one Serge Bonacase, a
Frenchman who had been in Brazil in 1947. Bonacase said that while
he was traveling with a group of Frenchmen and Brazilians, the party
spotted an anaconda asleep in the grass. They shot at it and killed it,
but only after it was dead, and they were able to get close to it, did
they have any idea of the size of the monster. "When we walked
along the whole length of its body it seemed as if it would never end,"
said Bonacase.
The party didn't have any measuring equipment, but using a piece
of string they roughly estimated the snake to be between seventy-two
and seventy-five feet in length. The triangular head itself was some
two feet long, and had an eighteen-inch base.
Unfortunately, no one in the group had a camera at the time, and
no one thought to bring back the skull or skin of the monster to prove
the veracity of the tale. Why not?
Said Bonacase, "The Brazilian officials who had spent much of their
lives in this country did not seem particularly surprised. As for me, I
had heard so many tales of giant snakes that I supposed the whole of
the Amazon was crawling with monsters of this size."
A seventy-five-foot snake, it seems, was just too commonplace to
bother with.
In his book The Leviathans, Tim Dinsdale reports seeing an article
from a 1949 Brazilian newspaper which tells of the capture and kill-
ing of an anaconda that was at least 131 feet long and weighed five
tons.
Dinsdale also examined two newspaper photographs of this giant
anaconda, and while he believed the photographs are genuine, he
admits that they are too poor in quality, and of too uncertain an ori-
gin, to constitute definitive proof of the existence of the fabled giant
anaconda.
See also: GIANT BOA
LAND MONSTERS 62

GIANT SLOTH Ramon Lista, explorer, geographer, adven-

turer, and for a time governor of Santa Cruz in Argentina (which
turned out to be the most dangerous pursuit of all, for he was assas-
sinated by political opponents), had a lot of strange experiences in his
life. But none was stranger than his encounter with an unknown beast
of gigantic proportions in the region of his country called Patagonia.
One night, Lista said, he and his companions saw at close range an
animal that looked like a gigantic armadillo, covered with long hair.
It lumbered off at considerable speed, while Lista and the others shot
at it with their hunting rifles. Lista thought they had actually hit the
beast several times, but that somehow it seemed impervious to their
bullets. This encounter was supposed to have taken place sometime
during the 1890s.
The story inevitably reached the ears of Professor Florentino
Ameghino, a paleontologist and Argentina's greatest expert on fossils.
Ameghino was known for his enthusiasm, and his imagination, but
even he found it difficult to credit Lista's story. Lista had told some
fairly wild tales in the past, and his word was not necessarily to be
trusted. Yet Professor Ameghino could not discount the tale either, for
it seemed to reinforce some other bits and pieces of information that
he had been collecting about a gigantic unknown creature in Pata-
gonia. There were, for example, Indian traditions about a nocturnal
animal the size of an ox that lived in the pampas, sleeping during the
day in burrows it dug with its large claws. The Indians considered the
animal harmless, but when they tried to kill it they found that their
arrows would not penetrate its skin.
The animal of the Indian tradition and the one Lista said he saw
sounded identical, and both of them sounded very much like the giant
sloth. The giant sloth, or rather a whole tribe of giant ground sloths
ranging from the elephant-sized Megatherium to creatures just a few
feet tall, had flourished in South America until about ten thousand
years ago. Then, along with a majority of other large mammals
63 Giant Sloth
throughout the world, they disappeared in the wave of extinctions
that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene period or Ice Age. What
caused these massive extinctions of large mammals is still a matter of
dispute today, and it probably always will be. The only surviving
descendants of these giant sloths are the tree sloths, small, sleepy crea-
tures that spend much of their existence hanging upside down from
the limb of a tree.
There was evidence that the ancestors of the modern Indians of
South American had hunted ground sloths. Was it possible that the
Indian legends really originated in memories of those ancient times,
and that Lista was just making up whoppers based on what the Indi-
ans had told him? Possible, more than possible. But the stories might
also be true, for Ameghino held in his hand a piece of hide that had
come from a medium-sized sloth known as a M ylodon and the hide
seemed remarkably fresh. The hide of the sloth was studded with
small, hard calcium nodules, which made it extremely tough and dif-
ficult to penetrate. This, in addition to the creature's long hair, would
have rendered it nearly impervious to the fangs and claws of Pleis-
tocene predators, or to Indian arrows or Ramon Lista's bullets.
Ameghino named the creature Neomylodon listai ("Lista's new
M ylodon") in honor of the man who had been ridiculed for his story
about seeing the unknown animal.

Giant sloth
 LAND MONSTERS 64
The "fresh" piece of hide had come from a ranch in far southern
Argentina near a place called Last Hope Inlet. The rancher, a German
immigrant named Eberhardt, had discovered the skin in a cave on his
property in 1895.
. Repeated expeditions to Eberhardt's cave brought forth some fairly
spectacular finds, including another "fresh" piece of hide that had
been cut and rolled up. There was other evidence that man, as well
as M ylodon, had lived in the cave. Indeed, one scientist thought the
remains in the cave showed that Mylodons had been stabled there,
like domestic animals. He pointed to the remains of a wall he thought
was used to keep the sloths in the cave. He even gave the animal a
new scientific name, Grypotherium domesticum ("domesticated grif-
fin animal"). However, others have disagreed with this interpretation.
Mylodon and man, they said, may have lived in the same cave, but
at different times.
Several other presumably fresh pieces of hide were found in other
caves in southern Argentina. At the time there was no way of deter-
mining the age of the hide. After the Carbon-14 dating process was
developed, the Mylodon dung in Eberhardt's cave was tested-all of
it turned out to be ten thousand years old, or older, well within the
coliventional date set for the extinction of the giant sloth. What about
the fresh pieces of Mylodon hide? The conditions within the caves
may have allowed them to retain their fresh appearance for thousands
of years. Or possibly they were brought from a place where the sloth
survived to a later date. According to one estimate the hide was 5,000
years old.
In any event, no further evidence of a surviving giant sloth has been
found in this century, and so what once appeared to be one of the
most promising cases of an "extinct" animal turning up alive may end
with the conclusion that the creature really is extinct after all.
See also: IEMISCH, SU
65 lemisch

I EMISCH Professor Florentino Ameghino was a great promoter

of the theory that the giant sloth survives or did survive into fairly
recent times in the southern part of his native Argentina. So when he
heard of the iemisch, a monster much feared by the Tehuelche Indi-
ans, he unhesitatingly identified it as a giant sloth-which only shows
how far astray one can be led by enthusiasm.
Here is a description of the iemisch (or hymche as it is spelled in
this account) written in 1900 by a French traveler named Andre
Tournouer who was on an expedition in Argentina:
"Lying in wait one evening on the bank of a river in the interior,
beside which I had pitched my camp, I saw emerge in the middle of
the stream the head of an animal the size of a large puma. I fired, the
animal dived and did not reappear.
"As far as I could see in the dusk, its round head had dark brown
fur, its eyes were encircled with light yellow hair, stretched in a thin
line to the ear hole. There was no external ear.
"I described it to the Indian who acted as my guide; he seemed
very frightened and assured me I had seen the mysterious hymche."
In other accounts, the iemisch is described as attacking people and
carrying its victims off into the water. Its fierceness earned it the title
"water tiger." This sort of activity is unlikely to be found in a slow-
moving, plant-eating ground dweller like the giant sloth. But such was
Ameghino's stature, that for years his identification has confused the
issue of what the iemisch might really be.
Others have more plausibly suggested that the iemisch is some sort
of unknown feline. Dr. Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, an anthropologist
from the Natural History Museum of La Plata, studied the iemisch
tradition and concluded that there really was no such animal, but that
the stories arose as the result of a confusion between a jaguar, which
can be quite ferocious and is also unafraid of water, and the otter,
which is not ferocious but is fully aquatic.
Bernard Heuvelmans sees much merit in Lehmann-Nitsche's the-
LAND MONSTERS 66
ory, but also suggests the possibility that there might exist some sort
of unknown giant otter. Dr. Roy Mackal is even more enthusiastic
about the giant-otter theory.
"Now my suggestion as to the nature of the iemisch is that it is a
rare large, ferocious species or subspecies of otter. . . . Its range is
restricted and may still be shrinking."
See also: GIANT SLOTH

M INHOCAO During the late nineteenth century, scientific

journals in Europe printed a number of reports about the Minhocao,
or gigantic earthworm, that was supposed to live in some of the high-
lands of South America.
An article in the February 21, 1878, issue of the prestigious British
publication Nature stated: "The stories told of this supposed animal,
says Fritz Muller [a German who lived in Brazil and supplied the
information], sound for the most part so incredible that one is tempted
to consider them as fabulous. Who could repress a smile at hearing
men speak of a worm some fifty yards in length and five in breadth,
covered with bones as with a coat of armour, uprooting mighty pine
trees as if they were blades of grass, diverting the courses of streams
into fresh channels, and turning the dry land into a bottomless
morass?"
Yet the correspondent for Nature was not entirely skeptical of these
tales." ... After carefully considering the different accounts given of
the 'Minhocao' one can hardly refuse to believe that some such animal
does really exist, although not quite so large as the country folk would
have us believe."
Most of those who believed in the existence of the Minhocao had
never actually seen it; they drew their belief from what they took to
be the underground burrowings of the creature.
"About fourteen years ago," said the Nature article, "in the month
of January, Antonio Jose Branco, having been absent with his family
eight days from his house ... on returning home found the road
67 Mngwa
undermined, heaps of earth being thrown up, and large trenches
made. These trenches commenced at the source of a brook, and fol-
lowed its windings; terminating ultimately after a course of from 700
to 1,000 metres. The breadth of the trenches was said to be about
three metres. Since that period the brook has flowed in the trench
made by the Minhocao. Paths of the animal lay generally beneath the
surface of the stream; several pine trees had been rooted up by its
passage. One of the trees from which the Minhocao in passing had
torn off the bark and part of the wood, was said to be still standing
and visible last year. Hundreds of people from Curtibanos and other
places had come to see the devastation caused by the Minhocao, and
supposed the animal to be still living in the marshy pool, the waters
of which appeared at times to be suddenly and strangely troubled.
Indeed on still nights a rumbling sound like distant thunder and a
slight movement of the earth was sensible in the neighboring
dwellings."
While tradition held that the Minhocao was a gigantic worm or
some kind of snake, the anonymous author of the Nature article had
an intriguing alternate suggestion. He thought that the creature might
in reality be some kind of gigantic armadillo. The author pointed out
that at least one known species of armadillo was almost entirely sub-
terranean, and that armadillos of enormous size were once common
in South America. He even went so far as to ask, "if the suggestion be
not too bold, even a last descendant of the Glyptodonts?" The glyp-
todont was an elaborately armored giant armadillo that was once
common in South America but died at the end of the Pleistocene era,
along with many other large mammals throughout the world.
See also: GIANT SLOTH

M NGWA The most feared and mysterious animal in central

Africa may be the mngwa, a name which translates roughly as "the
strange one." Stories about the beast are vague. It is supposed to have
a rather catlike appearance and the ability and desire to tear to pieces
LAND MONSTERS 68
any human being unlucky enough to meet it in the jungle. Mngwa
figures in a number of Swahili songs and tales, usually about a fearless
warrior who sallys forth to slay one of the monsters.
Europeans who heard mngwa stories tended to regard the creature
as sort of an African dragon-an entirely mythical animal. But in the
1920s there were a series of killings in some of the fishing villages on
the coast of Tanganyika which led some to wonder if the mngwa was
more than a legend.
The victims in the killings were usually horribly mutilated, and
they were often found clutching grayish hairs that had been pulled
from some unidentified animal-clearly the animal that had killed
them. The beast's modus operandi was quite unlike that of known
carnivores, and local natives insisted that the culprit was mngwa. All
attempts to capture the killer animal were in vain.
See also: NANDI BEAR

MoKELE-MBEMBE The idea that there is some sort of dino-

saur surviving in the swamps of central Africa has been around for
over a century. Nineteenth-century travelers in Africa brought back
a confusing collection of stories of unknown reptilelike creatures of
enormous size. There were a variety of descriptions and a tongue-
twisting proliferation of names. But as Africa was explored, and no
tangible evidence of this creature (or creatures) was produced, inter-
est began to fade. However, due primarily to the efforts of crypto-
zoologist Dr. Roy Mackal, there has been a rebirth of interest in the
central African dinosaur during the 1980s, making it one of the most
eagerly sought and well-publicized monsters of the era.
An early and popular account of a dinosaurlike creature came from
the tales of Alfred Aloysius Horn, or "Trader Horn," a late Victorian
traveler, adventurer, and storyteller:
"Aye, and behind the Cameroons there's things living we know
nothing about. I could 'a made books about many things. The Jago-
69 Mokele-Mb~mbe

Nini they say is still in the swamps and rivers. Giant diver it means.
Comes out of the water and devours people. Old men'll tell you what
their grandfathers saw, but they still believe it's there."
Horn had never seen the thing himself, but he thought it must be
the same as the creature called the Amali. He had never seen that
either, but he had seen its footprint, "about the size of a good frying-
pan in circumference and three claws instead o' five."
Trader Horn not only repeated legends, he exaggerated them in
order to make a better story; but still at least come of his tales had a
bit of truth behind them.
C. W. Hobley, an early twentieth-century crytozoologist, collected
stories of an African creature called the dingonek. At first he thought
them to be mere travelers' tales, but then he met a man that he con-
sidered to be a reliable witness: "He emphatically asserts that he saw
this beast. He was at the time about where the Mara River crosses the
frontier, and the river was in high flood. The beast came floating
down the river on a big log, and he estimated its length at about six-
teen feet but would not be certain of the length as its tail was in the
water. He describes it as spotted like a leopard, covered with scales,
and having a head like an otter.... " Hobley found that Masai tribes-
men in the region knew of the beast, but they called it Ol-umaina.
Hobley suggested the thing might be a dinosaur and added: "A
survival of some extinct race of saurians is a thing to thrill the imag-
ination of the scientific world."
Carl Hagenbeck, a well-known collector of African animals, also
collected tales of a beast called the chipekwe, though he didn't see it
himself:
"From what I have heard of the animal, it seems to me that it can
only be some kind of dinosaur, seemingly akin to the brontosaurus. As
the stories come from so many different sources, and all tend to sub-
stantiate each other, I am convinced that some such reptile must be
still in existence. "
Hagenbeck even financed an expedition to find the chipekwe, but
the expedition was a failure. "In the part of Africa where the animal
is said to exist, there are enormous swamps, hundreds of square miles
LAND MONSTERS 70
in extent, and my travellers were laid with very severe attacks of
fever."
Another traveler, John G. Millais, reported an experience attributed
the late King Lewanika of the Barotse Empire. The king "frequently
heard from his people of some great aquatic reptile, possessing a body
larger than that of an elephant, and which lived in the great swamps
near his town." The king gave orders that the next time the monster
was seen he should be informed at once so that he could go and see
for himself.
About a year later the king was told that the monster had crawled
out of the water of a nearby lake. "The beast was said to be of colossal
size, with legs like a gigantic lizard, and possessing a long neck. It was
also said to be taller than a man, and had a head like a snake."
The king immediately rode to the spot, but the monster was already
gone; however, as it had dragged itself through the reeds, it had flat-
tened a path about four and a half feet wide.
In 1932 a Swiss zoologist named A. Monard tried to track ·down
rumors of a huge reptilian monster in Angola. He didn't find what he
was looking for, but he was still convinced that "the existence of a
large saurian descended from the reptiles of the Mesozoic era is by no
means theoretically impossible."
That same year the British-born cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson
was also traveling in Africa. He had come across "vast hippo-like
tracks" in a region where there were no hippos, for they were said to
have been driven out by a creature whose name he gives as mbulu-
eM'bembe. A few months later he was paddling down a river when
he heard terrific noises coming from the caves on the river's bank,
"and something (and it was the top of a head [I] feel sure) much
larger than a hippo rose up out of the water for a moment, set up a
large wave and then gurgled under."
Of all the available accounts of a central-African dinosaur, the one
that Dr. Roy Mackal found most impressive was one written by Cap-
tain Freiheer von Stein zu Lausnitz, leader of a German expedition
to the Congo just prior to World War I. Von Stein had only heard of
the creatures:
71 Mokele-Mb~mbe

"The animal is said to be brownish gray with a smooth skin, its size
approximately that of an elephant, at least that of a hippopotamus. It
is said to have a long and very flexible neck and only one tooth, but
a very long one-some say it is a horn. A few spoke about a long
muscular taillike that of an alligator.... It lives in the caves that have
been washed out by the river in the clay of its shores sharp bends. It
is said to climb the shore even in the daytime in search of food; its
diet is ... entirely vegetable.... "
Von Stein called the creature mokele-mbembe, and it lived in the
region which Mackallater chose to investigate.
But between the early traveler's tales and the modern investigation,
there were a number of notable hoaxes, which tended to bring ridi-
cule on the whole subject of a central-African dinosaur. The most
elaborate hoax was one which began in 1919. It started with stories
appearing in London newspapers about an "extraordinary monster"
raging through the swamps and villages of central Africa. For some
reason the thing was called a brontosaurus, though the descriptions of
the monster with horns, tusks, and cloven hoofs did not sound the least
bit brontosauruslike. There was a story that the Smithsonian Institu-
tion had sent an expedition to capture the beast, but several members
of the expedition had been killed in a train crash. Therefore, the
rumor ran, the Smithsonian had offered a huge reward to anyone who
would go to Africa and kill or capture the thing.
That promise brought them out of the woodwork. A Captain
Leicester Stevens announced that he was heading for Africa on
Christmas eve in order to hunt the brontosaurus. His only companion
was to be his faithful dog Laddie, his only weapon a relatively small
Manchester rifle. He said that the monster would fall dead immedi-
ately when the bullet struck its "vital spot," but he declined to say
where the "vital spot" was.
The excitement over the brontosaurus had grown so great that by
February, 1902, the members of the Smithsonian expedition had to
write to the Times of London to explain that the whole story was a
practical joke. Just who was responsible for the joke, and how it was
allowed to get so far, was not explained.
LAND MONSTERS 72
A dozen years later there was another hoax, this time concerning a
monstrous lizardlike creature called the "Chepeke" or "water lion."
A picture of this monster was even produced, but it was so clearly
fraudulent that it could not be taken seriously for a moment.
Given the rather checkered history of the search for the central
African dinosaur, it took an act of almost foolhardy courage for Dr.
Mackal to make a genuine attempt to find it. But Mackal, a veteran
of the search for the Loch Ness monster, as well as a professor of biol-
ogy at the University of Chicago, had become convinced that there
just might be something in all the old stories. At least he thought it
was worth a look.
Along with associate James Powell, a Texas herpetologist and mon-
ster enthusiast, he went to central Africa in February, 1980. The pair
trekked to the remote and swampy Likouala region of the Republic
of the Congo. While they didn't see mokele-mbembe themselves, they
talked to many who said they had.
The best evidence they found was a report that one of these crea-
tures had been killed in 1959 because it disturbed the fishermen on
Lake Tele. The animal was killed with a spear and then cut up, a
tedious job because of the creature's extremely long neck and tail. A
rather fantastic end to the story was that everyone who ate the crea-
ture's meat died. Mackal said that there appeared to be a superstitious
dread attached to even talking about the beast, though people did
talk.
One witness, Nicholas Mondongo, who came from a village on the
fringe of the Likouala swamp region, told how his father had often
seen mokele-mbembe. Nicholas Mondongo himself saw the creature
up close one day while on a hunting trip along the Likouala-aux-
herbes River. Says Mackal, "He [Nicholas Mondongo] said that the
reddish brown animal stood upright on its short legs, which he
thought had been collapsed when it was submerged. He saw its back
and part of its tail. On the head was a frill resembling a chicken's
comb. After about three minutes the animal submerged."
The witness estimated the creature to be about thirty-two feet long,
ten feet of which were head and neck, the rest body and tapering tail.
73 Mokele-Mb~mbe

The head was somewhat larger than the neck. The descriptions col-
lected by Mackal and Powell led them to suspect that mokele-
mbembe is a dinosaur, most probably a pygmy version of one of the
great sauropods like the brontosaurus. The long neck and tail, plus
semiaquatic habits, make it sound very much like the brontosaurus,
as most scientists imagine it to have been.
Dr. Mackal has found few enthusiastic supporters for his theories
among his scientific colleagues, but his efforts have not met with the
scientific scorn usually accorded monster hunters.
Science 80, a publication of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, stated, "Paleontologists like the Smithsoni-
an's George Zug do not scoff at the efforts to document the existence
of such 'cryptozoological' specimens. But they certainly withhold
judgement until there is some direct physical evidence.... "
Mackal has offered a $2,000 reward for such evidence, a piece of
hide, a bone, anything that could have only come from this unknown
central-African animal. So far the reward has gone uncollected.
A second Mackal expedition in 1981 also failed to turn up any phys-
ical evidence, nor did Mackal see the animal itself; but he photo-
graphed some large and puzzling footprints, and of course collected
more stories of mokele-mbembe.
A few weeks after Mackal returned, the newspapers were full of
accounts of an expedition that had been undertaken in the same area
by a group from California led by Herman and Kia Regusters. They
said that they had seen and possibly photographed the creature in the
Lake Tele area.
The animal was described as being dark brown in color, with a slick
skin and a long neck and snakelike head. It was supposedly seen by a
number of people on the expedition on several different occasions.
The photographs, which were said to have been taken under very
difficult conditions, did not show very much.
See also: DRAGON OF THE ISHTAR GATE
LAND MONSTERS 74

NAND I BEAR Throughout Kenya there are rumors of a large

and terrifyingly ferocious creature called by many names, among
them the Nandi bear. Nandi, because it is from the land of the Nandi
people that most of the rumors originate; bear, because the creature
is said to look like a bear-though no native species of bear is known
to exist on the African continent anymore. The natives have a number
of names for this creature, among which chemosit is perhaps the most
common.
The traditions and tales concerning the Nandi bear are confusing;
they run from the very ordinary to the almost supernatural. Geoffrey
Williams, who had taken part in an expedition into Nandi territory in
1912, described his sighting of the strange beast:
"Looking in the direction to which he [my guide] pointed I saw a
large animal sitting up on its haunches not more than 30 yards away.
Its attitude was just that of a bear at the 'Zoo' asking for buns, and I
should say it must have been nearly 5 feet high .... Before we had
time to do anything it dropped forward and shambled away.... "
A number of other equally moderate reports led some zoologists to
conclude that there might indeed be some yet unclassified species of
bear or bearlike animal in Africa. As they began to question the
natives about the creature, they were told, yes indeed there is a bear-
like animal living in the jungle, but it is no ordinary animal; it is the
most ferocious and bloodthirsty animal in all Africa. One of its nick-
names is "brain eater," meaning that when it kills it eats only the
brain of its prey. According to one report:
"Men told me it came down to the villages at night and murdered
the inhabitants in their huts. It made its ent:ance through the roof,
killed the occupants, and ate their brains. That was one of the beast's
pecularities; it ate only the brains of its victims. Women gathering
firewood in the forest would be missed, and later their bodies would
be discovered, always minus the tops of their skulls."
According to the stories, the Nandi bear would crouch on a low-
75 Okapi
lying branch above a path. When a potential victim ambled by, the
beast would rip off the top of its skull with a single swipe of its great
claws. Then it would eat the unfortunate victim's brain. In his book
On the Track of Unknown Animals, cryptozoologist Bernard Heu-
velmans makes a heroic effort to sort out the various traditions
attached to the Nandi bear. He found that many of the stories appar-
ently relate to known animals like the hyena, the ratel, even the
baboon, that have simply been misidentified. But he also cites the
"daring theory" of Dr. Charles Williams of the British Museum of
Natural History, who suggested that the Nandi bear might be a sur-
vivor of a unique mammalian group, the Chalicotheridae. These
strange-looking beasts had short hind legs, sloping backs, heavy heads,
short tails, and enormous claws. They were, however, vegetarians who
used the claws for tearing down leaves and branches. No one knows
exactly when these creatures became extinct, but it appears to be in
fairly recent times.
Writes Heuvelmans: "There is no doubt that if a Chalicotherium
were clad in a furry coat-which is pure supposition -it would agree
perfectly with most witness' descriptions [of the Nandi bear]. And that
is all that one can say for the moment."
See also: MNGWA

OKAPI The okapi is not an unknown animal. Though they

are exceedingly rare in the wild, you may well have seen an okapi in
the zoo, for they have adapted very well to captivity, and they are
displayed in many large zoos throughout the world. The okapi is a shy
animal, and not at all monstrous in appearance. It looks somewhere
halfway between a zebra and a giraffe. In fact, it is the closest living
relative of the giraffe. ·
Yet the okapi must be mentioned in a book of monsters and
unknown animals, for it is the last large and singular-looking land ani-
mal to be discovered by science. The discovery took place at the turn
of the century, at a time when most scientists believed that all the
LAND MONSTERS 76
important animal discoveries had already been made.
Explorers in Africa had long heard rumors of the unknown animal,
and its first appearance in print dates back to about 1890, when Sir
Henry Stanley's book In Darkest Africa appeared. It was another ten
years before Sir Harry Johnston sent back from the forests of the
Congo a complete okapi skin and two skulls. During the 1920s some
living okapis were sent to European zoos, and the first American okapi
arrived in the Bronx Zoo in 1937.

Okapi

The okapi had escaped scientific detection for so long because it

made its home in the depths of inhospitable Congo (now Zaire) jungle,
where few Europeans cared to linger. Being a secretive creature, the
okapi was simply overlooked, and the Europeans brushed aside as
untrustworthy the stories of the native pygmies, who knew the animal
well.
Other land animals, the pygmy hippopotamus, the mountain
gorilla, and the pygmy chimpanzee, for example, were discovered
even more recently, but they closely resemble known species and
could easily be confused with them. The okapi does not really look
77 Su
like any other animal and it represents a type of creature thought to
be long extinct. The okapi is now being considered as the symbol of
the International Society of Cryptozoology.

Su In the mid sixteenth century, the humanist Konrad Gesner

published the first major naturalistic treatise on the animal life of the
world since before the triumph of Christianity. Gesner's four-volume
Historia animalium is a complete collection of what was known and
believed about the animals of that time. The work contains descrip-
tions and marvelous drawings of many known, and some mythologi-
cal, animals. And there are a few entries where one is not quite sure
if the creature is mythological, or if a fanciful description of a real
animal is being given, or if possibly the people of Gesner's day knew
of the existence of an animal that is unknown to us today.
One of the most puzzling creatures in Gesner's book is the Su, an
animal said to live in Patagonia, in the southern part of what is now
Argentina.
"The Most Obnoxious Animal that might be seen, called Su in the
New Lands. There is a place in the newly found land where lives a
people calling itself in its language Patagones, and since the land is
not very warm they cover themselves with fur from an animal they
call Su, which means Water, by reason of its dwelling mainly near
water. It is very dreadful and obnoxious, as may be seen. [The picture
shows an animal with a feathery tail and a distinctly human head,
which was probably the artist's fancy.] When hunted by hunters it
takes its young upon its back, covers them with its long tail and flees;
will be caught in pits and killed with arrows."
Gesner's information was based on an earlier (1558) work by Father
Andre Thevet, a French priest who had traveled widely throughout
the New World collecting observations and tales of "prodigies of
nature." The Su was one of them.
The animal was also mentioned by the Portuguese historian Lozano
in 1740. Lozano agreed that the creature was hunted to make cloaks
LAND MONSTERS 78

Su

or capes of its hide, and that is was called succarath or Su. Argentinian
paleontologist Professor Florentino Ameghino suggested that the Su
was a species of giant ground sloth which had somehow survived the
extinctions of large mammals that swept the world, and particularly
the Western Hemisphere, at the end of the Pleistocene or Ice Age.
Others have suggested that cloaks or capes made from the thick, stud-
ded hide of a giant sloth would have served as armor.
See a/so: GIANT SLOTH, IEMISCH

f ASMANIAN TIGER The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine,

most certainly did exist, and there is some evidence to suggest that it
still does. It was or is the largest of the carnivorous marsupials, being
about five feet in length overall. It looks more like a wolf than a tiger,
indeed, it is also known as the Tasmanian wolf. The tiger title comes
from the distinct stripes on the lower part of its body. In fact, it is
more closely related to the kangaroo, and has been known to hop like
one.
The Tasmanian tiger was once thought to be numerous on the Aus-
tralian mainland, but the arrival of the dingo presumably caused their
extinction. However, the creatures remained common on the small
island of Tasmania until fairly recent times. Since the arrival of white
79 Tazetwurm
settlers, the Tasmanian tiger has become increasingly rare, and the
species seems to be extinct.
There has been no positively confirmed sighting of a living Tas-
manian tiger for many years, but in August 1961 it was reported that
one of the rare creatures had been trapped, but then escaped, on the
west coast of Tasmania. It left behind blood and hair which were later
identified as belonging to the tiger.
More recently there have been other reports of sightings of a living
Tasmanian tiger, but these have not been verified. Footprints of the
creature have also been reported, but again the reports are uncon-
firmed. The Tasmanian tiger was a solitary and nocturnal animal, and
so it is quite possible that a few of these creatures may survive unde-
tected in inaccessible mountain regions.
Monster enthusiasts ask, Why, if this unique-looking animal can
escape detection for so long, is it not possible for others to have done
so?

TAZELWURM The tazelwurm . is not large or fearsome

enough to be truly monstrous. But it does carry with it an air of mys-
tery and uncertainty that qualifies it for inclusion in this work.
The tazelwurm, or "worm with feet," is a thick-bodied lizardlike
creature two to three feet in length that lives in the valleys of the
Swiss, Bavarian, and Austrian alps. Descriptions vary somewhat, and
there are a variety of different local names, but all apparently refer
to the same unknown creature. Among its many names are berg-
stutzen ("mountain stump"), springewurm ("jumping worm"), and
stollenwurm ("tunnel worm").
Descriptions and accounts of the creature and its habits are found
in a number of nineteenth-century almanacs and natural-history
guides to the Alpine regions. Compilers of these works seem unsure
as to whether the tazelwurm really exists or is simply a product of
Alpine folklore. But all agree that belief in the tazelwurm was
widespread.
LAND MONSTERS 80
There is no known physical evidence of the existence of such an
animal, but a work on animals of the Alpine region published in 1841
states:
"In 1828 a peasant in the Solothurn canton found one in a dried-
up marsh and put it aside intending to take it to Professor Hugi. But
in the meantime the crows ate half of it. The skeleton was taken to
the town of Solothurn, where they could not decide what it was, and
sent it to Heidelberg-where it was lost."
In 1934 a Swiss photographer produced a photograph of a tazel-
wurm that he said he had taken by accident. He was photographing
a tree stump when a large and angry lizard poked its head out just as
he snapped the shutter. The picture shows what appears to be the
blunt head and forepart of a rather lizardlike body. The picture also
looks very much as if what has been photographed is a crudely made
model rather than a living creature.
There is, however, plenty of anecdotal evidence. The tale of an
Austrian schoolmaster who was exploring a cave in 1929 is fairly
representative:
"Suddenly I saw a snakelike animal sprawled on the damp rotting
foliage that covered the ground. Its skin was almost white, not covered
with scales but smooth. Its head was flat, and two very short feet on
the fore-part of the body were visible. It did not move but kept staring
at me with its remarkably large eyes. I know every one of our animals
at first glance and knew that I faced the one that is unknown to sci-
ence, the tazelwurm. Excited, joyful, but at the same time somewhat
fearful, I tried to grab the animal but I was too late. With the agility
of a lizard the animal disappeared in a hole and all my efforts to find
it were in vain. I am certain that it was not my imagination that let
me see the animal but that I observed it with a clear head."
Others have reported somewhat more alarming encounters with
the beast. It is said by some to be very aggressive, and a Swiss hunter
who told of having to defend himself from an attack by an angry
tazelwurm said that his knife would barely penetrate its skin. There
is also a persistent rumor that the bite of the tazelwurm is poisonous.
Neither the virtually impenetrable skin nor the poisonous bite are
81 Waitoreke
biologically improbable. Belgian cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvel-
mans points out that the Gila monster of the American Southwest and
its close relative, the Mexican beaded lizard, both have venomous
bites. These large heavy-bodied lizards also have protectively studded
skins which are extremely hard to penetrate.
A source of confusion is the number of legs possessed by the tazel-
wurm. Many accounts give it four legs, but there are a significant
number that say it only has two short front legs. This too is not a
biological impossibility, for there is a variety of Mexican lizard that
has only two short front legs, and the glass snake, which is really a
lizard, has no legs at all. It is also possible that the creature's legs are
so short that the rear ones are often overlooked.
Heuvelmans also notes that there is a species of American salaman-
der known as the greater siren that has only two front legs. This crea-
ture may reach a length of three feet, making it a giant among sala-
manders. During periods of dry weather, the siren burrows into the
mud and appears only after the rain. Many accounts say that the rare
and elusive tazelwurm is most commonly seen after the first rain
which breaks a long drought. Heuvelmans thus raises the possibility
that the tazelwurm might be an amphibian of some sort, rather than
a reptile, as most commonly believed.

WAITOREKE In the middle of the nineteenth century, sev-

eral settlers in New Zealand's remote Canterbury Province reported
the existence of an otherwise unknown otterlike creature called the
waitoreke. Ferdinand von Hochstetter, writing about New Zealand in
1863, said that the waitoreke was one of those "few sporadic mam-
malia which have thus far escaped the searching eye." If the waito-
reke really exists, it has still escaped the searching eye.
When Bernard Heuvelmans reviewed the evidence, he suggested
that the waitoreke might be some sort of unknown otter, or even a
type of large platypus. NaturalistS. J. Watson was more pessimistic,
concluding that there was "very little ground" for believing in the
LAND MONSTERS 82
animal at all. But even he said that "it would be unwise to ignore the
possibility [of the existence of the waitoreke] however remote it may
be."
Monster enthusiast Peter Costello unearthed a privately published
1964 pamphlet that contains many recent sightings of an unknown
otterlike animal, mainly from an area of South Island in New Zealand,
in the mountain country around Lake Ellesmere. Costello rejects the
otter theory and points out that placental mammals like the otter are
recent arrivals in New Zealand and Australia. There is one excep-
tion-the seal; several varieties of seal are found along the New Zea-
land coast. Costello believes that the identification of waitoreke with
an otter was established on very little evidence and has never been
properly examined. He concludes it is far more likely that the wai-
toreke is some sort of seal, perhaps of an unknown variety.
See also: BUNYIP

WooLLY MAMMOTH The woolly mammoth, a thickly

coated, elaborately tusked relative of the modern elephant, once
roamed the northern portions of the globe in enormous numbers. Its
remains, bones and tusks, were found in such abundance in parts of
Siberia that fossil ivory from mammoth tusks was a major item of
trade. But the mammoth, along with the majority of other large mam-
mals, died out at the end of the Pleistocene era or Ice Age. At least
that is the orthodox scientific belief. The extinction of the mammoth,
however, and a number of other Pleistocene giants, has been dis-
rupted by cryptozoologists who contend that a few may yet survive
in remote corners of the earth.
Of all the Pleistocene animals, the possibility of the survival of the
mammoth has received the most attention. One of the reasons that
the mammoth has been the object of so much speculation is that its
remains have been so abundant, and in some cases so remarkably well
preserved. Specimens of frozen mammoths have been found in the
ice and permafrost of northern regions, particularly Siberia. While
83 Woolly Mammoth
these finds have been neither as frequent, nor have the specimens
been as perfectly preserved, as popular belief holds, they have been
nonetheless quite remarkable. In 1980 the Soviet Academy of Science
reported an attempt to "create" a living mammoth from the cells of
a frozen specimen. The plan was to thaw some of the frozen mam-
moth cells and then implant the nucleus into the fertilized egg of a
modern elephant. The egg would then be placed in an elephant's
womb. If all went well, the elephant would then give birth to a woolly
mammoth. However, the project went awry from the start, as scien-
tists were unable to revive any of the frozen mammoth cells.
But according to some, there is no need to revive frozen cells, for
the mammoth still lives. The ancestors of the modern-day Indians
hunted the woolly mammoth and its relative the mastodon during the
Ice Age. But there are Indian legends, apparently of more recent ori-
gin, about large, shaggy elephantlike creatures. A few traveler's tales
from the early days of European exploration of the New World also
mention elephantlike monsters.
Yet no storytelling tradition is pure, and what sounds like an
encounter with a real mammoth may, in fact, be something quite dif-
ferent. Here is an example of how a misleading story can take hold:
During the 1890s, large quantities of fossil mammoth ivory was being
found in Alaska. The Eskimos had no idea of what sort of a beast this
ivory had come from, so a friendly naturalist showed them a picture
of a reconstruction of a woolly mammoth. The Eskimos were fasci-
nated by the odd-looking creature and made sketches of the drawing
to show to their friends, who also made copies.
Pretty soon there were a lot of Eskimo mammoth drawings circu-
lating, and the origin of the drawings had been all but forgotten. It
seemed as though the Eskimos were drawing pictures of an animal
that should have been extinct, but how, asked some people, could the
Eskimos possibly know what a mammoth looked like unless they had
actually seen one-Eskimos, they pointed out, did not have access to
books on paleontology. So it was assumed that the drawings had been
made from firsthand observation. Thus the rumors of surviving mam-
moths grew more numerous than ever, and they were brought south
LAND MONSTERS 84
from Alaska and Canada to the United States by fur trappers and
traders. Around the turn of the century, there was a vigorous belief
that the woolly mammoth lived.
In 1899 a popular American magazine printed an account of the
killing of "the last woolly mammoth in Alaska." The report told of
how the beast's hide was sent to the Smithsonian Institution for dis-
play. The story was fiction, but it was not labeled as such in the mag-
azine. "Hoax" stories of this type were common in the journalism of
that era. A lot of people believed the account of the mammoth killing
and went to the Smithsonian to see the beast's remains. When they
were told there was no such exhibit, many became angry and insisted
that the Smithsonian was trying to hide something from them.
The best stories of surviving mammoths come not from Alaska but
Siberia, where the mammoth was more common. In 1918 an old Rus-
sian hunter is reported to have told the French consul at Vladivostok
that he had tracked a "huge elephant with big white tusks, very
curved; it was a dark chestnut color as far as I could see. It had fairly
long hair on the hind quarters but it seemed shorter on the front."
Another tale concerns the Don Cossack Yermak Timofeyvitch, who
in 1580 saw "a large hairy elephant" in Siberia. These elephants were
supposed to be well known by the natives in the remoter parts of Sibe-
ria, where they were referred to as "the mountain of meat."
It has been suggested that some of these stories were inspired by
the sight of frozen and preserved mammoths rather than the living
thing.
One major objection to the idea of surviving mammoths is that they
would be unable to escape detection on the open and treeless tundra.
But the habits of the woolly mammoths are not really known, and it
has been suggested that rather than being a creature of the tundra,
the mammoth really lived and lives in the taiga, the vast belt of forest
that stretches across Soviet Asia. The taiga may represent the least
explored land area in the entire world, and if a mammoth, or herd of
mammoths, was going to hide anywhere on earth, the taiga would be
the place.
See also: AMERICAN ELEPHANT, BEHEMOTH
MoNsTER

BDIRDS

AND

BATS
ATHOL From the island of Java come stories of a large flying
creature known as the Athol. The name is derived from its call Ah-
OOoool. It is described as having a body about the size of a one-year-
old child, and a wingspread that may reach twelve feet. It has a flat
monkeylike face and is covered by short gray fur. What most aston-
ishes those who first see it is that the creature's feet appear to be
turned backwards. It lives in caves by the side of the rivers and feeds
on fish which it scoops up with the long claws that top each of its
wings.
According to most reports, the Athol is a rare creature and one that
avoids contact with human beings whenever possible. But there is one
published account of a native of the area who was attacked and badly
wounded on both arms by one of these creatures.
Dr. Ernest Bartels, a European-educated resident of Java, is respon-
sible for preserving and transmitting most of the Athol accounts to the
West. Dr. Bartels, who himself encountered the creature, believed it
to be some sort of giant bat. Cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson agrees.
The bat is the only fur-covered flying animal. Its feet, which are
adapted for hanging upside down, do point backwards, and many
bats do have pushed-in faces that might be described as resembling
that of a monkey. There is even a variety of fish-eating bat which
scoops up its prey with its long claws while flying low over the water.
The difference between the Athol and known bats is size. The larg-
est known bats are the fruit-eating bats, or flying foxes. They have a
wingspread which may reach five feet. However, the fruit eaters, as
87
MONSTER BIRDS AND BATS 88
the name flying fox implies, have elongated snouts and could not pos-
sibly be described as having monkeylike faces. The bats with pushed-
in faces are primarily insect eaters, but they are much smaller, usually
having a wingspan of under a foot.
Sanderson, however, believed that the Athol was an as yet unknown
giant variety of these micro, or small, bats.

MoA The moa is a popular name for a group of large,

ostrichlike birds that once lived in great numbers on the two islands
that make up New Zealand. Moas ranged in size from a modest five
feet in height, to real giants which stood twelve feet.
There are a number of intriguing mysteries connected with the
moa, the most important being the time that it became extinct, if
indeed these giant flightless birds really are extinct.
When Europeans first came to New Zealand in the seventeenth
century, the native Maoris appeared to know nothing of moas, though
they did tell the explorers all about a number of other perfectly won-
derful and entirely imaginary creatures.
The first written mention of moas comes in a book on New Zealand
by J. S. Polack, a trader who had lived there from 1831 to 1837.
Polack said that on North Island, where he lived, "there once existed
a bird of the struthious [ostrichlike] order equal in size to the emu,"
and he said that he had seen the bones of that bird and believed that
it was still alive on South Island. Once Polack's book appeared, others
claimed that they too had seen the remains ef moas, and had seen
them even earlier than Polack did. More significantly, a number of
Maoris stepped forward with tales of how they had participated in
moa hunts in their youth. Other tales spoke of how the survivors of
these monstrous birds lived high in the mountains, fed on air, and
were guarded by giant lizards while they slept. One explorer found it
impossible to hire Maoris who would guide him to Mount Whaka-
punake, the supposed home of these monster birds.
89 Moa
At first many European scientists doubted the existence of the moa
at all, or at least doubted that the giant birds could have lived in New
Zealand at the same time as the Maoris, who had only been on New
Zealand for a few hundred years. Both of these doubts were swept
away, first by the discovery of moa bones, and then by the discovery
of the remains of moas in ovens that had once been used by the
Maoris.
Some of the moa remains looked amazingly fresh, as if they had
been part of a living bird only a few weeks earlier. But unusual con-
ditions can preserve remains for hundreds, even thousands of years in
a remarkably fresh-looking state. In the nineteenth century, when
most of these complete remains were discovered, there was no
method of accurately dating them. Since the development of radio-
carbon dating, the remains of one bird have been dated at A.D. 1300,
about the time that large numbers of Maoris came to New Zealand.
So it is possible that the Maoris hunted the great birds to extinction.

Moa
MONSTER BIRDS AND BATS 90
They may have been fairly easy prey. However, the freshest-looking
moa remains have long since been contaminated, and thus can not be
accurately dated by radiocarbon, so the time of moa extinction can
not be fixed with any certainty. And there are still all those detailed
personal accounts in the nineteenth century of moa hunts by some
New Zealand natives.
T. Lindsay Buck, a student of the moa, says that there are no good
European accounts of meeting a moa, but he does cite the 1823 story
of a man named George Pauley, who said that he had seen a moa
about twenty feet tall, much taller than any known moa. "No sooner
had the man and the bird sighted each other than, as Pauley says, 'I
ran from it, and it ran from me,' so that, by mutual consent, the crisis
was soon over, and our information is tantalizingly brief and amaz-
ingly inaccurate."
In 1878, a New Zealand newspaper ran an account of the sighting
of what it labeled "the last moa." The tracks had been seen repeatedly
by the (unnamed) European farmer. "On a recent occasion his shep-
herd-an intelligent man-started the bird itself out of a patch of
manuka scrub, with his sheep dog. The bird ran from the dog till it
reached the brow of a terrace above him, some thirty or forty yards
off, when it turned on the dog which immediately ran into the shep-
herd's heel. The moa stood for fully ten minutes on the brow of the
terrace, bending its long neck up and down exactly as the black swan
does when disturbed. It is described as being very much higher than
any emu ever seen in Australia, and standing very much more erect
on its legs. The color is described as a sort of silver grey with greenish
streaks through it."
While there is no way of checking the story, since no names are
given, it is not an entirely improbable account. Was that the "last
moa," perhaps, or one of the last, for even if the moa survived as late
as 1878, it would have been very rare. It is highly improbable that
such a large and singular-looking bird could have survived much
longer on increasingly populous New Zealand without being conclu-
sively detected. Improbable, but not entirely impossible.
See also: ROC
91 Roc

Roc We are most familiar with the roc from the tales of Es-
Sinbad, or Sinbad the Sailor, as related in A Thousand and One
Nights, a collection of ancient tales from the Middle East.
The size of the roc is expressed in nothing but superlatives. When
Sinbad first saw the roc's eggs, he thought it was the dome of a great
building. The sky darkened and Sinbad saw "a bird of enormous size,
bulky body, and wide wings, flying in the air; and it was this that
concealed the body of the sun and veiled it from view." The roc, says
the story, fed elephants to its young. When Sinbad angered one of the
monster birds, it took its revenge by dropping stones on his ships and
sinking one.
A Thousand and One Nights is originally based on tradititional
tales of the Middle East and India, some of which may date back to
the third or fourth millennium B.C. And the roc is really the rukh, a
huge bird that figured prominently in the mythology of the time and
region. The roc-rukh probably began in stories about the eagle or
some other large bird of prey, for these birds seem to have played an
important part in Middle Eastern mythology from the earliest histor-
ical times. Eaglelike figures appear in the art of the Sumerians, the
first known civilization. After centuries of retelling, one branch of the
legendary cycles surrounding the eagle must have grown into the leg-
ends of the huge rukh, or roc.
So far this is quite straightforward legend building, but what makes
the story interesting is that in later centuries travelers began bringing
back roc feathers and eggs. Marco Polo mentions the roc and says that
the Great Khan of Cathay wanted something that would prove the
creature's existence. An envoy presented the khan with a gigantic
feather from the island of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa that
was supposed to have been the roc's home. Marco reports that the
khan was impressed.
Madagascar once was the home of a really gigantic bird, Aepyomis
maximus, or the elephant bird. It looked like a big ostrich and was
MONSTER BIRDS AND BATS 92
among the biggest birds that ever lived. But more impressive than the
size of the bird itself was the size of its eggs. One elephant-bird egg
was equal in size to 6 ostrich eggs or 148 chicken eggs.
The elephant bird is now extinct, but the time of its extinction is
uncertain. It may well have survived into the sixteenth century, and
its end was probably brought about by hunters who preyed both on
the huge birds and on their eggs. The trip from Madagascar to Bagh-
dad, the city of A Thousand and One Nights, is a long one, but medi-
eval Arabs were great sailors and traders. They conducted thriving
trade along the east coast of Africa, before the trade was disrupted by
the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Arab traders
undoubtedly visited Madagascar and might have seen living speci-
mens of Aepyornis maximus. Large numbers of broken eggshells of
the giant bird have been found along the coast, and this has given rise
to the theory that the Arab sailors themselves helped kill off the birds
by stealing eggs for food. The eggshells could have been used for cups.
Such monstrous eggshells would also have been valuable trade items
and intriguing souvenirs to bring back to show family and friends at
home.
These same Arab merchants traveled as far as China and carried
the tale of the roc with them to the court of the Great Khan. The
"feather" shown at the khan's court could have been the frond of
Sagus ruffia, a palm tree that grows on Madagascar. This partjcular
tree has enormous fronds. The general similarity between the shape
of the palm frond and the feather would not have escaped the notice
of canny merchants anxious to impress a rich ruler with the wonders
of the Africa trade. A dried palm frond, if not examined too closely,
could be passed off as a giant feather.
See also: MOA, THUNDERBIRD

THUNDERBIRD The thunderbird is a gigantic bird drawn

from the mythology of the American Indian. Most scholars believe
that the thunderbird myth was based on the condor, or possibly the
93 Thunderbird

California condor

eagle. But there are a few who believe that the Indian story of the
thunderbird started with the observations of a truly gigantic, yet
unknown, bird. And there have been suggestions that the unknown
giant bird has survived into fairly recent times, and may even be alive
today.
According to one of the most persistent of the modern thunderbird
stories, in 1886 a group of ranchers living in the vicinity of Tomb-
stone, Arizona, shot and killed a monster bird. They nailed it up,
wings outstretched on the side of a barn, and took a picture of it. In
order to give a size comparison, six men stood in front of the bird
with their arms outstretched, fingertips just touching. Six average-
sized men with outstretched arms would cover a distance of between
thirty to thirty-six feet, meaning that the bird nailed to the barn
would have had a wingspread of about that size.
The figure is an astonishing one, for the California condor, one of
the largest of living birds, has a wingspread of a paltry six to eight
feet. Ostriches and other birds of that type are much larger than the
condor, but since they don't fly, they don't count in this discussion.
MONSTER BIRDS AND BATS 94
The thunderbird photograph was supposed to have been printed in
the newspaper the Tombstone Epitaph. But a search of the files of
the newspaper reveal no trace of such a picture. Crytozoologists Ivan
Sanderson said that he once had a copy of that particular photo in his
files, but it had disappeared. No one else seems to be able to find a
copy, though a number of people (including this author) vaguely
recall having seen it at one time. Such a photo could easily have been
faked, and only an examination of the original, if such a thing exists,
would be able to determine its worth as evidence.
Another version of the Tombstone thunderbird story holds that the -
creature that was shot was not a bird at all, but a smooth-skinned
featherless monster with enormous jaws and razor-sharp teeth. Most
astonishing in this tale were the monster's wings that were supposed
to be thin membranes of skin which measured up to 160 feet from
tip to tip!
The whole idea could be dismissed as just a wilder version of an
already wild legend, except for one thing. This creature sounds a lot
like one of the ancient flying reptiles called pterosaurs. The existence
of pterodactyls, or pterosaurs, was known before this story began to
circulate. However, in 1972, long after the tale of the reptilelike thun-
derbird had been discussed, the fragmentary remains of an unknown
but truly gigantic species of pterosaur were discovered in Big Bend
National Park, in southwestern Texas. This ancient creature may have
had a wingspread of up to 50 feet, twice as large as any previously
known pterosaur, and so large that conventional scientific wisdom
holds that the thing couldn't become airborne at all. Yet there it was,
and conventional scientific wisdom has been revised to fit the new
discovery. These remains were found in the heartland of the thun-
derbird legend, and while the wingspan of this creature does not
match the 160 feet of the second thunderbird story, it matches and
surpasses the wingspan of the creature in the original story attributed
(incorrectly) to the Tombstone Epitaph.
There are a couple of giant-bird stories from the East as well. There
is the case of a private-plane pilot who was flying along the Hudson
Valley in May 1961 when he sighted what appeared to be another
95 Vampire Bat
and slightly larger plane in the vicinity. This other "plane" seemed to
be trying to chase him. In an attempt to get a closer look at the hostile
"plane," the pilot circled back. Then he noticed that the other
"plane" began flapping its wings, and that it wasn't a plane at all but
an enormous bird. The pilot departed the area in great haste.
Another case involves the crash of a United Airlines plane in a
wooded area of Maryland near Washington, D.C., in November 1962.
There were no survivors of the crash, but on the wreckage were found
traces of blood and feathers. Investigators for the government said
that the plane had collided with a flock of geese, a few of which were
sucked into the plane's engine, causing it to crash. Predictably, there
are those who snort at such suggestions. They point to gouges and
slashes on the plane's tail assembly and insist that it had been attacked
and brought down by an angry thunderbird.
See also: ROC

Y AMPIRE BAT The image of a caped Bela Lugosi being

transformed into a bat is stuck in almost everyone's mind, so that it is
difficult to believe that the association of bats and vampires is not par-
ticularly ancient. Vampires, that is, the undead, were thought to
change themselves into wolves. Bats, being creatures of the night,
have always possessed some unpleasant and supernatural associations.
However, there are no vampires, that is, blood-drinking bats, in
Europe.
It was only after the discovery of true blood-drinking bats in South
and Central America that the European idea of the vampire and the
bat were fully merged. The real blood-drinking bats were naturally
named vampire bats.
There are three species of vampire bat, and they live on the blood
of larger mammals, and possibly large birds. To feed, the vampire bat
alights gently on or near a sleeping animal. The bat's teeth are
adapted to make a small and painless incision through which blood
flows. The bat feeds not by sucking blood, but by lapping it up with
MONSTER BIRDS AND BATS 96
its narrow tongue. Coagulation of blood in the wound is prevented by
a special chemical in the bat's saliva.
The bite of a vampire bat is so carefully inflicted that it rarely wak-
ens a sleeping victim. One bat cannot take enough blood from an ani-
mal the size of a goat to do it any harm from loss of blood. The bite

Vampire bat

of a single vampire bat is of no danger to a human being. However,

the bats can present a danger to livestock in areas where they are
numerous and attack frequently. A more serious problem is rabies and
other diseases which vampire bats are known to transmit.
Vampire bats are tiny and rarely, if ever, are shown in vampire
movies. The bat most often used in the movies is the flying fox, the
largest of bats, but a harmless vegetarian.
See also: VAMPIRE
 4

PIHIANTOMS
BERKELEY SQUARE HORROR The beliefs surrounding the
events at 50 Berkeley Square represent a blending of ghost and mon-
ster traditions.
For over a century, the house in the fashionable London square has
been the focus of tales of terror. It was said that anyone who spent a
night in the "top room" would either be dead or totally insane in the
morning. Because of its sinister reputation, the house was often
unoccupied.
One of the most celebrated stories connected with it concerns three
sailors who broke into the empty house one night looking for a place
to sleep. During the night they were awakened by strange and hor-
rible noises. One of the sailors was so frightened that he rushed out of
the house without ever seeing what was making the noise. The other
two stayed behind to confront "the horror."
The sailor who got out located a policeman and persuaded him to
come back to the house. When they returned they found the other
two sailors were already dead. No exact cause of death was ever deter-
mined, but both died with a look of utter terror frozen on their faces.
There are many theories and tales regarding the origin and nature
of "the horror." According to one account, a madman was kept in the
"top room" until he died. Another tells of a former owner with some
terrible secret in his past who lived a melancholy and hermitlike exis-
tence in the house until his death. The madman and/ or the hermit
are supposed to be haunting the place. These are fairly traditional
ghost stories.
99
PHANTOMS 100
There are, however, other accounts which assert that "the horror"
is not a ghost at all, but a shapeless and slimy thing, too grotesque to
describe accurately, that had crawled up out of the sewers and was
hiding somewhere in the house. It was said that the noises that so
terrified people were the gruesome slopping noises the thing made as
it slithered up and down the stairs.
For many years now, 50 Berkeley Square has been the headquar-
ters for a very respectable firm of London booksellers, and they have
reported no unusual occurrences. "The horror" seems to have
disappeared.

BLACK DOGS "Footprints?"

"Footprints."
"A man's or a woman's?"
Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice
sank almost to a whisper as he answered:
"Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"
And thus we are introduced to The Hound of the Baskervilles, the
most celebrated fictional treatment of a very real belief, a belief in a
monster or phantom dog, often called the black dog.
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel, Sherlock Holmes finds a per-
fectly natural explanation for the apparently supernatural hound. But
it really isn't the explanation that sticks in our minds after reading the
book, it is the idea of the hound itself.
"The moon was shining bright upon the clearing, and there in the
centre lay the unhappy maid where she had fallen, dead of fear and
fatigue. But it was not the sight of her body, nor was it that of the
body of Hugo Baskerville lying near her, which raised the hair upon
the heads of those three dare-devil roysterers, but it was that, standing
over Hugo, and plucking at his throat, there stood a foul thing, a great
black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever
mortal eye has rested upon. And even as they looked the thing tore
the throat out of Hugo Baskerville, on which, as it turned its blazing
101 Black Dogs
eyes and dripping jaws upon them, the three shrieked with fear and
rode for dear life, still screaming across the moor. One, it is said, died
that very night of what he had seen, and the other twain were but
broken men for the rest of their days."
Conan Doyle may well have drawn his inspiration for the Hound
of the Baskervilles from the legends attached to a creature called the
Black Dog of Dartmoor, which was sort of a demon in the shape of a
dog. But black-dog or phantom-dog stories occur in all parts of the
British Isles, and some have been imported to the United States as
well. And the dog of the accounts is not always as terrible as the
Hound of the Baskervilles either.
· Here is a story told by a Mrs. Jewell of her firsthand meeting with
a creature called the Black Dog of Torrington. The event was said to
have taken place in the 1870s when the narrator was only about ten
years old.
Late at night she was walking down the road with her father. "It
was a moonlight night," she said, "and suddenly a sound of something
panting came from behind us, and a great black dog, big as a calf,
with great shining eyes, came along side us. I caught my father's hand
and cried out. Father said, 'Tis the Black Dog! Hold my hand, don't
speak, walk along quietly, and don't cry out."'
The dog trotted alongside them for about a quarter of a mile. Then
father and daughter turned to go into their cottage. The dog showed
no further interest in them and continued on down the road. The
girl's father said that he had seen the black dog many times but had
never known it to harm anyone.
Mrs. Jewell added that later in life she also saw the dog several
times, but never again at close range. She insisted that many other
people in her district had seen the dog, but would not talk about it
with outsiders because they feared being ridiculed.
The woman who collected old Mrs. Jewell's account, Barbara Car-
bonell, said she believed the story because her own daughter had
reported an encounter with the animal. This incident took place in
1932, when her daughter and son-in-law were driving down a road
in the Torrington region at night. Suddenly an enormous black dog
PHANTOMS 102
appeared in the middle of the road, illuminated by the car's head-
lights. The driver slammed on the brakes, but was sure that it was too
late and that there was no way to avoid hitting the beast. They waited
for the impact. It didn't come. When the car stopped, the couple got
out to investigate; they could find no trace of the animal that both
had seen so clearly.
A more typical black-dog story comes from a place called Tring in
Hartford, England, at a spot where legend had it that a woman had
been hanged for witchcraft and a demon dog appeared from time to
time. This account comes from the early nineteenth century.
A man and his companion were riding home in a cart late one night
when they passed the accursed spot. There was a sudden flash of light.
"What was that?" the man cried out.
"Hush," said his companion, and he pulled the horses to a stop.
"I then saw an immense black dog just in front of our horse. It was
the strangest-looking creature I ever saw. He was as big as a New-
foundland dog, but very thin and shaggy. He had long ears, a long
tail, and eyes like balls of fire. When he opened his mouth we could
see long teeth. He seemed to grin at us. In a few minutes the dog
disappeared, seeming to vanish like a shadow, or to sink into the
earth."
Black dogs, or spectral dogs of one color or another, have often been
regarded as harbingers of evil news. Several old English families are
supposed to be cursed with a black dog, and whenever the dog
appears someone in the family is supposed to die. A small white dog
was reputed to appear before every execution at the notorious
Newgate prison in London.
Throughout the British Isles there is a tradition that graveyards
were guarded by a spirit in the form of a black dog. Though the black
dog was supposed to protect those recently buried in the graveyard
from the Devil, it was considered to be extremely bad luck for any
living person to see the dog. In fact, anyone who saw one of these
graveyard black dogs was fated to die within a year.
The tradition of the graveyard dog was carried over to the United
States. The author encountered it while growing up in Chicago in the
103 Devil's Footprints
1940s. A cemetery near the house was supposed to be haunted by a
white dog, and anyone who saw the dog would die within a year.
One of the favorite pastimes was to take a new kid in the neigh-
borhood through the cemetery and tell him the story. After a few
minutes of walking, you would point and shout, "There it is. My God.
Don't look!"
See also: PHANTOM LIONS

DEVIL'S FOOTPRINTS On the night of February 7, 1855,

there was an unusually heavy snowfall in the county of Devonshire,
England. When the people awoke the next morning they found that
the fresh snow had been broken by footprints, of a very mysterious
sort.
The prints were U-shaped and about 4 inches long by 2% inches
across. At first glance they looked as if they had been made by a small
pony. But closer examination showed that the prints were in line, one
in front of the other. They had apparently been made by a two-legged
rather than a four-legged animal.
That wasn't the oddest thing about the tracks either. In one place
a line of tracks led right up to a twelve-foot-high stone wall. The gates
of the wall were securely locked and had not been tampered with.
The snow lay undisturbed on top of the wall. Yet the line of tracks
continued on the other side, just as if a stone wall had been no obstacle
at all to the creature.
At another place the prints marched to the edge of the Exe River
near where it met the sea. The river there is two miles wide and was
not frozen, yet the trail continued on the opposite shore just as if the
creature had swum or walked across the water.
The line of prints was found to zigzag its way from the town of
Topsham southward to the town of Totnes, a distance of approxi-
mately ninety-seven miles along the south Devon coast. The prints
didn't make an unbroken line; sometimes they followed an irregular
PHANTOMS 104
course, and at others they disappeared for a distance of several miles.
The strange tracks seemed to be anywhere and everywhere. Prac·
tically every town and village in the area, as well as isolated farms,
were marked by the horseshoe·shaped tracks. They were found in
town squares and lonely beaches; cemeteries and public roads; wood·
lands; and even on the tops of houses.
The snow had stopped falling in Devonshire at about midnight.
The tracks had been made between that hour and about 6:00A.M.,
when people arose and first began to notice them. Yet not a single
person reported seeing or hearing anything unusual during the night,
and certainly no one reported seeing whatever it was that made the
tracks.
When people first saw the prints, they had a good deal of funs~
ulating what they might be, but as the day wore on, and the extent
of the trail of strange prints became known, the fun went out of the
speculation. The rumor spread that the prints were not horseshoe·
shaped at all, but were the prints of a cloven hoof! It was said that the
Devil had been abroad that night in Devonshire.
The following night poeple in the district locked themselves
indoors, for fear of meeting the Prince of Darkness walking about that
night. But in the morning there were no fresh footprints. Nor were
there any the next morning, or the next, and gradually the hysteria
died down.
What made the "Devil's footprints"? A local clergymen suggested
that they really had been made by the Devil and that they were a
warning against the swearing, drunkenness, and generally poor mor·
als of the district. But another local clergyman said this was a "gross
and incredible superstition." He had heard that a couple of kangaroos
had escaped from a nearby zoo, and they might be responsible for the
prints, since they would presumably be capable of jumping over walls.
The prints in no way resemble those of a kangaroo.
Sir Richard Owen, one of the most distinguished biologists of the
day, had a more reasonable explanation. He suggested that the prints
had been made by a group of badgers that had been driven out of
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ft"ttat"DH f'roaa tht" l'ak·itk c~.............. &rH tk .utf'f'\..._
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( w.lkin,r. -.·tt.a it .......... - • tN,..t; ..... botot&ndifiiC
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.._ an.._ IUHI ,. . .,., in tM ~........_.. . . . lt'ft
1M ......... imprt'llll Mre Nfttl'f<4 to. ~iU, it WU 'l•ite
i~q.ti..-u.. u..& t.M ..ama&. ,...... ,i.uiaa ttK- • • of tlae
foot. ellluu&d ......... ~·· ..... ,.... priat ...., ........ ....
Mta all'ftdJ ua..tn·f'4. -.-.till iatft'\..a. u t"U...'tlf ~-M
• if tlae lri•&a W ....._ . . . by a 4nll. w •1 ecw
ftM'Ithai-'al ,._., A ~·lk'ftlaintut-. ia~....,. 1M
et- laarillc tnt........ - ...... •-n. ......, ..
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•ccount of the Devil's footprints
 PHANTOMS 106
hibernation by hunger and were scurrying about the countryside in
search of food. The badger's characteristic print, he said, had been
distorted by the melting and refreezing of the snow.
Other animals, such as otters, racoons, skunks, jumping rats, and of
course ponies, were put forth as the possible source of the prints. So
were a variety of birds, including swans and cranes. Someone even
suggested a swarm of frogs. None of these explanations even gained
general acceptance.
To this day no one really knows whether the strange prints were
made by an animal or if they have some other origin. Perhaps they
were made by something that fell from the sky, or by a change in
weather. The phenomenon of "Devil's footprints" however, has been
observed in a few other places and is generally connected, at least in
the popular mind, with the appearance of some sort of devil or
monster.
See also: JERSEY DEVIL

<iEF-THE TALKING MONGOOSE In the annals of

strange phenomena, the case of Gef is quite unique. What was it,
monster, ghost, poltergeist, or what he called himself, "a little clever,
extraclever mongoose"? Readers may classify this creature however
they wish.
Gef first made his presence known in September 1931 in a lonely
farmhouse on the Isle of Man, a small island in the Irish Sea. The
house was occupied by James T. Irving, a piano salesman turned
farmer, his wife, and their youngest daughter, a girl of about thirteen.
The family began hearing strange noises in the attic, and as time
went on the noises grew stranger and stranger. There were barkings,
growlings, hissing, and spitting. It was almost as if some creature were
trying to imitate the noises made by other animals in the house. Then
it began making noises like a gurgling baby!
Irving would make noises, and the thing would repeat them. Said
107 Gef-The Talking Mongoose
Irving, "I was carried away with wonder. An animal was taking les-
sons from me in human speech! ... " And within a few weeks it was
speaking very well.
Gef, for that is what the creature called itself, remained hidden
behind the paneling on the walls, in the tall grass around the house,
in the dark attic, and any other place where it could be heard but not
seen. Only the girl ever claimed to have seen Gef, and then none too
clearly. She said it looked like a weasel or other small animal of that
type.
Whatever it was, Gef proved to be a troublesome guest. It often
threw things around the house, and once pretended to have been poi-
soned, which alarmed the lrvings greatly. It was often so noisy it was
hard for the Irving family to sleep, and more than once they threat-
ened to move out of the house. The threat upset Gef, who com-
plained, "Would you go away and leave me?"
Some twenty years before Gef's appearance, a neighboring farmer
had released some mongooses in his fields to kill rabbits. Gef, however,
insisted that it was not a local product, but that it had been born on
June 7, 1852, in Delhi, India. It never explained how or why it had
come to the distant Isle of Man. There is a tradition in India that the
mongoose is capable of learning human speech.
Gef wandered about the neighborhood listening in on the conver-
sations of others and reporting them to the lrvings. Several neighbors
also claimed to have heard the creature talking, or at least making
strange noises.
The stories of Gef's exploits came to the attention of psychical
researchers in Britain and the United States. Several of them visited
the Irvings in the hope of seeing or hearing the remarkable mongoose.
They saw and heard nothing, but came away convinced that the lrv-
ings were honest people who were reporting what they really believed
to be happening.
The lrvings continued to describe Gef's activities for several years.
Then in 1937 they abruptly sold their farm and disappeared. The new
owner never reported any dealings with Gef or any other strange phe-
nomena. In 1947 the new owner claimed that he shot a strange-look-
PHANTOMS 108
ing mongooselike animal. Some people said it was Gef, but most think
it more likely the "extraclever mongoose" disappeared with its friends
the lrvings.

HAIRY HANDS In the Dartmoor region of England there is

a stretch of road between the villages of Postbridge and Two Bridges.
It's a rather ordinary piece of road, running through slightly rolling
moors, on a generally straight path. Yet during the early years of the
twentieth century an unusually large number of accidents were
reported on this road.
First it was horses that would suddenly panic and throw their
riders. Ponies pulling carts would veer off the road for no apparent
reason, dumping their driver into the ditch. With the advent of the
bicycle, cyclists reported they felt as if the handlebars were suddenly
torn out of their control, and they plunged into a ditch or crashed into
a wall. Motorcycles, cars, and buses had more serious accidents, and
there were a number of fatalities.
Everyone figured there was something wrong with the road, but no
one knew what. Then in 1921 a young army officer was seriously
injured when his motorcycle crashed along that stretch of road. He
seemed to have suddently turned off and hit a wall. Later, he recalled
what happened just before the crash. He said that he distinctly saw a
pair of large hairy hands clamp down over his own and twist the
motorcycle's handlebars, forcing him off the road.
The story caught the attention of a London newspaper, and when
reporters came out to interview people in the area, they found quite
a number who said that they felt the presence of "something" when
they went down that road.
Engineers were called in and they agreed that the hairy-hands tale
was nonsense. According to the engineers, the whole problem was the
way the road was constructed-too many little ups and downs. So
they had the road resurfaced.
But the story didn't end with road repairs. Three years later a
109 Phantom kangaroo
woman and her husband parked their trailer near the spot where the
hairy hands had first been reported. That night the woman was awak-
ened by a scratching noise on the window. She said she saw a large
hairy hand clawing at the glass. She sensed something very evil. The
woman slipped out of her bunk and fell to her knees to pray. After
she made the sign of the cross the hand disappeared, but the feeling
of an evil presence remained. She said she and her husband never
again went into that part of the country.

PHANTOM KANGAROO A persistent and truly puzzling

figure in American monster lore is the phantom kangaroo, a large
kangaroo which appears where no kangaroo should or could be. These
kangaroos are sometimes reputed to be aggressive, even dangerous.
Yet after they are sighted, no material trace of them can be found.
An early phantom-kangaroo story comes from the community of
South Pittsburg, Tennessee. In January of 1934, according to a news-
paper report, the beast was spotted by the Reverend W. J. Handcock,
among others. According to the Reverend Handcock, "It was fast as
lightning and looked like a giant kangaroo running and leaping across
the field."
The same newspaper story tells of a large dog in the area being
killed and eaten. The phantom kangaroo was blamed for the killing,
and also for the destruction of a large number of chickens. Direct
evidence linking the phantom kangaroo to the killing of domestic ani-
mals is not reported, but the kangaroo was blamed anyway. A report
of unknown origin speaks of someone having seen the kangaroo car-
rying a dead sheep or dog under each arm.
A search for the mysterious animal was carried out, but there were
no results.
In January 1949, Louis Staub was driving at night outside of Grove
City, Ohio, when he saw something strange hop into the beam of his
headlights. "It was about 5~ feet high, hairy and brownish. It had a
pointed head. It looked like a kangaroo but it appeared to jump on
PHANTOMS 110
all fours. I'm certain it wasn't a deer."
Then there was the Minnesota "big-bunny" flap. For several years
children in the area of Coon Rapids, Minnesota, reported seeing some-
thing that they described as "a very big bunny," a "bunny" that was
as tall as they were. One adult, a woman named Barbara Battmer,
said that she got a clear view of two of these "bunnies" hopping
through the woods, but she knew they weren't bunnies, they were
kangaroos. As is usual in such cases, a search was made but no trace
of the kangaroos could be found. There were also the usual inquiries
to nearby zoos to see if any of their kangaroos were missing. All zoo
kangaroos were present and accounted for.
Probably the most astonishing of all of the phantom-kangaroo sto-
ries of recent years was the one that came out of Chicago in 1974.
According to the newspapers, early in the morning of October 18, the
police on the northwest side of the city received a call from a man
who said that there was a kangaroo jumping around on his front
porch. While the police didn't take the call too seriously, a couple of
patrolmen were nevertheless sent out to investigate.
Much to their surprise, they found the kangaroo and chased it,
finally cornering the beast in a dark dead-end alley. The kangaroo
didn't like being chased, and apparently didn't want to be captured
either, so it began kicking with its big powerful hind legs as kangaroos
do when they are on the defensive. The police, who were more puz-
zled than anything else, didn't want to shoot, so they backed off. Then
the kangaroo hopped over a fence and disappeared down the street.
During the next few days, a lot of people on the northwest side of
Chicago reported that they had seen a kangaroo in the neighborhood.
A newsboy selling papers on the street corner turned around and saw
the kangaroo standing just a few feet away from him. "He looked at
me, I looked at him, and then away he hopped," the boy said.
The Chicago police got a lot of calls from people who insisted that
there was a kangaroo in their backyards rummaging through their
garbage cans. Most of the calls were probably the result of mistaken
identity-people heard something in the back yard, probably a dog
or a cat or a raccoon knocking over the garbage can-but with all of
111 Phantom Kangaroo
the kangaroo excitement, they assumed, or perhaps hoped, that it was
the phantom kangaroo they heard. There were undoubtedly a fair
number of out-and-out kangaroo hoaxes as well. The newspapers had
a lot of fun with such headlines as: KANGAROO STAYS A JUMP
AHEAD OF THE POLICE.
Kangaroo sightings then began to spread to towns to the west of
Chicago. On November 2, just outside of the town of Plano, Illinois,
about fifty miles from Chicago, three young men were driving along
when:
"We almost ran over it. It jumped onto the road about twenty feet
ahead of us ... it landed on the road near the intersection with the
main road, and there was no traffic. It sat up on its haunches ... and
then jumped over a fence about five feet high and disappeared into
the woods."
Ten days later in Rensselaer, Indiana, it hopped out of a cornfield
and up to a drugstore. It was early in the morning and the only
observer around was an employee opening up the drugstore:
"I hope some farmer or somebody else sees it or everybody'll think
I'm a nut. But it was the kangaroo. . . . I know it was." No one else
saw it that morning. The mystery beast just hopped down the street
and vanished into another cornfield. But other people did report
seeing it around the same area later.
By the end of November 1974 the Great Midwestern Kangaroo
Flap had died down, but there was another rash of sightings in Illinois
the following year and again in 1976. Other waves of phantom-kan-
garoo sightings have broken out in Wisconsin, Colorado, and Ohio.
When the kangaroo was sighted in Ohio in 1967, reporters talked
to the director of the Cincinnati Zoo. He said, "We had a kangaroo
story about two years ago. I doubt if there's a kangaroo around here
on the loose. We never found one. Down the years we've chased after
reported black leopards, panthers, and even a polar bear. Anyone
seeing the kangaroo, which I doubt exists, should try to keep it in sight
and call the zoo."
See also: PHANTOM LIONS
PHANTOMS 112

PHANTOM LIONS In the district of Surrey in England there

is the Surrey puma. In Nottingham it is the Nottingham lion and in
the Midwestern part of the United States it's Nellie the Lion. These
are but three local examples of the widespread phenomenon of the
phantom lions-a lion or some other large cat, which appears in a
place where no lion or large cat should be, is seen by many people,
but seems to disappear before anyone can locate any physical traces
of it.
Of the many phantom lions, the Surrey puma is probably the best
known, for it has been seen on a fairly regular basis since the early
1960s. The sightings have been so numerous that they are almost com-
monplace, and a local newspaper complained about the annual"sum-
mer ritual of puma spotting."
What is a typical puma spotting like? On July 19, 1977, London
newspapers carried an account of sighting a "large, grey and lean ani-
mal with a small head and 3 ft. tail," seen on the grounds of a nursing
home at Patchem, near Brighton. One man got within forty feet of
the lion before it disappeared, but a police search of the grounds
turned up no material evidence of the creature's existence.
In October that same year near Reigate, Surrey, several workmen
claimed to have seen the creature, one even said he had taken a pic-
ture of it. The police were unimpressed. The image on the photo was
too tiny to identify conclusively, though it definitely looked catlike.
Police were of the opinion that the animal in the photo was simply a
large house cat.
Often the Surrey puma has been described as a large, growling, and
rather menacing creature. But there is one odd report in which the
creature is said to have behaved like-well, a real pussycat. On Sep-
tember 1, 1966, a woman walking through a thistle patch in Hamp-
shire, near Surrey, stepped on the tail of a puma. The animal reared
up on its hind legs and struck out at her with both its paws, but the
woman displayed either extraordinary courage or extreme foolishness.
 - . . .
g;·Jiit~trllirwttWrtHtnrsr!fnettert1nW'Iitrtl' mttiil' !tfnu* t~tw· '1&1 .. •"r•
PHANTOMS 114
Instead of running she picked up a stick and hit the beast on the nose.
The blow so frightened the poor animal that it clambered up a tree.
The woman went for help, but when she returned with others the
animal was gone.
The Nottingham lion was first spotted on the morning of July 29,
1976, by two milkmen who were making their rounds near the
entrance to the Nottingham airport. They both saw what they were
sure was a lion, " ... its head down and its long tail had a bushy end.
It was walking slowly away from us."
They watched the beast disappear around the edge of the field and
then they called the police. The story made the newspapers and sud-
denly everybody in Notingham seemed to be seeing "the lion." There
were over sixty sightings reported to the police in the following weeks.
The police checked with all the zoos and private animal collections
within a hundred miles, but no one reported a missing lion. A massive
search was carried out using dogs and even a helicopter. At first the
police had been quite sympathetic to the lion reports, but as time
went on and no evidence turned up, they became more skeptical, and
finally official police sources indicated that the whole thing had prob-
ably started as a mistake, and the story was being kept alive by sen-
sationalistic journalism and deliberate hoaxes. There is no doubt that
the British press, some of which leans heavily toward sensationalism,
had a field day with the Nottingham lion.
Phantom lions were spotted in other parts of the British Isles, and
today they seem as common as the phantom black dogs once were.
While the black dog inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The
Hound of the Baskervilles, the phantom cats inspired two less famous
pieces of fiction-Man-eater by Ted Willis, and The Surrey Cat by
Andrew Sinclair.
In the United States similar phantom-cat sightings go back over a
century. In 1853 a huge "tiger" was supposed to have been seen
around Russelville, Kentucky. While the people of Kentucky have
long been famed for their marksmanship, not one of them seemed
able to shoot this beast, though several "tiger" hunts were organized.
In December 1877 a large cat of unknown origin attacked a young
115 Phantom Lions
woman named Mary Crane near the village of Sun, Indiana. There
had been rumors of a lion in the vicinity, and one evening she and a
young man were walking through the woods when they heard a ter-
rible shriek behind them. Turning, they saw a pair of glowing eyes
approaching rapidly. Behind the eyes was something "big as a good
sized calf, with a tail as long as a door." That was enough; the couple
broke into a run, the young man proving to be the fastest of the pair.
The big cat caught up with Mary Crane and tore at her dress with its
claws.
- She fainted, and when she awoke she found the thing licking her
face, so she just shut her eyes and prayed. After an agony of waiting,
she heard voices coming from the direction of the village. The
approach of other humans seemed to frighten the animal, for it ran
away without hurting Mary Crane, and she was left with nothing
worse than a torn dress and some scary memories.
In 1917 people in central Illinois reported seeing something that
looked like "an African lion." According to one report, the lion
jumped out of the grass onto a car, then slid off and ran away. The
central Illinois beast was nicknamed "Nellie the Lion," but despite
several searches, no trace of Nellie was ever found, nor was there ever
a clue to where she might have come from or where she went to.
A mysterious giant black cat was reported near Cairo, Illinois, in
April1970. The press called it a panther, but once again no trace of
a real panther could be found.
The mountain lion, or puma, is native to the United States, and
though it has generally been considered to be extinct in those areas in
which phantom lions have been sighted, it is still possible that a rare
individual puma survived, to terrify and perplex the local residents.
But it is far more likely that Nellie the Lion and all of her elusive
companions are really part of modern folklore.
See also: BEAST OF TRURO, BLACK DOGS, PHANTOM KANGAROO
RovER
AND

LAIKIE

MONS TIERS
BEAST OF 1 BUSCO A large pond on a farm near the city of
Churubusco, Indiana, is reputed to be the home of a monster turtle,
sometimes known as Oscar, and more ominously as the Beast of
'Busco.
In 1948 the owner of the pond noticed that there were fewer fish
than usual, and that ducks resting on the pond sometimes disappeared
mysteriously. The cause of these disappearances was a gigantic snap-
ping turtle. The largest of the snapping turtles, the alligator snapper,
has been known to weigh up to two hundred pounds, and is strong
enough to break a broomstick with its horny jaws, or snap off a finger.
But this snapping turtle was much bigger, though accounts differ as
to its size. Some say it was only as big as a dining-room table while
others insist it was as big as a pickup truck.
Turtle hunts were organized, and the men went at the pond with
baited hooks, traps, and guns, but were unsuccessful in their efforts.
The farmer who owned the pond, however, studied the monster tur-
tle's habits, and one day while it was sleeping he slipped a rope or
chain around its middle, attached the other end to four strong horses,
and tried to pull Oscar out of the pond.
The horses pulled and the turtle dug its claws into the mud. The
contest finally ended in a draw when the rope (or chain) broke. Oscar
slipped back into the murky waters of the pond and was never seen
again. Some say he died from the exertion, and others insist that he is
just hiding and waiting, for turtles live a long time and can be very
patient.
119
RIVER AND LAKE MONSTERS 120

Alligator snapping turtle

Every year the people of Churubusco celebrate their local monster

with a festival called Turtle Days, where visitors are encouraged to
buy turtle models, turtle T -shirts, eat a variety of dishes that are in
one way or another named after turtles, and in general spend money.

(HAMP The event that put the Lake Champlain monster,

Champ as it is affectionately known, on the map took place on July
5, 1977. Sandra Mansi was standing at the edge of Lake Champlain
when she saw a disturbance in the water. At first she thought it was
just a school of fish, but then a long neck broke the surface.
"I was scared to death," Mrs. Mansi said. "I had the feeling I
shouldn't be there."
121 Champ
Just another unsupported sighting of a lake monster? Not quite, for
not only was there another witness, Mrs. Mansi's future husband, she
also had her camera with her. It was a Kodak Instamatic and, scared
or not, Mrs. Mansi had the presence of mind to snap a picture. When
she had the picture developed, it showed what looked like a long-
necked creature emerging from the water. But Mrs. Mansi decided
not to say anything about her picture, because people might think she
was crazy or a faker. As more people reported seeing Champ, how-
ever, she decided to go public.
Scientists who have looked at the photograph are equivocal. Dr. B.
Roy Friedan, professor of optical sciences at Arizona State University,
examined the photo and found it to be a high-quality print that "does
not appear to be a montage or a superimposition of any kind" and
that "the object appears to belong in the picture."
"We don't see any evidence of tampering with the photo," Dr.
Friedan concluded.
Of course, someone could have hauled a monsterlike object out into
the lake and had it photographed. Mrs. Mansi insists the thing couldn't
be a hoax, because she saw the object move. However, she says she is
unable to remember exactly where she took the photo, and the neg-
ative of the picture has been lost. This makes more intensive investi-
gation of the photo impossible. The result is that the photograph,
while interesting, is inconclusive.
But the publicity generated by the Mansi photo was just enough to
move Champ into the monster-star category.
In many respects, Lake Champlain is an excellent place for an
unknown animal, because it is extremely large, over one hundred
miles long, and thirteen miles wide at its widest point. It is also fairly
deep, four hundred feet at its greatest depth. Most of the lake is in
New York State, although the northernmost tip, which drains into the
Saint Lawrence, is in Canada. Most of the best freshwater-monster
reports come from deep, cold-water lakes like Lake Champlain.
The first recorded observation of Champ was made by the lake's
European discoverer, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, in
1609. Champlain said he observed a twenty-foot-long snakelike crea-
RIVER AND LAKE MONSTERS 122
ture with a horselike head in the lake. Back in the nineteenth century
the Lake Champlain monster was well known enough for the show-
man P. T. Barnum to offer a $50,000 reward for the carcass of the
creature. Barnum never had to pay a penny.
Sightings have multiplied over the last few years as the Champ
publicity has increased. Most of those who report seeing the creature
speak of humps in the water or occasionally a snakelike neck and
small head. All in all, the sightings tend to follow the pattern set at
Loch Ness or other lakes which are supposed to contain monsters.
Despite all the publicity to date, there has been only limited sci-
entific investigation of the area. A scientific conference on Champ was
held at Port Henry, New York, in 1981, and among the participants
was Dr. Roy Mackal of the University of Chicago, who once again
pressed his zeuglodon, or primitive-whale, theory as the possible
source of this and other freshwater monster sightings.
In the meantime Port Henry, New York, and other towns that bor-
der the lake have been prospering from the excitement by selling
"Port Henry, Home of Champ" T-shirts, and other monster souvenirs
to tourists.
On both the New York and Vermont sides of the lake there have
been moves to have the animal declared an endangered species to
protect it from would-be "sportsmen." And Port Henry has passed an
ordinance protecting the creature, if creature there be.
See also: CHESSIE, ZEUGLODON

(HESSIE The first recorded sighting of the Chesapeake Bay

monster, or Chessie, came in the summer of 1978. The creature was
described as "grayish ... about 25 feet long ... swimming with an
undulating motion." It was reported in the bay near the mouth of the
Potomac River.
From time to time there have been other reports of the monster,
though it has never become a major water monster like the Loch Ness
monster, Ogopogo, or Champ. Some insist that the sightings are prob-
123 Flathead Lake Monster
ably a misidentified seal, a porpoise, a floating log, a sea otter, or just
plain hoax or hallucination. A three-minute videotape shot by Robert
Frew created some excitement during the summer of 1982. But the
pictures were unclear and hard to interpret.
But at least one "sportsman" took off after what he thought was
Chessie with a rifle, though he missed his target and whatever it was
that he was shooting at disappeared. This attack prompted Fortean
writer George W. Earley to propose in a Baltimore newspaper that
Chessie be protected by law, just as Bigfoot and Champ already are.
Wrote Earley:
"So how about it Mary landers-why not follow the lead of the good
people of Port Henry [New York] and Skamainia County
[Washington] and get some protection for your monster? After all,
why shouldn't they be afforded the same consideration we give the
snail darter, bald eagle, California condor and other officially endan-
gered species?"
See also: CHAMP

FLATHEAD LAKE MONSTER Visitors to Flathead Lake,

Montana, have occasionally spotted something "huge and black" in
the water. In 1963 Ronald Nixon, who lives near the lake, saw "some-
thing at least 25 feet long and with enough substance that as it moved
near the surface, it threw up a two foot head wave. It was perfectly
black, and it didn't have any sign of a fin on back. It couldn't have
been a fish, and I'm sure it wasn't man made."
Some local opinion holds that the Flathead Lake monster is a fish,
some kind of giant sturgeon perhaps. Peter Costello, author of In
Search of Lake Monsters, does not believe that available evidence
supports the fish theory, but some residents of the Flathead Lake area
have formed a company called Big Fish Unlimited, and a number of
attempts have been made to catch the monster. Once giant hooks
baited with whole chickens were used, but without any success. A skin
diver searched the lake for four days without finding anything, and a
RIVER AND LAKE MONSTERS 124
reward for the first good photograph of the monster has gone uncol-
lected. So has a $1,000 reward for the capture of the monster or any
fish over fourteen feet long that might account for the sightings.

GIANT BOA Reymonod Zima, a Portuguese merchant living

in Brazil, said that one night in 1930 he was going up to Jamunda
River when he saw a light on the river. At first he thought it was the
light from the house on the far shore that he was looking for, so he
switched on his searchlight.
"But suddenly we noticed the light was charging towards us at an
incredible speed. A huge wave lifted the bow of the boat and almost
made it capsize. My wife screamed in terror. At the same moment we
made out the shape of a giant snake rising out of the water and per-
forming a St. Vitus dance round the boat. After which, the monster
crossed this tributary of the Amazon about a mile and a half wide, at
fabulous speed leaving a huge wake, larger than any of the steamboats
make at full speed. . . . Owing to the understandable excitement at
the time it was not possible for me to reckon the monster's length. I
presume that as a result of a wound the animal lost one eye, since I
saw only one light. I think the giant snake must have mistaken our
searchlight for the eye of one of his fellow monsters."
The giant anaconda of Brazil is a monster that has received a good
deal of publicity. However, mixed in with the reports of this huge
snake are others which indicate the possibility of the existence of an
even larger giant water snake, or giant boa, sucuriju gigante, from
approximately the same region. Zima's story is one such account. Var-
ious individuals who have collected reports of the giant boa conclude
that it may be 130 or even an incredible 200 feet in length, and since
it is basically aquatic in nature, it has been described as an "inland
sea serpent."
Descriptions of this creature tend to vary a great deal, but practi-
cally every story contains some mention of its eyes, which in the
words of one witness "were as large as plates." The eyes are also lumi-
125 Loch Ness Monster
nous or phosphorescent, as mentioned in Zima'a narrative. A priest
who encountered the monster while sailing down the river first
thought that its eyes were navigation lights on the bridge of a river
boat. Later, when he got a closer look at the giant snake (too close for
comfort he thought), "We were able to appreciate clearly the differ-
ence between the light of the lamp and the phosphorescent light of
the monster's eyes. "
See also: GIANT ANACONDA

LOCH NESS MONSTER The Loch Ness monster, or Nessie,

is quite justifiably the most celebrated of all the modern monsters or
unknown animals. The subject of Nessie has been investigated with
unusual care, and while the evidence produced has not convinced
everybody that there is a large unknown creature (or herd of crea-
tures) living in Loch Ness, even skeptics have been impressed by the
quality of some of the evidence.
Loch Ness is the largest freshwater lake in the British Isles. It is
approximately twenty-four miles long and a mile and a half wide at
its widest point. In most places the loch is about 450 feet deep, but
there are spots where the depth plunges to 900 feet. The shores of the
loch are quite steep. Though it is far to the north, Loch Ness never
freezes, but it never gets very warm either, the temperature hovering
around forty-two degrees Fahrenheit year round. The water itself is
very murky, and there are dangerous currents, making any under-
water search an uncertain and risky business. Loch Ness is very like
many of the other cold northern lakes in which monsters have been
reported over the years.
The loch forms a portion of what is called the Great Glen, a split
in the earth which cuts completely across the Scottish Highlands. The
Great Glen contains a chain of lochs, rivers, and canals which connect
the Atlantic Ocean with the North Sea. Loch Ness itself was once an
arm of the sea and is still connected to the North Sea by the river
Ness.
RIVER AND LAKE MONSTERS 126
Like all of the other highland lochs, Loch Ness had its share of
ancient legends about water kelpies and other monstrous creatures liv-
ing in its depths. Unlike most other Scottish monster tales, which were
conveyed only by word of mouth, the story of a monster in Loch Ness
was written down in A.D. 565. The monster, it seems, ran afoul of Saint
Columba, the great Christian missionary to Scotland. According to
Adamnan, the saint's biographer, the saint saved a swimmer from the
rampaging monster by saying, "Think not to go further, touch not
thou that man. Quick! Go back! Then the beast upon hearing the
voice of the saint was terrified and fled backwards more rapidly than
he came." This, by the way, is the only aggressive act ever attributed
to the Loch Ness monster.
It is probable that the monster story predates Saint Columba, for it
was traditional in pagan societies for heroes to slay dragons and mon-
sters, and it was also traditional when these pagans became Christians
to alter the old story to accommodate the new faith.
In the centuries that followed there were vague stories of "some-
thing" in the loch, but there was nothing to distinguish these accounts
from all of the other myths and legends of the Highlands. The mod-
ern story of the Loch Ness monster begins in 1933.
At that time a road was built around the once isolated loch. The
construction brought a large number of outsiders to Loch Ness, and
clearing the shore of the loch for the road gave observers a much
better view of the water.
The first recorded modern monster sighting was on April14, 1933.
Mr. and Mrs. John Mackay were driving home from the city of Inver-
ness along the new road when they saw an "enormous animal" in the
water, and watched while the beast "disported itself, rolling and
plunging for fully a minute." The Mackays happened to own the inn
at Drumnadrochit, which is still. a center for monster hunters and
more casual tourists. This fact has not been overlooked by skeptics
who tend to set the whole Loch Ness phenomena down as a tourist-
grabbing hoax.
The Mackays told their friend Alex Campbell, the water bailie on
Loch Ness, that is, the man in charge of regulating salmon fishing in
127 loch Ness Monster

Theoretical loch Ness monster

the loch. Campbell, who lived on the shores of the loch and spent a
lot of time looking at the water, said that he had seen the monster
many times since he was first told of it by the Mackays.
Campbell was also a correspondent for the Inverness Courier, and
he wrote up the story on the Mackay sighting for the May 3, 1933,
edition of the paper. Campbell says that he is the man who first called
the thing a monster, not because there was anything particularly hor-
rible about it, but because of its great size. Campbell's description of
the monster has become the standard:
"It had a long, tapering neck, about 6 feet long, and a smallish head
with a serpentine look about it, and a huge hump behind which I
reckoned was about 30 feet long. It was turning its head constantly."
The Loch Ness monster story has been told many, many times, and
it is appropriate here only to touch upon the high points.
While there have been a number of alleged sightings of the Loch
Ness monster on land, the most famous came early in the monster's
RIVER AND LAkE MONSTERS 128
modern history. That was the night of January 5, 1934. Arthur Grant,
a young veterinary student, was riding home on his motorcycle when
he practically ran over the Loch Ness monster, which was crossing the
road in front of him.
It was a bright moonlit night, so Grant got a good view of the thing.
He described it as having a long neck, smallish head with large oval
eyes, a thick body, and a large round tapering tail. Grant saw that it
had front flippers, but could not be sure about flippers in back. Over-
all, he estimated the length to be about fifteen or twenty feet, much
smaller than the beast reported by Campbell and Mackay. Grant said
he tried to chase the thing, but it plunged into the loch and
disappeared.
When he got home, Arthur Grant made a quick sketch of what he
had seen, and the drawing looked remarkably like everybody's idea
of a Plesiosaurus.
The first known photos of "something" in the loch were taken in
November of 1933, but they were too vague and fuzzy to show any-
thing. The next picture, taken in April1934, was critical in the growth
of the Loch Ness story. This is the photograph taken by "the London
surgeon," a man named Kenneth Wilson who was on vacation at Loch
Ness when he saw something in the water. Wilson snapped two pic-
tures, the first showing what appears to be a long neck and small head
sticking up above the water's surface. It is to this day the clearest
photo of the Loch Ness monster ever taken. Yet the photo has always
been controversial, partly because Wilson was very publicity shy and
simply didn't want to talk about how he had taken the photo. In fact,
his name was not used in connection with the photo until after his
death.
The problem with the photo is that it shows water and the object
and that's all. There is no identifying landmark to show that it
actually was shot at Loch Ness, though few doubt that it was. More
significantly, there is nothing by which the size of the object in the
water can be judged. The object itself is completely in silhouette and
no features are visible. While many who look at it say it must be the
neck and head of the monster, others think it is a piece of a log, the
129 loch Ness Monster
head and neck of a diving bird, or the tail of an otter. The London
surgeon's photo aroused interest in the monster but did not settle the
problem.
Interest in Nessie declined sharply during the war years, and there
was even an absurd rumor that the monster had been killed by a Ger-
man bomb. Nothing of importance really happened untill960, when
the first good motion pictures of the monster were taken.
In Aprill960, Tim Dinsdale, an aeronautical engineer and monster
buff, took what he believed to be a very brief film of the monster
swimming rapidly on the far side of the loch. To the untrained eye,
the film showed little more than a dot moving across the water. It
could have been a powerboat, and that's what some said it was. How-
ever, in 1965 the Dinsdale film was examined by photographic experts
of the Royal Air Force. The RAF study concluded that the object in
Dinsdale's film was "probably" animate, and might be as much as
ninety feet long. While everyone recognizes that photo analysis is not
an exact science, the RAF report was impressive and stimulated a
burst of serious Loch Ness monster investigation.
In 1970 a team from the American Academy of Applied Science,

The london surgeon's photograph of the loch Ness monster

RIVER AND LAKE MONSTERS 130
headed by Dr. Robert Rines, came to the loch with a variety of new
equipment and approaches. Not much happened that year, or the
next, but in 1972 one of the team's automatic underwater cameras
shot four frames of what appeared to be a diamond-shaped flipper
that might have been from six to eight feet long. It was a highly
impressive series of photographs because there was no suspicion of a
hoax. Scientists could not agree what sort of animal the flipper might
be attached to, but further investigation was very clearly warranted.
It wasn't until1975 that the next good evidence turned up. Again
it was underwater photos. The pictures themselves were very far from
clear, but one of them shows a close-up of a wrinkled, knobby object
that could be the face of the Loch Ness monster. Another photo may
show about three-quarters of a long-necked creature swimming away.
The pictures had to be computer enhanced, and even so, they are
quite vague and fuzzy. Interesting evidence, fascinating even-but
not conclusive. However, it seemed that the scientists were really
moving in on the monster.
A really big expedition sponsored jointly by the Academy of
Applied Science and the New York Times went to the Loch in 1978.
No monster-spotting expedition has ever been as well financed and
elaborately equipped. But this expedition added nothing to our total
knowledge of the Loch Ness phenomenon and must be counted a fail-
ure. Since that time interest in the Loch Ness monster has dropped
off considerably, though serious monster buffs and casual tourists still
come to the loch every summer in the hopes of seeing the thing. Very
few of the hopeful visitors ever see anything out of the ordinary.
Indeed, many longtime residents of the Loch Ness area have never
seen the creature, and some of the Scots who live around the loch are
hardened monster skeptics, who are alternately amused and irritated
by the many monster enthusiasts from around the world.
Most Loch Ness monster sightings are not of the impressive head-
and-neck type as seen in the London surgeon's photograph. What
people most frequently report seeing is a hump or humps in the
water.
If the Loch Ness monster is a real animal, and not some sort of
Searching for the Loch Ness monster

mythical beast, then there simply has to be more than one monster.
The thought that the loch is inhabited by a single immortal monster
that has lived in its depths, undetected at least from Saint Columba's
day to our own, is absurd. Cryptozoologists speak of a viable breeding
herd of the creatures-perhaps as many as a hundred. There have
been some sightings and a few photos and films which seem to show
more than one of the creatures at one time.
Speculating over what the Loch Ness monster might be has always
RIVER AND LAKE MONSTERS 132
been one of the most popular sports at the loch. Everyone's favorite
candidate is the ancient marine reptile plesiosaur-it looks like the
London surgeon's photo and the drawing by Arthur Grant. It might
have fins like those shown in the underwater photo, and since no one
knows what a plesiosaur's face looked like, there is no reason why it
could not have a face like that seen in the 1975 photo.
The most persistent objection raised to the plesiosaur identification
(aside from the fact that plesiosaurs are assumed to have been extinct
for 70 million years) is that it is a reptile, hence it is cold blooded and
could not survive in the very cold waters of the loch. The answer to
that objection is that we do not know whether ancient reptiles like
plesiosaur really were cold blooded. There is some evidence that the
dinosaurs, which were contemporaries of plesiosaur, may have had
internal temperature controls.
Dr. Roy Mackal, who first entered the world of cryptozoology
through an interest in the Loch Ness monster, suggested at one time
that it might be a variety of giant sea slug that had adapted to fresh
water. What made this suggestion attractive was that the giant slug
would not have had to spend much time on the surface, and that
when it died its remains would sink to the bottom and decompose
completely. A telling objection to the case for the monster is that no
bones or other remains have ever been found. A number of other pos-
sible invertebrate candidates have also been put forth, but none has
ever gained wide support.
Mackal discarded the sea-slug theory and suggested the possibility
that the monster might be a giant amphibian. Others have suggested
gigantic eels or other types of elongated fish. But neither amphibian
nor fish has ever been popular.
Next to plesiosaur, the most popular candidate for the Loch Ness
monster has been some sort of mammal. An unknown variety of giant
otter or a long-necked seal have been suggested. Mackal for a while
toyed with a theoretical long-necked sirenian, a type of manatee or
sea cow. Most recently he has supported the primitive whale, zeug-
lodon. The principal objection to all mammals is that they are air
breathers and should spend more time on the surface than the Loch
133 Loch Ness Monster
Ness creature appears to.
Another problem is food. It is generally assumed that the monster
is a fish eater, and there are enough salmon in the loch to support
comfortably a small herd of fish eaters. But if the monsters are fish
eaters, they should leave their mark-some of the fish should get
away and later be caught by human fishermen who would notice
strange wounds on them. While there have been a few reports of
wounded salmon, there has been nothing conclusive.
Since the Loch Ness monster seems so elusive, many have won-
dered if the creature (or creatures) are only part-time residents of the
loch, for Loch Ness is connected with the sea. But this would mean
the creatures had to migrate up the river Ness, which runs right
through the middle of the city of Inverness. It is impossible to imagine
any large creature going up that river unobserved. At the other end
the monsters would have to navigate the locks of the Caledonian
Canal, an even more absurd idea. There have been theories about an
underground tunnel connecting the loch to the sea, but no evidence
of such a connection has ever been found. If the Loch Ness monster
exists, it is a full-time resident of Loch Ness.
Since about 1969, attention has also been focused on Loch Morar,
about seventy miles from Loch Ness. A creature dubbed Morag has
been reported in this smaller but deeper body of water. On August
18, 1969, ~ couple of fishermen said that their boat had actually
rammed a large, unknown animal in Loch Morar. The fishermen took
a couple of shots at it, but the creature submerged, apparently unhurt.
There have been other sightings since, but Morag has never captured
the public imagination as has Nessie.
Short of draining the loch and sifting the silt on the bottom, it is
probably impossible to disprove the existence of the Loch Ness mon-
ster. Proving its existence, however, should be relatively easy. A bone,
a piece of hide, an unambiguous close-up photo-any of these would
prove the reality of the creature. Since intensive investigation has
been going on since the 1930s, it is not unreasonable to wonder how
the creature has escaped detection for so long. Loch Ness is large,
deep, and dark, but how many years can it hold its secret before we
RIVER AND LAKE MONSTERS 134
begin to wonder if there really is any secret after all?
But still there are the photographs, and thousands upon thousands
of sightings, many from reliable and experienced observers.
News of the final proof of the existence of the monster may be in
tomorrow's newspaper, or the next day's. Until then the Loch Ness
monster remains what it has always been, the most tantalizing and
best of all the modern world's cryptozoological mysteries.
See also: CHAMP, CHESSIE, MANIPOGO, OGOPOGO, STORSJON ANIMAL,
ZEUGLODON

MANIPOGO Ogopogo, the popular name for the monster of

Okanagan Lake in British Columbia, has proved infectious through-
out Canada. A monster reputed to live in Lake Manitoba has been
dubbed Manipogo.
The story of Manipogo is a familiar one. There are the usual Indian
legends, ~few sightings by early settlers of "something" in the water,
and then a stream of more modern sightings with their attendant
newspaper publicity. Most of the reports made Manipogo sound like
a large snake.
The Manipogo reports were numerous enough to attract the atten-
tion of Professor James A. McLeod, head of the Department of Zool-
ogy at the University of Manitoba. Dr. McLeod organized two sum-
mer expeditions at the lake, the first in 1960. That was an excellent
year for monster sightings. Unfortunately, though a lot of people at
the lake reported seeing the monster while McLeod was there, he
never was at the right place at the right time. Once, he arrived on the
scene less than an hour after the creature had been sighted and
disappeared.
In 1962 a couple of Canadian cameramen said they had better luck.
"We first spotted the object to the left of our boat about three hundred
yards away. After swinging into the direction in which it was heading,
we saw what we believed to be either a huge black snake or an eel.
The back was at least a foot across and about twelve feet of the mon-
135 Manipogo
ster was well above the water. At no time were we able to see the
head or tail. We were about fifty to seventy-five yards away when the
photograph was taken."
The photograph, which to the untrained eye looks a bit like a giant
inchworm in the water, is too indistinct to be conclusive proof of any-
thing. Still, McLeod was impressed. "If this isn't a photo of the mon-
ster, then I'd like to know just exactly what in the world it really is.
In certain respects it very closely resembles photographs taken of the
monster in Loch Ness."
Professor McLeod took a somewhat different approach than most
modern lake-monster hunters. He wasn't only looking for a sighting
or a contemporary photograph, he was looking for remains of the
creature. If Manipogo or any of the other modern monsters exist, they
must be real animals that breed and die. There should be bones or
other remains.
One of the district residents, Oscar Frederickson, reported that he
had discovered an unusual bone on the north shore of another Mani-
toba lake, Winnipegosis. The monster that allegedly lives in Winni-
pegosis is predictably called Winnipogo. Winnipegosis is a shallow
lake and seems a highly unlikely place for an unknown creature to
hide. But Professor McLeod followed Frederickson to the lake to
search for more pieces of bone. The search was unsuccessful.
The original bone Frederickson found is supposed to have been
destroyed in a fire, and only a wooden model remains. The model,
which is six inches by three inches, apparently represents a spinal ver-
tebra. Cryptozoologist Dr. Roy Mackal comments, "Even if there
were no fraud involved, the model was of no evidential value. One
cannot, for example, determine from the model whether the original
was fossilized or 'green.' In spite of the inadequacy of such evidence,
this report, coupled with the 'monster' sighting reports from the area
was sufficiently intriguing to move Professor McLeod to investigate
further."
One final descendant of Ogopogo is Igopogo. Back in the 1950s a
cartoon strip about a possum named Pogo was extremely popular. "I
go Pogo" was a slogan used in the comic strip, and that gives you an
RIVER AND LAkE MONSTERS 136
idea of how seriously this particular monster is taken. lgopogo is sup-
posed to live in Lake Simcoe, Ontario. The problem is that the lake is
a bare forty miles from Toronto, and is a crowded summer resort area.
The appearance of a monster amid the bathers and boaters of Lake
Simcoe should create more of an impression than it has. Evidence for
the existence of this creature is little more than a handful of news-
paper clippings about vague sightings by unnamed individuals.
See also: OGOPOGO

OcoPoco The most euphonious name in the monster

world comes from a really silly little English ditty of the 1920s:

I'm looking for the Ogopogo. The funny little Ogopogo.

His mother was an earwig, his father was a snail.
I'm going to put a little bit of salt on his tail.
I want to find the Ogopogo while he's playing on his old banjo.

For some unknown reason the song crossed the ocean and wound
up in a service-club review in the town of Kelowna, British Columbia,
on the shores of Okanagan Lake. Rotarian W. H. Brimblecombe
decided the song might be given a local twist when he sang it. "At
the time," he wrote, "there was considerable talk about the mysterious
creature in Okanagan Lake, and the possibilities of making a little fun
were recognized." So Brimblecombe wrote a parody of the original
which he sang at a club luncheon in 1926.

I'm looking for the Ogopogo,

The bunny-hugging Ogopogo.
His mother was a mutton, his father was a whale.
I'm going to put a little bit of salt on his tail.
I'm looking for the Ogopogo.

The reference to mutton is a:n allusion to the statement of several

witnesses that the "mysterious creature" has a head like a sheep.
137 Ogopogo
The day after the luncheon, the Vancouver Daily Province
declared Ogopogo to be the official name of the ''Famous Okanagan
Sea Serpent." It is a foolish and meaningless name, but it has stuck.
Long before Brimblecombe's song, there had been tales of a crea-
ture in the lake, and it was known under a variety of difficult to pro-
nounce Indian names, the most popular of which was Natiaka, which
may be translated as "snake of the water," though the creature was
regarded not only as a snake but as a water god and a lake demon.
Visitors to the Okanagan Valley will find the monster's supposed
image all over the place. In the town of Kelowna there is an "Ogopogo
corner," which contains a snakelike statue painted green with a
forked red tongue, pointed ears, and horns. A sign next to the statue
reads:
"The story of Ogopogo is centuries old, going back before the days
of the white man in the Okanagan. Originally called by the Indians
'Natiaka' or 'N'ha-a-atik' meaning 'The Lake Monster' or 'Lake
Demon.' Since seen and described by scores of reliable witnesses.

Hoax photograph of Ogopogo

RIVER AND LAkE MONSTERS 138
"Descriptions vary but the length is said to be from thirty to sev-
enty feet. The body is long and serpentlike, one to two feet in diam-
eter, and·the head is shaped like a horse's head. [The statue, however,
has a dragon's head.] Ogopogo is able to move very rapidly. Protected
by law. Watch for Ogopogo!"
Yet for all the foolishness, boosterism, and tourist trapping, Okan-
agan Lake is, next to Loch Ness itself, the site of the most promising
of freshwater monsters. Indeed, the comparisons between the British
Columbian lake and Loch Ness are often striking. Both are long, deep,
cold-water lakes formed by glaciers. Okanagan is seventy-nine miles
long and about two and a half miles wide and 800 feet deep at its
deepest point. That makes it longer, wider, and nearly as deep as
Loch Ness. Lake Okanagan never freezes, but it never gets very warm
either. The water temperature hovers around thirty-four degrees
Fahrenheit, just a few degrees colder than Loch Ness, where the
water temperature is forty-two degrees Fahrenheit.
There had been Indian water-demon legends attached to the lake,
as there had been to most large lakes in Canada and elsewhere. And
there were a fair number of rather vague stories of sightings by early
white settlers in the area. But the Ogopogo story really got going dur-
ing the 1920s, with a long string of impressive sightings.
One of the best took place on July 19, 1926. John L. Logie, his wife,
and their two grandchildren were driving along the west shore of the
lake. It was about seven in the morning:
"The lake was perfectly calm at this time, and this brought our
attention to the fact that something must be causing the undulations
that we saw. My wife, Isabella, called my attention to it first.
" ... what appeared to be causing the swell, we discovered was a
rather strange looking animal. It created quite a trough in the water,
was about twenty feet long with a head rising some eighteen inches
above the body.
"We had to go faster to overtake the creature. Travelling along-
side it, we had every opportunity of observing the creature. What was
our surprise to see that it resembled very much the descriptions of the
strange sea serpent (so-called) that we heard so much about. We
139 Ogopogo
couldn't tell whether it was covered with scales or hair. The back of
its head looked like that of a bulldog without ears. The face resembled
that of a sheep, with the pointed nose."
A little later the same year some local pranksters fashioned a mon-
ster model out of old automobile tires and other scrap material. They
had the thing towed out at the start of the annual regatta at Kelowna.
On the second day of the regatta some canoeists saw what they took
to be the model-until the thing dived, and they realized that they
had been gazing not at the model, but at the monster itself.
Throughout the rest of the summer and well into the fall, Ogopogo
continued to be seen by visitors to the lake. A most unusual sighting
took place in November 1926 when some fifty or sixty people attend-
ing a baptism on the lake shores were treated to a sight of the monster
cavorting in the water.
The December 27, 1926, edition of the Vancouver Star headlined
a story that Ogopogo had been found dead in the ice on the lake. In
response the Kelowna Daily Courier wired the Star, "No ice on lake.
Ogopogo invisible. Somebody should sober up-Christmas is over."
The whole story it seems had been concocted as a joke on the Van-
couver paper, and the paper swallowed it and was forced to print a
retraction headlined LAKE SERPENT STILL LIVING. Investigation
fails to support theory of-death."
Ogopogo sightings dropped off rather dramatically during the thir-
ties and forties, but picked up again after World War II, and now
hardly a year goes by without one or more good sightings discussed
in the area newspaper. In mid-December 1969 the publisher of the
Kelowna Daily Courier himself saw the creature from the picture
window of his living room, which faces the lake.
"The humps were silhouetted against the light and the body
seemed to be as big around as a new automobile tire, twelve to four-
teen inches across, but no scales were visible....
"Suddenly, the north end of the humps, which were parallel to the
shore, seemed to rise out of the water again. I didn't see a head."
Though local interest in Ogopogo has always been keen, the people
of the Okanagan Lake region appear to take a fairly lighthearted view
RIVER AND LAKE MONSTERS 140
of their most famous resident. Unlike Loch Ness, which has been the
object of repeated serious investigations, attempts to organize a thor-
ough scientific search for Ogopogo have often been discussed but
never successfully carried out. Photographs and films of the monster
have also been disappointing. In August 1968, Arthur Folden, a saw-
mill worker from Case, British Columbia, took about one minute of
motion-picture film of something that he thought was Ogopogo. For
a
about year and a half he showed the film only to friends because he
feared ridicule. By the time he was persuaded to give a public show-
ing, the film was in pretty bad shape. At best, the object in the film
was indistinct. While some of those who saw it thought that it defi-
nitely showed the monster, others were openly skeptical. Folden,
apparently stung by the disbelief, simply disappeared with the film
and could not be contacted again according to Mary Moon, author of
Ogopogo, the best and most thorough account of the monster of
Okanagan Lake.
There have been a number of reports of footprints of varying sizes
and shapes, but as Dr. Roy Mackal comments, "The trouble with foot-
prints is that anyone can fake them easily. Further, to assume that
they were made by Natiaka [Mackal prefers the Indian name] is pure
conjecture and supposition-certainly possible but without even a cir-
cumstantial link to the two cases cited of direct land sightings."
So what we are left with is the uncomfortable fact that there is not
a shred of reliable tangible evidence that Ogopogo exists at all. Still,
there are all those sightings, made over a long period of time, many
by reliable people. This has been enough to produce a virtual orgy of
speculation over what Ogopogo might be.
Probably the most mundane explanation, and one that was popular
in the 1920s, is that Ogopogo is a monster sturgeon, or perhaps a
group of perfectly ordinary sturgeon swimming in a line.
The oarfish, a large elongated fish with a flattened ribbonlike body,
has sometimes been suggested as a possible source of sea-serpent sight-
ings, and during the 1920s it was brought up as an explanation for
Ogopogo; but it isn't a very good explanation, for the oarfish is
extremely rare and, besides, it's a sea animal and Okanagan is a fresh-
141 Silver Lake Monster
water lake. A manatee, a seal (long necked or otherwise), a school of
porpoises, and the ever popular Plesiosaurus also have had their
partisans.
The most recent challenger to enter the lists is zeuglodon, a long
thin primitive form of whale. This is the theory currently supported
by Dr. Roy Mackal, who concludes, "a better correspondence of char-
acteristics could hardly be desired." Mackal notes that although
whales are thought of as being exclusively sea animals, there is no
reason why there could not be freshwater forms of more primitive
types for, "It seems probable that adaption to life in the water (in
aquatic mammals) proceeds through a freshwater phase."
It also seems probable that the investigation of the Okanagan Lake
mystery will not advance much beyond the stage of collecting inter-
esting, but inconclusive sightings until there is some serious scientific
interest in the subject.
See a/so: LOCH NESS MONSTER, MANIPOGO, ZEUGLODON

SaLVER LAKE MONSTER On the evening of July 13, 1855,

a party of six, four men and two boys, were fishing on Silver Lake in
Wyoming County in the northwestern part of New York State when
they spotted what first appeared to be a large log off the stern of the
boat. The log turned out to be the head of what witnesses agreed was
"a most horrid and repulsive-looking monster." The monster was
thrashing about, and the waves it created nearly swamped the boat.
The terrified fishing party reached shore feeling that they had been
lucky to escape with their lives.
This was the first appearance of the Silver Lake monster. For the
rest of the summer, people reported astonishing close-up encounters
with the creature. Somebody interviewed a local Indian, who said that
the monster was nothing new to him, his ancestors had known all
about it, and that was why they had wisely refrained from fishing and
bathing in the lake for generations.
Silver Lake was a remote and undeveloped area in 1855, but this
RIVER AND LAKE MONSTERS 142
did not discourage hordes of monster hunters from descending upon
the region, bristling with harpoons and guns. None of the well-armed
parties ever seemed to see the thing, though the creature continued
to show itself to isolated boats and fishermen. The monster mania con-
tinued right through the following year, when it began to taper off.
The Silver Lake monster might have remained a mystery monster
forever had there not been a fire on December 19, 1857, in the
Walker House, a hotel in the town of Perry, which borders Silver
Lake. In the debris left by the fire was found the remains of the Silver
Lake monster. It had all been a hoax cooked up by Truman S. Gillett
and A. B. Walker, owner of the hotel. The monster had been con-
cocted out of waterproof canvas and wire, and made to surface by
forcing air into the frame with a hose. It was towed around the lake
by ropes. Since the Walker House was the only hotel anywhere near
Silver Lake, its owner did a booming business from the monster
mania.
Walker confessed to the hoax and quietly left town. He returned
eleven years later and found that all had been forgiven. The hoaxer
was treated as a hero, not a villain. He opened another hotel, which
he ran successfully until his death, and every once in a while the Perry
Chamber of Commerce stages a Sea Serpent Festival in commemo-
ration of the event.

SuMEY suM "The serpent was about 50 feet long and going
five miles an hour with a sort of undulating movement. ... His head,
which resembles that of a snub-nosed crocodile, was 8 inches above
the water. I'd say he was about 35 feet long (on consideration)."
The man who made this report was Thomas L. Rogers, of Boise,
Idaho. He reported the sighting in Lake Payette, Idaho, a seven-mile-
long lake fed by mountain rivers. The lake is a popular vacation spot
and seems an unlikely place for an unknown animal, yet reports of a
sea-serpent-like creature have been coming from Lake Payette since
143 Storsjon Animal
the 1930s. The summer of 1941, which was the year in which Rogers
reported his sighting, was a banner year, with over thirty people
reporting sightings. Newspapers gave the creature the nickname Sli-
mey Slim.
Many people reported the traditional long neck and small head,
and others said that the monster appeared to have humps on its back,
another feature of other freshwater monster sightings.
After a burst of excitement, and a certain amount of national pub-
licity, Slimey Slim slithered back into obscurity. One might speculate
the outbreak of World War II in December 1941 swamped any pub-
licity the monster might otherwise have received.

SroRSJON ANIMAL At the museum in the town of Oster-

sund in the mountains of central Sweden there is a display of gigantic
hooks and an immense spring trap, which were to be used to catch a
monster reputed to live in nearby Lake Storsjon. The lake covers 176
square miles, is the deepest in Sweden, and is frozen over several
months of the year. In 1894 a wealthy Ostersund widow formed a
company to capture the beast. An experienced Norwegian whaler was
hired to do the job, and he spent a year on the lake trying various
methods of luring the creature into his trap, or getting it to take his
hook. The whaler didn't even see the monster, the company went
broke, and the Norwegian had to go back to chasing whales.
But if all the stories of the Storsjon animal are to be believed, the
Norwegian whaler was one of the few poeple around the lake who
didn't see the thing. There are more solid sighting reports of this crea-
ture than of any other lake monster, with the exception of the Loch
Ness monster itself.
According to the curator of the Ostersund museum, the "Great
Lake Monster" was seen most frequently between the years 1820 and
1898. According to the curator, "The head is said to be round and
smooth like that of a dog, with great eyes . . . the extremities are
RIVER AND LAKE MONSTERS 144
described as short, stumpy legs or feet, possibly big clumsy fins, pos-
sibly long, webbed hind legs. It has great fins on the back of the head,
possibly ears, described as little sails, which can be layed tight on the
neck." The body is generally described as long and is often reported
to have humps which stick above the surface of the water. Except for
the "ears," the description is similar to that of many other lake
monsters.
Until the 1880s Ostersund was just an isolated village and stories of
the creature supposed to inhabit the neighboring lake did not travel
far. But as the timber industry prospered and a railway was built to
the town, the outside world began to hear of the Storsjon animal. One
of those who listened to the stories was Dr. Peter Olsson, a zoologist
at the Ostersund State High School. In 1898 he visited Lake Storsjon
to collect all the information he could about the creature. It was a
good year to visit; the creature seemed to be exceptionally active. For
example, on November 20, 1898, a group of people saw the animal,
a mere "two stones' throw" from where they were standing. They
estimated it to be twenty or thirty feet long. At first they saw only a
head, then it ducked its head and its rear end came up. Then the
water was churned up, and the animal took off across the lake at a
considerable speed. Two of the group tried to chase it in a boat, but
it was too fast for them. After gathering together all of the evidence,
Dr. Olsson came up with the theory that the Storsjon animal was a
mammal related to the seals. Olsson's theory was undoubtedly influ-
enced by the work of Antoon Cornelis Oudemans, a Dutch biologist
who had, a few years earlier, published an enormous volume, The
Great Sea Serpent, in which he concluded that the sea-serpent sight-
ings were most likely stimulated by an unknown and gigantic long-
necked seal. Olsson put his ideas into a little pamphlet that was pub-
lished at Ostersund but generally ignored by the rest of the world.
Though the heyday of Storsjon animal sightings was the late nine-
teenth century, the unknown creature has not disappeared in modern
times. Indeed, sightings are reported quite regularly, particularly in
the summer months when tourists flock to the lake in the hopes of
seeing the monster. Unfortunately, the best view of the thing that
145 White River Monster
most people get is a mock-up of the monster that welcomes visitors to
the town of Ostersund.
See also: LOCH NESS MONSTER

wHITE RIVER MONSTER Where the White River passes the

town of Newport, Arkansas, it runs deep-nearly sixty feet deep in
some spots. These deep pools are said to be the home of one of Amer-
ica's better-known freshwater monsters, the White River monster.
As with so many American monsters, there were tales of Indian
legends of a monster in that very spot. But most of the "Indian leg-
ends" surfaced only after the modem monster excitement began-so
they are suspect. The modern excitement, however, is well
documented.
It began in 1937 when a plantation owner named Bramlett Bate-
man swore, in an affadavit, that he had seen the thing several times.
"I saw something appear on the surface [about 375 feet away]. From
the best I could tell, from the distance, it was about 12 feet long and
five feet wide. I did not see either head or tail but it slowly rose to the
surface and stayed in this position for some five minutes. It did not
move up or down the river at this time, but afterward on different
occasions I have seen it move up and down the river."
Bateman's motives in reporting his sightings have been questioned,
for he owned property on one bank of the White River, and when
the inevitable tourists and curiosity seekers flocked to the little town
of Newport, Bateman fenced off part of his land and charged twenty-
five cents a head for a chance to see the monster. It was a bad bargain
because no one saw anything.
Other nonpaying observers did see something. One said, "I just saw
a creature the size of a boxcar thrashing in the White River.... It was
smooth gray and long ... very, very long. It didn't really have scales,
but from where I was standing on the shore, about 150 feet away, it
looked as if the thing was peeling all over. But it was a smooth type
of flesh ... the thing was about the length of three or four pick up
RIVER AND LAKE MONSTERS 146
trucks, and at least two yards across.... I didn't see his head, but I
didn't have to; his body was enough to scare me bad."
The best recent sighting took place on June 28, 1971.
Cloyce Warren was fishing from the White River Bridge when he
saw a foaming and bubbling in the water. "This giant form rose to
the surface and began moving in the middle of the river.... It was
very long and grey colored. It appeared to have a spiny backbone that
stretched for 30 or more feet. It was hard to make out exactly what
the front portion looked like, but it was awful large.... The creature
looked like something prehistoric." Warren had his Polaroid camera
at hand and took a picture, but it doesn't show much.
Ernest Denks said the creature was gray, weighed over a thousand
pounds, and had a big bone sticking out of its forehead. A couple of
fishermen, Ollie Richardson and Joe Dupree, had their boat lifted
completely out of the water and turned sideways. They didn't see
what lifted them, but they were sure it was the White River monster.
There are those who believe that the whole White River monster
excitement was a hoax. Dr. Curtis D. MacDougall, a professor of jour-
nalism, states in his book Hoaxes: "Hoping to intensify interest the
Newport Chamber of Commerce really killed business by hiring a
Memphis diver with an eight-foot harpoon to descend to the bottom
of the eddy and see what he could see. After seventy-five minutes he
was compelled to confess he saw nothing, and those who had bet it
would be a sturgeon or a catfish or an alligator gar or a cousin of the
Loch Ness serpent had to be content to call it even." This failure
dampened interest for a while but did not kill it.
Cryptozoologist Dr. Roy Mackal does not believe that the White
River monster is a hoax, or an alligator gar, or an unknown creature
for that matter. He suggests that it is an elephant seal that has some-
how found its way into the White River. The elephant seal, a giant
among seals, is found primarily along the coasts of California and
Mexico. "It is quite conceivable," he writes, "that occasionally, a wan-
dering individual finds itself in the mouth of the Mississippi, which it
follows, finally appearing in the White River, a large branch of the
Mississippi."
 6

MONSTERS
 (oELACANTH No discussion of monsters or unknown ani-
mals can go on for long without mention of the coelacanth. While not
a monster in any sense of the word, the discovery of this creature has
a bearing on every account of the survival of an unknown animal.
The story began on December 22, 1938, when fishermen who had
been dredging in shallow water off the tip of South Africa hauled up
a large and very odd-looking fish. The fish was about five feet long
and weighed over a hundred pounds. It was covered by heavy scales
and had big, bulging deep blue eyes. It survived for a long time on
the deck of the trawler, snapping viciously at·anyone who came near
it. It didn't look very edible, and probably could not be sold at the
fish market. Under normal circumstances, the unusual creature would
have been thrown overboard with the rest of the trash fish. But this
trawler's skipper thought the fish was so singular looking that it might
have some other value.
By the time the trawler had put into port, the fish had died, and
despite rudimentary efforts at preservation it had already begun to
rot in the hot African sun. The specimen was taken to a local museum,
where the curator, Miss Courtenay Latimer, realized at once that she
had been presented with a rare prize. She hurriedly called Dr. J. L. B.
Smith, a leading South African ichthyologist. By the time Dr. Smith
had arrived at the museum, the fish had become so foul that Miss
Latimer had it skinned and the skin mounted. She saved the skull.
The rest of the specimen, now alive with maggots, was carried out as
quickly and as far as possible. Still, there was enough left for Dr.
149
SEA MONSTERS 150
Smith to recognize that what he was looking at was a coelacanth fish,
belonging to the subclass of the Crossopterygii, "lobe-finned fish." It
has rather leglike fins, in fact, Dr. Smith nicknamed it "old fourlegs."
While this type of fish was well known to paleontologists, no sci-
entist ever expected to see a living or recently dead specimen. It was
a representative of an extremely ancient group of fish, the type from
which the first land creatures probably evolved. While the coelacanths
had once stood at the pinnacle of evolution, their importance had
declined, and ultimately they became extinct at the end of the Cre-
taceous period, about 60 or 70 million years ago. That was the same
time the dinosaurs became extinct. Obviously, the coelacanth had not
become extinct, for Dr. Smith found himself confronting the skin and
skull of one that had been swimming around in the ocean less than a
month earlier.
Clearly, this was not one immortal fish that had somehow survived
alone all those millions of years, there must be others. A substantial
reward was offered for another specimen, but it was fourteen years
before one turned up. The study of this second and considerably more
well-preserved example showed beyond a doubt that this indeed was
a coelacanth, and that expert opinion which held that this fish had
been extinct for 60 or 70 million years had been dead wrong.
Subsequently additional specimens have turned up, and the fish has
even been photographed alive by underwater photographers. It isn't
as rare as first believed and was not entirely unknown. African fish-
ermen knew of it under the name Kombessa, but since it wasn't edi-
ble they weren't particularly interested. It was just another big ugly
fish as far as they were concerned.
The coelacanth is the best argument in favor of the cryptozoolo-
gists' belief that a presumably extinct animal can remain unknown to
science well into modern times. If the coelacanth can do it, runs the
argument, why not others?
151 Daedalus Sea Serpent

DAEDALUS SEA SERPENT In October 1848 strange, in-

triguing and disturbing rumors reached the British Admiralty. It was
said that the frigate H.M.S. Daedalus had put into Plymouth Har-
bor on the fourth, and the men had immediately begun talking about
the enormous sea serpent they had seen while sailing to the East Indies.
A statement about the Daedalus sea serpent was even published
in the Times. Since such tales tended to reflect discredit on the navy
as a whole, the ship's captain was asked to state openly exactly what
he and his men had seen.
Captain Peter M'Quhae did so, with admirable precision and clar-
ity, and his response constitutes the finest of all the reports of sea-
serpent sightings.
The sighting had taken place on the sixth of August, 1848. After
stating his position, the time of day, the weather, and the condition
of the sea, Captain M'Quhae went on to describe what happened:
Something unusual was seen approaching the ship. "On our atten-
tion being called to the object it was discovered to be an enormous
serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly
above the surface of the sea, and nearly as we could approximate by
comparing it with the length of what our main topsail yard would
show in the water, there was at the very least 60 feet of the animal d
fleur d' eau, no portion of which was, to our perception, used in pro-
pelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undula-
tion. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter, that had it
been a man of my acquaintance, I should easily have recognized his
features with the naked eye; and it did not, either in approaching the
ship or after it had passed our wake, deviate in the slightest degree
from its course....
"The diameter of the serpent was about 15 or 16 inches behind the
head, which was without any doubt, that of a snake, and it was never
during the 20 minutes that it continued in the sight of our glasses,
once below the surface of the water; its colour a dark brown, with
SEA MONSTERS 152

'··~··

Daedalus sea serpent

yellowish white about the throat. It had no fins, but something like a
mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of seaweed, washed about its
back. ... "
All of the officers and several of the crewmen witnessed the passage
of this extraordinary creature, and they confirmed Captain
M'Quhae's account in all details. Several drawings of the creature
were also supplied.
While sailors' tales of sighting sea serpents can sometimes be taken
rather lightly, this one cannot. If the officers of the Daedalus had
decided to cook up a hoax between them, it was a very dangerous sort
of hoax, for it meant not only lying to the public but lying to the Lords
of the Admiralty as well, a very, very serious offense. If the hoax had
been discovered, the career of Captain M'Quhae and all the others
who confirmed his story might have been ruined. The risk was far too
153 Giant Octopus
great for a simple joke; the men of the Daedalus had seen some-
thing-but what?
There are a couple of odd things about the various accounts of the
Daedalus sea serpent. Though the creature was seen to be moving
rapidly through the water, no one could see how it was propelled. It
did not undulate like a snake, nor were there any fins visible. It held
to a steady course; it didn't dip or turn its head. Even the picture of
the monster is bothersome, for it is shown as having a back as straight
as a board. The Daedalus sea serpent just does not look or sound like
a living creature.
The writer L. Sprague de Camp proposed an interesting theory
about this sighting. He suggests that what the men of the Daedalus
saw was an abandoned dugout canoe. These canoes sometimes have
prows painted with the faces of animals. But what was moving the
canoe? De Camp believes that the fishermen who had originally used
the canoe had harpooned a whale shark. The gigantic shark would
then have pulled the canoe out to sea. The fishermen panicked and
jumped overboard before they could cut the rope.
There are, of course, objections to such an explanation. Wouldn't
the fishermen have cut the rope somehow rather than abandon their
canoe? Wouldn't the rope have rotted or broken after a few hours, or
wouldn't the canoe have been swamped and sunk? Then there are the
witnesses themselves. Could experienced seamen have been so mis-
taken in their observations?
All such questions are at this late date quite unanswerable.
See also: SEA SERPENT

GIANT OCTOPUS The giant octopus may be the only mod-

ern unknown animal for which we possess physical evidence. The
story of the discovery or, to be more accurate, partial discovery of the
giant octopus began in Saint Augustine, Florida, in 1896. On Novem-
ber 30, two youngsters were cycling along the beach when they dis-
covered what appeared to be the rotting carcass of something very
SEA MONSTERS 154
large on the beach. The partly decomposed remains of large sea crea-
tures-whales, large sharks, and the like-are not uncommon on the
beaches of the world. But this mass was so large and unusual looking
that when the boys reported their find, the story was soon brought to
the attention of Dr. DeWitt Webb. Webb was a medical doctor with
a passionate interest in natural history and considerable expertise in
the field. He was one of the founders and a longtime president of the
Saint Augustine Historical Society and Institute of Science.
Webb examined the remains and found that they were indeed in
a very poor state of preservation. At first glance, the thing on the
beach seemed nothing more than a shapeless pinkish mass. Webb's
first thought was that he was confronted with the badly rotted carcass
of a whale-the only creature that he could think of large enough to
rot down to such a mass. Upon closer examination, however, Webb
decided that the mass was not a whale at all but the remains of a giant
octopus.
That conclusion was a startling one. True enough the octopus, like
the squid, is a mollusk of the cephalopod class, and the existence of a
gigantic squid was well established and well known by 1896. But the
largest octopus that had even been measured was only twenty feet

Remains of giant octopus

155 Giant Octopus
from tip of tentacle to tip of tentacle, and would not have weighed
more than about 125 pounds. There were stories of specimens that
were a few feet larger and a few pounds heavier. This mass on the
beach was quite obviously the remains of something much, much
larger and heavier. Webb estimated the weight of the mass to be
about five tons. The visible part (it was half buried in the sand) was
twenty-three feet long by four feet high and eighteen feet across the
widest part.
Just exactly what first led Webb to the octopus identification is not
entirely clear, though it may have been the shape of the mass. Pho-
tographs were made on December 5 and again on December 7, 1896.
The original photographs can no longer be located, but drawings
made from two of them show what appear to be the stumps of several
tentacles around the central mass. (Photographs taken later have sur-
vived, but by that time the remains had suffered further damage.)
The squid is a torpedo-shaped creature, with all its tentacles at the
head end, whereas the head and body of the octopus form a bulbous
central section with the eight tentacles of about equal length radiating
starlike around the center. The shape shown in the drawings is
vaguely like an octopus.
A man named Wilson, who was digging around the carcass,
reported that he had found fragments of tentacles. Said Wilson, "One
arm was lying west of the body, twenty-three feet long, one stump of
arm, west of body, about four feet; three arms lying south of the body
and from appearance attached to same (although I did not dig quite
to the body, as it lay well down in the sand, and I was very tired),
longest measured over thirty-two feet, the other arms were three to
five feet shorter." Unfortunately, Wilson was alone when he did his
digging, so there is no other witness to confirm his observations, and
a few days later a storm washed the mass out to sea. But it was washed
up on the beach again two miles farther south, in a somewhat more
battered condition than before. The tentacles, if any, had apparently
not survived the second beaching.
There were no professional biologists in the Saint Augustine area at
the time, so Webb wrote up his discoveries and sent copies of his
SEA MONSTERS 156
report to leading universities in the north. One of his accounts even-
tually reached the right man, Professor A. E. Verrill of Yale Univer-
sity, a world-renowned authority on the squid, octopus, and the like.
Professor Verrill was intrigued by Webb, but his first instinct was to
identify the carcass as belonging to a giant squid, a subject in which
he had a particular interest. But Webb kept sending additional infor-
mation, and within a month Professor Verrill had changed his mind
and wrote a couple of articles stating that it was his belief that the
Saint Augustine mass was a hitherto unknown species of giant octo-
pus. Unfortunately, neither Professor Verrill nor any other scientist
was able to go to Saint Augustine to examine the specimen at first
hand. Webb alone continued to study his rotting prize.
He had a team of horses pull the mass up farther on the beach to
prevent it from being washed away once again. This was to no avail,
a March storm once again pulled the carcass into the sea. It was
washed up at a new location, much the worse for the battering it had
received. After that, the Saint Augustine mass disappeared from sight
forever.
But before the March storm, Webb had fulfilled a request from
Verrill to send some specimens from the remains to Yale for closer
study. Webb cut some pieces from the mass, which proved to be very
tough and rubbery, placed them in formaldehyde, which Verrill had
apparently forwarded to Florida for that specific purpose, and packed
them off to Yale. He also sent specimens to Professor William Healy
Dall, curator of mollusks at the National Museum (now the Smithson-
ian Institution) in Washingtion, D.C.
When Verrill looked at the specimens Webb supplied, he decided
that he had been wrong about the octopus identification, and even
about the squid identification. He concluded that what he had been
sent were pieces of blubber from the rotting carcass of a whale. Said
Professor F. A. Lucas of the National Museum, "The substance looks
like blubber, and smells like blubber, and it is blubber, nothing more
nor less." A dead whale was no scientific novelty.
While Verrill publicly withdrew his giant octopus identification, he
did admit that there were some difficulties with the whale identifi-
157 Giant Octopus
cation. The tissue samples seemed to contain surprisingly little fat,
which whale blubber should have been rich in. He also noted that not
all of his colleagues who had examined the specimen sent by Webb
agreed that they had come from a whale. Given the badly deterio-
rated condition of the sample, some disagreement was probably
inevitable.
When Webb heard that the carcass upon which he had lavished so
much time and attention had been declared to be a perfectly ordinary
whale carcass, and not the remains of some monster octopus, he was
disappointed and surprised. He expressed his astonishment and disbe-
lief in a letter to Professor Verrill, but could not persuade the professor
to change his mind again. And so the matter was dropped-for over
fifty years.
It wasn't untill957 that the giant-octopus controversy was revived.
F. G. Wood, a scientist who worked in the Ocean Sciences Depart-
ment of the Naval Undersea Research and Development Laboratory
at San Diego, California, ran across a yellowed clipping with the title
"The Facts About Florida." It was one of those illustrated oddity fea-
tures, much like the popular "Ripley's Believe It or Not." The item
contained a drawing and a very brief description of the 1896 Saint
Augustine incident. The item noted that Professor Verrill had iden-
tified the remains washed ashore as belonging to a giant octopus
which, when alive, "had a girth of 25 feet and tentacles 72 feet in
length." The item ~ust have been prepared without knowledge of
Verrill's change of heart.
Wood was intrigued, for two reasons: at that moment he was work-
ing in Florida, a mere sixteen miles from where the carcass had first
been washed ashore, and because he recognized Professor Verrill's
name and knew that he had indeed been an authority on mollusks,
and on the giant squid in particular. Why then, had he never heard
of Verrill's giant octopus?
Wood began to do some digging, and found to his surprise that at
the time quite a lot had been written both in the popular press and
in the scientific journals about the "giant octopus." After Verrill
changed his mind, interest in the Saint Augustine mass faded.
SEA MONSTERS 158
From Yale, Wood obtained not only Webb's letters to Verrill, but
the photographs he had sent, or the drawings made from them. The
deeper Wood looked into the case, the more convinced he became
that Verrill's final retraction of the octopus identification had been an
error.
The Smithsonian Institution has sometimes been referred to as the
nation's attic, because all manner of odds and ends have been stored
in it. Wood was soon to have good reason to praise the Smithsonian's
reluctance to throw anything out. He heard from an associate that
among the thousands of jars of preserved specimens of marine life was
one labeled Octopus giganteus Verrill. It was the original specimen
sent to the Smithsonian by Webb in 1897. The next job was to see if
the Smithsonian would part with a piece of its precious specimen.
Wood contacted a friend, Dr. Joseph F. Gennaro of the University of
Florida, who in turn got in touch with the Smithsonian, where he had
contacts. Gennaro was told that he could indeed have a sample of the
specimen for examination.
Gennaro went to the Smithsonian personally to pick up his prize.
Writing in Natural History, Gennaro said, "There by the sink was a
glass container about the size of a milk can. Inside was a murky mix-
ture of cheesecloth, formalin (and I think some alcohol), and half a
dozen large white masses of tough fibrous material, each about as
large as a good-sized roast. We lifted them up with the cheesecloth,
then took them out with forceps."
With considerable difficulty, Gennaro cut off two smaller pieces for
study in his own laboratory. At first glance, the specimens looked like
an undifferentiated mass of tissue, of unidentifiable origin. His first
thought was that the tissue had been so badly decomposed that no
cellular structure was visable under the microscope. However, when
Gennaro examined specimens of known octopus and squid tissue pre-
pared the same way, he found that they also revealed little if any
cellular structure. Thus he concluded that the tissue from the Florida
monster belonged either to an octopus or a squid-but which?
Gennaro found that there were striking differences in the appear-
ance of the connective tissue of his octopus and squid samples when
159 Giant Octopus
viewed in polarized light. When he compared the Florida specimen
to the contemporary samples, he found that it closely resembled that
of the octopus, but hardly resembled the squid tissue at all.
Gennaro concluded, "The evidence appears unmistakable that the
Saint Augustine sea monster was in fact an octopus, but the implica-
tions are fantastic."
Fantastic indeed, for it now is reasonable to assume that what was
washed up on the beach at Saint Augustine in 1896 was the remains
of a gigantic octopus that may have measured from 150 to 200 feet
across, from tip of tentacle to tip of tentacle. That would make it far
and away the largest living invertebrate. The current commonly
accepted invertebrate size champion is the giant squid, the octopus's
close relative. Squids measuring over fifty feet from tip of tail to tip
of tentacle have been confirmed, but they may grow much, much
larger. However, a two-hundred-foot octopus would beat even the
most generous estimate of squid size.
How could such an enormous sea creature have remained unknown
for so long and, indeed, be virtually unknown today? The case of the
giant squid is instructive. This monstrous sea creature was unknown
to science until the final third of the nineteenth century. It became
known to science only when occasional specimens were washed
ashore. While the giant squid is a deep-sea dweller, it is also very
active, and therefore more likely to appear on the surface and to be
washed ashore when sick or injured. The giant octopus, on the other
hand, is most likely a sluggish sea-floor dweller, far less likely to be
seen on the surface. When one of these monsters dies, its carcass
would remain on the sea floor, and only under the most unusual of
circumstances would it be washed ashore, as happened at Saint
Augustine in 1896. Other specimens may have been washed ashore
and gone undetected or at least unrecognized. Professor Verrill, an
authority on mollusks, identified the octopus as a whale. Similar mis-
identifications may have been made elsewhere.
Long before the giant squid was identified, there were legends of
the existence of a squidlike monster called the kraken. Some of the
kraken stories may have been originally inspired by the sighting of a
SEA MONSTERS 160
giant octopus rather than a giant squid. The eccentric nineteenth-cen-
tury naturalist Denys de Montfort first identified the kraken as a giant
octopus, rather than a giant squid.
F. G. Wood, the marine biologist who rediscovered the Saint
Augustine incident, found another set of tales which might relate to
a giant octopus. Before he had heard of the Saint Augustine mass,
Wood had been working in the Bahama Islands. One of his guides
told him of the existence of "giant scuttles." Scuttle is the Bahamian
word for "octopus," and the small octopus is a familiar sight in the
waters around the islands. Wood believed that his guide would have
known the difference between an octopus and a squid or any other
sea creature. Giant squids are also rumored to live in the region,
though the evidence is strictly anecdotal. According to the guide,
these monster octopus's arms might be as much as seventy-five feet
long, but the creatures themselves were not considered aggressive or
particularly dangerous.
The commissioner of Andros Island told Wood of an incident that
happened when he was a boy. He was out fishing in deep water with
his father when his father's line hooked something very heavy. As the
line was pulled up, they discovered that a huge octopus had grabbed
hold of it. The octopus finally let go and disappeared into the depths
from which it had come. The commissioner would not estimate the
size of the creature, but it was clearly much larger than the ordinary
octopus of the region.
Also from the area of Andros Island come tales of the Lucsa, which
may be a giant octopus, but is more probably a giant squid.
The Bahamian stories square away well with the Saint Augustine
find. The Florida current sweeps up past the islands toward Florida
and could have carried the remains of a giant octopus and deposited
it on the Saint Augustine beach in November of 1896.
We may not have to wait for another accidental stranding for fur-
ther knowledge of this monster of the sea bottom. Deep-sea explora-
tion in the Bahamas region may ultimately establish the existence of
the giant octopus.
See also: KRAKEN, LUCSA
161 Gloucester Sea Serpent

GLOUCESTER SEA SERPENT What could and should have

been a significant investigation into the problem of the sea serpent
was turned into an embarrassing debacle by overenthusiasm. The case
stands as a warning for all future cryptozoological investigation.
During the late summer of 1817 something that looked very much
like an enormous snake with a humped back was seen by many appar-
ently credible witnesses swimming in and around Gloucester Harbor
in Massachusetts.
A group of scientifically inclined amateurs calling themselves the
Linnaean Society of New England quickly organized a committee to
collect statements from those who said they had seen the great sea
snake. The committee prepared a detailed set of questions to ask
every witness, and committee members attempted to get accounts in
writing from witnesses as soon after the sightings as possible, so that
the information would be fresh. In short, they tried hard to make a
competent and thorough investigation.
What emerged from the statements collected by the committee is
a fairly consistent picture of a black humpbacked sea snake, perhaps
one hundred feet long.
Traps and nets were set out to capture the creature, but nothing
was caught. The Linnaeans theorized that the great sea snake had
come close to shore in order to lay its eggs on the land. So they aban-
doned the attempt to catch the snake itself and began a search for
sea-serpent eggs. No eggs were found, but some boys brought them a
three-foot-long, blackish snake with curious humps down its back.
The boys said they had found the snake fifty feet from the shore.
The Linnaean Society's committee had become so enchanted with
their theory that the giant snake had come to lay its eggs, that they
convinced themselves that what they had before them was a newly
hatched baby sea serpent. They gave it a scientific name Scoliophis
atlanticus, "Atlantic Humped Snake." A report illustrated with excel-
lent plates showing the bones and organs of the "baby sea serpent"
SEA MONSTERS 162

Gloucester sea serpent

appeared in the society's publication. The report contained one obser-

vation which should have put the investigators on their guard, the
"baby sea serpent," said the report, bore a remarkable resemblance
to the common black snake.
"On the whole, as these two animals agree in so many conspicuous,
important and peculiar characteristics, and as no material difference
between them has yet been clearly pointed out, excepting that of size,
the Society will probably feel justified in considering them individuals
of the same species.... "
It never seemed to occur to anyone in the society that "the baby
sea serpent" was a common black snake, and that the humps along
its back were an abnormal condition, the result of injury or disease.
This painfully obvious conclusion was quickly and gleefully pointed
out by the French scientist Alexandre Lesueur after he read the
report. Lesueur's devastating criticism destroyed the credibility of
Scoliophis atlanticus, but it did not provide an answer to the question
of what people saw swimming around Gloucester Harbor in 1817.
Even Lesueur was aware of this, and said that if the giant humped
snake reappeared, he would travel to America to see it.
Unfortunately, if the giant humped snake ever did reappear, no
one was willing to risk the ridicule that might have been involved in
reporting its presence.
See also: SEA SERPENT
163 Kraken

The transformation of the mythical monster the

kraken into the very real yet still monstrous giant squid is probably
the most instructive story in the entire history of monster hunting.
References to a giant squid are scattered throughout the legends
and folklore of many lands. The giant squid may have accounted for
the Greek legend of the many-armed Scylla.
Much later, in 1555, Olaus Magnus wrote of "monstrous fish."
"Their forms are horrible, their Heads are square, all set with
prickles, and they have sharp and long Horns round about, like a Tree
rooted up by the Roots: They are ten or twelve cubits long [twenty to
twenty-four feet], very black, and with huge eyes ... one of these Sea-
Monsters will drown easily many great ships provided with many
strong Mariners."
"A Tree rooted up by the Roots," is just what a giant squid might
look like. But a twenty- or twenty-four-foot monster is a pigmy when
compared to the classic kraken as described by Bishop Erik Ludvigen
Pontoppidan in his monumental volume The Natural History of Nor-
way, written in 1752. Pontoppidan calls the kraken "incontestably the
largest Sea-monster in the world." And, as he describes it, it certainly
must have been. The bishop wrote that its circumference was a mile
and a half, "some say more," but the bishop was disposed to accept
the more conservative mile-and-a-half estimate. The kraken was
so huge that when resting near the surface it was sometimes taken
to be an island, or a series of small islands. The "island beast," that is,
a sea creature so large that it was taken to be an island, had been
a feature of sea legends since antiquity. It is more likely that the ori-
gin of the island-beast legend came from the sighting of a whale
or school of whales. Whales may often bask near the surface, giant
squids do not.
But aside from the incredible and physically impossible size of Pon-
toppidan's kraken, his description contains some suggestive features.
It is "round, flat and full of arms, or branches.
SEA MONSTERS 164
"As this enormous Sea-animal in all probability may be reckon'd of
the Polype, or of the Star-fish kind ... it seems the parts which are
seen rising at its pleasure, and are called arms, are properly tentacles."
Pontoppidan said that while the creature had strength enough to
drag down the largest ship, it "has never been known to do any great
harm." Except, of course, to those who never came back to tell about
it.
Sailors occasionally returned from the sea with firsthand accounts
of encounters with the kraken, and fishermen and shore dwellers from
the South Sea Islands, South America, and many other places in the
world also spoke of a gigantic many-armed sea monster. There were
even reports that the remains of some of these creatures (far smaller
than those in the stories, but enormous nonetheless) had been washed
up on the shore in various parts of the world, and had been examined

kraken
165 Kraken
by the locals before being cut up for bait or reclaimed by the sea.
Unfortunately these specimens were generally washed ashore in
remote places, there were no cameras, preservation was difficult if not
impossible, and so there was no physical evidence to present to rec-
ognized scientists and naturalists, who generally lived and worked in
cities far from the isolated beaches where the strange giant carcasses
were washed ashore. As a result, most scientists and naturalists didn't
believe such creatures existed.
There was one exception, an enthusiastic young French naturalist
named Denys de Montfort, who did take the reality of the kraken
seriously. De Montfort spent a good deal of time with a group of
American whalemen who had established themselves in the French
port of Dunkirk. From the whalemen, he heard many fantastic stories
of encounters with the gigantic many-armed sea beast. One whaling
captain told de Montfort of finding what he thought to be a huge sea
snake. The "snake" turned out to be the severed arm of an enormous
squid or octopus. It was recognizable because of its suckers. The arm
alone was forty-five feet long.
De Montfort came to the conclusion that there were really two
types of gigantic sea creatures: the kraken octopus-probably a giant
squid-and a "colossal octopus"-a true giant octopus. The kraken
octopus de Montfort thought to be rather a peaceable creature,
whereas the colossal octopus was the raging, ship-sinking monster that
had figured in so many sailors' stories.
Just why de Montfort made this particular distinction is unclear.
Both squid and octopus are mollusks, of the class Cephalopoda, but
they look quite different. The octopus has a sac-shaped head and
body, from which radiate eight arms, all roughly equal in length. The
squid has a more rigid, torpedo-shaped body with a distinct head at
one end. At the head end are eight arms of equal length, and two
longer specialized arms or tentacles. The octopus is generally a bottom
dweller and not a particularly good swimmer, whereas the stream-
lined squid can move with considerable speed by expelling a jet of
water. The octopus waits for its prey, while the squid is an active
predator. Of the two, the squid would seem to be the more likely
SEA MONSTERS 166

Kraken

candidate for the ship-sinking monster. But de Montfort thought

differently.
Both the octopus and squid were well known in de Montfort's time;
however, neither were known to grow to giant size. The largest known
cephalopod would have been ,a Mediterranean variety of octopus
which might at the very outside have reached a size of twenty-five
feet across and a weight of 130 pounds-big but no monster. The
known squids were considerably smaller. It is probably because-as
far as he knew-the octopus grew larger than the squid that de Mont-
fort was so insistent on identifying so many of the monster tales with
a "colossal octopus." In fact, almost all of the stories that de Montfort
reported probably originated in encounters with a giant squid. But no
matter, de Montfort was closer to the truth than artyone else at the
time.
In 1802 de Montfort published a book called The Natural History
of Mollusks in which he declared that cephalopods are "the most
enormous animals that exist on the globe . " Unfortunately for his own
167 Kraken
reputation, de Montfort was ready to include as gospel virtually any
fantastic story he heard. He also included a picture which showed a
"colossal octopus" rising up from the sea and wrapping its arms
around an unfortunate ship "right to the tops of the masts." De Mont~
fort's drawing was taken from a picture in a church. The story which
accompanied the picture told of how the monster attacked the ship,
and how the sailors managed to save themselves and their ship with
the aid of Saint Thomas. It was the sort of miraculous deliverance
story that had been common since ancient times, but was not taken
seriously by early nineteenth-century science.
Because his book contained so much of this sort of material, de
Montfort was either denounced or ridiculed by other naturalists. De
Montfort's own bitter sense of humor didn't help him, and when he
once joked, "If my colossal octopus is accepted, I shall make it sink a
whole squadron in the second edition," his remark was taken by some
as proof that he was a scoundrel and a liar. His reputation never
recovered, and he died in poverty and obscurity in Paris around 1820.
Yet despite exaggeration, and a persistent confusion between squid
and octopus, de Montfort was basically correct, and he was vindicated
less than half a century after his death. There was no single dramatic
discovery that at a stroke proved to a skeptical scientific world that
the legends of the kraken had been inspired by a gigantic squid;
rather it was a gradual accumulation of material, until resistance to
the giant squid idea broke down from sheer weight of evidence.
Probably the best evidence came from Newfoundland. An
unusually large number of gigantic squids were washed ashore in
Newfoundland in the 1870s. The reason for these groundings during
this period probably has to do with a change in the ocean currents,
but we cannot be sure. Nothing quite like it had happened before or
has happened since. The most dramatic case came in 1878 off the
coast of a little town with the strange name of Thimble Tickle. On
November 2 a couple of fishermen spotted what they thought was a
wrecked boat offshore. They rowed toward it and "to their horror
found themselves close to a huge fish, having large glassy eyes, which
was making desperate efforts to escape, and churning the water into
SEA MONSTE~S 168
foam by the motion of its immense arms and tail."
The fishermen, who must have been exceptionally brave, managed
to slip a line around the thing and tow it to shore. They tied it to a
tree, so it couldn't get back in the water. After it died they measured
it. The body was twenty feet long, the largest of the tentacles thirty-
five feet, a total length of fifty-five feet.
Even before the dramatic Newfoundland groundings, science had
been leaning toward recognition of the giant squid. A Danish zoolo-
gist, Johan Japteus Steenstrup, interested himself in the giant-squid
problem. In 1853 portions of a giant squid that had been grounded in
Denmark came into Steenstrup's hands. He published a description of
what he called Architeuthis monachus, the Latin scientific name for
"giant squid," in 1857. Since Steenstrup was a more cautious scientist
than de Montfort, and because he had what appeared to be pieces of
the creature itself in hand, he was not greeted with the same sort of
scorn that de Montfort had faced. But the reality of the giant squid
was not fully accepted until the decade of the Newfoundland
groundings.
In 1861 sailors on the French gunboat Alecton found a giant squid
on the surface of the water, hooked it with an anchor, and tried to
haul it aboard. Unfortunately, the rope broke and the creature slipped
back into the water. Yet when a report of the incident was presented
to the highly respected French Academy of Sciences, many refused
to accept it, and declared the sailors to have been "mistaken." But
after the decade of the Newfoundland groundings all skepticism
evaporated.
Since everyone now accepts the fact that the giant squid exists,
there is only one question left-how large does it grow? Here there
is still considerable room for speculation and controversy. The largest
known specimen is the Thimble Tickle squid, which measured
approximately fifty-five feet from tip of tail to tip of tentacle. No
specimens anywhere near the size of the Thimble Tickle squid or
other Newfoundland giants have been beached in the present cen-
tury. That has led some zoologists to suspect that the late-nineteenth-
century Newfoundland measurements may have been exaggerated.
169 leviathan
But Bernard Heuvelmans, the Belgian cryptozoologist, thinks that
we may actually be underestimating the monster's size. He points to
large circular scars found on the skin of some whales. These scars were
almost certainly made by the suckers of giant squids. Whales are
known to eat squids, and the giant variety doubtless resists becoming
a meal, and fights back. The scars are nearly twice as large as those
that could have been made by the suckers of the Thimble Tickle
squid-indicating that the squid that made them might have been
twice as large-perhaps 100 feet in length and weighing, Heuvelmans
estimates, as much as sixty-four tons.
Squids, Heuvelmans points out, are active predators. There are sto-
ries of fights between a whale and a giant squid. Although the squid
was probably just fending off an attack, perhaps the squid was the
aggressor, and so it is possible that a giant squid might attack and even
sink a fair-sized ship, just as de Montfort had once insisted.
Modern accounts of giant squids attacking ships are unknown. Per-
haps that is because modern ships are large enough, noisy enough, and
fast enough to discourage attack. Or it may be because the giant
squid-despite the reputation it has received from such works of sci-
ence fiction as Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea-is in reality not a very aggressive monster at alL
See also: GIANT OCTOPUS, LUCSA

LEVIATHAN In several places the Bible mentions a sea crea-

ture called leviathan, which has been identified with everything from
the great sea serpent· to the whale. The translation of the word is
unclear, but it has often been rendered as "tortuous monster," a
phrase that certainly makes one think of some sort of serpent. But the
most complete description of leviathan, that given in Chapter 41 of
the Book of Job, presents a rather unserpentlike picture.
"Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? ... I will not conceal
his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion.. "·Who can open
the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about. His scales are
SEA MONSTERS 170

Leviathan

his pride, shut up together as with a close seal. One is so near to

another, that no air can come between them. They are joined one to
another, they stick together, that they can not be sundered. By his
neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the
morning.... In his neck remaineth strength, and sorrow is turned into
joy before him. The flakes of his flesh are joined together: they are
firm in themselves; they cannot be moved. . . . When he raiseth up
himself, the mighty are afraid .... "
The description gives many more details of leviathan's power, such
as his ability to breathe fire, deflect spear thrusts, and perform other
miraculous feats.
It has generally been assumed that leviathan is not an imaginary
171 Lucsa
creature, but it is not at all obvious what animal served as the inspi-
ration for this description. Some of the statements, like "the flakes of
his flesh are joined together," which has been taken to mean that lev-
iathan was a creature with webbed feet, and the reference to close-
fitting scales and a mouth filled with "terrible" teeth, have led many
commentators to the conclusion that the inspiration for leviathan was
a large crocodile, a creature with which the ancient Hebrews would
have been well acquainted.
If that were the only mention of leviathan, we might be able to
content ourselves with the crocodile identification. There is, however,
a briefer but much more famous reference to leviathan in Psalm 104,
verses 25-26. "So is the great and wide sea, wherein are things creep-
ing innumberable, both small and great beasts. There go the ships:
there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein."
Here the reference clearly is to a creature of the deep sea, but croc-
odiles are river and swamp dwellers. It is the statement in Psalms
which has led to the identification of leviathan with the great whales.
But is it likely that the ancient Hebrew would have known about the
great whales? The celebrated Jonah and the "whale" story is really
the result of a mistranslation. The original reference is to a "big fish"
of unspecified variety. Later translators added the word whale
because it was the biggest "fish" they could think of. Besides, whales
just do not fit with the description given in Job; they do not have scales
or necks, and the largest don't even have teeth.
Possibly the same word, leviathan, is being used to refer to two
different creatures. The leviathan of Job is a crocodile, while the le-
viathan of the Psalms is something else, a whale or some genuinely
unknown sea creature.
See also: BEHEMOTH, UNICORN

Lues A In the vicinity of Andros Island in the western Baha-

mas to the south of Florida there are tales of a many-armed monster
called Lucsa. This tradition was investigated by George J. Benjamin,
SEA MONSTERS 172
a research chemist and underwater explorer. Though Benjamin him-
self never saw the creature, he was frequently told about it by island
fishermen:
"I remind de time one stop a two-master dead in de water. He
wrap all around de rudders and wid de free hahnds he feelin' on
decks. Once de hahnd feel a mahn, dey was a flunder in de water,
and bot' mahn and Lucsa gone."
Before diving, Benjamin was warned by one of his native helpers,
"You go dere and Lucsa, him of de hahnds, sure to catch you. Once
de hahnds get hold of you, you dead, mahn."
Biologist Bruce Wright believes that Lucsa might be a giant octo-
pus or more probably a giant squid. Wright also found natives who
said that these monsters can sometimes be found inland in deep holes
in lakes and other deep holes called "banana holes." The squid and
octopus do not live in fresh water, but the water found in some of
these deep holes may be brackish, and thus the possibility cannot be
dismissed out of hand.
See also: KRAKEN, GIANT OCTOPUS

PLESIOSAUR The ancient animal that comes up most fre-

quently in a discussion of water monsters, be they sea or lake mon-
sters, is plesiosaur, a gigantic marine reptile from the age of the dino-
saurs. This great marine reptile has excited wonder and awe from the
time of its discovery in the early nineteenth century. Baron Cuvier,
the greatest paleontologist of his day, said of the early plesiosaur
fossils:
"We have now reached those of all the reptiles and perhaps of all
the animals which least resemble those we know and are most
designed to astonish the naturalist by their combinations of structures
which without the slightest doubt would seem incredible to anyone
who had not been able to observe them himself ... in the genus Ple-
siosaurus with the same whale's flippers, a lizard's head, and a long
neck like a snake's.... The Plesiosaurus is perhaps the strangest of
173 Plesiosaur

Plesiosaurs (in background)

all of the inhabitants of the ancient world and the one which seems
more to deserve the name monster."
Plesiosaur has sometimes been described as looking like a snake that
has swallowed a barrel. There are several different known species, but
they all possess the same general shape, long thin neck, relatively
small head, heavy body, thick but tapering tail, and four powerful
flippers. Plesiosaurs attained a length of up to forty-five feet.
Of the known species of Plesiosaurus, the elasmosaur, which is the
most elongated of the genus, has been mentioned most often in con-
nection with the sea-serpent sightings. With its enormous neck stick-
ing out of the water, it could easily look like a snake.
Plesiosaurs were among the earliest and most sensational of the
great reptiles to be discovered. They had been used in stories by Jules
Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle. Models of plesiosaurs had been on
display at the Crystal Palace during the Great Exhibition of London
in 1851. (Indeed, the very same models are still on display in Syden-
SEA MONSTERS 174
ham Park in London today.) So the image of the plesiosaur was firmly
fixed in the public's mind long before the start of the Loch Ness mon-
ster excitement, or the reported appearance of many other Plesiosau-
rus-like monsters. How much the well-known image of the great
marine reptile influenced what people saw, or thought they saw, is
not possible to determine.
There is no fossil evidence to suggest that the plesiosaur survived
the wave of extinctions that struck marine reptiles, pterosaurs (flying
reptiles), and dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, some 65
to 70 million years ago. But there has been much speculation that
some form of plesiosaur has survived.
See also: LOCH NESS MONSTER, PSEUDOPLESIOSAUR, SEA SERPENT

PsEuooPLESIOSAUR Every few years it seems, there is a

story that the partly rotted carcass of an unknown sea creature has
been washed up·on a beach somewhere or dredged up from some
great depth. The creature is usually described as being twenty or
thirty feet in length with a long thin neck, small head, thick body,
long tapering tail, and four flippers. It appears to be the perfect image
of the plesiosaur, a large marine reptile from the age of the dinosaurs,
and a favorite candidate for everything from the sea serpent to the
Loch Ness monster.
Typical of this genre of monster story is one which appeared in
newspapers all over the world in mid-1977. It concerned the decaying
carcass of a "sea monster" hauled up by a Japanese fishing boat off
the coast of New Zealand. The carcass itself was in such a putrid con-
dition that it was thrown overboard before the ship returned to port.
But some tissue samples had been preserved, and there were sketches
and photographs of the thing. The papers carried a quote from Pro-
fessor Yoshinori Imaizuni, director of research at the Tokyo National
Science Museum: "It's not a fish, whale or any other mammal. It's a
reptile and the sketch looks very like a plesiosaurus. . . . This was a
precious and important discovery for human beings. It seems to show
175 Pseudoplesiosaur
that these animals are not extinct after all. It's impossible for only one
to have survived."
Yet the expected announcement that confirming evidence of the
survival of the plesiosaur has been found never appeared. The story
died away, and most of those who had first marveled over the report
were left to wonder what happened. What happened was that when
the tissue samples were examined, they turned out to be from a shark.
Looking at the picture of what appears to be a long-necked creature,
the layman might wonder how it could possibly be a shark. But any-
one familiar with the history of monsters would not have been sur-
prised at this conclusion to the mystery-it had all happened before,
many times.
In November 1970 a similar "monster" was washed up on the
beach at Scituate, Massachusetts. Photographs of the carcass on the
beach show it to be remarkably plesiosaurlike in appearance. Yet the
Scituate "monster" also turned out to be a shark. So too did the Stronsa
beast, a huge carcass washed up on one of the Orkney islands in
1808-which caused considerable excitement in the scientific com-
munity of that day. So too have many lesser-known "monsters" and
"beasts" whose rotting remains have sparked short-lived sensations all
over the world.
How, you may wonder, can a shark, even one long dead and well
on its way to decay, resemble a plesiosaur? As it happens, there is one
variety of shark, the basking shark, that is anatomically perfect for
the deception, a natural deception, not a man-made hoax. It has hap-

Pseudoplesiosaur
SEA MONSTERS 176
pened so frequently that a basking-shark carcass has sometimes been
labeled a pseudoplesiosaur.
The basking shark is one of the largest of all the world's sharks.
Males average about thirty feet, and the record length is forty-five
feet. But the basking shark, like the even larger whale shark, is a
peaceable giant-quite unlike the man-killing monster of Jaws. The
basking shark feeds entirely on plankton, as do the largest whales. The
shark swims lazily along with its mouth open. Water and plankton go
in, the plankton are filtered by grill-like structures behind the gills into
the digestive system, and the water passes out through the gill slits,
which are extremely long and go nearly completely around the neck
of the shark.
When a basking shark dies and its carcass begins to decompose, the
whole gill apparatus tends to fall away, taking with it the most prom-
inent of all shark features, the enormous jaws. What remains at the
front end of the carcass is a small cranium and a long, exposed piece
of backbone. These can look like a small head and long neck. Another
shark trademark, the triangular dorsal fin, also tends to rot away
quickly. The creature's backbone extends into only one lobe of the
two-lobed tail, so one lobe will fall off, leaving what appears to be a
smooth back and long tapering tail. The pectoral fins remain and look
like the front flippers of the extinct marine reptile.
One final joke that nature plays on the enthusiastic monster hunter
with this pseudoplesiosaur is that when the shark's skin decomposes,
the underlying muscle fibers begin to break up into whiskerlike fibers
which tend to give the carcass the appearance of being covered with
fur. Never mind that the real plesiosaur was a reptile that did not have
fur-the furry appearance further confuses the shark identification.
See also: PLESIOSAUR

Georg Wilhelm Steller was one of the pioneer explor-

ers of the northern seas. On August 11, 1741, Steller was aboard a ship
in the Gulf of Alaska when he saw swimming alongside the ship an
177 Sea Ape
animal the likes of which no one else had ever seen before, and no
one has seen since.
It wasn't a giant, being only about five feet in length. "The head
was like a dog's," wrote Steller, "with pointed erect ears. From the
upper and lower lips on both sides whiskers hung down which made
it look almost like a Chinaman. The eyes were large, the body was
round and thick, tapering gradually toward the tail. The skin seemed
thickly covered with hair, of a gray color on the back, but reddish
white on the belly ... the tail was divided into two fins of which the
upper, as in the case of sharks, was twice as large as the lower. Noth-
ing struck me more surprising than the fact that neither forefeet as in
the marine amphibians nor, in their sted, fins were to be seen.... "
Steller compared the creature he saw to a picture in Konrad Ges-
ner's epic sixteenth-century work on natural history. Steller said Ges-
ner called his creature the sea monkey because of its agility. Steller's
creature has more commonly been called the sea ape.
Steller watched the strange animal for about two hours. Then, as
naturalists were accustomed to do in those days, he decided to kill it
so that he could take the specimen back to Europe. Steller took a shot
at it, missed, and the creature fled, never to be seen again by anyone.
Steller's observation has caused nothing but confusion. In the first
place, there is no illustration or description in Gesner's well-known
work which matches what Steller described, but there are a couple of
illustrations that Steller might have recalled imperfectly which could
have led him to make the comparison. Steller's description certainly
does not match any known animal.
This has led some to conclude that Steller made a mistake, that he
was looking at an otter, a seal, or some other kind of known animal.
Yet Steller was an experienced and acute observer. He certainly knew
what otters and seals looked like and he described them accurately
elsewhere. And he had not observed this creature under difficult con-
ditions. On the contrary, he watched it for about two hours, some-
times at very close range.
What, then, did he see? To this day, nobody knows.
See also: STELLER'S SEA COW
SEA MONSTERS 178

SEA SERPENT For centuries sailors have come back from voy-
ages with tales of the strange and monstrous sea creatures they had
seen in the oceans. Today we can identify many of these "sea mon-
sters" as whales, giant squids, or other large but known sea creatures.
There remains, however, a considerable body of unexplained sight-
ings generally lumped under the heading of sea serpent. Not all of the
sightings refer to a distinctly serpentlike animal, and, indeed, several
different sorts of creatures may be involved here. But the traditional
name of sea serpent has stuck, and it would be foolish to attempt to
change it at this late date.
The first extensive references to what was later to become known
as the sea serpent appear in the works of Olaus Magnus, a sixteenth-
century archbishop of Uppsala, Sweden. Olaus compiled a history of
his northern homeland in which he tried to include descriptions of all
the land and sea animals, among them the sea serpent. Olaus
described the sea serpent as being two hundred feet long and twenty
feet thick. Not only that: "He hath commonly hair hanging from his
neck a Cubit long and sharp Scales, and is black, and hath flaming
shining eyes. This snake disquiets the Shippers, and he puts his head
on high like a pillar, and catcheth away men, and he devours them."
No wonder he disquieted the shippers!
Quite clearly Olaus had an active imagination and was willing to
treat as gospel the wildest of stories. Yet his book is not entirely fan-
ciful, and many of the creatures that he described, while exaggerated,
are quite real.
The first really good eyewitness account of a sea serpent we have
comes from a Norwegian Protestant missionary named Hans Egede.
In 1734 Egede was on his way to Greenland, when he saw a huge sea
creature, that was not really a serpent, but certainly was an unknown.
"This monster was of so huge a size," he wrote, "that coming out
of the Water, its Head reached as high as the Mast Head; its Body
was bulky as the Ship and three or four times as long. [Unfortunately,
179 Sea Serpent

Hans Egede's sea serpent

we do not know the dimensions of Egede's ship, but Egede probably

thought the creature was at least one hundred feet long.] It had a long
pointed Snout and spouted like a Whale-Fish; great broad Paws, and
the Body seemed covered with shell-work, its skin very rugged and
uneven. The under part of its Body was shaped like an enormous huge
Serpent, and when it dived again under the Water, it plunged back-
wards into the Sea, and so raised its Tail aloft, which seemed a whole
ship's length distant from the bulkiest part of the Body." A sketch of
the monster, made by another missionary, accompanied Egede's
account of his voyage. Everything that we know of Egede indicates
that he was a competent and trustworthy observer, one not given to
hysterical exaggeration. Unfortunately, we have little information
concerning the conditions under which this sighting was made, so we
can't be sure how good a view Egede got of his monster. Much later,
a skeptic named Henry Lee, in his book Sea Monsters Unmasked,
concluded that what Egede had really seen was a giant squid with its
tail sticking out of the water. Lee believed that Egede had mistaken
the squid's tail for a head and a tentacle for the tail.
It was yet another churchman who took the next major step in sea-
serpent history. In 1752 Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, com-
piled a massive book called A Natural History of Norway. In his
chapter on the wondrous creatures of the northern seas, Pontoppidan
published a lot of previously unknown sea-serpent reports. The bishop
made a clear distinction between the "true" legless sea serpent and all
SEA MONSTERS 180
of the other monstrous creatures of the sea, like that of Hans Egede,
which possessed legs or "paws."
Pontoppidan was an uncritical collector who included obviously
fabulous as well as possibly factual accounts, and made no attempt to
distinguish between the two. One of the more believable stories is that
of Captain Lorenz von Ferry, who recounted for Pontoppidan how
he shot at a large sea snake in August 1746. "As the snake swam faster
than we could row, I took my gun, which was loaded with small shot,
and fired at it; on this it immediately plunged under water. We rowed
to the place where it sank down (which in the calm might be easily
observed) and lay upon our oars, thinking it would come up again to
the surface; however, it did not. Where the snake plunged down, the
water appeared thick and red; perhaps the small shot might have
wounded it, the distance being very little.
"The head of this sea serpent, which it held more than two feet
above the surface of the water, resembled that of a horse. It was of a
greyish colour, and the mouth was quite black, and very large. It had
large black eyes, and a long white mane, which hung down to the
surface of the water. Besides the head and neck we saw seven or eight
folds, or coils, of this snake, which were very thick, and as far as we
could guess there was a fathom's distance between each fold."
The nineteenth century was in many respects the heyday of the sea
serpent. Sightings of the creature, which at one time seem to have
been limited to the Scandinavian countries, began coming in from all
parts of the world. At least a few of these reports appeared to be
beyond reproach. Yet the scientific community in general failed to
take much of an interest in the subject of the sea serpent. In addition,
scientists got themselves involved in a couple of well-publicized errors
and frauds, and so they tended to treat the subject of the sea serpent
with extreme caution, and even derision. Certainly, few scientists
were going to invest their time and prestige in attempting to investi-
gate the subject, which by the end of the nineteenth century had
become something to laugh about.
One exception to this generally hands-off attitude on the part of
scientists was Antoon Cornelis Oudemans, a Dutch biologist and
181 Sea Serpent
expert on ticks and mites. Perhaps as a relief from the study of these
tiny pests, Dr. Oudemans turned to collecting information about the
great unknown giant of the sea. Oudemans, who was an extremely
methodical man, gathered an impressive number of sea-serpent sight-
ings from around the world and then tried to make some sense out of
the mass of material.
His conclusion was a rather surprising one for the time. The sea
serpent was real, he said, but it wasn't a serpent at all, it was a mam-
mal, probably a gigantic long-necked seal with small flippers. Oude-
mans's seal resembled the ancient reptile plesiosaurs more closely than
it did any modern seal, both in size and shape. The Dutch biologist
had rejected reptiles because of the worldwide distribution of the
unknown sea serpent. Reptiles, he pointed out, could not survive in
the far northern waters where the sea serpent seemed to be particu-
larly active. Besides, there were many mentions of fur, whiskers, and
a mane, definitely not reptilian characteristics.
Oudemans massive tome was rather roughly treated by the popular
press and the scientific community. He brought part of this treatment
upon himself by trying to explain so many different kinds of sightings
with his theoretical long-necked seal. That required too much stretch-
ing and bending of the evidence. Still, there were those who praised
his courage for tackling so controversial a subject, even if they did not
share his opinions.
Interest in the sea serpent declined rapidly after the publication of
Oudemans's book, not because of it, of course, but simply because
there were fewer and fewer sea-serpent reports coming in. By the
outbreak of World War I, sightings of gigantic snakelike marine ani-
mals had dropped off to near zero. But there was one sea monster that
allegedly fell victim to the war.
U-boat Captain Georg Gunther Freiherr von Forstner reported that
in 1915 he sank the British steamer Iberian. Shortly after the ship
went down, there was a tremendous underwater explosion and among
the objects thrown to the surface was a violently struggling sea mon-
ster. Von Forstner described the monster as looking like a sixty-foot
crocodile with a long neck. The report, however, is highly suspect
SEA MONSTERS 182
because of inconsistencies and contradictions, and would not be men-
tioned at all if there were other good accounts of this era to chose
from, but there are not.
After the war the sea serpent never again regained its popularity as
a monster to be wondered over and speculated upon. There was a
brief flurry of enthusiasm in 1930 with the publication of a book
called The Case for the Sea Serpent, written by Lieutenant Com-
mander Rupert T. Gould. Gould was a retired naval officer, radio
broadcaster, and tireless collector of odd facts and unexplained phe-
nomena. Gould had dug up a considerable number of previously
unpublished sea-serpent reports, but he was so aggressively partisan
about the creature that he hurt his own case by jumping to
conclusions.
The inescapable fact was that people were reporting fewer and
fewer sea serpents, and that by the 1930s the Loch Ness monster had
replaced the venerable sea serpent in public interest.
While most people had either decided that the sea serpent did not
exist at all, or did not care whether or not it existed, cryptobiologist
Bernard Heuvelmans toiled patiently away, checking out all possible
information on the sea serpent. In 1968, after nearly a decade of what
he described as, "the hardest work I have ever done," Heuvelmans's
massive book In the Wake of the Sea Serpents was published.
Heuvel~ans reviews all of the classic cases cited by Oudemans,
Gould, and the others, and brings the catalog of sea serpent events up
to date. But Heuvelmans is no mere collector of data. In his final chap-
ter, "Disentangled and Classified at Last," he attempts to determine
the kind of creature or creatures that were responsible for all of the
sea-serpent stories. While Oudemans tried to attribute all sea-serpent
sightings to a single long-necked mammal, Heuvelmans does the
opposite, indeed, one may say he goes to the other extreme. He pos-
tulates nine different sorts of large unknown sea animals, five giant
sea mammals, two huge reptiles, a colossal eel, and something called
the Yellow-belly, which is of an unknown type. In practice, Heuvel-
mans is willing to drop two of the nine, one of the reptiles and the
Yellow-belly, for the reports concerning them, he believes, are too
183 Sea Serpent
infrequent and too vague to inspire much confidence. But he sticks
by the other seven: the long-necked sea serpent, the many-humped
sea serpent, the many-finned sea serpent, the merhourse, and the
super otter-all mammals-plus the super eel and the reptilian
marine saurian.
Oudemans floundered upon getting us to believe that so many char-
acteristics could b.( displayed by a single animal. Heuvelmans
stretches our credulity by asking us to believe that there are not one
or two but a veritable zooful of large, unknown, and very unique-
looking creatures swimming around in the sea.
While the seas are not realms of total mystery to us anymore, it is
quite true that we know a great deal less about them, and the crea-
tures that live in them, than we do about the land. But is it reasonable
to believe that we have overlooked all of these different kinds of ani-
mals? It is particularly difficult to accept Heuvelmans's theory
because the majority of his sea serpents are mammals. Of all crea-
tures, the mammals should be the most obvious and easy to identify.
They are air breathers and must come to the surface frequently.
Many basically marine mammals spend much of their time on land.
Mammals are intelligent and curious and should show more interest
in passing ships than the sea-serpent reports seem to indicate that it
does. An anatomical objection is that while most marine mammals,
whales, seals, sea cows, and the like tend to have torpedo shapes and
necks that are either severely reduced or entirely absent, at least some
of Heuvelmans's theoretical mammalian sea serpents have long necks
and elongated bodies.
In the more than ten years since Bernard Heuvelmans first
advanced his theories about the many unknown species that contrib-
uted to the legend of the great sea serpent, no additional evidence has
turned up to support the theories. The seas, particularly the great
depths, have been explored more intensively than ever before. Many
new and utterly surprising life forms have been discovered. But there
is no trace of Heuvelmans's theoretical sea serpents or of any other
unknown sea creatures that could possibly have accounted for any of
the classic sea-serpent sightings.
SEA MONSTERS 184
We must recall that the evidence for the existence of a large and
unknown serpentiform animal in the sea rests entirely upon reported
sightings. Not a single one of these creatures, as far as we know, has
ever been washed ashore. Nor has there ever been an even vaguely
credible photograph of any sort of sea serpent. Beachings of "sea ser-
pents" have been recorded, but these have either turned out to be
mistakes or the alleged sea-serpent remains were never examined by
persons competent to determine what they might be. The surprisingly
few sea-serpent photographs that have been shown are either so vague
they are worthless as evidence, or are clearly hoaxes.
An intriguing bit of possible evidence turned up in 1969. An Alas-
kan shrimper picked up what appeared to be a distinctly plesiosaur-
like shape that might have been as much as 150 feet long on its echo
sounder, while dragging for shrimp off Raspberry Island in the She-
likof Strait. Cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson got wind of the story and
gave it considerable publicity. The publicity attracted the attention
of the Norwegian firm that manufactured the echo-sounding device.
After examining the paper strip upon which this astonishing echo
"picture" had been traced, a company official said that it had been
tampered with. In short, the tracing was a fake. Sanderson refused to
accept this verdict. He wrote, "I have to say simply, that until and
unless somebody comes up with a lot more accurate and provable
facts to the contrary and much better ones than the manufacturers of
Simrad [the echo-detection device] offered, we have here the first con-
crete proof of the existence of a marine longneck." But alas, nothing
has been heard from the marine longneck since.
Still, it is not wise to completely shut our minds to the possibility
that some form of "sea serpent," possibly even several forms, might
yet be found. The oceans have surprised us before, and doubtless will
do so again.
See also: DAEDLAUS SEA SERPENT, GLOUCESTER SEA SERPENT, KRAKEN,
PLESIOSAUR, PSEUDOPLESIOSAUR, ZEUGLODON
185 Steller's Sea Cow

STELLER'S SEA COW Vitus Bering, a Danish mariner, had

been hired by Peter the Great of Russia to find out if Siberia was
attached to America. He found it wasn't and the body of water that
separates the two continents is now called the Bering Strait in his
honor. Bering might better have declined the honor, for during the
course of the expedition, in 1741, his ship was wrecked on the coast
of a desolate island between Kamchatka and the Aleutians. Bering
died on the island of scurvy and cold. But a number of his crew sur-
vived the cruel winter and were able to salvage enough of their old
ship to make a new and smaller one and sail back to Europe.
Among the survivors was Georg Wilhelm Steller, a German natu-
ralist and surgeon. Steller was the first man with scientific training to
visit the remote regions of the Arctic, and he kept a careful record of
his observations. Steller told of how, during the time he was ship-
wrecked, he saw what appeared to be the dark-colored hulks of over-
turned boats drifitng near the shore. Periodically, a snout would
appear above the water and expel a great gust of air. His first thought
was that this was some kind of whale or even a large shark. But closer
observation proved that it was neither whale nor shark, but an enor-
mous sirenian or sea cow, a relative of the gentle dugongs and man-
atees of southern waters, but much larger than these familiar .beasts.
This northern sea cow reached a length of thirty-five feet. The great
sea cows grazed on seaweed that is surprisingly abundant in Arctic
waters.
The peaceable, slow-moving animals proved to be a boon to the
shipwrecked mariners, who easily slaughtered them for food. Other
explorers and hunters followed in the wake of the Bering expedition
and they too found the huge sea cow an excellent and easy source of
fresh meat. They were slaughtered not only for survival but for con-
venience, and by 1768 no more of these gentle giants could be found.
It had taken a mere twenty-seven years from discovery to extinction.
Indeed, there is not even a complete skeleton or good contemporary
SEA MONSTERS 186

Manatee

drawing of Steller's sea cow available today.

But did Steller's sea cow really become extinct in 1768? There are
some accounts which indicate it might have survived longer, indeed
that it, or something very like it, may still survive today.
The exact date of .extinction (if the creature is indeed extinct) has
long been a matter of controversy, with at least one authority, A. E.
Nordenskjold, insisting that the giant sea cow had survived at least
until 1854. As late as 1963, Russian whalers reported seeing a small
herd of sea animals that were neither whales nor seals. From the
description they might-just might-have been a few surviving spec-
imens of the Steller's sea cow.
Bernard Heuvelmans also thinks that Steller's sea cow could have
accounted for at least a few northern sea-serpent observations. "It
sometimes lifts its head above the water and is not in the least shy of
approaching man. Its blackish skin, with irregular creases, looks like
the bark of an oak and could remind one of a reptile's scales. And its
187 Zeuglodon
fat forms a series of great rolls round its body which might look like
a series of humps out of the water. Someone ignorant of anatomy
might think they were a serpent's coils."
See a/so: SEA APE

ZEUGLODON The zeuglodon is a primitive form of whale

that is not only suspected of being several types of modern monster,
but its remains were actually passed off as a monster during the nine-
teenth century.
A variety of these creatures roamed the seas during the Miocene,
some 25 million years ago. Though they were ancestors of the modern
whale, they didn't look much like them. The zeuglodons were long
and fairly thin, the longest being possibly seventy feet from snout to
tail. They had long pointed snouts, big mouths, and a wicked-looking
set of teeth. The zeuglodon is so unwhalelike in its superficial appear-
ance that when fossil remains were first found in the 1830s they were
thought to be the remains of a marine reptile and were given the
name Basilosaurus. This misidentification was corrected long ago, but
the term Basilosaurus is still occasionally used.
A zeuglodon skeleton looks very much like one would imagine· the
skeleton of the traditional sea serpent to look. When "Dr." Albert
Koch, a talented but none too honest collector of fossils, unearthed the
skeletons of several zeuglodons in Alabama, he got the idea that he
could improve on nature. Koch put the pieces from four different
skeletons together and wound up with a monster some 114 feet long,
impressive indeed. Koch exhibited his creation around the country as
the remains of a sea serpent and leviathan of the Bible. "Dr." Koch,
whose academic credentials appear to have been self-conferred, did
not neglect to observe the scientific proprieties. He felt he had the
right to give his creation a Latin scientific name, Hydrargos silli-
manii, "Silliman's water king." Benjamin Silliman was a professor at
Yale who had once said some nice things about Koch. As soon as sci-
SEA MONSTERS 188

Dr. Koch's sea serpent

entists got a look at the 114-foot-monstrosity, they knew it was a fake

and began saying that only a silly man could believe in Hydrargos
sillimani. Silliman, stung by the gibe, asked Koch to change the crea-
ture's name. He did, to Hydrargos harlani, in honor of Dr. Richard
Harlin, a pioneer American paleontologist, who also happened to be
safely dead and unable to decline the honor.
Conventional scientific opinion holds that the zeuglodon has been
,extinct for some 20 million years, but cryptozoologist Dr. Roy Mackal
has suggested that surviving zeuglodons may not only be the source
of many sea-serpent sightings, but that their freshwater descendants
may be the Loch Ness monster, Ogopogo, and other monsters that
have been reported in many northern lakes.
See also: LOCH NESS MONSTER, SEA SERPENT, OGOPOGO
 '7

YusoroRs
IF ROM

STRAINI<DE

PLACES
AuENS IN THE FREEZER The most persistent of all of the
rumors of contact with alien creatures from UFOs is this one: Some-
time back in about 1947 or 1948 when the flying-saucer sightings
began, one (or in many accounts two) of the flying saucers crashed
somew here in the western desert. The crew of the alien craft was
killed in the crash. The air force immediately descended upon the
crash scene, hauled away the wreckage of the flying saucer, and took
the corpses of the little men found inside of it. These alien corpses
were put in a cold storage unit at some air force base out West. There
they remain to this day, though the government will always deny and
ridicule this fact. For years the government has been covering up the
momentous information of alien contact because officials are afraid
that if it leaks out, the news will create a worldwide panic.
With variations, this rumor has been the basis of a popular film,
and at least one apparently serious book. In one form or another, the
rumor resurfaces every few years, accompanied by the promise that
the "lid will finally be blown off the cover-up and the full and shock-
ing truth will be revealed." Of course it never is, but this does not stop
the same rumor from being repeated again in a slightly different form
a few years later, and it fascinates a new group, hearing it for the first
time. Yet the origins of this particular legend are well known, or
should be. It began in the late 1940s with a fellow by the name of
Silas Newton, who, among his other activities, gave lectures on flying
saucers.
The centerpiece of Newton's talk was the story of the crashed sau-
cer, the aliens in the freezer, and the government cover-up. Newton
191
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 192
said that he had learned all of these details from a friend of his, a
mysterious Dr. Gee, a "magnetic expert," who had been called in by
the government to investigate the saucer crash, because these flying
saucers seemed to be propelled by some kind of magnetic force.
In Newton's account there were two separate crashes, one of a
larger craft, the other of a small "scout ship," both taking place in the
same general area. lpside the craft, according to Newton, were several
little men from Venus who had been killed in the accident. They were
miniature replicas of human beings, and they were perfect, that is,
they showed none of the defects, such as tooth decay, that humans
suffer from.
According to Newton, Dr. Gee told him that after examining the
craft and its occupants the government had everything moved to a
secret location, and then denied that the crash had ever taken place.
Newton said that Dr. Gee deplored the cover-up and was trying to
get the story out.
Newton repeated his tale to audiences all over the West, but he
never achieved much more than local fame, until his tale reached the
ears of a writer named Frank Scully, who had spent the bulk of his
career working for the show-business newspaper Variety. Scully built
a book called Behind the Flying Saucers around Newton's account.
The book, published in 1950, became the first in a long line of flying
saucer best-sellers.
Even at that time a lot of people who believed in flying saucers
were highly suspicious of the Newton-Scully story. Today it is gen-
erally acknowledged to be a complete hoax. Silas Newton, who,
among other things, had tried to portray himself as a Texas oil mil-
lionaire, was in truth a promoter of a variety of questionable schemes,
including a device for finding oil. Selling that device earned him a
conviction for fraud. The mysterious Dr. Gee was no government sci-
entist; he was a radio repair man and sometime associate of Newton
named GeBauer. Whether Frank Scully knew, or cared, that there
was no foundation to the story that he had made famous can not be
determined, for Scully died shortly after the publication of his book.
Copies of Behind the Flying Saucers can still be found today, but
193 Alien kidnappers
most of those who repeat the tale of the aliens in the freezer are quite
unaware of its origins. It has become a genuine and prominent feature
of American folklore.

AuEN KIDNAPPERS On the night of September 19, 1961,

Betty and Barney Hill, a couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
were driving home from a vacation in Canada. The drive took them
down a deserted highway in the White Mountains of New Hamp-
shire. At about ten o'clock they saw a bright object in the sky, and
Barney got the idea that it was a UFO, which seemed to be following
the car. He stopped a couple of times to look at the object through
binoculars. When he drove on, it still seemed to be following the car,
and that worried him.
At approximately twelve o'clock, Barney stopped the car again.
Now the light seemed closer, and he could see a craft-a sort of a
wingless plane behind the light. The thing seemed to be about to land,
and that prospect absolutely terrified Barney. He rushed back to the
car and drove off.
Approximately two hours later Barney saw a road sign that he fig-
ured was about thirty-five miles from where he had last stopped his
car. Neither he nor Betty had any clear recollection of what had hap-
pened during the previous two hours.
After weeks of being troubled with headaches and nightmares, the
Hills went to see a psychiatrist and underwent a series of hypnotic
sessions. Under hypnosis, the Hills told of being stopped on the road
by the occupants of a spaceship, taken aboard the ship, given a phys-
ical examination, and then released, with the memory of their expe-
riences erased or partially erased from their minds. The memory, they
believed, had been retained in their unconscious minds and released
by hypnosis.
The descriptions that both Betty and Barney Hill gave of their alien
kidnappers were rather vague. The aliens appeared to wear black
shiny jackets. Betty said they had faces with large slanting eyes and
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 194
big lipless mouths. A hypnotized Barney Hill drew pictures of strange
insectlike faces. It was the eyes that he remembered most clearly and
horribly. During one hypnotic session he cried out, ''Ohhh, those eyes!
They're in my brain! Please, can't I wake up?"
Were the Hills really kidnapped by the strange-looking aliens?
They apparently thought so, but there was no tangible evidence to
back up their story. Even the psychiatrist who hypnotized them did
not think there had been an actual abduction. He believed that after
the drive home Betty had begun to have nightmares about being
taken aboard a spaceship. She had some previous interest in UFOs.
Gradually she convinced first herself and then Barney of the truth of
these nightmares-and so when the Hills were hypnotized they
thought they were telling the truth-but the whole thing had never
happened.
Still, the case became extraordinarily famous. It ~as inspired
hundreds of similar accounts of UFO abductions over the last two

Betty and Barney Hill

195 Deros
decades. The slanting-eyed, lipless creatures of the Hills' experience
or fantasy has become part of our national consciousness, and since
1961 a lot of other people have reported seeing them.
See also: PASCAGOULA CREATURES

In 1943 Raymond Palmer, the editor of the science

fiction magazine Amazing Stories, received a long letter from a Penn-
sylvania welder named RichardS. Shaver. Shaver claimed that he had
discovered the key that would unlock the secret ancient language of
the lost continent of Lemuria. Palmer was intrigued and asked for
more details, and was rewarded with a bulky manuscript entitled
"Warning to Future Man." Thus began what some have called "the
Great Shaver Mystery" and others labeled "the Great Shaver Hoax."
In a long series of stories written by Shaver, and heavily edited and
rewritten by Palmer, the "hidden history of earth's past" was spun
out in a melodramatic fashion. According to Shaver, the earth had
once been inhabited by two godlike races, the Titans and the Atlans,
who built enormous civilizations. A change in the sun's radiation
forced the superbeings to retreat undergroun1 to protect themselves
from the harmful rays. But even that solution was only temporary and
the Titans and Atlans were forced to abandon earth, leaving the
planet in possession of the inferior human race.
Some humans found their way into the underground caverns of the
superraces and began meddling with the marvelous machinery that
they left behind. The results were disastrous, for the radiation from
the machines affected these {>eople, turning them into what Shaver
called "detrimental robots," or "deros." The evil deros came to control
the machinery, and used it to cause accidents, disappearances, and all
sorts of other unpleasant things on the surface of the earth. Almost all
evil could be attributed to the actions of the deros.
Shaver's stories turned out to be enormously popular, and boosted
the circulation of Amazing Stories. Moreover, a lot of people began
writing to Amazing Stories saying that they agreed with Shaver's the-
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 196
ories, that they too had seen the underground caverns and had been
subjected to the evil rays of the deros.
Whether Palmer himself really believed in Shaver's deros is diffi-
cult to determine. But after being editorially noncommittal for many
months, he openly began to support the truth of the "mystery."
Shaver almost certainly believed a good deal of what he was writing.
He finally got into a dispute with Palmer, complaining that the editor
had given his scientific research an "occult slant" with the rewriting.
Up until his death in 1975, Shaver continued to try to illuminate
earth's hidden history by translation of what he called the "rock
books," the records of the ancients written on rocks and stones all over
the world but scattered and nearly obliterated by the biblical Flood.
For several years the Shaver mystery was big news in the science
fiction world, and had begun to attract considerable attention beyond.
The deros had become the modern equivalent of demons. But science
fiction fans turned against Shaver, labeling his mystery a hoax, and
Palmer was attracted by the newer mysteries of flying saucers.
Though Shaver labored on, he was taken seriously by fewer and
fewer, and the deros, which once seemed destined to become a per-
manent part of American folklore, were forgotten.

DovER DEMON At first young Bill Bartlett thought it was

a cat on the wall. But as the headlights of his car illuminated the little
figure more completely, he realized that it was not cat. He didn't
know what it was. The creature's most prominent feature was a huge
head, dominated by large, shiny orange eyes. The body was tiny and
frail in comparison, though the fingers and toes seemed extraordinar-
ily long. It appeared to be hairless, with a rough, peach-colored skin.
The total length, head to foot, Bartlett estimated, was about four feet.
"Did you see that," Bartlett yelled. The two other boys who were
in the car with him had been looking out the other window, and saw
nothing. They persuaded Bartlett to drive back to the spot where he
saw the creature, though he was frightened and did not want to do
197 Dover Demon
so. By the time they got back to the wall, whatever it was had
disappeared.
This sighting took place in the town of Dover, Massachusetts, about
fifteen miles southwest of Boston. The date was April 21, 1977, the
time approximately 10:30 P.M.
About two hours later, fifteen-year-old John Baxter was walking
home when he saw a small figure coming toward him. As he got close
to it, the figure ran off into a wooded area. Baxter gave chase but was
not able to catch it. He did get close enough to get a pretty good look
at it. The figure he saw had a thin monkeylike body and a large head
shaped like a figure eight. When it stopped and turned to stare at him
with its enormous eyes, Baxter became nervous and backed off.
Within a few seconds he found himself running away.
Both Bill Bartlett and John Baxter made drawings of what they
saw, or said they saw. The drawing looked as if they were of the same
creature, though both boys insisted they had not heard of the other's
experience until after they made their drawings.
The following evening several other teenagers in the area reported
catching a glimpse of the thing. The newspapers got hold of the story
and began calling the thing "the Dover demon."
But the Dover demon was a short-lived phenomenon, as are so
many monsters. After two days no one else reported seeing the Dover
demon and interest died away. However, monster buffs continued to
speculate over what this thing, assuming that it had been anything
more than the result of teenage hysteria, might have been. The most
common explanation was that it had come from a UFO, not that any
UFOs had been seen in the vicinity, just because it looked as if it
should have come from a UFO.
Someone also mentioned the Mannegishi, creatures from the
mythology of the Cree Indians of Canada. They are supposed to be
little people with big round heads, small skinny bodies, big eyes, and
no noses. Their main purpose in life, according to the Cree legends,
was to play jokes on the big people.
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 198

FLA TWO ODS MONSTER The first well-publicized UFO

monster was reported in the small town of Flatwoods, in Braxton
County, West Virginia, on September 12, 1952. That was a mere four
years after the start of the modern UFO, or flying-saucer, era, and it
took place at a moment when interest in the subject was greater than
it had ever been, or perhaps ever was to be again.
Early in the evening a couple of teenagers saw what they first
thought was a meteor flash through the sky and crash into a nearby
hill. Gathering a few of their friends and one adult, a Mrs. Kathleen
May, a party of seven hurried up the hill to where they estimated the
meteor had fallen.
It was dark. There was mountain fog around. The group was
excited. And above it all there had been a great deal of talk and spec-
ulation in the newspapers and on the radio about flying saucers and
creatures from outer space.
When they got to the top of the hill, they did not find a meteor
crater as they had expected; rather they were confronted with, "a fire
breathing monster, ten-feet-tall with a bright green body and blood-
red face."
Mrs. May said, "It looked worse than Frankenstein [sic]. It couldn't
have been human."
Such descriptions are more hysterical than helpful, but it was a hys-
terical moment, and details of the appearance of the Flatwoods mon-
ster are difficult to come by. One thing all the witnesses seemed to
agree on was that the top had a roughly triangular shape; "like the
ace of spades," was how one witness described it. It has been theorized
that this was some sort of helmet or hood. The face, particularly the
eyes, were luminous, though details of the face are vague. The rest of
the body seemed to be swathed in a dark cloak, and the feet, or bot-
tom, of the creature were not visible at all because of the fog and
darkness.
It moved toward the little group with "a bouncing floating motion."
199 Flatwoods Monster
Though it didn't make any overtly hostile moves, the group was not
inclined to hang around long enough to find out if it was friendly or
not. Panic broke out and they dashed madly down the hill. One
account tells of Mrs. May clearing a high fence in a single leap to get
away from the thing.
When they got back to Mrs. May's house, they called the sheriff.
The sheriff was skeptical and unsympathetic, but he investigated any-
way. As he expected, he found nothing. It was the opinion of the sher-
iff and other local skeptics that the whole affair was the result of over-
excitement. It was suggested that when the group arrived at the top
of the hill, they had seen the eyeshine from a raccoon or some other
animal sitting in a tree some ten feet above the ground. Since the
group was mostly young, and they really expected to see something,
imagination did the rest.
Despite such skeptical grumbling, the story caught on. Accounts of
the Flatwoods monster appeared in newspapers throughout the coun-

Flatwoods monster
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 200
try. Mrs. May and one of the other witnesses were invited to New
York City to appear on a radio program that specialized in UFO
reports. Their story was very popular, and for a short time these peo-
ple from the small West Virginia town were celebrities.
No more was ever seen of the Flatwoods monster, and years later
those who had been involved in the original sighting seemed unwill-
ing to discuss it further. But the Flatwoods monster still has the dis-
tinction of being the first of the major UFO-monster incidents.
See also: MOTHMAN

IHJ OPKINSVILLE GOBLINS One of the early UFO "contact"

cases took place in August 1955 at a farmhouse about eight miles from
the town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The farm was occupied by a Mrs.
Lenny Langford and her son Cecil "Lucky" Sutton and his family.
On the night of August 21, 1955, they also had visitors-so the house
was crowded. Shortly after 7:00 P.M. they got more visitors, these
entirely uninvited, unexpected, and unearthly.
First there was a light w:.~ch came to rest a short distance from the
house. When one of the men went out to investigate, he found that
the light was coming from some kind of a craft-a flying saucer or
UFO. And also coming from the craft was the first of some strange
and frightening-looking creatures. Later, people began referring to
them as "goblins."
The creature wa~ about three and one-half feet tall with a roundish
outsized head and huge pointed ears. Its large eyes were set wide
apart almost on the sides of its head. The creature's mouth was slitlike,
and it had no external nose, only a couple of nostrils in the middle of
its face. The creature's arms hung almost to the ground and ended in
large clawlike hands.
It seemed to be clad in a silvery sort of garment, and according to
one witness it floated rather than walked. Another said that when the
creature ran it dropped down on all fours. Obviously there was a good
deal of confusion, for the witnesses were excited and more than a little
201 Hopkinsville Goblins
bit frightened. They ran back inside the house. The men grabbed
their guns and waited.
When a pointy-eared head popped up at the window, Lucky Sut-
ton fired at it with his shotgun. The blast tore out the screen, and

head
31cm

39cm

Hopkinsville goblin
legs
A7cm

should have shattered anything standing directly in its line. But the
little creature seemed relatively unharmed. It was knocked back:.
wards, rolled over a couple of times, and then scuttled away on all
fours.
One of the men stepped outside the back door only to discover that
a goblin had climbed onto the roof of the house and made a grab for
his hair or head. The man was able to shake himself out of the crea-
ture's grasp.
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 202
Dozens of the goblins seemed to be prowling around the house or
climbing all over it. During the next four hours a battle of sorts
erupted between the humans and goblins as shots were fired wildly
and ineffectively at the ducking and dodging little creatures. At one
point one of the creatures was hit full in the body at close range. But
it simply rolled up into a ball and floated away in the direction of the
"flying saucer" from whence it had come originally. The creatures
didn't seem capable of being hurt, but on the other hand, they didn't
seem capable, or willing, to hurt the humans either.
When the "battle" was over, and the little creatures in the silvery
suits seemed to have disappeared, all the members of the Sutton fam-
ily and their friends piled into cars and drove to the Hopkinsville
police station. The police investigated, but could find nothing unusual
in the dark. While they did not necessarily believe the stories told
them by Sutton and the others, they were convinced that something
had happened, for all of the witnesses were genuinely frightened and
excited.
Sutton and his family returned home, but about three-thirty in the
morning the alien creatures returned too, and one of them was peer-
ing through the window. More shots were fired with the same
results-nothing. The police went back to the farm, but the only evi-
dence of anything unusual that they could find were a few stray bullet
holes.
The United States Air Force, which was still investigating UFO
reports in 1955, conducted a quick and informal investigation. Air
force investigators dismissed the incident as hysteria or hoax. Other
groups that were interested in UFOs were more thorough, and more
impressed, but no one was able to come up with any tangible evidence
that the "attack" at Hopkinsville had ever really taken place and that
the goblins existed. They did discover that Sutton and his family were
generally well thought of by their neighbors, and were not considered
to be the sort of people who told lies or had hallucinations.
Once the story got around, the family was besieged by curiosity
seekers. At first the Suttons tried to make a little money off their noto-
riety by charging admission to their land and a fee for photographing
203 Little Green Men
the house. This inevitably led to more charges of fakery. All the atten-
tion and ridicule was too unwelcome and disruptive, so within a few
days the entire family packed up and left without telling anyone
where they were going. At the time there were a lot of rumors that
they had been "kidnapped" by the aliens or silenced by the govern-
ment. But none of these rumors had any basis in fact. The family
simply moved to get away from the publicity-but they continued to
stick to their story about being attacked by goblins from outer space.

LITTLE GREEN MEN "People keep insisting that they've seen

little green men."
That statement was attributed to Captain Robert White, spokesman
for Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force's UFO investigation project
in the mid 1950s.
The statement is quite wrong, for while the idea of the "little green
men from outer space" became a popular cliche and a joke, in reality
very few people have ever reported seeing little green men. Just how
the concept of little green men became synonymous with creatures
from outer space is far from clear.
Probably the best early story of the little green men from space
comes from Europe. It concerns an encounter that is supposed to have
taken place on August 14, 1947, less than two months after the mod-
ern era of UFO's or flying saucers began in June of 1947, with a
flying-saucer sighting in the state of Washington.
By August 14, the term flying saucers had become pretty well
known in the United States, but it was apparently unknown to Pro-
fessor Rapuzzi Luigi Johannis, an Italian artist who was on a hiking
trip in the mountainous region between Italy and Yugoslavia.
As he was walking along, Johannis spied, through the rocks, what
appeared to be a large, bright red, round object, about ten feet in
diameter. Standing next to the object were a couple of figures that
Johannis first took to be boys-but they were very odd boys, for they
had green skin.
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 204
The pair was a little under three feet tall, with outsized heads.
Their faces were completely hairless, lacking even eyelashes and eye-
brows. Their yellow green eyes were huge, round, and prominent,
and seemed to have no eyelids. Their mouths were wide and slitlike
and, all in all, with the green skin their faces reminded the artist of a
frog. There was no sign of hair on their heads, but it might have been

little Green Men

concealed under the tight-fitting caps they wore. They were clothed
in tight-fitting brown suits.
At first Johannis did not see the two figures clearly and he walked
toward them, but when he got a good look at those green faces, he
froze. Johannis was carrying a geologist's pick, for he was an amateur
rock collector. He waved the pick in the direction of the figures, in
what they may have taken to be a threatening gesture. One of the
creatures touched his belt, which gave off either a ray or some sort of
puff of smoke, Johannis wasn't clear. Whatever it was, it struck the
artist with the force of an electric shock, and knocked him to the
ground. He was momentarily stunned.
205 Little Green Men
"I felt myself deprived of all my strength and all my efforts to raise
myself meant an expenditure of energy that was beyond me.
"Meanwhile the two midgets were coming toward me ... I man-
aged to roll over to one side and I saw one of them bend down and
pick up the tool [the geologist's pick he had dropped], which was
longer than he was. And this was how I was able to see his green
'hand' quite distinctly. It had eight fingers, four of them opposable to
the others! It wasn't a hand: it was a claw, and the fingers were with-
out joints.
"I also noticed that the chests of the two beings were quivering:
like a dog's chest when it pants after a long run."
Too weak to even rise, Johannis watched helplessly as the two little
green men went back to their craft, which then took off silently and
disappeared. They took his geologist's pick with them, and Johannis
commented:
"I believe that that old pick of mine is now in a museum on some
other planet. I hope that somebody up there is trying to decipher the
marks cut in the handle, my name and a mountaineering motto, and
a pair of stylized alpine flowers, and an eagle. And I hope they rack
their brains to a standstill trying to make it out."
Johannis said that it was several months before he first heard of the
flying-saucer excitement which had begun in the United States. If the
date given for Johannis's encounter is accepted, his is the first known
little-green-man sighting.
In a discussion of this case in The Humanoids, Gordon Creighton
asks, "Do we have here the creatures that gave rise to the stories about
'little green men'?" That is a hard question to answer, for while the
Johannis case has never received extensive publicity, it is the only
good early contact case involving little green men. The idea of crea-
tures from other planets being little green men may actually have
come from science fiction rather than from any reported contacts
with UFO occupants.
See also: ALIENS IN THE FREEZER
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 206

MAo GASSER OF MATTOON In 1944 a number of peo-

ple in the town of Mattoon, Illinois, got up in the morning feeling ill.
Some reported severely upset stomachs, while others complained of a
temporary paralysis. Doctors could find no obvious reasons for the ill-
nesses. The possibility that the illness might be caused by some sort of
noxious fumes was discussed, and the afflicted houses were checked
for escaping gas. Everything appeared to be normal. Yet the reports
of the mysterious illness continued.
Then a rumor began that someone had awakened during the night
and seen a strange figure in a tight-fitting dark suit and wearing some
sort of gas mask standing outside the open window. The figure was
spraying a gas into the room, and the gas made the person feel ill.
When the figure saw that his victim was awake, it fled. During the
scare, there were several other reports of this figure dubbed the phan-
tom anesthetist or, more popularly, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. No
mad gasser was ever found, nor was there ever a full explanation of
the strange illness.
Some psychologists put the mad gasser scare down as a classic case
of mass hysteria, and say the hysteria itself caused the illness. Others,
including the more radical Forteans and UFO buffs, suspect that
there really was some sort of "mad gasser," but that he was a creature
from another world or another dimension. Why was this creature
gassing people in Mattoon, Illinois, in 1944? No one will even venture
a guess.
See also: SPRING-HEELED JACK

MEN IN BLACK The mysterious Men in Black, or MIBs, are

the extreme personification of a sense of paranoia that sometimes per-
vades the world of Ufology. In its broadest sense, the Men in Black
can be an entity (earthly or unearthly) that for unknown reasons per-
207 Men in Black
secutes, harasses, confuses, or otherwise interferes with those who say
they have seen UFOs, or people who believe that they are in posses-
sion of important information regarding UFOs. MIBs also are blamed
for stealing evidence that would prove the existence of UFOs.
Usually these entities are described as men wearing new black suits,
black hats, and often sunglasses. Commonly, they are rather short in
stature, have olive complexions, and straight dark hair. Indeed, they
are said to look "like gypsies." When their sunglasses are removed,
they sometimes reveal strange "glowing" eyes. Typically the Men in
Black arrive in shiny new black cars-usually Cadillacs. The newness
of the cars is stressed, people saying that the cars even "smell new."
The MIBs may claim to be on some sort of official mission (they often
flash official-looking cards or badges), but attempts to trace the indi-
viduals are invariably fruitless. They appear to come from nowhere.
Though the MIBs are never reported to have done physical harm to
anyone, a visit from them tends to leave an individual badly shaken
and feeling physically ill. Some people have reported that after
receiving a visit from the MIBs, they have had to seek psychiatric help
to overcome insomnia, loss of appetite, and depression.
This is one of those cases where the origin of a belief is well known.
Without any question, the saga of the Men in Black began in 1953
with a man named Albert K. Bender. Bender was head of a small
organization with the grandiose title of the International Flying Sau-
cer Bureau. He edited a little publication called Space Review, which
was read by a few hundred hard-core saucer believers.
In the September 1953 edition of Space Review, Bender printed
two rather surprising announcements. The first said that the flying-
saucer "mystery" was nearing a solution. It was commonly believed
at that time that there was a single "key" to the flying-saucer "mys-
tery," and as soon as that "key" was found, all would be known.
Promises that the solution was close at hand would have been familiar
fare to the readers of Space Review.
The second notice was more surprising. It announced that the flying
saucer mystery had in fact been "solved," but that the solution was
being withheld on orders from "a higher source." Bender said, "We
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 208
advise those engaged in saucer work to be very cautious." He then
suspended publication of Space Review and dissolved the IFSB.
Bender's friends and fellow saucer buffs were shocked by his
actions, but at first he wouldn't tell them why he had taken such dras-
tic action. After a few weeks Bender gave an interview to a local
newspaper in which he stated that he had been "emphatically"
warned to stop publishing by "three men in dark suits." Later they
became men in black suits.
From the beginning, many of those who knew Albert Bender sim-
ply did not believe this story. They knew that Space Review and the
IFSB were shoestring operations, always tottering on the verge of
financial extinction. They assumed that Bender got out of the flying-
saucer business because he ran out of money and time, but didn't
want to say so, so had invented the tale of the three men in dark suits
as an excuse for making an exit. It was a more dramatic way to go.
There was, however, another school of thought about the story. In
the 1950s a lot of people in the flying-saucer world assumed that the
air force or the government was trying to "cover up" the "truth"
about flying saucers. That they would send some of their agents wear-
ing dark suits to attempt to silence a man who knew the "truth" was
not entirely implausible to this line of thinking. Indeed, Albert Bend-
er's own comments about his mysterious visitors strongly supported
the belief that they were agents of the U.S. government. In an inter-
view with his friend Gray Barker, recorded shortly after he closed
down the IFSB, Bender was asked, "Why can't you talk freely about
this thing?"
Bender responded, "Just before the men left, one of them said, 'I
suppose you know you're on your honor as an American. If I hear
another word out of your office you're in trouble!"'
"What will they do with you if you give out information?"
"Put me in jail and keep me shut up."
So the original men in black sounded like they were government
agents.
Soon these entities, whose very existence was based entirely on the
unsupported word of Albert Bender, began to take on an independent
209 Men in Black
life of their own. Bender retired from the Ufological world for nearly
a decade. But others began to report visits from the Men in Black,
only now they were less and less like government agents, at least like
agents of any earthly government. The MIBs began to take on a dis-
tinctly otherworldy, even supernatural air.
In 1963, a decade after he had begun the tale of the three men,
Albert Bender decided to enlarge upon it in a book called Flying Sau-
cers and the Three Men in Black. This time the Men in Black were
distinctly extraterrestrial. They were accompanied by women in
"tight white dresses." It is a fairly standard work of the UFO contac-
tee, which means it is a difficult, rambling, confused, and in some
respects a rather troubling book. Flying Saucers and the Three Men
in Black had no impact at all on the general public and very little
within the community of UFO believers, who are quite used to stories
of contacts with beings from other worlds. The book could not even
find an American publisher. People were not interested in Albert
Bender anymore, but they were very interested in the Men in Black.
All manner of things were being blamed on them. When Maurice
K. Jessup, a well-known Ufologist, committed suicide in 1958, there
were rumors and at least one published hint that he might have
"ignored the warning of the dark trio."
A bizarre, but not untypical MIB story was reported by Ivan Sand-
erson in his book Uninvited Visitors. It concerned an unnamed fam-
ily who had made a UFO sighting. A short time after the sighting
they were visited by a very strange individual. He was described as
being "almost seven feet tall, with a small head, dead white skin, enor-
mous frame, but pipe stem limbs." This odd-looking fellow arrived at
the family's isolated home one evening saying that he was an insur-
ance investigator and he was looking for someone who had the same
name as the husband in this family. The "insurance investigator"
hinted that the man he was looking for had inherited a great deal of
money. Continued Sanderson, "This weird individual just appeared
out of the night wearing a strange fur hat with a vizor and only a
light jacket. He flashed an official-looking card on entry but put it
away immediately. Later on he removed his jacket and disclosed an
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 210
official looking gold shield on his shirt which he instantly covered with
his hand and removed."
The visitor's line of questioning was as odd as his appearance, and
sometimes very personal. He didn't even mention UFOs. The strang-
est and creepiest moment in the whole affair came when the eldest
daughter of the family noticed that the "insurance investigator's"
tight pants had ridden up his skinny leg, and she saw a green wire
running out of his sock up his leg and into his flesh at two points. After
the interview was over, the "insurance investigator" got into a large
black car which contained at least two other persons and seemed to
appear on a dirt road that led from the woods. The car drove off into
the night without headlights.
Though the "insurance investigator" in this case wasn't wearing
black, and never specifically discussed UFOs, this is unhesitatingly
classed as an MIB case. So too is what happened to Rex Heflin.
Heflin was a California highway inspector. On August 3, 1963, he
took a series of what were to become some of the most widely
reprinted flying-saucer pictures ever. Heflin said that he was sitting in
his car near the Santa Ana Freeway when he saw the UFO quite close
by. He grabbed his Polaroid camera and took four shots of the craft
before it disappeared. The pictures show an object that looks rather
like a straw hat floating above the ground.
Naturally, there was some suspicion that the photos had been faked,
and when a major government-sponsored UFO study was carried out,
the investigators wanted to get a look at Heflin's original prints, on
the theory that they might show something less distinct copies did not.
But Heflin said he didn't have the originals, he had already given
them to a man who claimed that he represented the North American
Air Defense Command, NORAD. NORAD denied that it had ever
sent anybody to Heflin, or that it had the slightest interest in his
photographs.
Later, Heflin said that he received another mysterious visitor, this
one also claiming he came from the air force. The second visitor asked
all sorts of strange and apparently unrelated questions. While the
interview was going on, Heflin said that he saw a car parked in the
211 Mothman
street in front of his house. It had some sort of lettering on the front
door, but he could not make it out. A report on the incident states,
"In the back seat could be seen a figure and a violet (not blue) glow,
which the witness attributed to instrument dials. He believed he was
being photographed or recorded. In the meantime his FM multiplex
radio was playing in the living room and during the questioning it
made several loud audible pops." The identity of this second "inves-
tigator" was never established either, and of course the original pic-
tures were never seen again.
In neither of these cases were the men actually wearing black. But
these too have been classified as MIBs.
John Keel, an author who has written extensively about UFOs and
particularly about the sightings of a weird UFO-related creature
called Mothman of West Virginia, reported that while the Mothman
excitement was going on, dozens of witnesses were visited by MIB
types. In some of the rural areas, it was said the MIBs drove around
in shiny new black pickup trucks instead of the traditional black
Cadillacs.
Keel was called by Ufological researcher Dan Drasin and told, -
"You know, this probably doesn't mean anything, but the other day I
was walking through midtown Manhattan and an Indian took my pic-
ture. He wasn't even wearing a black suit."
Stories of alleged encounters with MIBs are frequently spoken of
among UFO buffs, and such encounters are sometimes reported in the
more sensationalistic weekly supermarket tabloids.
See also: ALIENS IN THE FREEZER, MOTHMAN

MoTHMAN The extraordinary series of events that became

known as the Mothman phenomenon began on the night of Novem-
ber 14, 1966. Two young couples from Point Pleasant, West Virginia,
were driving through an abandoned ammunition dump known
locally as the TNT Area. It was located approximately seven miles
outside of the town.
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 212
As they passed the empty power plant they saw something "shaped
like a man but bigger" standing alongside the road. The thing seemed
to have large wings folded against its back, and bright, almost lumi-
nous red eyes. The driver of the car slowed down and the four stared
at it for about a minute, but it didn't seem to have any interest in
them. The thing then turned away from the road, and walked, with
a strange shuffling gait, back towards the door of the power plant. The
sight filled the four occupants of the car with a sense of uneasiness,
almost dread, and they didn't feel like hanging around to see what
would happen. The driver stepped on the accelerator and sped away
down Route 62.
Imagine their horror when they looked up in the sky and found
that the "thing" was following them. It was flying overhead, and
seemed to be pacing the car though the driver swears he was doing
100 mph after he spotted it. The thing made a squeaking noise "like
a big mouse." At the city limits, the flying creature veered off and
disappeared.
The frightened quartet drove directly to the sheriff's office, and a
deputy was dispatched to the TNT Area and the abandoned power
plant, but nothing out of the ordinary was found.
While the two young couples may have been frightened by the
creature, they were not shy. The very next day they held a press con-
ference and the story of their encounter was picked up by one of the
wire services. "The Bird," as it first was called, became known
throughout the nation.
The title "the Bird" was not grand enough for a creature that was
described as being seven feet tall and having a wingspan of at least
ten feet. It couldn't be called "Big Bird," because that was the name
of a character on the popular children's TV show "Sesame Street."
But another popular TV show at that time was based on the comic
strip Batman, and somewhere some newspaperman began calling the
thing seen near Point Pleasant "Mothman," and the name caught on.
That has led to a lot of jokes about people finding gigantic holes in
their clothes. In fact, the creature was never described as having a
particularly mothlike appearance.
213 Mothman
Usually it was described as a big gray manlike thing, with folded
wings and reddish staring eyes. That's how it was described by Mrs.
Marcella Bennett. Just a few days after the initial sighting, Mrs. Ben-
nett was out for a visit with her friends Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Wam-
sley. Mrs. Bennett was holding her infant daughter. They were driv-
ing out to see the Ralph Thomas family, who happened to live in one
of the few houses in the TNT Area.
They stopped the car in front of the Thomas house, and Mrs. Ben-
nett, carrying her baby, was the first to get out. Then she saw it. "It
seemed as if it had been lying down. It rose up slowly from the
ground. A big grey thing. Bigger than a man, with terrible glowing
eyes."
Mrs. Bennett was so startled that she actually dropped her baby,
but she soon recovered, scooped up the child, and along with the
Wamsleys ran for the house. Only the Thomas children were home,
but they let in the terrified visitors and locked the door behind them.
Mothman followed slowly. It shuffled up onto the porch and peered
in the window. No one inside was brave enough to try and get a good
look at it. Wamsley called the police, but by the time they arrived,
the creature had already disappeared.
Mothman sightings started coming in from all over the Point Pleas-
ant area, and beyond. Most of the reports ~ere from people who had
been driving along some relatively deserted stretch of road. The crea-
ture, almost always described as being between six and seven feet tall
and gray in color, was seen standing at the side of the road. At the
approach of the car, it might unfold its wings and rise straight up in
the air "like a helicopter" according to one witness. Sometimes it flew
away, but on other occasions, like the one described by eighteen-year-
old Connie Carpenter, it made straight for the car. It flew directly at
the windshield; she thought there was going to be a collision, but
Mothman veered off at the last second.
"Those eyes!" she said. "They were a very red and once they were
fixed on me I couldn't take my own eyes off them. It's a wonder I
didn't have a wreck."
Most people could only remember the eyes. Connie Carpenter got
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 214
a closer look at the creature's face, though her description isn't too
helpful. "It was horrible ... like something out of a science-fiction
'
mOVIe.
..
Police in nearby Clarkton, West Virginia, received a call from a
man who insisted that "Batman" was standing on the roof of the house
next door.
The exact number of Mothman sightings made over the next few
weeks is a matter of some controversy. Estimates range from the doz-
ens to the hundreds. Police gave out the lower number; independent
investigators say the vast majority of sightings were never reported to
the police, who tended to be skeptical and unsympathetic. Whatever
the real number, there is little doubt that the Mothman stories gen-
erated considerable local excitement, and in addition, accounts were
carried in newspapers and on TV and radio stations throughout the
nation. Mothman had become a celebrity.
Explanations for the sightings were also advanced. Dr. Robert
Smith of the West Virginia University biology department suggested
that the excitement might have been set off by sightings of a rare
sandhill crane. The sandhill crane is a large gray bird, with a bald red
forehead. It also has a reputation for being an aggressive bird which
might run or fly after people. The sudden appearance of one of these
creatures could startle an unwary witness, particularly since such a
creature is not native to West Virginia.
However, there is a wildlife station in the Point Pleasant region,
and the rangers there discounted the sandhill-crane theory, insisting
that if such a bird had been in the area, they certainly would have
known about it.
John Keel, a writer who spent a great deal of time interviewing
witnesses in the Mothman case, carried pictures of a sandhill crane
and other large birds that had been suggested as the inspiration of the
Mothman excitement and showed them to people who had reported
seeing the monster. Not one of the witnesses thought the sandhill
crane resembled what they had seen in the least. The other birds were
even less satisfactory.
Mothman was rapidly linked to UFOs. While no one had ever
215 Mothman
claimed they had seen the creature stepping out of a UFO, UFOs had,
from time to time, been reported in the Point Pleasant area. In addi-
tion, several of those, like Keel, who had done a great deal to research
and publicize Mothman, had a long-standing interest in UFOs, and
many of the Mothman accounts were published in UFO-oriented
magazines. There also is a natural human tendency to lump mysteries
together, even if there is no compelling reason to do so. Somehow it
seems more intellectually satisfying, though in reality it may simply
confuse the issue. So the connection between Mothman and UFOs
became an accepted "fact."
After the initial burst of Mothman publicity, the number of
reported sightings of the creature dropped off but still continued at a
somewhat lower level until December 1967. On December 15, 1967,
some thirteen months after the Mothman sightings began, there was
a terrible disaster near Point Pleasant. The Silver Bridge, an old sus-
pension bridge which spanned the Ohio River between West Virginia
and Ohio, collapsed in the middle of an afternoon rush hour. Forty-
six vehicles plunged into the river, and nearly fifty people died as a
result of the disaster.
Engineers who prepared a report on the bridge collapse pointed out
that the structure had been erected in 1928, was unsuited to the needs
of modern traffic, and had been poorly maintained to boot. They
insisted that the collapse was completely attributable to natural
causes.
But believers in Mothman thought differently. They whispered that
the disaster was somehow connected with the appearance of the flying
monster. In past ages the sighting of a sea serpent or some other
strange or unnatural creature was considered to be an omen of
impending disaster. Some thought that Mothman too had been an
omen of doom.
Omen or not, Mothman sightings fell to near zero after the Silver
Bridge disaster. Whatever it was seems to have disappeared.
See also: FLATWOODS MONSTER
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 216

0ANNES There has been endless speculation over the possi-

bility that in some time long past, the earth was contacted by superior
beings from outer space who imparted to the then primitive human
race some of the arts of civilization. This would help to explain why
the human race has made so much progress over the past seven or
eight thousand years, after stagnating for tens of thousands of years.
Most of this speculation has been sheer fudge, and most of the theo-
rizers have been either cranks or charlatans. But there is one bit of
speculation that cannot be so easily brushed aside, for those who pro-
posed it are neither cranks nor charlatans. One of them is a noted
Soviet astronomer, Dr. I. S. Shklovsky, the other the now celebrated
American astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan. In 1966 these two scientists col-
laborated on a book called Intelligent Life in the Universe. In this
admittedly highly speculative work, the astronomers discussed the
possibility of ancient contact, and how memory of such a contact
might have been transmitted from generation to generation in mytho-
logical or legendary form. The authors found one ancient story which
in their view "more nearly fulfills some of our criteria for a genuine
contact myth."
It is the story of Oannes, a half-man, half-fish creature. The story
comes to us from the Babylonians of the third or fourth century B.c.,
but it is much, much older, perhaps going back as far as the Sumeri-
ans, the first known civilization in the world. About six thousand years
ago the Sumerians, who lived in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers, made a leap from the simple village life that mankind had
lived for thousands of years to full urban civilization. The sudden
appearance of civilization seems to be freakishly abrupt-though it
may not be. Perhaps archaeologists have just not dug in the right
places yet, and somewhere there still exists evidence of the slow devel-
opment of Sumerian civilization.
But there is another possibility: that Sumerian civilization did begin
explosively after the people of the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates
217 Pascagoula Creatures
came into contact with superior beings. And that is where Oannes
comes in, for, according to the myths, that is just exactly what
happened.
This half-man, half-fish being appears suddenly from the Persian
Gulf. The Babylonian version of the story continues: "This Being, in
the day time used to converse with men; but took no food at that

Oannes

season; and he gave them insight into letters, and sciences and every
kind of art. He taught them to construct houses, to found temples, to
compile laws and explained to them the principles of geometrical
knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and
showed them how to collect fruits. In short, he instructed them in
everything which could tend to soften the manners and humanize
mankind. From that time, so universal were his instructions, nothing
material has been added by way of improvement. When the sun set
it was the custom of this Being to plunge again into the sea, and abide
all night in the deep; for he was amphibious."
See also: MERMAID

pASCAGOULA CREA lURES Charles Hickson and Calvin

Parker, a couple of Mississippi shipyard workers, said that they were
kidnapped briefly by weird-looking creatures that had landed in a
UFO. This is their story:
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 218
On the night of October 11, 1973, Hickson and Parker were fishing
from an abandoned pier in the Pascagoula River. Without warning,
a strange craft landed about thirty yards from where they were
sitting.
A door opened and three grotesque-looking creatures floated out.
According to Hickson, who did most of the talking about the incident,
the creatures were about five feet tall and covered with grayish wrin-
kled skin. It was like "the skin of an elephant," he said. They didn't
have any real faces; where the nose should be there was a carrotlike
growth. Two similar carrotlike growths were where there should have
been ears. The mouth was just a hole., and there were no eyes at all.
The creatures had what looked like two legs, but the legs were stuck
together so they could not walk in any normal fashion. Their two arms
ended in clawlike pincers. Hickson also felt that there was something
rather robotlike about the way they acted.
Hickson and Parker said that they were too terrified by the sight of
these escapees from a science-fiction horror film to try to run away.
"Calvin done went hysterical on me," Hickson complained.
The creatures floated toward them, making buzzing noises, as if
they were communicating with one another. Hickson and Parker felt
as if they had been hypnotized and were unable to move. The crea-
tures took hold of them and floated them into the ship. Once inside
the brightly lighted ship, the creatures examined the two men with a
machine. Hickson said, "It looked like a big eye, and it went all over
my body, up and down."
The examination didn't hurt, but during the fifteen or twenty min-
utes the men were in the ship they were still unable to move. When
the examination was over, the creatures floated the two men back out-
side their craft and then took off, disappearing into the night sky.
At first Hickson and Parker were badly confused, but when they
gathered their wits they decided that they had better tell someone
what had happened. So they went to the local newspaper. It was
closed. Their next stop was the sheriff's office. As news of the "abduc-
tion" spread, these two "good 'ol boys," as they have often been
described, rapidly attained celebrity status. They even appeared on a
219 Spring-Heeled Jack
couple of nationally televised talk shows to repeat their story. Artists'
renderings of the carrot-nosed, elephant-skinned aliens were widely
circulated.
However, aside from the word of the two men, there is absolutely
no evidence to suggest that the story they told was true. No one else
saw the creatures, no one else even saw the strange craft, though the
alleged landing had taken place just a few blocks from the center of
the city of Pascagoula, and the abandoned pier was near a busy high-
way. Very near the place where the spaceship was supposed to have
landed is a drawbridge, and the bridge operator was on duty through-
out the entire period of the landing and abduction. He should have
been able to see a brightly lighted spaceship nearby. He saw nothing.
Hickson took and passed a lie-detector, or polygraphy, test about
his story, but the lie detector is not an infallible guide to reality. The
-accuracy of a lie-detector test depends in large measure on the skill
of the machine's operator. The man who tested Hickson was a relative
novice. More highly trained polygraph operators were found closer
by, but Hickson chose to go all the way to New Orleans to employ
this particular operator. Hickson also turned down an offer to take
another polygraph test with a more experienced operator. Even if
Hickson told the truth, that does not mean that the events he
described happened as he described them. A person who has a hal-
lucination may really believe what he has seen, and would be able to.
pass a lie-detector test. But that does not mean that the hallucination
was a physical reality.
See also: ALIEN KIDNAPPERS

SPRING-HEELED JACK In 1888 all London was terrified by

a series of particularly gruesome murders. The unknown murderer
was never caught; the press gave him the name Jack the Ripper, a
name that the murderer himself seems to have adopted and a name
that is still famous today. But Jack the Ripper was not the first mys-
terious "Jack" to terrorize London; a half century earlier, terror had
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 220
spread by someone or something called Spring-Heeled Jack.
Now it must be admitted that this earlier Jack was nowhere near
as bloodthirsty as Jack the Ripper. His activities seemed to consist of
jumping in front of people, frightening them badly, and then disap-
pearing with great leaps and bounds before anyone could lay hands
on him. It was this apparent leaping ability which gave rise to the
name spring-heeled.
Rumors of Spring-Heeled Jack began to circulate in London late in
1837, and they were obviously tinged with hysteria and exaggeration.
While some stories said that Spring-Heeled Jack looked like a pow-
erfully built man in a strange, shiny, tight-fitting suit, others con-
tended that he had wings, or horns, or that he breathed fire.
The London police apparently didn't take the stories very seriously
at first. Then one day in early 1838 a very respectable-looking man;
accompanied by this two equally respectable-looking daughters,
walked into the police station in Lambeth Street and told an astonish-
ing story.
He said that he lived with his daughters on Bearbind Lane, at that
time a rather isolated and out-of-the-way spot. The previous evening
one of his daughters went to the front gate to answer the bell. It was
dark and foggy, so she couldn't see the figure at the gate too clearly,
though she got the impression of a tall man wearing a cloak. The fig-
ure at the gate said that he was a policeman who had been hunting
Spring-Heeled Jack, and had finally located him in that neighbor-
hood. "For God's sake, bring a light!" he cried. The girl ran to the
house and got a candle and gave it to the cloaked figure. Suddenly he
threw back his cloak, revealing a "hideous and frightful appearance."
He seemed to be wearing a helmet, and a shiny white suit. He slashed
at the girl with metallic claws, tearing her dress. Blue and white
flames shot from his mouth. Naturally, the terrified girl screamed and
her screams brought people running, but the creature bounded away
before anyone else could get a good look at it.
A few months later the men of the Lambeth Street police station
heard a very similar story from a butcher named Squires. He said that
his two sisters had been walking along the street when they were
221 Spring-Heeled Jack
accosted by a cloaked figure. The cloak was pulled back to reveal a
shiny suit. The thing then appeared to squirt blue flames in the
younger girl's face. She was uninjured physically, but had been fright-
ened half to death. As usual, Spring-Heeled Jack bounded away
before help could arrive.
As these stories circulated, people demanded that the police protect
them. The police felt helpless. What were they trying to protect peo-
ple from? No one was sure, and the mystery made the whole affair
more frightening than ever.
There was another report that a strange and ghastly figure had been
seen climbing the spire of a London church. It spent several minutes
glaring down at the crowd below before leaping agilely from its high
perch and disappearing into the darkness. There was a rumor that the
same figure had been seen at the Tower of London.
Excitements of this kind inevitably inspire hoaxes, and in War-
wickshire the police caught a young man wearing a sheet and mask
trying to jump about with the aid of springs attached to his boots.
The major Spring-Heeled Jack excitement died down after a few
months, but for decades there were minor Spring-Heeled Jack flaps.
In the 1860s there was a rash of Spring-Heeled Jack sightings around
London. According to one report, the monster had been cornered by
an angry mob but got away by jumping over a hedge. People kept
their children off the streets for fear that they would somehow be
harmed by the thing.
In 1878 an athletic army officer was arrested in the town of Alder-
shot on the charge of impersonating Spring-Heeled Jack, though the
charge appears to have been a false one and the officer was let go.
Meanwhile, Spring-Heeled Jack had undergone sort of a popular
metamorphosis in those cheap and sensationalistic Victorian publica-
tions known as "penny dreadfuls." The penny dreadfuls were the lit-
erature of the poor. They cost only a penny and you got your money's
worth, plenty of action and thrills, even if the stories often didn't
make much sense. The Spring-Heeled Jack of the penny dreadfuls
was no longer an evil monster; he had become a sort of strange-look-
ing superhero, a bit like the popular comic book and TV superhero
VISITORS FROM STRANGE PLACES 222
the Incredible Hulk. Amid flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder,
Spring~Heeled Jack would arrive to frighten the evil doers.
Spring~Heeled Jack stories kept on appearing for years. In 1863
there was a popular play on the London stage called Sprlng~Heeled
jack; or the Felon's Wrongs. It and a couple of les~er-known Spring-
Heeled Jack plays ran for several seasons, indicating the general pub-
lic's fascination with the mysterious subject.
The Spring~Heeled Jack excitement never had a dramatic ending.
It just petered out. No one really knows what happened, or how the
excitement began in the first place. Some believe that it began as the
work of a prankster, aided by public hysteria and a sensaHonalistic
press. Others think it was hysteria and sensationalism alone. Still oth-
ers are not sure, and point out that the shiny suit so often reported on
Spring~Heeled Jack sounds very much like some kind of a space suit,
and the "fire" that squirted from his mouth may really have been an
exaggerated and imperfect recollection of the action of a ray gun.
Spring-Heeled Jack is sometimes mentioned in discussions of UFO
contacts, or creatures from another dimension.
See a/so: MAD GASSER OF MATTOON
 8

WIEDRD

<REATURIES

UN

FOLKLORE
ALLIGATORS IN THE SEWER Stories that alligators live in
the sewers of New York City have circulated for decades. The story
runs like this: At one time, baby alligators were widely sold as pets in
Miami and other Florida cities. Vacationers returning to New York
City brought baby alligators with them, but they proved to be trou-
blesome pets, and so many of them were simply flushed down the
toilet. A few survived the experience and in the warmth and darkness
of the sewers of New York thrived, feeding on rats. In some versions
of the tale a new breed of blind albino alligator had developed. Sewer
maintenance workers were said to fear meeting one of these creatures,
and to have publicly protested the additional on-the-job hazard of
having to face hungry alligators.
Most people have never taken the alligators-in-the-sewer stories
very seriously, however, researcher Loren Coleman has unearthed a
factual-sounding story in The New York Times of February 10, 1935.
Writing in the journal of American Folklore, Coleman states: "The
incident may or may not have taken place, but its publication in a no
nonsense fashion in a highly regarded and respected newspaper must
have lent much credibility to the story."
According to the Times article a group of teenaged boys were shov-
eling snow into a manhole on East 123rd Street near the Harlem
River. One of them saw something moving down where the manhole
drop merged with the sewer conduit, which led to the river. The mov-
ing thing turned out to be a seven-and-a-half-foot alligator. The boys
dropped a rope around it, pulled it to the surface, and then proceeded
225
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLkLORE 226

Alligator

to beat it to death with their snow shovels. The alligator, said the
Times, "was in no mood for a struggle after its icy incarceration. It
died on the spot. "
The article is very specific about times, places, and names of wit-
nesses. It reported that the dead creature was taken to the Lehigh
Stove and Repair Shop, where it was found to weigh 125 pounds.
Unfortunately, the story ends, "A Department of Sanitation truck
rumbled up to the store and made off with the prize. Its destination
was Barren Island and an incinerator."
The Times speculated that the creature might have been dumped
from a passing ship into the East River and, attracted by the relatively
warm water flowing out of the sewer, swam a short way up the con-
duit to the place where it was discovered.
As far as Coleman has been able to determine, this is the earliest
published report of an alligator in the sewer, and it may even be true.

BASILISK To Aristotle the basilisk was the "king of snakes."

To the Roman naturalist Pliny it was simply a snake that had some
sort of crownlike structure on its head. But by the late Middle Ages,
the basilisk had become something quite a bit more wonderful and
terrible. A book printed in 1480 states: "There is a kind of lizard that
is called Basilisk in Greek and Regulus in Latin and lsidorus says that
it is the king of all the snakes and serpents. Even serpents flee the
Basilisk because its breath is deadly and so is its appearance."
227 Basilisk
According to one medieval version of the already elaborate basilisk
story, it had to be born of an egg laid during the days of the dog star
Sirius by a seven-year-old cock. Such an egg was easy to recognize: it
did not have the normal ovoid shape but was spherical. It had no shell,
but was covered by a thick skin or membrane. The egg then had to
be hatched by a toad, and the result was an unbelievably poisonous
monster which was basically a serpent but with some of the charac-
teristics of the toad and the cock as well.
Despite all the fabulous characteristics, the basilisk was widely
believed in during the Middle Ages. Many mysterious deaths were
attributed to the presence of a basilisk, and more than one basilisk
hunt was organized. Those brave enough to attempt such a hunt
would carry a mirror, for just to look directly at a basilisk was a death
sentence, and in order to strike it with a sword, you had to view it in
a mirror. Alternately, the mirror was an excellent weapon, for if the
basilisk looked at itself in the mirror it would be killed by its own
poisonous glance.
In 1587 there was a big basilisk hunt in Warsaw, perhaps the
world's last major basilisk hunt. Two small girls had been found dead
in a cellar and it was assumed a basilisk was responsible. A condemned
prisoner was the only "volunteer" to hunt the monster.
Fitted with a leather suit and mirrors, the condemned man entered
the cellar. A short time later he merged carrying what looked like an
ordinary snake. But a physician proclaimed it to be a basilisk.
The basilisk legend was kept alive by the sale of manufactured

Basilisk
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLkLORE 228
monsters called jenny hanivers which were often sold as basilisks and
influenced the popular view of what a basilisk was supposed to look
like. But in the sixteenth-century naturalist Konrad Gesner had
already denounced the creature as "gossip," and belief declined
rapidly.
See also: DRAGON, JENNY HANIVERS

DRAGON · Of all the world's monsters, the dragon appears to

be the most universal, and its history the most complex. Yet the origin
of the idea of the dragon in the West is quite simple and straightfor-
ward. The word dragon itself can be traced back to a Greek word
meaning "sharp-sighted one," an appropriate epithet for a beady-
eyed snake. In Latin, the Greek word was converted to draco, and it
came to mean "giant snake." To the Romans the dragon was a giant
snake, probably a python from India or Africa.
Very few Romans had ever seen a real python, for their informa-
tion they had to rely on travelers' tales which tended to be both exag-
gerated and inaccurate. These exaggerations and inaccuracies found
their way into standard works on natural history and were reported
and believed for nearly two thousand years. The greatest of the
Roman naturalists, Pli~y, said of the dragon of India that it was "so
enormous a size as easily to envelop the elephant with its folds and
encircle them with its coils. The contest is equally fatal to both; the
elephant, vanquished, falls to the earth and by its weight crushes the
dragon which is entwined about it."
Pliny added a few more details about dragons. There were dragons
in Ethopia, he said, but these were a mere thirty feet long, and there-
fore much smaller than the great elephant-killing Indian dragons.
Actually the longest Old World snake is the reticulated python of
India, which reaches a length of thirty feet. Pliny had greatly exag-
gerated the length of the python. But as with the traditional fish story,
length tends to increase the more often a story is retold. Encircling
their prey and squeezing it to death is what pythons and a number of
229 Dragon
other large snakes do. However, no python would be foolish enough
to attack an elephant, even a small one, and despite what is often
shown in films and described in books, pythons do not attack full-
grown human beings either. There have been a couple of reports of
pythons attacking small children, but such attacks, if they occur at all,
are extremely rare.
Pliny added a few exotic tales about African dragons which he said
had crests on their heads, and would use them to go sailing. "Four or

Dragon

five of them twisted and interlaced together ... setting sail with their
heads erect, they are borne along upon the waves to find better
sources of nourishment in Arabia." Pliny didn't seem to take this
dragon tale too seriously.
Pliny's work remained the standard compilation of natural history
for centuries. At the time of his death, Konrad Gesner, the first com-
piler of a work on natural history since the days of the Romans, was
working on a volume on snakes. While he never finished the book, his
manuscript was later edited and published by others. It is clear that
Gesner believed dragons were giant snakes of the python variety. He
got most of his information from Pliny and even repeats some of Pli-
ny's dragon stories.
In an English version of Gesner's work, Historie of Serepents, pub-
lished in 1608, translated and edited by Edward Topsell, we once
again meet the elephant-killing dragon:
"They [the dragons] hide themselves in trees, covering their head
and letting the other part hang downe like a rope. In those trees they
watch until the Elephant comes to eate and croppe of the branches;
WEIRD CREA lURES IN FOLKLORE 230
then suddenly, before he be aware, they leape into his face and digge
out his eyes. Then doe they claspe themselves about his necke, and
with their tayles or hinder parts, beate and vexe the Elephant untill
they have made him breathlesse, for they strangle him with theyr fore
parts as they beate him with the hinder.... And this is the disposition
of the Dragon that he never setteth upon the Elephant but with the
advantage of the place, and namely from some high tree or rock."
Pliny had the struggle end as a draw, but over the centuries the
dragon seems to have come out the winner.
Other evidence that the dragon was a large snake comes from the
early pictorial representations of dragons. They were almost always
shown as large snakes. Gesner had noted that the old German word
for "dragon," Lindwurm, really meant "snake-worm," or just "snake,
snake." The old Anglo-Saxon word W yrm has been translated as
meaning equally "dragon," "serpent," or "worm." In Beowulf the
dragon is called the Worm, and in old English ballads dragons are
called the "laidly (loathly) Worm." Throughout Ireland dragonlike
monsters were called "direful W urms."
A popular English folktale which may date back to the early fif-
teenth century recounts the fight between Sir John Lambton and "the
Worm." It is a traditional knight-versus-dragon story. From the six-
teenth century onward, artists showed "the Worm" with legs. But the
original legend says nothing of legs.
So the direct dragon-snake identification is unarguable. Yet the
dragon has become much more than a large snake, for a variety of
reasons. The principal reason is that the dragon is mentioned promi-
nently in the Bible. Sometimes the words dragon and serpent are
used interchangeably, but this itself became a source of confusion, for
the snake was the animal that the Hebrews hated and feared the most;
the snake, and thus the dragon, became identified with evil and the
Devil. And so, by the time we reach the Book of Revelation, the final
book of the New Testament, we find:
"And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the
Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out
into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him" (Rev. 12:9).
231 Dragon
This interchangeable use of the words dragon and Devil gave us
the name for one of the most popular fictional monsters, Dracula. The
fictional vampire Dracula was very loosely based on a fourteenth-cen-
tury Transylvanian ruler, Vlad IV. Vlad belonged to a knightly order,
the order of the Dragon. (In the West dragons were usually, but not
always, considered evil. Occasionally they were admired for their
power and the dragon could be a symbol of power.) The word for
both dragon and Devil was dracut, and Vlad was called Dracula.
Since he had such a fearsome reputation, people tended to use the
Devil, rather than the dragon, connotation of the name.

Dragon

Just how the dragon picked up all its other attributes-the legs, the
wings, the ability to breathe fire and the rest-is not clear. They seem
to have been added bit by bit over the centuries by people who
thought that a simple snake, no matter how large, was not a sufficient
symbol of pure evil. Gesner's incomplete volume on snakes and drag-
ons displays the confusion. He discusses how the dragon was really a
large constricting snake, and then immediately the text jumps to drag-
ons with feet and wings. Something has been left out, and had Gesner
lived to complete his work, we might know a lot more about dragon
history than we do now.
The fire-breathing attribute may have come from the many poi-
sonous snakes, though the python is not poisonous. The spitting cobra
from India, a snake which actually spits its venom, may have influ-
enced the fire-breathing concept, but we really cannot be sure.
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 232
The belief that a dragon was a creature with feet and wings was
reinforced, even if it was not begun, by medieval monster makers,
those clever forgers who pieced together parts of different animals
and sold the exotic results to collecters of wonders and curios. A
dragon, being such a well-known monster, would have been in
demand. Of course, manufactured dragons were necessarily small,
and had to be passed off as "baby dragons."
Several of these showed up in Paris in 1557. An Italian mathema-
tician who saw the "baby dragons" described them thus: "Two footed
creatures with wings so small that, in my opinion they could hardly
fly with them. Their heads were small and shaped like the heads of
snakes, they were of a pleasant color without feathers or hair and the
largest of them was as large as a wren."

Dragon

At about the same time, a Frenchman named Pierre Belon printed

a picture of a winged dragon which was to become the standard
source for many later dragon pictures. In 1640 a book called The His-
tory of Serpents and Dragons by Ulisse Aldrovandi was published
and it contained a drawing of a two-footed dragon that was clearly a
more elegant rendering of Belon' s sketch. The Aldrovandi dragon has
been reprinted countless times.
233 Dragon
So it is possible that the fakers who sewed bat wings on lizard's
bodies to produce "baby dragons," may have influenced aH later
visions of the dragon. Many kinds of weird creatures were passed off
as dragons. The Bible speaks of the seven-headed dragon of the Apoc-
alypse, and apparently a group of fourteenth-century monks, trying
to attract pilgrims to their monastery, sewed seven weasels' heads onto
a snake's body and displayed the result as the seven-headed dragon
of the Apocalypse. Later this monstrosity was sold as an example of
another monster, the hydra.
For centuries, people had been finding gigantic bones of unex-
plained origin. These were attributed to humanoid giants, unicorns,
behemoth and leviathan of the Bible, and of course to dragons. The
bones belonged to extinct giant mammals that had once roamed much
of the world but had died out at the end of the Ice Age. Dinosaur
bones contributed little if anything to belief in dragons. The strange
relationship between dragons and dinosaurs will be discussed shortly.
How dragon legends were spun from the bones of extinct mammals
has been beautifully illustrated by Willy Ley. In the marketplace in
the city of Klangenfurt in Austria, says Ley, is a rather impressive
monument. "That monument fashioned about the year 1590 shows a
naked giant in the act of slaying a dragon with a big spiked club. The
dragon has a body similar to that of a crocodile, with bat wings
attached, and is furiously spitting at a giant-fire in the legend, water
in the monument. It is the skull of the dragon that is interesting: Aside
from its somewhat incongruous leaf ears, it displays very clearly the
outlines of the skull of woolly Rhinoceros antiquitatis, one of the con-
temporaries of the woolly mammoth. Chroniclers state that the skull
of the 'dragon' was found near Klangenfurt about the middle of the
sixteenth century, three decades before the monument was erected.
The skull itself was kept in the Town Hall. It has been repeatedly
examined by modern scientists and found to be the skull of a wooJly
rhinoceros."
Several learned treatises were written on the "dragon bones" and
"dragon skulls" found throughout Eruope. Examined in the light of
today's knowledge, it is obvious that the "dragons" were really extinct
mammals. The learned seventeenth-century Jesuit Father Athanasius
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 234
Kircher developed an elaborate theory about how dragons lived
underground-because their bones were usually found underground.
He said that they lived in caves and, being subterranean creatures,
were rarely seen on the surface. It was only when their return to the
underground was blocked by an earthquake or avalanche that they
were forced to remain on the surface. That is why so few dragons
were seen.
Even after the real origin of the many strange bones was estab-
lished, there were still those who refused to believe that the dragon
was just a myth-encrusted snake. They looked for some sort of large
lizardlike animal that might have inspired the dragon stories. One
man, Charles Gould, was able to describe this theoretical monster in
some detail: "We may infer that it was a long terrestrial lizard, hiber-
nating and carniverous, with the power of constricting, with its snake
like body and tail; possibly furnished with winglike expansions of its
integument . . . and capable of occasional progress on its hind legs
alone, when excited in an attack. ... "
Most modern lizards are small, generally sluggish creatures that are
unlikely candidates for inspiring the dragon myths. Then in 1912 a
great monitor lizard that lives only on the island of Komodo in the
East Indies was discovered by Europeans. It looked so much like what
people thought a dragon should look like that the lizard was named
the Komodo dragon. But the range of the Komodo dragon is very
restricted, and as far as we know always has been. Nor is there any
other modern lizard that seems to have served in any way as the
model for the dragon myth.
Well if not a modern, or recent lizard, how about a very ancient
one-the dinosaur. Dinosaurs aren's really giant lizards-they may
not even have been giant reptiles-but when first discovered, people
thought they were gigantic lizards, and the name dinosaur itself
means "terrible lizard."
When dinosaurs were first being discovered during the latter half
of the last century, the dinosaur-dragon identification was made fre-
quently. Even today people who gaze on the awesome skeletons or
reconstructions of dinosaurs are often struck with the feeling that here
235 Fairies
is the origin of the worldwide dragon story.
But that identification runs into serious problems. The first is time;
the dinosaurs, as far as we know, died out completely 65 or 70 million
years ago. That is long before human beings, or anything vaguely
resembling human beings, existed on this earth. In the days of the
dinosaurs, our own ancestors were little furry ratlike things running
between the legs of the great dinosaurs.
Could the date for the extinction of dinosaurs be wrong? Could
dinosaurs have survived until a time when they would have met
human beings face to face? Unlikely, but even if it is possible, the
dinosaurian survivors would have been extremely rare and unlikely
to have inspired a widespread myth.
The fact is that dinosaurs don't really look like the traditional
dragon-which in its early days looked like a snake, and later like a
winged lizard. Indeed, the influence has probably run the other way.
Many of the early reconstructions of dinosaurs were influenced by the
popular view of dragons. But we now know that most dinosaurs,
instead of crawling about in a lizardlike fashion, stood nearly erect
and moved on two long and powerful legs. Dinosaurs looked more
like a kangaroo or an ostrich than the traditional dragon. (There are
a couple of medieval and Renaissance drawings of bipedal dragons,
but these are quite untypical.) The four-footed dinosaurs-the sau-
ropods-such as the brontosaurus did not look dragonlike either.
What is now happening is that our view of the dinosaur has influ-
enced our view of the dragon, and some modern representations of
dragons' look more like a tyrannosaurus than the traditional dragon.
There is no authentic connection between dinosaurs and dragons.
See also: DRAGON OF THE ISHT AR GATE, ORIENTAL DRAGON

FAIRIES "The word 'fairy' is used in various ways," explains

the British folklorist Katharine Briggs. "There are a number of slang
and cant usages of the word, varying from time to time, which are
beside the point. . . . "
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 236
The usage preferred by Briggs and others is an old one dating back
at least to the seventeenth century describing the fairies as creatures
"of a middle nature between men and angels." To update that a bit,
the fairies have been regarded as a separate race of beings, neither
human nor divine, nor, we may add, diabolical-just different.
Though they inhabit some of the same space on earth as human
beings, the lives of the fairies are separate and quite distinct and the
two races interact only occasionally.
In Victorian times fairy lore was debased into children's stories, and
the fairies portrayed as tiny winged creatures flitting from buttercup
to buttercup. But that was only because people, at least those who
wrote and read Victorian "fairy stories," no longer believed in fairies.
In earlier times, and in rural areas of the British Isles and parts of
continental Europe, up to about the turn of the century, belief in fair-
ies remained strong, and they weren't all Tinkerbell either.
The fairy folk could come in a variety of sizes, some quite as large
as the average human being. While they were rarely considered
actively malevolent, they were regarded as potentially dangerous, for
they did not much like human beings, particularly humans who
entered their territory or pried into their secrets. The fairy folk were
quite powerful, and capable of severely punishing those who irritated
them. They might also aid those who had gained their favor, but good
deeds from the faries were relatively rare. The fairies were so feared
that their name could not be uttered aloud. They were referred to as
"The Good People" or "The People of Peace" or "The Good Neigh-
bors." Such names expressed more hope than reality, rather like say-
ing "good dog" to a large and ferocious-looking animal confronting
you.
The body of fairy lore is large and extraordinarily complex. Most
scholars believe that belief in fairies grew out of the ancient belief in
nature spirits and pre-Christian religions in which many gods and
spirits were worshiped.
However, there are a small number of scholars who are of the opin-
ion that fairy lore grew from authentic memories of contact with a
small-statured, secretive race of forest dwellers. According to the the-
ory, these small people were the early inhabitants of the British Isles
237 Fairies
and perhaps other parts of Europe. They were conquered by invading
tribes-the Celts in Britain and the Germanic tribes in northern
Europe. The original inhabitants were submerged, but not destroyed.
Instead, they retired to the inaccessible woods and continued to live
a secretive existence around the towns, farms, and fortifications of the
invaders. They may have dwelt in low turf-covered houses that
resembled green hillocks. Fairies were traditionally supposed to live
inside of hills. The green costume so often attributed to the fairy folk
may have been a form of camouflage.
Such a people would surely hate their conquerors and take every
opportunity to strike back at them. They could never risk an open
attack. They would have relied on guerrilla warfare, the murder of
isolated travelers, kidnapping, cattle poisoning, and other hit-and-run
tactics to revenge themselves. From these activities would grow the
legends of changelings and the dangers associated with traveling at
night through regions supposed to be the home of the fairy folk and
of the hazards to livestock posed by angry fairies.
The small and elusive people would probably have had a difficult
time eking out a living in the forest. They may have lived by robbing
their larger neighbors, and there are plenty of legends to indicate that
fairies were confirmed robbers. In order to stay in the good graces of
the fairies, people living on isolated farms customarily left food out
at night for them.
Elusive as they were, these little people could not have remained
entirely isolated from their larger neighbors. There are many stories
of men taking "fairy wives" who brought good or ill fortune depend-
ing on the circumstances. In the castle of Dunvagen on the Isle of
Skye, off the coast of Scotland, a visitor will be shown the ancient
"fairy flag," which according to legend was given to one of the early
leaders of the Clan McCloud by his fairy wife, and when carried into
battle always brought victory.
There are stories of tiny children like Tom Thumb (not the famous
circus midget, but the Tom Thumb of Grimm's Fairy Tales) and Hop
o' my Thumb, who were born to normal-sized parents. The stories
may reflect the fact that some families had the "little people" in their
hereditary background.
WEIRD CREA lURES IN FOLKLORE 238
Ultimately, the little people would have either died out or have
been completely absorbed by the dominant elements of the popula-
tion. But memories of the small hidden forest folk would remain, and
as stories of them were retold they would slowly be transformed from
human to supernatural beings.
Professor Margaret Murray, an early twentieth-century British
Egyptologist who became interested in the Middle Ages and who pro-
pounded a number of influential if eccentric theories, suggested that
what we call witchcraft started with these small folk. They were, she
said, followers of the old pagan gods and doubtless resisted Christian-
ity. With their secretive ways, they were able to keep their ancient
beliefs alive. And like many primitive people, they were skilled in the
use of herbs and poisons, which gave them their reputation for being
magical.
It is an attractive theory, but for one shortcoming, there is not a
shred of physical evidence to back it up. Margaret Murray wrote,
"The dwarf race which at one time inhabited Europe has left few
concrete remains but has survived in innumerable stories of fairies
and elves." That is an understatement; they left no concrete remains.
Not an artifact, not a bone, not the ruins of a hovel, can be attributed,
even remotely, to this theoretical small-statured race. Until such time
as some tangible evidence turns up, the idea of a real race of little
people must be regarded as sheer unfounded speculation.
There is an even more bizarre theory regarding the origin of fairy
beliefs. The British writer Leslie Shepard, when reviewing some of
the work of the British Fairy Investigation Society, commented:
"I have a strong suspicion that in the newer mythology of flying
saucers, some of those 'shining visitors' in spacecraft from other
worlds might turn out to be just another form of fairies."
UFO theoretician Jacques Vallee has suggested that the beliefs
about UFOs and fairy lore spring from the same source. He is, how-
ever, quite unclear as to just what this source may be. But he has been
able to point to an extraordinary number of parallels in the accounts
of persons who say that they have encountered fairies and those who
say they encountered beings from outer space.
239 Fearsome Critters

FEARSOME CRITTERS "Fearsome critters" is a term used

by Richard Barber and Ann Riches in their book A Dictionary of
Fabulous Beasts to describe "the fabulous fauna of the American
West." Most of these critters were born in the tall tales of the lum-
berjacks and other frontiersmen. The creatures were part of storytell-
ing sessions where the participants tried to top one another in telling
the most outrageous and outlandish lie. But while the tellers knew
they were lying, some of their listeners did not. The essence of a tall
tale is that it be told as if it were true. No matter how ludicrous the
story might seem, it is told with a straight face; it is told to be believed.
That is the difference between a taU tale and a joke.
The favored victims of these taU tales were "greenhorns," newcom-
ers to an area. As the critters became part of the general folklore of
the country, the primary victims were children, perhaps those going
on their first outing in the woods. Under these circumstances, many
of the fearsome critters of the tall tales were believed in-at least for
a while.
The taU-tale tradition was also taken up in newspapers or other
publications intent on creating or promoting some local monster.
Of all the fearsome critters, the one that has received the widest
currency is probably the hoop snake. This is the fabulous snake that
grasps its tail in its mouth and can roll down a hill at tremendous
speed. The only way to escape such a snake is to jump through the
hoop. Barber and Riches comment that the hoop snake "may derive
from the eternity-serpent symbol known in Egyptian and Greek art."
Most children appear to believe the hoop snake story when it is first
told to them, and some may carry this belief into adulthood. Another
fearsome serpent is the horn snake, which has a poisonous spur on the
end of its tail.
A popular creature known under a variety of names was the guy-
ascutus, sidewinder, hunkus, ricaboo racker, side-hill gouger, prock
gwinter, or cutter cuss. The most notable feature of this creature was
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 240
that the legs on one side of its body were longer than the legs on the
other side, so that it could graze in steep mountain pastures. There
were many variations of this theme. Some said there were either
right-sided or left-sided guyascutuses, and that they could go around
the hill in only one direction. Others insisted that the creature had
telescoping legs so that when it wanted to go one way it made one set
of legs longer, and when it wanted to go the other way it elongated
the other set. It is possible that this tale originated in an old belief that
the badger has one set of legs shorter than the other. An alternate
name for badger is brock, and one of the names for this creature was
prock.
Guyascutus was also used as a name for a far larger and more dan-
gerous animal. The size and appearance of this particular beast was
never made clear, but it was certainly something to be feared. There
are a number of stories connected with showmen who put one of these
truly fearsome critters on display. In one story, a couple of showmen
came into a Midwestern town and advertised that the ferocious guy-
ascutus, or guyanoosa, would be shown, for a fee of course, that eve-
ning. The local people dutifully paid their fee and took their seats,
and as they waited with some anxiety for their first sight of this ter-
rifying creature, one of the showmen rushed in shouting, "De guy-
anoosa am loose!" The audience fled in panic, and the showman pock-
eted the money without ever having to show the local yokels
anything.
Mark Twain improved the tale a bit by telling how the showmen
came to town advertising that they would be displaying a guyanoosa
and a prock. As the moment for showing the two fabulous beasts
approached, the showman rushed in shouting, "De guyanoosa am
loose, and it's eaten de prock!"
The hodag was a monster of the Wisconsin swamps. The creature
had huge claws, bulging eyes, large horns, and a line of sharp spikes
which ran down the middle of its back. But the most unusual feature
of the hodag was that it could never lie down, for it had no joints in
its legs. It slept by leaning against a tree and the best way to catch
one was to cut into its favorite tree so that when the hodag leaned
241 Fearsome Critters
against it to sleep, both monster and tree fell over.
The jointless legs were a characteristic also attributed to the achlis,
a creature mentioned in the works of the ancient Roman naturalist
Pliny. Pliny's beast, however, was an inoffensive vegetarian, not a
ferocious killer like the hodag. Whether the characteristic of being
unable to lie down was carried straight from the pages of Pliny to the
swamps of Wisconsin or whether the hodag received his jointless legs
as the result of independent invention is unknown.
A live hodag was supposedly captured near Rhinelander, Wiscon-
sin, in the late nineteenth century. The whole hodag capture was a
hoax planned and executed by a man named Eugene S. Shephard
who threw a spike-studded horsehide over a large dog and then
charged admission to see the "hodag" that was housed in a dimly
lighted cage. When the story of the hodag's capture was sent to the

Hodag
WEIRD CREA lURES IN FOLKLORE 242
newspapers, the theory was advanced that the hodag was "the long
sought missing link between the ichthyosaurus and the mylodon of
the Ice Age" -a statement that is meaningless double-talk.
According to Curtis D. MacDougall in his book Hoaxes, "After the
original hodag's death a stuffed successor was exhibited at fairs for
two years. Whenever a convention meets at Rhinelander the fame of
the monster lives anew, stuffed hodags being manufactured for floats
and other displays. Luke Sylvester Kearney in 1928 published a book
The Hodag. W. J. Lemke, head of the news bureau of the University
of Arkansas, states that during his boyhood at Wausau, Wisconsin,
'large photographs of the hodag on a fallen log, surrounded by a
group of his captors armed with axes pitchforks, etc., were fairly com-
mon. Many of them were used as decorations in the saloons.'"
The growrow, so named because of the terrible growling sounds it
made, was a monster from Arkansas. A copy of the Arkansas Gazette
of Little Rock in 1897 mentions the killing of one of these creatures
by a posse in Search County, Arkansas, after the monster had terrified
the countryside and killed off a large number of cows and horses.
According to the paper, the creature was twenty feet long, with a
ponderous head, two enormous tusks, short legs, webbed feet with
claws, green scales, a back bristling with short horns, and a long thin
tail. Around the turn of the century the newspaper hoax-an abso-
lutely ridiculous story, reported straight without any indication of its
fictional origin-was a popular and nearly respectable style of jour-
nalism. The newspaperman's cynical attitude was. if the reader fell for
such nonsense, that was his problem. We can assume that the Arkan-
sas growrow falls into the hoax category.
Some of the popular fearsome critters were not really meant to be
taken seriously at all, and they are examined here in order to give
something of the flavor that these tall tales possessed. There was, for
example, the argopelter, which lives in hollow trees and amuses itself
by throwing pieces of wood at passers-by. It throws so hard that it
sometimes causes injury, and it is so fast that it has never been seen.
The mysterious whirling whumpus has been seen only as a blur,
because it constantly spins around at a tremendous rate of speed. The
243 Fearsome Critters
splinter cat eats raccoons and bees, both of which live in hollow trees.
It extracts its prey by charging at the tree and smashing it with its
hard forehead. The results of a hungry splinter cat's work is often
attributed to lightning or wind damage.
The sliver cat is a killer; it eats people. It's an evil-looking thing
with slanting red eyes and a long tail with a hard knob on the end.
One side of the knob is spiked, the other side smooth. The creature
would lurk in the branches of trees and when a likely-looking meal
passed underneath, it would knock him down with the knob and pick
him up with the spikes.
Another danger lurking about in trees was the hidebehind. It got
its name because it hid behind trees ready to carry men off to its lair
and eat them. No one knew what a hidebehind looked like because it
was always hiding behind something. When a lumberjack failed to
return to camp, it was assumed that a hidebehind had gotten him.
The rumpifusel was a thin furry creature that wrapped itself
around trees and looked rather like a fur scarf. An inexperienced lum-
berjack might actually try to put a rumpifusel on, and be strangled
by it.
The flitterbick is a flying squirrel that flew so quickly it could kill
a man if it hit him between the eyes. Flitterbicks were considered
exceptionally dangerous because you couldn't see them coming.
From the Southwest came the cactus cat, which looked very much
like an ordinary cat except that it had hair like thorns and a clump of
thorns over each ear. Sharp knifelike spurs of bone protruded from
above its feet, and it had a three-branched tail. It used the blades on
its legs to slash giant cactuses and allow the sap to ooze out, thus get-
ting a drink in the dry desert. But there was a danger, for after several
days the oozing sap would ferment in the desert heat and when the
cactus cat drank it, the creature became intoxicated and rushed
around the desert uttering horrible shrieks.
In an even more lighthearted vein there was the goofus, a bird that
only flew backwards, because it was not interested in where it was
going, only where it had been. Its aquatic counterpart, the goofgang,
was a fish that swam backwards to keep the water out of its eyes. The
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 244
phyllyloo was an American variety of stork that flew upside down to
keep warm and avoid rheumatism, and the gillygaloo was a bird that
nested on hilly ground and therefore had to lay square eggs so that
they would not roll downhill. Hardboiled gillygaloo eggs were used
as dice by the lumberjacks.
Giddyfish were small and elastic. In the winter they could be
caught in a rather unusual way through holes in the ice. The trick was
to hit one of them on the head with a paddle, so that it would begin
to bounce up and down. All the other giddyfi.sh would imitate it.
When they had all bounced through the hole in the ice, fishermen
could just pick them up.
There are almost an endless number of other local monsters or
incredible creatures bearing such names as the billdad, treesqueak,
cross-feathered see, and snoligostus, but of all of them the most mel-
ancholy was the squonk. This was a beast from the hemlock forests of
Pennsylvania. It was extremely ugly, and so ashamed of its appear-
ance that it kept out of sight and wept continuously from self-pity. It
could be traced by the trail of tears that it left, but if captured was
liable to dissolve entirely, leaving behind only a puddle of tears and
some bubbles.
See also: FUR-BEARING TROUT, JACKALOPE, JERSEY DEVIL

FuR-BEARING TROUT The fur-bearing trout, that is, a per-

fectly ordinary mounted trout wrapped in a white rabbit pelt or some
other fur, was a common ornament at bars in the upper Midwest and
parts of Canada. Specimens of this fake were sometimes shown at fairs
throughout the country. They were said to be examples of a very rare
fish that was found only in deep cold lakes and rivers. Often these
mounted fish looked realistic enough to fool, or at least puzzle, the
young or the inexperienced.
In his book Animal Fakes & Frauds Peter Dance describes a fur-
bearing trout that was brought by a lady to the Royal Scottish
Museum in Edinburgh. Under the fish was this engraved label:
245 Giants
FUR BEARING TROUT
Very Rare
Caught while trolling in lake Superior off Gros Cap, near Sault Ste.
Marie, district of Algoma. It is believed that the great depth and the
extreme penetrating coldness of the water in which the fish live has
caused them to grow their dense coat of (usually) white fur. Mounted
by ROSS C. JOBE, Taxidermist of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.

Dance indicates that the woman who brought the fish into the
museum had bought it in good faith and "the idea of a fur-bearing
trout did not seem outlandish to her."
See also: JACKALOPE

GIANTS Most peoples have tales of giants somewhere in their

mythology. The fact that giants are mentioned prominently in the
Bible has made many people believe that even if giants no longer exist
today, they did at some time in the history of the human race.
Some of the biblical references to giants, most notably the story of
Goliath, can be explained by assuming that Goliath was just an excep-
tionally tall and powerful individual whose size and strength tended
to be exaggerated as the story of his defeat by David was retold over
the centuries. How much more wonderful it is to defeat a giant, rather
than a tall man.
Other references are not quite so easy to explain. In Numbers
(13:33) there is the tale of the Israelites who had been sent ahead to
spy on the inhabitants of the Promised Land: "And there we saw
giants; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were
in their sight." This thoroughly unsettling report plunged the Chil-
dren of Israel into a state of despair.
Another reference to giants comes in Deuteronomy (3:11) and
speaks of Og, king of Bashan, as the last of the race of giants. We are
given some idea of Og's size by being told that his iron bedstead was
about fourteen feet long and six feet wide.
In both of these cases, we might again explain the giants away by
WEIRD CREA lURES IN FOLKLORE 246
assuming that they are exceptionally tall individuals or races whose
size had been exaggerated as stories about them were retold. But the
reference that has always excited the most speculation about the exis-
tence of a race of real giants is the one that appears very early in the
Bible, Genesis 6:4: "There were giants in the earth in those days."
This passage begins one of the most enigmatic and widely discussed
sections of the Bible. It is connected with the ancient Jewish story of
the watcher angels, and some believe with the story of the fall of
Satan. One possible interpretation of this section of Genesis is that the
giants were the result of a union between human females and fallen
angels-though such an interpretation is by no means obvious. But it
is beyond dispute that the ancient Hebrews believed that at one time
there were giants in the world.
It is also possible that the Hebrews got the idea of giants from occa-
sional observations of the bones of giant animals of past ages. Unques-
tionably, some of the belief in giants was kept alive in later eras by
finding such bones. An ingenious theory holds that the giant cyclops
that appears in Homer's Odyssey was inspired by the finding of the
skull of an extinct variety of elephant. Homer, or the people from .
which this story of the cyclops originally sprang, may never have seen
a living elephant. So when they found the huge skull of one, the enor-
mous nasal passage looked to them like a gigantic single eye socket,
right in the middle of the creature's forehead.
When the Spanish reached Mexico, they were told that the land
had once been inhabited by a race of giants. These giants had been
evil creatures, the Indians said, and had been defeated by the Indians'
ancestors.
Bernal Diaz del Castillo, whose chronicle of the Spanish conquest
of Mexico is considered accurate and reliable, wrote: "And in order
that we might judge their [the giants] size, they brought us a thigh-
bone of a man of this race. It was so large that when placed upright
it was as high as a man of average size. I stood beside it, and found
that it was as tall as myself, though I am as tall as most men. They
brought also other pieces of other bones of great size, but much
decayed by time, but the one I have mentioned was entire; we were
247 Giants
astonished at these remains, and thought they certainly proved the
former existence of giants." One of the best samples of bones was sent
to Charles V of Spain, but there is no record that it was ever received,
or if it was what happened to it. It would be nice to have the speci-
men, but even without it we are quite safe in assuming that Bernal
Diaz's interpretation of what he saw was wrong. He was almost cer-
tainly looking at the thighbone of a long-extinct mastodon, and not a
bone from the leg of a humanoid giant, though both the Spaniard and
the Mexican Indian thought that's what it was.
The confusion continued for centuries. When an enormous tooth
and some very large bones were uncovered in 1705 on the Hudson .
River near the town of Claverack, N.Y., the discovery inspired Joseph
Dudley, governor of Massachusetts and a keen student of natural his-
tory as well as of the Bible, to write: "I am perfectly of the opinion
that the tooth will agree only to the human body, for whom the Flood
could only prepare a funeral."
Dudley wrote those words to the Reverend Cotton Mather, who is
known today primarily for his part in the notorious Salem witchcraft
trials. But in his own time, Mather was highly respected intellectual,
and one of the best-educated men in the country. He was very inter-
ested in the remains of giants that had perished in the Flood, and had
sent a description of a "giant's tooth" to the Royal Society in London,
the world's leading scientific organization. It was an elephant's tooth,
but most of the members of the Royal Society didn't know that.
The biblical giant explanation for the bones of long-extinct giant
mammals went out of fashion completely in about the middle of the
eighteenth century. But the search for giants in the earth did not end
then; there was even talk of living giants.
Patagonia, the southern part of Argentina that has so often been the
setting for tales of bizarre creatures, was also supposed to be the home
of giants. Antonio Pigafetta, who wrote the chronicle of Ferdinand
Magellan's around-the-world voyage, said that in Patagonia Magel-
lan's crew had encountered giants. "This man was so tall that our
heads scarcely came up to his waist, and his voice was like that of a
bull." Other early travelers to Patagonia reported meetings with sim-
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 248
ilar giants and the Patagonian giants became world famous. But they
did not much impress the young naturalist Charles Darwin, who met
them during his around-the-world voyage on the Beagle.
"We had an interview at Cape Gregory with the famous so-called
gigantic Patagonians who gave us a cordial reception," Darwin wrote
in his journal. "Their height appears greater than it really is, from
their large guanaco mantles, their long flowing hair, and general fig-
ure. On an average their height is about six feet, with some men taller
and only a few shorter; and the women are also tall; altogether they
are certainly the tallest race which we anywhere saw." Darwin had
not encountered the Watusi of Africa, who are even taller. Though
the Patagonians were tall, Darwin believed that the impression of
truly colossal size they had given to many travelers was more of an
illusion. No one since Darwin has spoken of meeting Patagonian
giants.
There are rumors that the people met by Darwin and later travelers
were not the real Patagonian giants. The real giants, according to the
rumors, have slipped away into the interior where they cannot be
found, and they may be lurking there still.

Patagonian giants
249 Giants
There are tales, fairly recent ones, of giants in the interior of South
America. This item appeared in the London Daily Mirror on May 16,
1966:
"A ferocious band of savages more than seven feet tall are terror-
.izing neighboring tribes in the Amazon jungle. The existence of the
savages was revealed by a group of Brazilian air cadets who went on
a course of adventure-training in the jungle.
"According to the cadets the giants are known locally as the Krem-
Akaore."
Closer investigation revealed that these "giants" in fact averaged
only six feet or less in height. They were only somewhat taller than
the average member of the surrounding tribes.
The newspapers, particularly the more sensationalistic ones, occa-
sionally carry reports of the discovery of the dried and mummified
remains of "red-haired giant cannibals" in places throughout the
American West. While naturally dried and mummified remains have
been found in the American West, such giant stories are based on
exaggeration, misinterpretation, and downright falsehood.
Another piece of evidence often cited for the existence of a now
vanished race of giants are huge and ancient structures found in var-
ious parts of the world, which, according to some, could not possibly
have been built by ordinary mortals with simple tools. Such structures
are often called "cyclopean," a reference to the giant Cyclops of
Greek mythology. Stonehenge is the best known of these "cyclopean"
structures, and at one time it was known as the Giant's Dance. How-
ever, the theory that any of these great structures were built by giants
can no longer be taken seriously by anyone.
Another area that has been explored in the search for the "giants
in the earth" is our own evolutionary heritage. In the 1930s Ralph von
Koenigswald, a Dutch geologist, found the teeth of a creature that he
believed belonged to a long-extinct giant ape that he named Gigan-
topithecus. One of von Koenigswald's friends and associates, Franz
Weidenreich, decided that the teeth belonged to a giant man, or
Giganthropus, not a giant ape. He linked this up with some other
fossil fragments and concluded:
WEIRD CREA lURES IN FOLKLORE 250
"I believe that all of these [giant] forms have to be ranged back in
the human line and the human line leads to giants the farther back it
is traced .... In other words the giants may be directly ancestral to
man. "
Weidenreich got very little scientific support for his giant-ancestor
theory, and the multitude of fossil finds made since he first developed
the idea point strongly in the other direction-our ancestors were not
giants-they were in fact quite small, and the human race is bigger
today than it has ever been.
One cannot leave the subject of giants without at least a brief men-
tion of one of the more spectacular and funnier hoaxes in American
history-the Cardiff giant. The hoax was pulled off by George Hull,
a tabacconist from Binghampton, N.Y. Hull apparently got the idea
after losing an argument to a traveling evangelist about the existence
of giants in biblical times.
If they want to believe in giants, Hull appears to have thought, then
I'll give them giants. He had a giant figure carved out of gypsum by
Edward Salle, an Iowa stonecutter. He then had the figure brought in
by cart and buried secretly on the farm of one of his relatives, William
C. Newell of Cardiff, New York. All in all, the hoax cost the conspir-
ators about one thousand dollars, a considerable sum in those days,
but they looked on it as an investment.
The conspirators were in no hurry. A full year was allowed to pass
before some of Newell's neighbors "accidentally" unearthed the fig-
ure while digging a well on Newell's property. The figure ~as about
twelve feet long, four feet broad, and twenty-two inches thick. It was
a nude man with his legs drawn slightly upward and with one hand
placed modestly to cover his genitals.
As word of the remarkable find spread, Hull and his associates
acted rapidly. They set up a tent and began charging admission to see
"the American gohath." Many people did indeed believe that they
were seeing proof positive of the biblical statement about giants in the
earth, and that this petrified figure was one of a race of giants that
had existed before the Flood.
Incredibly, an Indian "legend" was also brought out to explain the
251 Giants

Cardiff giant

fake. An Onondaga woman was said to have declared that Cardiff

giant was really the body of a gigantic Indian prophet who had said
upon his death that his descendants would see him again. Others
thought that the giant was a Phoenician idol, and still others insisted
it had been made by the Jesuits, who had once been in the region.
The great paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale would have
none of this speculation. He flatly declared the thing to be a modern
fake, and his word carried great weight. Finally Hull himself admit-
ted to the hoax.
The Cardiff giant was the victim of a double hoax. The showman
Phineas T. Barnum tried to buy the thing, but Hull refused to sell, so
Barnum just had his own fake made and exhibited it at Wood's
Museum in New York City as the genuine article. What could Hull
do-sue for fraud? It would have made an interesting legal case.
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 252

The origins of the griffin-that fabulous half lion,

half eagle-are obscure. Griffins often appeared in the art of the
nomadic Scythians, who used all sorts of fabulous animals for deco-
ration. The Scythians, however, probably didn't invent the griffin.
The Romans heard rumors of griffins in central Asia. The depreda-
tions of these wild creatures were cited by refugees who came to
Rome from the East as one of the major reasons for fleeing their
homeland.
The Roman naturalist Pliny wrote about griffins, but he made it
quite clear that he did not believe such monsters existed. Those who
compiled medieval bestiaries, or books of beasts, were a good deal
more credulous than Pliny. One book warns men to stay away from
the griffin "because it feasts upon them at any opportunity." The
warning continues: "It is also extremely fond of eating horses."
Throughout the Middle Ages, objects reputed to be "griffin's claws"
were brought to the markets of Europe. Those that came from the
north were often the tusks of long-extinct mammoths, or the horns of
the equally extinct woolly rhinoceros. Those "griffin's claws" from
southern regions were usually the horns of antelopes.
Unlike the dragon, which has been the subject of serious specula-
tion, the griffin has long been recognized to be an entirely mythical
creature.

IHJYDRA The second of Hercules' twelve labors was to vanquish

the many-headed Hydra. This monster had nine heads, one of which
was immortal. Every time you cut off one of the heads, two more
quickly grew to replace it. Hercules managed to prevail over the
monster by having his servant cauterize the stump as he severed each
head, and then burying the immortal central head under a big rock.
The Hydra was almost certainly inspired by the eight-tentacled
octopus: the ninth immortal head would have been the octopus's real
253 Hydra
head. There are several pieces of Roman art which show Hercules
struggling with a distinctly octopuslike Hydra.
However, the Hydra-octopus identification was lost and both Kon-
rad Gesner in the sixteenth century and Edward Tapsell in the sev-
enteenth century wrote of the Hydra as a real, many-headed monster,

Hydra

specimens of which existed in private collections. Said Tapsell in 1607,

"I have also heard that in Venice in the Duke's treasury, among the
rare Monuments of that City, there is preserved a Serpent with seven
heads, which if it be true, it is more probable that there is a Hydra,
and that the Poets were ·not altogether deceived that say Hercules
killed such a one."
What happened to this "Hydra" is unknown, but a couple of other
preserved "Hydras" turned up. The most famous of these was kept in
a collection in Hamburg, and was regarded as authentic by many nat-
uralists for years. This monster, in fact, was a fabrication made up of
weasels' heads and paws and snakeskin. It had probably begun as a
monkish forgery of the seven-headed dragon of the Apocalypse, but
had somehow been transformed into a Hydra in an age when people
no longer believed in the dragon of the Apocalypse. By the early eigh-
teenth century, even the Hydra identification could no longer be sus-
tained. The young naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who was to become the
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 254
acknowledged father of systematic biology, took one look at the
fabled creature and exclaimed, "Great God, who never put more than
one clear brain in one of thy created bodies."
The day of the Hydra was over. It is now the name of a multiten-
tacled miscroscopic creature.
See also: DRAGON

JACKALOPE Throughout the Western United States, you can

buy postcards with a photograph of the fabulous jackalope. Stuffed
specimens of this creature can sometimes be found on display, usually
in bars. The jacakalope is said to be a rare, nearly extinct antlered
species of rabbit. Up close, the jackalope looks like a stuffed rabbit
with a pair of horns or antlers stuck onto it. And, of course, that is
exactly what it is.
The jackalope appears to be strictly an American invention, for the

Jackalope
255 Jenny Hanivers
creature is often made up of a combination of jackrabbit and antelope
(pronghorn) horns. However, the combination of stuffed rabbit and
horns has a wider popularity. Daphne Hills of the British museum
tells of a letter from a Frenchwoman who said that she had seen a
hare with deer's antler attached in a shop in Scotland.
In his book Animal Fakes & Frauds, Peter Dance adds this infor-
mation: "Henry Tegner djscovered that it [the jackalope] probably
originated in Central Europe many years ago. Commenting on a jack-
alope exhibited in a small Canadian town recently (it was a 'horned
cotton-tailed rabbit' as far as he was concerned), he mentioned a dis-
covery he had made in one of the Seine-side open-air bookstalls in
Paris. There he found a series of old German prints 'beautifully
painted by an artist called Haid and dated 1794.' The series included
pictures of a number of antlered hares. 'The antlers of these nonex-
istent creatures' he says, 'appeared to resemble those of immature roe-
bucks.' Whether or not the Scottish and American jackalopes have
connections with these German examples I have not been able to
discover."
See also: FEARSOME CRITTERS, FUR-BEARING TROUT, JENNY HANIVERS

JENNY HANIVERS Sailors would bring them home to amaze

their friends. Sometimes they would be sold at curio shops in seaports.
They were called baby dragons, basilisks, devil fishes, or some other
suitably monstrous name. But those who knew what they were called
them jenny hanivers, though no one really knew why.
They were small dried, ugly creatures, with rather diabolical faces,
wings, tails, and often legs. They looked extremely monstrous, but in
fact they were only fish of the ray or skate tribe which had been
carved in various ways, dried, and varnished.
No one knows when the practice of turning skates and rays into
miniature monsters began, but it must have been centuries ago. Kon-
rad Gesner's historic work on the animals of the world, Historia Ani-
malium, published in 1558, contains a picture of a creature that is
WEIRD CREA lURES IN FOLKLORE 256
clearly a jenny haniver, and a couple of others that might be.
It isn't hard to see how the practice began; you just have to look at
the underside of a skate or ray to get the idea. Said science writer
Willy Ley, "Anyone who has ever seen a ray swimming in an upright
position near the glass of a large seawater aquarium will recall the
quite unpleasant sensation of having faced an evil living mask.

Ray

Actually the staring 'eyes' of the face are but the nostrils. The real
eyes are on the dark back of the fish and are rather inconspicuous."
Our imagination turns the nostrils into eyes. So while the ray looks
harmless enough from the top, which is practically featureless, the
"face" on the bottom looks distinctly evil.
At some time someone looked at a dead ray turned up on the beach
and decided that its evil appearance could be improved upon. Here,
according to the Australian ichtyologist Gilbert P. Whitley, is how it
can be done: "By taking a small dead skate, curling its side fins over
its back, and twisting its tail into any required position. A piece of
string is tied round the head behind the jaws to form a neck and the
skate is dried in the sun. During the subsequent shrinkage, the jaws
project to form a snout and a hitherto concealed arch of cartilage pro-
trudes so as to resemble folded arms. The nostrils, situated a little
above the jaws are transformed into a quaint pair of eyes, the olfac-
tory laminae resembling eyelashes. The result of this simple process,
257 Jenny Hanivers
preserved with a coat of varnish and perhaps ornamented with a few
dabs of paint, is a jenny haniver, well calculated to excite wonder in
anyone interested in marine curios. The front aspect of the finished
article is really the under surface of the skate, whose back and true
eyes are hidden by the curled pectoral fins."
The fins can be cut and stretched so as to appear to be wings or legs

Jenny haniver

or both. Thus a rather harmless and ordinary-looking sea creature can

be transformed into a monster. The only real mystery is the origin of
the odd name, which has proved quite untraceable. The best guess is
that the second word i.s a distorted form of Anvers, the French name
for Antwerp, a port city in Belgium where many of these fraudulent
monsters were made.
Jenny hanivers were extremely popular and valued specimens dur-
ing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they frequently
turned up in the collections of amateur naturalists. The jenny hanivers
greatly influenced the popular conception of the appearance of a
purely mythical monster, the basilisk. By the eighteenth century,
however, the fraudulent nature of these creations was generally
recognized by knowledgeable people, though they were still collected
as oddities.
The once thriving trade in jenny hanivers isn't completely dead,
even today. New specimens turn up now and then. The most common
place of origin today is the Gulf of Mexico. Usually they are crudely
made when compared to their old prototypes, and they are no longer
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 258
displayed as basilisks and dragons, but as "devil fish" and, at least on
one occasion, as a little man from outer space.
See also: BASILISK, NONDESCRIPT

JERSEY DEVIL The Pine Barrens of New Jersey are a surpris-

ingly isolated and sparsely populated region, located in the midst of
one of the most heavily populated and highly industrialized places in
the world, southeastern New Jersey. The Pine Barrens, which are
unsuitable for farming, enjoyed a measure of prosperity during the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when iron ore was
mined there. But the mines closed down over a century ago when
their product could no longer compete with the higher grades of iron
ore being mined in the West, and the population of the Pine Barrens
shrank. Those "Pineys" who remained slid into isolation and extreme
poverty.
From this region come tales of the monster known as the Jersey
Devil. No one is quite sure when the Jersey Devil stories began. Some
think they go back to colonial times while others insist the story is less
than 150 years old. There are also many versions of what the Jersey
Devil is, and where it is supposed to have come from. In his book on
the Pine Barrens, the writer John McPhee recounts the most popular
tale concerning the birth of the monster.
In about 1735 a poor woman known as "Mother" Leeds had eleven
children. When she found out she was to bear a twelfth, she cried out
that she was sick of children, and that this next one could be the Devil.
And so, according to the legend, it was.
The Leeds Devil was another popular name for the monster of the
Pine Barrens; yet another version of the legend places the birth of the
"Devil" at Leeds Point, between the Pine Barrens and the Atlantic
Ocean. "Mother" Leeds is not mentioned. Still another variation sets
the birth of the monster as late as 1850, and says that it was born as
the result of a Gypsy's curse on a young girl. According to all the
versions of the legend, the monster escaped into the woods shortly
259 Jersey Devil
after its birth and still survives there.
Descriptions of the monster also vary a good deal, though certain
basic characteristics remain fairly constant: a large horselike head,
wings, and a long serpentine body. People said they could hear its
screams coming from deep in the woods at night, and its appearance
was generally regarded as a harbinger of evil.
The Jersey Devil would probably have remained an obscure local
legend, and have faded away entirely by now, were it not for a series
of events that took place during the week of January 16 to 23, 1909.
These events are chronicled in detail in The jersey Devil, a book
by James F. McCloy and Ray Miller, Jr. According to the authors,
thousands of people saw the Devil or its footprints during that week.
Fairly typical was the sighting of E. W. Minster of Bristol, N.J.
"As I got up I heard an eerie, almost supernatural sound from the
direction of the river .... I looked out upon the Delaware and saw
flying diagonally across what appeared to be a large crane, but which
was emitting a glow like a fire-fly.
"Its head resembled that of a ram, with curled horns, and its long
thick neck was thrust forward in flight. It had long thin wings and
short legs, the front legs shorter than the hind. Again it uttered its
mournful and awful call-a combination of a squawk and a whistle,
the beginning very high and piercing and ending very low and
hoarse .... "
In addition to this and other equally fantastic sightings, many peo-
ple found what they took to be the hoofprints of a strange animal in
the snow. The mysterious tracks appeared in the oddest places, even
on the roofs of houses. The prints seemed to be particularly thick
around chicken houses, and indeed the death or disappearance of
many chickens and some larger animals were blamed on the Jersey
Devil. The Jersey Devil was no longer a local legend of the Pine Bar-
rens; stories about it appeared in papers all over the country. And
sightings were reported well beyond the boundaries of the Barrens.
The newspaper accounts contained ridicule and awestruck specula-
tion, in about equal measure. Like most monster stories, people were
unsure about whether to take them seriously.
WEIRD CREA lURES IN FOLKLORE 260
But after a week, the Devil seemed to disappear as suddenly and
as mysteriously as it had appeared. Interest, however, did not die
down at once. The curator of the Philadelphia Zoo, with tongue firmly
in cheek, offered a $10,000 reward for the monster.
Jacob F. Hope, an animal trainer, and Norman Jefferies, a publicist,
claimed that they had actually captured the Jersey Devil. It was, they
said, a rare Australian vampire which Hope had in his possession and
intended to put on display, when the creature escaped and created all
the Jersey Devil excitement. Hope and Jefferies said it had been
recaptured after "a terrific struggle," and was put on display in a
dime museum. What was put on display was a large kangaroo with
false wings attached to its back and painted with green stripes. The
public was only given a quick look at this bogus monstrosity. Jefferies
later gleefully confessed to his part in the hoax.
Since 1909 there have been occasional Jersey Devil "flaps," but
none approaching the great 1909 outburst. The Jersey Devil did cre-
ate quite a furor among the teenagers in the area of Gibbstown in
November 1951. There were the familiar tales of strange sounds in
the woods, rumors of killed and maimed birds and animals. Most of
those who reported seeing the Devil were teenagers, and the local
police and school authorities firmly denounced the excitement as a
mixture of hoax and hysteria.
See also: DEVIL's FOOTPRINTS

MERMAID "As well as yearning to fly like a bird, we humans

have always wanted to swim like a fish, and that may be one reason
for the existence of the mermaid legend, prevalent in all ages and in
almost all countries." So writes Peter Dance of the British Museum,
author of Animal Fakes & Frauds.
Unfortunately, the historical record for the mermaid contains an
enormous gap. We know that the first civilizations of the Middle East
worshiped a variety of fish-tailed gods. The earliest known was
Oannes, Lord of the Waters, whose worship began some 7,000 years
261 Mermaid
ago, about the same time civilization itself began. There are also fish-
tailed gods of one sort or another to be found in the beliefs of India,
China, Japan, and Greece.
The connection between these ancient gods and the mermaid fre-
quently reported by European seamen from the fifteenth century
onward, however, is unclear. The mermaid tradition does not appear
to have been drawn directly from the ancient beliefs but is the prod-
uct of relatively modern seafaring lore.
According to Richard Barber and Anne Riches, authors of A Dic-
tionary of Fabulous Beasts: "The seal is at the root of the many Nor-
wegian and Hebridean legends about mermaids; and she has been
confused again with the seal-maid proper, who comes ashore and casts
her skin. If her skin is removed she is compelled to remain in human
shape .... Mermaids who took human lovers more frequently exacted
a vow of secrecy from them, which if broken meant their return to
the water."
But this is the purely legendary mermaid; there are also plenty of
sightings of "real" mermaids. In 1608 two of Henry Hudson's crew
saw a mermaid. "This morning," wrote Hudson, "one of our com-
panie looking over boord saw a Mermaid, and calling up some of the
companie to see her, one more came up, and by the time shee was
come close to the ships side, looking earnstly on the men: a little after,
a Sea came and overturned her: From the Navill upward her backe
and breasts were like a womans [as they say they saw her] her body
as big as one of us; her skin very white; and long haire hanging down
behinde, of the colour blacke; in her going downe they saw her tayle,
which was like the tayle of a Porposse, and speckled like a Macrell."
Mermaid sightings were reported right into the nineteenth century.
In 1881 a Boston paper ran a description of a preserved mermaid that
was brought to New Orleans:
"This wonder of the deep is in a fine state of preservation. The head
and body of a woman are very plainly and distinctly marked. The
features of the face, eyes, nose, mouth, teeth, arms, breasts and hair
are those of a human being. The hair on its head is of a pale silky
blonde, several inches in length. The arms terminate in claws closely
WEIRD CREA lURES IN FOLKLORE 262
resembling an eagle's talons instead of fingers with nails. From the
waist up, the resemblance to a woman is perfect, and from the waist
down, the body is exactly the same as of the ordinary mullet of our
waters, with its scales, fins and tail perfect."
What are we to make of such reports? Even during the nineteenth
century there were a few zoologists who took the mermaid accounts
quite seriously. Of course, we now know there are no such creatures.
As far as the sightings like the one reported by Henry Hudson's crew-
men, they may have been deliberate tall tales, or they may have been
mistakes. It has often been suggested that seals, or more probably sir-
enians like the manatee and sea cow, were mistaken for mermaids.
How these rather ugly creatures could have been seen as the tradi-
tionally beautiful mermaid is unclear to anyone who has not spent a
long period at sea. However, the manatee will sometimes nurse its
young in a surprisingly human manner.
The report in the Boston paper of the mermaid that had been
brought to New Orleans may have been a complete hoax. Hoaxes of
that type were quite common in newspapers. But it was more prob-
ably a different sort of hoax. The manufacture of "mermaids" was a
small, though vigorous, industry from the sixteenth to the nineteenth
centuries. Not that these manufactured mermaids were very good
looking. Writes Peter Dance:
"Ideally the mermaid needed to be-well, like a mermaid is sup-
posed to be-good to look at. The reality, as concocted by the mer-
maid manufacturers, fell far short of this ideal. It is as if they knew
they could not produce anything even remotely satisfying as the leg-
endary mermaid and abandoned the attempt in favour of a grotesque
parody of it."
Dance speculates that the manufacture of mermaids probably
began in ancient times, though there is no proof of this. The earliest
recorded reference to a manufactured mermaid appears in a work
written in the late sixteenth century, and by the late eighteenth cen-
tury there was a virtual "mermaid craze" which continued well into
the nineteenth century. It was an age of showmen who exhibited dis-
plays of "curiosities of nature" for a fee in public halls all over the
263 Mermaid
world. Along with the two-headed snakes and three-legged dogs there
was often a preserved mermaid.
Most of these "mermaids" were quite small, being made up of the
head and shoulders of a shaved monkey stitched to the body and tail
of a fish. Occasionally, a larger specimen used the head and shoulders
of an ape, like an orangutan, and the tail of a porpoise. These man-
ufactured mermaids were invariably ugly and often obviously faked.
It took a great deal of imagination to see the beautiful mermaid of
legend in such specimens.
P. T. Barnum, America's prince of humbug, described in detail
how he took what he described as "an ugly, dried up, black-looking

Fejee Mermaid

and diminutive specimen," that he called "the Fejee Mermaid" and

promoted it into an enormous financial success. In 1842 thousands of
people in New York paid 25 cents each (a considerable sum in those
days) to view the tiny fake.
A large number of these nineteenth-century manufactured mer-
WEIRD CREA lURES IN FOLKLORE 264
maids are still in the hands of private collectors, or in museums where
they are valued, not as mermaids, but as interesting examples of his-
torical fraud.
See also: OANNES

ORIENTAL DRAGON When Westerners first came into

contact with the civilization of China, they discovered that Chinese
mythology and art was rich with tales and pictures of a large, pow-
erful reptilian creature that looked remarkably like the large, pow-
erful reptilian dragon with which they were already familiar. The
Chinese called the creature the lung. Westerners called it the dragon.
This has led to a belief that the dragon is a universal symbol in both
East and West, based on memories of the dinosaur or some other great
"lizard" of the past. In reality there is no evidence to support this
view. The Western and Oriental dragon have quite different origins.
The two forms of dragons really have few things in common aside
from being generally long and rather fearsome in appearance. In
mythology both Western and Oriental dragons are reputed to be pow-
erful and the guardians of great fortunes. (In both East and West the
figure of a dragon is commonly displayed at entrances and on doors.
From its treasure-guarding activities, the dragon has come to be used
as a protective symbol.) There the similarities end. Western dragons
were evil misers, while one rarely encountered an Oriental dragon
without coming away with a generous gift.
Oriental dragons could occasionally be capricious and even malev-
olent, but they were usually benevolent. Unlike the Western dragon,
which was a symbol of evil, closely allied to the Devil himself, the
Oriental dragon was often a symbol of royalty and good luck. Western
dragons were notoriously solitary, while Oriental dragons lived in
crowded Chinese-style societies. There was, for example, a hierarchy
of dragon bureaucrats.
As with the Western dragon, many once believed (and a few still
do) that the stories of the Oriental dragon began with a real, but
265 Oriental Dragon

Oriental dragon

unknown, giant reptile. Dr. N. B. Dennys, a nineteenth-century

expert on Chinese mythology, held that there was "little doubt" that
there once had been real dragons in China.
Thrilling as Dr. Dennys's suggestion was, there is "little doubt" that
there never was a real dragon in China. The form of the mythical
Oriental dragon was probably taken from a much more ordinary
creature, but not the snake, which is at the core of the Western dragon
myth. The snake also figures heavily in Chinese mythology, and, like
most other peoples in the world, the Chinese hated snakes and
regarded them as symbols of evil, quite unlike the usually benevolent
dragon.
One clue to the possible origin of the Oriental dragon is that it is
intimately associated with water. Dragons lived in lakes and rivers
and seas, even in raindrops. Dragons controlled the tides and waves,
created or stopped floods, and were the guardians of the rainfall. For
the ancestor of the Oriental dragon, we should look to a water animal.
The best candidate is the Chinese alligator, Alligator sinensis.
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLklORE 266
Today the creature is rare and its range highly restricted. But in his-
torical times it was widespread throughout eastern China. Although
not quite as large as the American alligator, it is sufficiently large and
powerful to inspire legends. Of course, as with the snake in the West,
the Chinese alligator was only the starting point.
Like the Europeans, the Chinese also mistook the bones of ancient
and extinct mammals for those of departed dragons. While the bones
of the evil Western dragons were regarded as mere curiosities, the
bones of the benevolent Oriental dragon were supposed to have great
healing powers. The Chinese pharmacopoeia, accumulated over the
long centuries of Chinese civilization, is a marvelously long and
detailed collection of remedies. Virtually every known substance, if
properly prepared, was thought to be a cure for some disease. But of
all the cures, dragon bones were supposed to be the most effective.
Dragon bones and teeth, that is, the bones and teeth of extinct ani-
mals, were once prominently displayed in the drugstores of Peking,
Hong Kong, and other metropolitan centers in China. There they
were ground up and sold as medicine, often at very high prices. Dur-
ing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western paleon-
tologists could also be found browsing among the bins of dragon
bones. They were not looking for a cure for stomach trouble, they
were looking for valuable fossils, and they found some, including
some teeth that ultimately led to the discovery of Peking man.
See also: DRAGON

UNICORN The unicorn, a horselike creature with a single

horn in the middle of its forehead, is the most glorious of all mytho-
logical animals. Today we are in the midst of what must be called a
unicorn revival. We find the symbol of the unicorn on everything
from stationery to sheets-it is more popular than it has ever been.
How did belief in this extraordinary beast begin? Is it possible that
somewhere, sometime there was a real unicorn?
The first mention of the unicorn comes in the writings of the Greek
267 Unicorn
historian Ctesias, onetime physician to the King of Persia. Ctesias
returned from Persia around the year 389 B.c. and proceeded to write
a lengthy history of that land, and another of India. Only fragments
or abstracts of Ctesias's original works survive, but it is in one of these
that the unicorn first enters written history:
"There are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses
and larger. Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their
eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead which is about a
foot and a half in length. The dust filed from this horn is administered
in a potion as a protection against deadly drugs. The base of this horn,
for some two hands breadth above the brow, is pure white, the upper
part is sharp and a vivid crimson; and the remainder or middle por-
tion is black. Those who drink out of these horns made into drinking
vessels, are not subject, they say, to convulsions or to the holy disease
[epilepsy]. Indeed, they are immune even to poisons if, either before
or after swallowing such they drink wine, water, or anything else
from these beakers. . . . "
Ctesias was writing about India, a land he had never seen, so his
account had to be based on hearsay, not firsthand knowledge. The

Rhinoceros

basic animal being described is almost certainly the Indian rhinoceros,

for the rhinoceros is the only one-horned animal in the world. (Strictly
speaking, the rhinoceros does not have a true horn, but that is a dis-
tinction that would bother only professional zoologists.) The key to the
rhinoceros identification is the almost magical properties attributed to
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 268
the horn. Even today rhinoceros horn is regarded as both a universal
remedy and powerful aphrodisiac throughout much of the Middle
East, an unfortunate honor for the rare and hard-pressed rhinoceros.
So long as rich and superstitious men are willing to pay enormous
prices for illegally obtained rhinoceros horn, there will be poachers
willing to kill the protected animal and drive it to extinction.
In addition to the rhinoceros, Ctesias apparently mixed a couple of
other creatures into his description of the unicorn, for it is difficult to
imagine a cumbersome rhino being described as a form of wild ass.
But this sort of confusion was common enough in travelers' tales. The
unicorn was just one of a number of mythical beasts that were built
up from an exaggerated and inaccurate description of a real animal.
Mention of the unicorn appeared in the writings of Pliny and other
Romans, but what really insured the survival of the unicorn concept
into modern times was its mention in the Bible. The primary refer-
ence to the unicorn comes in the Book of Job (39:9-12), the same book
in which the monsters leviathan and behemoth are described. The
unicorn is treated very much in the same way as these other creatures.
"Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?
"Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will
he harrow the valleys after thee?
"Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? or wilt thou
leave thy labour to him?
"Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and
gather it into thy barn?"
It is more than probable that the use of the word unicorn is the
result of a mistranslation from the original Hebrew. The animal being
described is really a form of wild cattle that was unfamiliar to the
translators, so they used the name of another animal that was reputed
to be fierce and intractable-the unicorn. In any case, once the name
of the unicorn was inserted into the Bible, it was guaranteed a high
degree of respectability in Europe during the Middle Ages. Saint Ber-
nard railed against the "ridiculous monstrosities" that often adorned
even church walls, but he could not bring himself to denounce the
biblical unicorn. Christian artists who would have hesitated depicting
269 Unicorn
"pagan monsters" had no such reservations about the unicorn. The
unicorn was sometimes even used as a symboHor Christ.
Throughout the Middle Ages there were two attitudes toward the
unicorn. One emphasized its wildness, as seen in this 1587 translation
of a Roman description of the beast:
"But the cruellest is the Unicorne, a monster that belloweth horri-
ble, bodyed like a horse, footed like an elephant, tayled like a Swyne,
and headed like a Stagge. His horn sticketh out the middle of hys
forehead, of a wonderful brightness about foure foote long, so sharp,
that whatsoever he pusheth at, he striketh it through easily. He is
never caught alive; kylled he may be, but taken he cannot bee."
Yet the unicorn had a romantic side too. The myth grew that while
no man could capture the unicorn, it would i'llmediately become
slave to a virgin.
The unicorn never completely shook off its rhinoceros origins. Like
the horn of the rhinoceros, the horn of the unicorn, called the alicorn,
was credited with miraculous healing powers when ground up and

Unicorn
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 270
taken as a powder. Most of the "true" unicorn horns that were offered
for sale were the tusk of the narwhale, which like the unicorn of myth
has a single "horn." In most medieval drawings of the unicorn, the
horn was clearly inspired by the narwhale tusk. Sometimes mammoth

Narwhale

tusks were sold as unicorn horns, but even in the Middle Ages they
were denounced as "false."
When travelers went to the Orient looking for the fabled unicorn,
they were often shown a rhinoceros, a great disappointment. Marco
Polo, after seeing a rhinoceros unicorn, complained, "It is a hideous
beast to look at, and in no way like what we think and say in our
countries, namely a beast that lets itself be taken in the lap of a virgin.
Indeed, I assure you that it is quite the opposite of what we say it is."
Belief in the unicorn that is the beautiful yet ferocious horse with
the horn in the middle of its forehead began to fade during the Ren-
aissance, and the use of unicorn horn as a cure was questioned. Ali-
corn was last lisled by London pharmacies in 1741.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the unicorn was
declared to be a biological impossibility by no less a figure than Baron
Cuvier, the most distinguished and influential anatomist of his day.
There was a brief reprise for a belief in a real unicorn in the early
1900s when the remains of an extinct relative of the modern rhinoc-
eros was discovered in Siberia. But the scientists soon recognized what
they were dealing with and the unicorn was once again placed firmly
in the world of myth-permanently this time-despite occasional
excitements about the birth of one-horned goats and bulls.
See a/so: BEHEMOTH, LEVIATHAN
271 Vampire

VAMPIRE Our modern conception of the vampire as an ele-

gantly dressed, erotically attractive, and supremely evil "undead"
creature represents the blending of a number of different folkloric
traditions with a heavy influence of nineteenth-century fiction and
twentieth-century filmmaking.
Some sort of blood-sucking spirit or demon is a part of the mythol-
ogy of many lands. Such spirits were not necessarily or even usually
associated with the dead. However, blood has always been considered
a substance with magical properties, and blood sacrifices were com-
monly made to appease the dead. In the Odyssey, Odysseus descends
to the underworld, but is unable to speak to the shades of the dead
until he feeds them with the blood of a sacrificed sheep. Without the
blood, the dead are too weak and insubstantial to be heard.
Another tradition that figures importantly in the vampire story is
the belief that under some circumstances a corpse, not a spirit or
ghost, but the physical body itself, could rise out of the grave and walk
about.
A twelfth-century English chronicle by William of Newburgh tells
several stories of such animated corpses. The most interesting is about
an evil man who died without confessing his sins but was nevertheless
given a proper Christian burial which "he did not deserve and which
profited him nothing."
This evil man could not be held in his grave: "For by the power of
Satan in the dark hours, he was wont to come forth from his tomb
and to wander about all through the streets, prowling round the
houses, whilst on every side dogs were howling the whole night long."
Since this creature was a real corpse, it was rotting and its presence
infected the air with a terrible plague so severe that "there was hardly
a house that did not mourn its dead."
Finally, two brothers decided to dig up the body and burn it. Open-
ing a grave was a mortal sin, but in this case it seemed to be a sin
committed in a good cause. This particular story has many of the
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 272
overtones of a modern vampire tale, for the brothers found the corpse,
"gorged and swollen with a frightful corpulence, and its face was
florid and chubby, with huge red puffed cheeks."
When the corpse was struck with a spade, "there immediately
gushed out such a stream of warm red gore that they realized the
creature had fattened in the blood of many poor folk." The corpse
was burned and the plague ended.
Other animated corpse accounts from the same era do not mention
the apparent blood-drinking activities of the corpse.
The various traditions about blood-sucking spirits, the magical
properties of blood, and animated corpses seemed to merge most
completely in central Europe. By around the seventeenth century,
printed accounts of vampires began to appear. These were not meant
as fiction but were supposed to be true accounts. In 1732 a typical
vampire was exhumed near Belgrade in what is now Yugoslavia:
"It leaned to one side, the skin was fresh and ruddy, the nails grown
long and evilly crooked, the mouth slobbered with blood from its last
night's repast. Accordingly a stake was driven through the chest of
the vampire, who uttered a terrible screech whilst blood poured in
quantities from the wound. Then it was burned to ashes."
Vampire beliefs were occasionally given a Christian veneer with
the claim that a vampire was a dead witch, or a corpse animated by
a demon. But in general, vampirism was not of much concern to
church authorities, who appeared to regard it as just another primitive
superstition. In werewolf cases, people were actually brought to trial
and executed, but no one was ever tried for being a vampire, so no
important theological decisions had to be rendered, except possibly
concerning the exhumation of corpses.
The various vampire tales from central Europe were doubtless read
in western Europe ~nd the British Isles, but there was no deep indig-
enous belief in vampires, indeed, the word itself did not even appear
in English until1734. The modern, Dracula type of vampire is strictly
a recent and completely literary development.
The first great vampire in English fiction, Lord Ruthven, appeared
in a novel written in 1819. At one time the writer of this sensational
 CHAI•TER I.
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Illustration from Varney, The Vampyre
WEIRD CREA lURES IN FOLKLORE 274
story was believed to be the poet Lord Byron, but the real author of
Vampyre was Dr. John Polidori, Byron's personal physician and
friend, though it is probable that Byron first suggested the idea.
In 1847 Varney, The Vampyre, a long, confusing, but incredibly
popular tale of vampirism and adventure began appearing as a series
of penny dreadfuls. But it was the publication of Bram Stoker's novel
Dracula in 1897 that set the standard for all later vampires.
It has often been said that there was a "real" Dracula, and in a sense
there was. Stoker drew the name of his vampire and some of the back-
ground characteristics from Vlad IV, a mid-fifteenth-century Tran-
sylvanian ruler. Vlad had a reputation for exceptional cruelty, and his
nickname, Dracula, could mean either dragon or devil. But there is
nothing in Vlad's history to indicate that anyone thought of him as
being a blood-sucking corpse. In a sense Dracula the vampire is what
Vlad is supposed to have become after he died. But this is entirely
Stoker's invention.
Another figure historically linked with vampirism is Elizabeth·
Bathory, the so-called vampire countess of Hungary. In 1610 Eliza-
beth Bathory was suspected of killing several hundred peasants and
often using their blood in potions that were supposed to help her
retain her youth. She was convicted of sorcery, rather than vampir-
ism. Later ages stuck her with the title of "vampire."
The idea that a vampire might be able to change itself into a bat is
also a fairly recent and apparently completely literary development.
There were tales of vampires that changed themselves into wolves,
for there has always been an intermingling of vampire and werewolf
lore.
During the eighteenth century there was some serious discussion,
particularly among the occult minded, about "real" vampires. Dr.
Johannes von Lobel participated in vampire hunts in Serbia, and
maintained that he could even feel a slight pulse in a vampire corpse.
The last of the vampire hunters was Dr. Franz Hartmann, a scholar
of occultism and later a member (and for a while president) of the
Theosophical Society. But Hartmann's views leaned away from the
pi:vsical, and he spoke of such creatures as "astral vampires."
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Since Hartmann's time there has been only one serious believer in
vampirism-he was Montague Summers, a highly eccentric Catholie
clergyman who may well have been self-ordained. Summers looked
upon vampires as just another Satanic manifestation.
A few modern vampire-hunting, or Dracula, societies profess to
treat the subject seriously, but one can not help suspect that there is a
smile behind all the assumed gravity.
The vampire has become the most popular of all the folklore-fic-
tional monsters-it is nothing more than that and hasn't been for a
long time.
See also: VAMPIRE BAT
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 276

WEREWOLF The werewolf and other were, or "man," ani-

mals are creations of both folklore and modern fiction and filmmak-
ing. Belief that humans could be transformed or transform themselves
into animals of one sort or the other is extremely ancient and very
widespread. It has been theorized that the lore of the were animal
began with hunting magic. An early cave drawing shows a human
figure, apparently a sorcerer, wearing the skin of a deer. This is one
of the very few human figures ever to appear in cave art.
In modern hunting societies, the sorcerer, shaman, or witch doctor
will sometimes put on the skin of the animal that is to be hunted.
When the shaman looks like an animal, this is supposed to establish a
magical connection with the real animal, which gives the shaman
some power over the real animal's movements and helps him guide it
to the hunters' spears or traps. This is called sympathetic magic. The
shaman dressed like an animal is caught by the hunters. The shaman
looks like the animal to be hunted and, since like produces like, the
hunters will catch the animal.
Under the hypnotic influence of dancing, chanting, or perhaps
some form or narcotic, the shaman or any other individual who put
on an animal skin or mask might begin to feel that he had actually
taken on the characteristics of that animal, that for the period of the
ceremony he had magically or mystically become whatever creature
it was that he was imitating.
In many primitive societies, different tribes or clans possess what is
called a totemic animal. This is the particular sort of animal from
which the tribe or clan is believed to be descended, or to which it has
some other special relationship. In ceremonies tribesmen will put on
the costumes that make them look like their totem. They then begin
to act like the animal because they believe they have become the
animal.
Among the ancient Norsemen there were the berserkers-men in
bear shirts. These warriors would wear the pelts of bears, not only for
277 Werewolf
the warmth and appearance of ferocity they gave but because such a
shirt was supposed to impart to the wearer the courage and strength
of a bear. Here is a clear case of sympathetic magic. The berserkers
were the most feared fighters among the warrior Norsemen, for they
fought with the insane courage of wounded bears. No one could stand
against them. Ultimately the word berserk, which can mean anyone
who is violently insane and imagines himself to be a wild animal,
came into our language.
The transformation from man to animal might also take place in

Madman thinking himself to be a werewolf

WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 278
secret. In many primitive societies there are secret cults whose activ-
ities are deliberately shrouded in mystery and fear. Meeting in hidden
places, the cult members don the skins of the cult animal to perform
the rites specified by membership. These rites may include acting like
the cult animal. If the animal happens to be a vicious one, such cults
can represent a danger to the community. In the middle of the twen-
tieth century, several members of an African leopard-man cult were
convicted of murder. They put on leopard skins armed with sharp
metal claws and clawed their victims to death, just as a leopard might.
There was some suspicion that the cult had lost its original purpose,
which was religious and magical, and had degenerated into a gang of
professional killers who used the leopard costume to hide their iden-
tity and spread terror among those who might betray them.
In Roman times the werewolf idea was firmly established. A well-
known Roman story that describes how a young man watched his
companion turn into a large gray wolf, later wounded the wolf, and
found his companion dying of the very same sort of wound, could be
279 Werewolf
used as the basis for a modern werewolf film. Sophisticated Romans
probably didn't believe the werewolf story any more than modern
moviegoers do, but it was an established part of the folklore of the
time.
In the Middle Ages, however, the werewolf story was believed, and
many individuals were executed for being werewolves. The medieval
attitude toward the werewolf represents a mixture of pagan lore about
shape shifting and Christian theology.
The medieval werewolf was not merely a man changed to a wolf.
The werewolf was some sort of demon or servant of the Devil. Were-
wolf and witchcraft were closely intertwined in the medieval mind.
Such unnatural transformation had to be the work of the Devil. A
particularly vicious witch might be "rewarded" by his master the
Devil, and allowed to become a werewolf. The change from man {or,
less frequently, woman) to wolf was the result of diabolical magic.
The Devil gave the werewolf a magic wolf skin, or wolf "ointment,"
that was rubbed on. Eating roasted wolf flesh or drinking water from
a cup made from the skull of a wolf might also effect the
transformation.
The wolf was a particularly powerful symbol in Christian Europe.
It was the largest and most dangerous animal the average European
was ever likely to meet. In addition, the wolf was a conspicuous sym-
bol of evil in the Bible: "Beware of false prophets, who come to you
in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves....
Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. . . . I know that
after my departure, ravening wolves will enter in among you, not
sparing the flock."
However, the Bible did not specifically mention werewolves, and
that gave theologians considerable trouble. Some proposed that the
man did not change into a wolf, but that under diabolical influence
he was able to project the illusion of being a wolf. Others said that he
was not a wolf at all, but a demon in the shape of a wolf. While still
others insisted that there had been no actual transformation, but that
an individual's spirit left his human body and temporarily took over
the body of a wolf.
WEIRD CREA lURES IN FOLKLORE 280
Such quibbling hardly mattered when a suspected werewolf was
brought to trial. The "evidence" was usually based on a collection of
old superstitions such as werewolves having hair on the palms of their
hands, long index fingers, eyebrows that grew together, etc. As far as
one can determine from the scanty trial evidence, most of those who
were convicted and executed as werewolves were actually madmen
who killed their victims in fits of insane savagery. Perhaps they
actually were convinced that they had become wolves, or became
convinced of the transformation during their trial. Most seemed to
confess freely.
There is some recognition in the medieval trials that a few judges
knew that they were dealing with mental conditions rather than
actual transformations. There is one French case where a self-con-
fessed werewolf was judged to be "stupid and idiotic" and confined
to a monastery rather than executed, as was the custom.
While some belief in werewolves probably persisted in isolated
rural areas until fairly recent times, for most people the werewolf had
become strictly a creature of stories to be trotted out to frighten chil-
dren. In the nineteenth century a few mystics and occultists tried to
retain the werewolf idea by speaking of the transformation of "astral
bodies," but....that never caught on.
Most people today have learned about werewolves from such films
as The Wolf Man. The modern folklore of Hollywood has added a
few innovations to the werewolf legend. The idea that a person bitten
by a werewolf will turn into one is fairly new; so is the lore of the
silver bullet and the full moon. The greatest innovation however, is
the "wolf man," making the werewolf a hairy biped. Medieval and
ancient werewolves looked like real wolves; the werewolf of the films
does not. The probable reason is that it is much easier to make an
actor look like a wolf man than a real wolf. However, the increased
technological sophistication of such films as An American Werewolf
in London (1981) allows the on-screen transformation from man to
more realistic-looking wolf.
See also: BEAST OF LE GEVAUDAN
281 Zombie

ZoMBIE While the vampire has been called the undead, or

the living dead, the zombie is simply the walking dead. The zombie
is a corpse without soul or will, animated by secret spells and potions.
It is neither good nor evil, but mechanically does the bidding of its
master. It is, in short, a flesh-and-blood robot.
The zombie grew out of the voodoo beliefs of the island of Haiti.
To create a zombie, the voodoo doctor or priest would steal a recently
buried corpse and animate it by magic. The zombie made the perfect
slave, for it needed neither food nor rest, but would toil on ceaselessly
without complaint. There were rumors that crews of zombies were
hired out to work in the fields. Bakers were also suspect; since they
did their work at night, they were supposed to rely on zombie labor.
Because zombie beliefs grew up among slaves, they have a partic-
ular horror about them. At least the slave could look forward to release
from toil in death-but if he became a zombie, he could not escape
even beyond the grave.
The origin of the zombie idea is not at all clear. The word itself
seems to come from the name of an African god or spirit. But there
is nothing quite like the walking-dead zombie in African belief. Only
in the New World was the name zombie applied to a walking-dead
man.
There has been some speculation that the voodoo priests with their
knowledge of drugs were really able to create zombies of a sort. These
would not be animated corpses, but living men so stupified by drugs
that they were unaware of their surroundings, seemed insensitive to
pain, and did whatever the priest commanded them to do. Just what
drugs might create such an effect we do not know, but it is possible
that some narcotics, plus an intense belief in the power of the voodoo
priest, might turn a living man into the image of a zombie.
-There are some fairly recent "true" zombie stories. One concerns a
young girl who was supposed to have died and was buried in 1935,
but three years later some of her friends saw her working in a shop.
WEIRD CREATURES IN FOLKLORE 282
Though the girl moved stiffly and had a blank "zombie-like" look on
her face, her friends were sure of her identity.
An investigation was launched, her grave was opened, and it was
found that the girl's body was missing from its coffin. There were
rumors that the body had been stolen by a voodoo priest and turned
into a zombie. The priest had since died, but his wife confirmed that
he had indeed made a zombie of the girl. The girl was taken under
the protection of a Catholic priest who sent her to a convent in
France. Her brother was supposed to have visited her there years
later.
How much, if any, of this story is true can not be determined. How-
ever, a woman reputed to be a zombie was actually kept in a hospital
in Haiti.
The woman appeared one day on a farm. She could barely speak
and acted very strangely. A few people thought that they recognized
her as someone who was supposed to have died years earlier. A rela-
tive of the dead woman was sent for and confirmed the identification.
Rumors flew that the dead woman's husband had contrived to have a
voodoo priest poison her and turn her into a zombie.
The truth of this particular tale is probably far less sensational. The
"zombie" was almost certainly a woman who was mentally defective;
she may have wandered away from where she had been kept, or have
been turned out. She also may have borne a resemblance to the dead
woman, so that when she turned up on the farm, people were fright-
ened and confused. It is also possible that the dead woman's relatives
didn't like her husband and were ready to blame him for any sort of
crime.
In his book Magic Island, William Seabrook told an allegedly true
story of a voodoo priest named Joseph who owned several zombies.
One day Joseph's wife gave the zombies some salted biscuits, a big
mistake, because salt is supposed to break the spell on the zombie. The
salt made the zombies realize that they were really dead, and they
made straight for the graveyard, where they threw themselves on
their graves and tried to dig back into the earth. But their arms and
hands rotted away before they could complete the task. Seabrook is
283 Zombie
considered more of a teller of tales than a purveyor of the unvarnished
truth.
There is no doubt that in Haiti today voodoo is still a viable and
vigorous religion. But the zombie belief is not central to voodoo and
there is some doubt as to how deeply even the Haitians believe in
zombies anymore. Sophisticated Haitians have, of course, always rid-
iculed the idea of the walking dead.
The British author Francis Huxley spent considerable time in Haiti
researching a book on voodoo beliefs. He kept trying to find a real
zombie. Though he met several voodoo priests who said that they
would show him a zombie for a price, they always backed out of the
deal at the last moment. Huxley also recorded a couple of occasions
where the creation of a "zombie" had been faked for tourists. A zom-
bie was seen to rise from the grave. But upon examination of the
grave, an air hose leading down to the coffin was found. The man
inside the coffin had been alive all of the time, and the air hose
allowed him to breathe. When the coffin was dug up, he stepped out
as a "zombie." An impressive show, but just a show.
Some Haitians do still take special precautions against grave rob-
bers, perhaps out of fear that the stolen corpses will be turned into
zombies or used for other evil magical purposes.
ANNOTATIED

IDILDO<iiRAPIHIY

It is not my intention to burden the general reader with a list of the

hundreds of books and articles that I have read in compiling The
Encyclopedia of Monsters. Much of the information came from
obscure publications that would be unobtainable anyway. For the
serious student of monsters help is available, or will be shortly. Gar-
land Press soon will publish Strange Beasts, Giant Birds, and Bigfoot:
A Bibliography of Monsters, prepared by George M. Eberhart. I have
seen portions of this work in manuscript and it promises to be the most
complete monster bibliography ever attempted in English.
For the less committed, I have prepared a short annotated bibli-
ography of some of the leading and most accessible books on mon-
sters. Many of these books contain their own extensive bibliographies.
Any list of monster books must start with Bernard Heuvelmans's
two massive cryptozoological works, On the Track of Unknown Ani-
mals (New York: Hill & Wang, 1959) and In the Wake of the Sea
285
Annotated Bibliography 286
Serpents (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968). Other Heuvelmans books
are not yet available in English, but hopefully will be shortly.
In Searching for Hidden Animals (New York: Doubleday, 1980),
Dr. Roy P. Mackal, America's leading cryptozoologist, presents infor-
mation and many of his own theories on unknown animals. Some of
the information in my A Modern Look at Monsters (New York:
Dodd, 1970) can be found in the present volume in an abridged and
updated form.
For general information about monsters and all kinds of oddities,
one must read the granddaddy of all clipping collectors, Charles Fort.
The Books of Charles Fort (New York: Holt, 1941) is a one-volume
edition of his four best-known books. These books, The Book of the
Damned, New Lands, Lo! and Wild Talents, are also available in
individual paperback editions.
Roy Mackal's The Monsters of Loch Ness (Chicago: Swallow,
1976) is the most scholarly work on that subject. But it is also pretty
heavy going and the casual reader might prefer Nicholas Witchell's
The Loch Ness Story (London: Penguin, 1975), which is a good gen-
eral introduction to Nessie. An overview of lake monsters, including
Loch Ness, is provided by Perter Costello in Searching for Lake M on-
sters (New York: Coward, 1974).
John Napier's Bigfoot (New York: Dutton, 1973) is far and away
the best book on the hairy bipeds. Ivan Sanderson's Abominable
Snowmen, Legend Come to Life (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1961) is a
bigger book, but is far less reliable and not as well written.
Two of Willy Ley's books, The Lungfish, the Dodo and the Uni-
corn (New York: Viking Press, 1952) and The Dawn of Zoology
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), provide an interesting
and clear picture of how some of our monster beliefs evolved. So does
Richard Carrington's Mermaids and Mastodons (New York: Rine-
hart, 1957).
The best book on fake monsters is Peter Dance's Animal Fakes &
Frauds (Maidenhead: Sampson Low, 1976). The text is informative
and the pictures are marvelous.
Surprisingly, there are no good general books about human contacts
287 Annotated Bibliography
with aliens. The best available is The Humanoids (Chicago: Henry
Regnery, 1969), edited by Charles Bowen. Any book by John Keel is
going to be a unique experience for the uninitiated. For the monster
buff, the most interesting book by this eccentric author is Strange
Creatures from Time and Space (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1970).
An overview of mythical animals can be found in Peter Lum's Fab-
ulous Beasts (New York: Pantheon, 1951). For medieval view of ani-
mals or just a good read), try T. H. White's The Bestiary (New York:
Putnam, 1960), a translation of a twelfth-century bestiary, with the
talented author's informative notes.
The world's undisputed expert on fairies is British folklorist Kath-
arine M. Briggs. Her An Encyclopedia of Fairies (New York: Pan-
theon, 1977) not only provides a wealth of information on the little
people, but also on giants, dragons, and a whole lot more.
While there are a lot of books on vampires and werewolves, most
of them are not very good. On the general subject of shape shifting
the best book is still Frank Hamel's Human Animals (New Hyde
Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1969), a book that first appeared in
1915. Most of the basic werewolf stories are contained in The Book
of Werewolves, written in 1865 by Sabine Baring Gould (New York:
Causeway Books, 1975). Much basic vampire lore is found in The
Book of Vampires by Dudley Wright (New York: Causeway Books,
1973), which was originally published in 1914.
Finally, the reader might want to look at the works of Montague
Summers on both of these subjects. They are The Vampire, His Kith
and Kin (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1960), The Vam-
pire in Europe (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1961), and
The Werewolf (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1966). All
of these books first appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. Though Sum-
mers was a twentieth-century writer, his style is deliberately archaic
and his outlook absolutely medieval.
Those seriously interested in the subject of modern monsters, Nessie
not Dracula, would be well advised to get in touch with the Interna-
tional Society of Cryptozoology, P.O. Box 43070, Tucson, Arizona
85733.