NONBINARY CRAWFORDSVILLE MONSTER
AGENDER
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A strange, unearthly cry echoes across the mirrored surface
of the Louisiana bayou, echoing off scattered cypress and tupelo dripping with
Spanish moss. Is this merely the call of a wading bird? A lone puma? Or is it the
shriek of the man-wolf creature known as the Rougarou?
Rougarou is a Cajun variation on “loup garou”, the French
word for werewolf. France has a long history of werewolf folklore. In the 16th
century these creatures were often blamed for crimes such as disappearances,
animal killings, and particularly violent burglaries. In a parallel to the infamous
witch hunts also taking place at the time, scared and panicked villagers would usually
accuse someone living outside the societal norms of the time- such as a hermit
in the woods, or a person with mental illness- as being the beast. Once
accusations had been made, the condemned had little ability to defend
themselves in court other than to “confess” to being a werewolf and implicate
others in their ddeds.
Many legends existed to explain how one became a loup garou.
Some men (medieval werewolves were almost always masculine) could change by
putting on a wolf’s skin- a possible link to legends of the Norse berserker warriors
who would don bear skins to take on the beast’s power. Some people would become
werewolves through cannibalism and other debauchery. Catholic priests claimed
that a man who didn’t observe Lent for seven straight years would become a werewolf.
Stories of the loup garou came to North America in the 17th
century with French settlers in the Acadia region, located in what is now
Eastern Canada. In the aftermath of the French and Indian War, the British
colonial government took over the region and forcibly deported most of the
ethnically French Acadians. Many of
these displaced people settled in Louisiana, originally a colony of France that
was ceded to Spain in 1762. The Spanish government was fairly tolerant of the
settlers, allowing them to continue their cultural practices- which included tales
of the loup garou.
In modern times the rougarou has become more of a boogeyman to
frighten children. Parents warn their kids not to misbehave or play in the swamp
or else the beast will come for them. These stories usually do not make it
clear if the creature is a transformed human or if it is always a humanoid
beast akin to the Beast of Bray Road and other dogmen of the Midwest.
Despite- or, more likely, because of- its frightening appearance
and behavior, the Rougarou has become a popular part of Louisiana culture.
Costumes based on the creature frequently appear in Mardi Gras celebrations,
and the city of Houma even has an annual festival themed around the creature.
Stepping into the dense rainforest of Southeastern Alaska,
one can’t helping feeling a strange sort of presence, as if something unknown
and unseen were watching from the trees. Is this sensation merely a construct
of the mind? The human tendency to anthropomorphize nature? Or is it possible
there are ancient spirits and unknown beasts lurking among the dripping spruces
and shadowy hemlocks?
Around 1900 a gold prospector named Harry D. Colp wrote a
story of an alleged encounter between one of his companions and a pack of
unknown entities in the Alaskan wilderness.
Colp had been lodging with the man, Charlie, along with a few other
prospectors in a shack near the city of Wrangell. Charlie had heard about a deposit of
gold-bearing quartz in the nearby Thomas Bay area. Packing three months of supplies, he set off
alone to investigate the site, only to return less than a month later badly shaken
and with neither supplies nor gold.
Charlie told Colp that upon arriving in Thomas Bay, he’d gone
in search of a half-moon shaped lake where the gold could supposedly be found.
After several days of searching, he finally locating the body of water at the
foot of a glacier. He had only just gotten his bearings when he was horrified
to see a pack of hairy “devils” swarming towards him from the shore.
Charlie described these beings as looking halfway between
men and monkeys. They were “entirely sexless, their bodies covered with long,
coarse hair, except where the scabs and running sores had replaced it.” The
stench of the creatures made Charlie ill, and their screams and cries made him
delirious. The beings chased him all the way back to Thomas Bay, where he
passed out and woke up hours later floating in his canoe in the middle of the water.
Several decades after Harry Colp’s death, his daughter,
Virginia, published the manuscript of the story under the title “The Strangest
Story Ever Told”. Over the years this tale has become a popular piece of folklore
in Southeastern Alaska.
Some have suggested that the beings Charlie encountered may
have been kushtaka- shape-shifting otter-men from the folklore of the Tlingit
people. Stories depict these creatures as malevolent tricksters who lure
fishermen and hunters into the wilderness, only to drown them or transform them
into more otter-men. They are often used as boogeymen to scare children aware
from the dangers of the ocean. Yet, like shapeshifters in many cultures,
kushtaka can be mercurial in behavior, and may occasionally save lost travelers
from dying in the freezing cold (often, again, by turning them into kushtaka
themselves). In at least one tale recorded by the Smithsonian Institute, an
otter-man is depicted as the reborn spirit of a dead man who returns to aid his
impoverished family.
While Harry Colp never refers to the creatures in his story
as kushtaka, the otter-men have become closely linked with “The Strangest Story
Ever Told” in Alaskan folklore.
Other people have allegedly also seen the hairy devils
around Thomas Bay, though Colp’s story is the only one widely known. These
sightings have led locals to dub the area “Devil’s Country”. Thomas Bay is also
known as the “Bay of Death” by the Tlingit people because of a landslide in the
1700s that wiped out a village.
SOURCES
Full text of "The Strangest Story Ever Told", from bigfootencounters.com
A story about a more benevolent encounter with a kushtaka
An article from the Juneau Empire with more details about Harry Colp
"Kushtaka", a short film created by Cameron Currin about the monstrous Otter-Men
In every culture, in every era, humans have always been fascinated by monsters. We love to sit around the fire- or listen to the radio, or read a book, or play a video game- immersing ourselves in tales of dragons, gorgons, yokai, trolls, asuras, tokoloshe, and even stranger beings that lurk in the unseen corners of our world. The phenomena of cryptids is just the newest iteration of this fascination, though our modern age has added a scientific veneer onto these hidden monsters.
With that being said, I wanted to expand this list of state cryptids out beyond the European American legends to include mysterious beasts form other cultures of the North American continent.
Thunder beings and their rivals, the horned water serpents, are prominent in the legends of many Native American peoples, and are known under many names. Among the Lakota Sioux and other Native peoples of the American prairies, the Thunder Beings are known as Wakinyan, and the horned serpents called Unktehi. The Wakinyan often manifest as great birds to do battle with the serpents, smiting them with lightning and driving them into the Earth. Some legends say that the bones of both combatants can be found all over the American West, particularly in the prairies of Midwest and in the Badlands of South Dakota.
These bones are said to have great wakan, spiritual power similar to the Algonquian concept of manitou. People sometimes gather bones from Unktehi for medicine bundles. And there are stories of evil sorcerers using shards of horned serpent bones to “sting” or curse others.
In the late 1800s, European-American paleontologists such as Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope came to the West in search of fossils. Guided by Native stories, they collected many of the monstrous bones and identified those of the Wakinyan as pterosaurs. Unktehi bones found on the grasslands were discovered to be from aquatic reptilian mosasaurs, while the bones from in badlands belonged to extinct mammals.
Why, one must wonder though, are the bones of marine animals found in the middle of the prairies? The answer lies in the late Cretaceous period when a long, shallow Interior Sea ran through North America, dividing the continent into the landmasses of Laurentia in the West, and Appalachia in the East. Mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs, and giant carnivorous fish such as Xiphactinus hunted these waters, while pterosaurs soured above the waves, and dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus and duck-billed hadrosaurs roamed the shores. Over millions of years, plate tectonics pushed up the floor of the Interior sea, leaving the bones of its prehistoric inhabitants entombed on dry land.
It's important to note that the cryptid commonly called a "Thunderbird" by many European Americans is distinct from the Wakinyan. While the former was definitely inspired by the legends of Native peoples, it tends to be thought of as a natural- if unusual- animal such as a giant bird or even a pterosaur. The Wakinyan, however, is a spiritual being that can take many forms. I've talked about the other type of Thunderbird- and an imfamous phantom photograph of one that everyone remembers, but no one can find- in a previous post.
SOURCES
Fossil Legends of the First Americans by Adrienne Mayor
Lakota Belief and Ritual by James R. Walker, edited by Raymond J. DeMallie and Elain A. Jahner
A legend of the Unktehi from the National Park Service website
Information on the "horned serpent" from Native-Language.org
Among the pines, an apparition looms. Towering twice the height of a man, the beast
has the form of a moose, but is far bigger than any ordinary member of Alces
alces. Its coat is deathly white. Its
antlers spread wide as outstretched arms, pronged with over two dozen sharp
points. Is it a ghost? A spirit of the forest? Or perhaps it is merely an
ordinary- if impressive- natural mutation.
The first recorded sighting of Maine’s spectral moose
occurred in 1891 when hunting guide Clarence Duffy spotted the creature around
Lobster Lake. A year later it was seen again by a sportsman from New York who
shot at it, only to be chased down and nearly trampled by the vengeful beast.
Regular sightings occurred for several decades. Witnesses
described the moose as being white or light gray, with some even claiming that
it glowed dimly. It was said to be about 10-15 feet high at the shoulder, much
taller than the 8-10 foot shoulder height of an average moose. Its antlers were
said to be 10-12 feet wide and festooned with up to 22 prongs- much larger and
more complex than the 4-6 foot spread of a regular moose. Some eyewitnesses
claimed that the moose would actually vanish into thin air right in front of
them.
Some have suggested that the animal was albino. Albino moose
have indeed been documented many times, but their eyes are pink or violet,
while the eyes of the spectral moose are said to be brown. Albinism would also
not explain the creature’s tremendous size and enormous antlers.
Its possible the spectral moose had a condition similar to
the Kermode Bears of British Columbia, also known as Spirit Bears or Moksgm’ol
in the language of the Indigenous Kitasoo, a tribe of the Tsimshian people.
Although these bears have white fur, their eyes and skin do have pigment. The
white coloration is due to a recessive gene that stops melanin from being made
only in the fur, a condition called leucism (as opposed to albinism, in which
all pigmentation is lost in all tissues).
In fact, population of white moose are well-known to inhabit
the woods around the town of Foleyet in Ontario. Like the Moksgm’al, these
moose are not albino, instead possessing a recessive gene that makes their
coats a grayish-white. Its quite possible that Maine’s spectral moose had a
similar genetic condition, though again the creature’s alleged great size, and
its seeming ability to disappear into thin air have not been fully explained.
Perhaps eyewitnesses, startled by the sight of such an otherworldly-looking
animal, exaggerated their descriptions.
SOURCES
An article from New England Folklore about the Spectral Moose
An article from Mysterious Universe about the Moose
An article from Lumberwoods.org
A Smithsonian article about the white Moksgm'ol Bear
A 1911 article from the Sacramento Union about the Specter Moose
A post from legendsofamerica.com about the Specter Moose
I’ve read
many, many books in the course of my research for this blog, and figured I’d
start reviewing and sharing some of them in between regular State Cryptid
posts.
For five days
in late autumn 1903, the small Iowa town of Van Meter was haunted by a
mysterious winged Visitor with a glowing horn on its head. Though the story was
big news at the time, it fell into
obscurity for decades until paranormal investigators Voss, Lewis, and Nelson
turned their flashlights on it.
This book is
the culmination of their research. It is as much a character study of
historical Van Meter as it is a recounting the Visitor encounters. In my own cryptid
research, I often find that the people and circumstances surrounding the
sightings are just as fascinating as the creatures themselves.
The majority
of evidence is drawn from accounts in local newspapers. This might make the
whole Visitor phenomenon seem dubious at first since “monster yarns” were a
common feature in papers of the 1800s and early 1900s (see, for example, my
entries on the Bear Lake Monster and the Snallygaster). Journalistic integrity
hadn’t fully developed yet, and many papers were more like sensationalist
tabloids like the old Weekly World News that used to lurk in grocery store
check-outs. The details of the Van Meter Visitor, however, feel different from
a typical newspaper tall tale. Fantastic as the sightings are, there is a
degree of realism in the accounts. It seems that the people of Van Meter definitely
experienced something- though whether it was monster, demon, or mass
hysteria is still unknown. The authors offer several possibilities as to the
being’s identity. Could it have been an alien? A living thoughtform? A demon? A
case of mass hysteria? Or something more?
This book was
my first introduction to John Keel’s Ultraterrestrial theory, which has become
a major theme of my cryptid writings and illustrations. Keel postulated that
unexplained, seemingly supernatural phenomena- ghosts, UFOs, bigfoot, fairies, Mothman-
are actually manifestations of beings from higher dimensions beyond our own.
When they move into our plane of reality, our minds cannot fully perceive or
comprehend them, so we translate them into forms that we can handle. The
authors speculate that the Visitor may have been one such manifestation.
I’d highly
recommend this book as a thorough investigation in a lesser known, but very intriguing,
cryptid. You can get a copy here.
A few years ago I wrote a couple articles for Cryptid Culture magazine. While the publication itself seems to have gone under, you can still order copies of it on their website. Definitely go check it out. There are lots of great articles and illustrations. Here I'd like to share one of the articles I wrote on a most unusual deep-sea cryptid which may have existed since before the dinosaurs.
PALEODICTYON
In 1976 oceanographer Peter A. Rona was using an underwater
camera towed behind a research boat to explore the seafloor along the
Galapagos Rift, a volcanic hotspot in the Pacific Ocean near the islands made
famous by Charles Darwin. Though the Rift is dotted with numerous hydrothermal
vents that are abundant with life, the area Dr. Rona was exploring was far
away from the hot, black-smoking chimneys. It was little more than an undersea
desert- a flat expanse of mud and silt almost devoid of life. So it was a great
surprise when the camera came across a hill of sediment about the size of a
silver dollar covered with an intricate pattern of holes. The placement of the
holes was so geometrically perfect, and the find itself so out of place, that
Dr. Rona at first assumed that the other researchers on the exploration team
had somehow played a trick on him. But they were just as surprised as he was by
the find.
Later excavations of the holes revealed that they led to
shafts that connected to a network of honeycomb-like interconnected tunnels
about an inch below the surface. A burrow of some sort. A burrow so geometrically perfect as to
almost seem made by intelligent beings- though there is no need to invoke an
intelligent builder here since many animals can create startlingly precise
structures.
The first question Dr. Rona and the others asked, of course,
was just what animal had made these remarkable structures. No living organisms
were discovered when the burrows were dug up. There weren’t even any telltale
food scraps, bits of DNA, or other detritus to provide a clue to the identity
of these deep-sea engineers.
The mystery only grew deeper as word of the discovery spread.
A few years after Dr. Rona formally described the strange structures, he was
contacted by paleontologist Adolf Seilacher, who showed him fossil burrows
that were nearly identical to the Galapagos Ridge hills. Seilacher’s fossils,
dubbed Paleodictyon (trace fossils
such as burrows, footprints, and coprolites are given their own distinct scientific
names), dated from the Eocene Epoch, approximately 55 million years ago. Other,
simpler but still very similar fossil burrows dated all the way back to the
early Cambrian Epoch, when large multicellular animals first appeared in the
fossil record. Whatever was making the mystery
burrows had apparently existed on Earth with minimal evolutionary change since
before the dinosaurs had evolved. Or, at least, with little change in the way it
constructed its dwellings. Once this striking continuity was brought to light,
the still-unknown maker of the modern tunnels was given the name Paleodictyon nodosum.
Since the initial discovery in 1976, Doctors Rona and
Seilacher, along with other researchers, have found thousands of Paleodictyon burrows along volcanic
rifts in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Like those first specimens, the
other structures were found on the barren seafloor far from the hydrothermal
vents and their diverse ecosystems. Perhaps these unknown animals have evolved
to survive in this rough environment, adapting to feast on what few nutrients are
present in the form of “marine snow”- tiny bits of organic matter formed from
bits of dead plankton and other organisms that constantly rain (or rather,
snow) down from above.
 |
| A large xenophyophore in its shell. |
But the question still remains: what sort of animals are
making these Paleodictyon structures,
exactly? One hypothesis is that they are
a species of giant amoebae known as xenophyophores. These single-celled
organisms can be found in the deepest parts of every ocean. Most species cement
sand and other debris together to build complex, rippled shells or “tests”
which can resemble brains, sponges, heads of lettuce, or other corrugated
objects. Some, however, are known to live buried in the sediment, admittedly in
much simpler burrows.
If Paleodictyon
nodosum is indeed a xenophyophore, though, why does it excavate such
geometrically complex burrows? Laboratory tests have shown that the convex
lens-shaped mound over a Paleodictyon
burrow draws water down through the vertical shafts, so perhaps the structure
is used to pull suspended marine snow from the water column down to the buried
amoebae. Alternatively, the tubes could be used for “farming” bacteria on their
walls, much like how leafcutter ants in the Amazon will farm fungi on the bits
of vegetation, they bring into their nests.
The farming hypothesis is suspect, though, since research has shown that
the concentration of bacteria in the tubes is no higher than the concentration
on the sea floor above, indicating that there is no deliberate cultivation occurring.
Dr. Rona’s favored possibility as to the identity of Paleodictyon is that the “burrows” may
actually be the outline casts of sediment-dwelling sponges or other soft,
filter-feeding organisms. This idea is not as strange as it may seem. Many
sponges will burrow into mud, coral, or even the hard shells of oysters (the
latter by using a weak acid secreted by the sponge’s cells) to protect their
soft bodies from predators. As to why no remains of the animals themselves have
been found, Dr. Rona suggests that they may have died and been completely
devoured by bacteria and small deep-sea scavengers, leaving behind the
geometric pit structure as the only evidence of their existence.
It is still curious, though, that in all these years of
searching not a single burrow has been found that contains a live Paleodictyon nodosum, or even a few
small scraps of their remains. Perhaps it is because the structures are
actually much older than they appear. Though the burrows seem freshly dug, the
seafloor deserts where they are found are still, quiet places lacking any
current and only rarely disturbed by other organisms. These unusual conditions may have allowed the
burrows to persist intact for hundreds of years, long after their builders had
completely rotted away.
The lack of a living builder may also simply be due to the
fact that the area where Paleodictyon
burrows are found has not been explored that extensively. Investigating the
deep sea is an expensive endeavor that requires reserving highly competitive
slots of time with a submersible or diving robot. Rona and Seilacher simply
haven’t had enough time or money to search for these enigmatic builders. Though
they have found thousands of Paleodictyon
burrows, perhaps these are only the graveyards of a long-dead colony of the
creatures. Perhaps the living animals lie just a few miles beyond the
submersible’s light, waiting for someone to finally stumble across them.
Paleodictyon has
received some media attention, though. Most notably in the form of “Volcanoes
of the Deep Sea”, an IMAX documentary chronicling the researcher’s discovery
and search for the animal.
On a final, interesting side note, the first recorded
reference to Paleodictyon fossils may
have come from Leonardo da Vinci. In the Leicester Codex, Leonardo records
extensive notes on fossilized shells and other traces of prehistoric marine
organisms. Among his drawings is a small, quick sketch of a honeycomb-like
structure. Though the sketch is unlabeled, it is not a huge stretch to
postulate that this may have been a representation of Paleodictyon, especially since these striking trace fossils are
common around the inventor’s childhood home in the valley of the Arno River.
