Jersey Devil-- New Jersey

The Devil walking along the ground with folded wings.

Sorry for the long delay, folks.  I've been pretty busy the last few months with family stuff and a writing project.  But now I'm back to the cryptids again with the Garden State's favorite monster.

The Jersey Devil, also called the Leeds Devil, is a winged beast that supposedly inhabits the Pine Barrens along the Jersey coast. It is said to have the head of a horse, wings of a bat, cloven hooves and a forked tail. The beast has been sighted numerous times throughout the twentieth century, starting with a rash of reports around 1909.

   

Before I talk about the beast's origins, though, I think it's worth talking a little bit about the Pine Barrens themselves. The Barrens are part of the Atlantic Coastal Plain-- a flat apron of land along the Atlantic shore of North America formed from minerals eroded out of the Appalachian mountains and washed down towards the sea.  Soils here are sandy and acidic, which made it nearly impossible for early settlers to grow their traditional crops.  Yet, despite the name, the Barrens are ecologically diverse and species-rich.  Natural fires, typically caused by lightning strikes, play a huge role in the Barrens ecosystem. Where fires are frequent (relatively speaking. Fires usually only occur naturally once every three to five years), the land is occupied primarily by pitch, scrub and shortleaf pine (Pinus rigida, P. echinata and P. virginiana, respectively), with wide open spaces between occupied by grassy savanna.  Where fires are more infrequent-  whether due to human intervention or wetter soils-- the forest is a tighter mix of pines and species of oaks.  Dark swamps of Atlantic white cedar form along the water ways and numerous bogs-- complete with carnivorous sundews and Sarracenia pitcher plants-- dot the landscape. The Pine Barrens are a pretty cool region and worth check ing out. Go here to learn more.

Now, on to the Devil itself. The classic story of the Jersey Devil's origins concern a woman known as "Mother Leeds" who dwelt in the Pine Barrens in the late 1700s.  According to some legends, Leeds already had 12 children and was so frustrated when she discovered that she was pregnant with a 13th that she openly wished that this one would turn out to be the Devil himself.  When the child was born, it was monstrously deformed.  It could walk and  talk fresh out of the womb and, after cursing its mother,  the creature flew up the chimney and out into the night. Since then the Leeds Devil has haunted the Pine Barrens, emitting its piercing shriek and terrorizing the inhabitants.

However, Brian Regal, who teaches the history of science at Kean University, has a less supernatural, though still historically intriguing, explanation for the Devil.  According to Regal, the story can be traced back to Daniel Leeds, a councilor to the early governor of New Jersey.  Leeds, a Quaker, published an almanac which made use of astrological data which did not sit well with other members of the Society of Friends, who found this aspect of his publication a bit too "pagan". Leeds did not take well to being insulted by his fellows, and ended up publishing even more esoteric works that  slowly pushed him farther and farther away from other Quakers. His reputation was further degraded by his outspoken support for royal authority at a time when thoughts of revolution were stirring in the minds of many throughout the colonies. Eventually Leeds soured in the public eye to the point that he was accused of literally working for the Devil. 

When Daniel Leeds retired, he gave his almanac business over to his son Titan, who quickly got into a feud with future Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, wanting to mess with Titan it seems, used astrological signs to predict the date of his rival's death.  When the date came and went with Titan very much alive, Franklin joked that the man was, in fact, dead, but his printing company was being run by his unquiet spirit.

The unpopular reputation of the Leeds family, combined with Franklin's joke about one of them being a spirit from the Other Side slurried together in the local gossip circles until the whole clan became "political and religious monsters" -- (The Jersey Devil: The Real Story, Brian Regal)

Matters weren't helped any by the fact that Leeds' personal coat of arms bore a wyvern on it-- a creature remarkably similar to later descriptions of the Jersey Devil.

So it seems the Jersey Devil is not a hexed child, a bizarre unknown animal or an outright demon.  Rather it is a recollection of a recollection of gossip about a much-maligned Revolutionary-era family.

Go here to read Regal's much more detailed article.

For my depiction of the Jersey Devil, I based the head on the Hammerheaded Bat (Hypsignathus monstrosus), since to me the boxy head of the classic Devil depiction from 1909 somewhat resembles this creature.  The body of the beast is that of a Vampire Bat (Desmodus rotundus)

Nain Rouge-- Michigan

According to legend, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, founder of Detroit, was plagued throughout his career in North America by hauntings and dream-visions of a small, bestial man in crimson clothing-- the Nain Rouge or "Red Dwarf" (not to be confused with the British sci-fi show). The appearance of the Nain Rouge was said to portent disaster and hard times.  And indeed, Cadillac died penniless.  After his demise, the creature is believed to have taken up residence in the city he founded to haunt the residents of Detroit to the present day.

The Red Dwarf is recorded throughout the Motor City's history.  It was sighted multiple times in the days leading up to the destructive 1805 fire. Another sighting occurred just before the 1967 12th Street riot, one of the most destructive riots in US history. It was also reported just before a massive snowstorm in 1976 by two utility workers who saw it jump from the top of a utility pole.

In 2010, local Detroiters formed the Marche du Nain Rouge, an annual festival/parade celebrating the resilience of the city and its inhabitants and their fight against the problems that plague Detroit as personified by the Red Dwarf. At the conclusion of the festivities, the being is ceremoniously driven out of the city and burned in effigy to usher in a new year of hope.

The concept of the Nain Rouge is believed to trace back to Norman French tales of lutins-- variations of the "house elves" found throughout Germanic, Gaelic and Scandinavian cultures.  While traditional lutins are usually fairly harmless-- doing nothing more fiendish than playing the occasional prank on the humans they share their homes with--the Nain Rouge evolved into a vicious, destructive spirit in New France.  A harbinger of destruction for Cadillac's city, much like the Mothman supposedly was for Point Pleasant.

My version of the Nain Rouge wears French soldier's garb from the era of the Nouvelle France colony in North America.   The Dwarf is usually depicted as a goblin, devil or even a crimson Krampus, with horns, curly hair and huge fangs. His moon-head depiction here is my own invention, inspired by a figure from the Warhammer Fantasy table top game.  And, uh, most definitely NOT inspired by a certain late night fast-food mascot.

The LP records on the house behind the Nain Rouge are a reference to the Heidelberg Project, an outdoor exhibit on the city's east side begun by artist Tyree Guyton. Guyton started the Project initially as a political protest against the decay of Detroit's inner city neighborhoods.  Eventually it became a group effort "to inspire people to appreciate and use artistic expression to enrich their lives and to improve the social and economic health of their greater community." (mission statement of the Heidelberg Project) 

I thought that the hope and constructive creativity of the Project made a fitting contrast and answer to the chaos and destruction personified by the Nain Rouge.

Mothman-- West Virginia

Next to Bigfoot, the Mothman that terrorized Point Pleasant, West Virginia from 1965 to 67 is probably one of the most iconic American cryptids.  Initial sightings followed the typical "boogeyman" mold: a bizarre monster appears in the road suddenly to terrify motorists or chase horny teenagers in a local make-out spot and old munitions dump known as the TNT Area.

 

The Mothman is described as a gray,  sometimes brown, biped with  enormous wings and two red glowing eyes.  Some descriptions said that the beast didn't even have a head, and that its eyes sprouted directly out of its torso. Though the creature did not closely resemble a moth, its name was coined in reference to the Adam West Batman TV series, which was extremely popular at the time.

The numerous sightings gradually attracted more and more media attention, bringing tourists to the town, hoping to catch a glimpse of the monster. Eventually paranormal investigator John Keel arrived to study the being.  The results of his investigation became the book The Mothman Prophecies-- the basis for the 2002 Richard Gere film.  According to Keel's book, the Mothman's hauntings were accompanied by a plague of paranormal phenomena, including disembodied voices, poltergeists, visits from Men in Black (the actual, historical mysterious beings upon whom the movies were based) and encounters with an otherworldly being called Indrid Cold who seemed human, but always bore an enormous, unnerving grin.

Sightings of the Mothman came to an abrupt end near the end of 1967.  In December of that year, the Silver Bridge spanning the Ohio River near Point Pleasant collapsed, killling 46 people.  As time went on, many began to connect the Mothman to the disaster.  Did the creature somehow cause it?  Or, as Keel and others have speculated, was it perhaps a harbinger of the coming tragedy?  A being drawn to the impending fear and death? Or maybe it was even trying to warn the locals about  what was coming?

So what was the Mothman, exactly?  Some think it was an extraterrestrial, or even extradimensional being.  A creature living outside time and space.   

On the mundane side, it's possible that the creature was just an owl or other bird, which was turned into a "monster" by poor light conditions and mass hysteria.  The hypothesis I like best is that the Mothman was actually a misidentified Sandhill Crane (Grus canadensis).  These birds are huge-- nearly as tall as a human being-- with an enormous wingspan.  Seen at night by someone unfamiliar with, or not expectin it,  it isn't difficult to see how one of those birds could be "transformed" into a red-eyed winged monster.

Regardless of what it was, mundane or supernatural,  the Mothman has become a cultural phenomenon, turning up in cartoons, comics, video games, etc.  Point Pleasant itself has erected a statue of  the creature, and even boasts a small museum. 

Mothman statue in Point Pleasant, WV

references:

http://www.mothmanmuseum.com/

http://www.americanmonsters.com/site/2012/12/mothman-west-virginia-usa/

Sinkhole Sam-- Kansas

Although Kansas is primarily known for its agricultural lands and prairies, a corridor of lakes and wetlands once ran through the state-- all across the Midwest, actually-- providing an important stop-over point for migrating birds.

Over the years land development drained these wetlands to the point that today the corridor is just a few small scattered ponds, potholes and playas.  The largest remnant body of water is Lake Inman, in the center of the state. Though the lake is tiny-- only about a quarter mile surface area-- it is said to house its very own monster, Sinkhole Sam.

 Sam is described as a 15 foot long, serpentine creature as round and wide as a car tire. The beast was first sighted by two unknown fisherman who reportedly took shots at it (as people tend to do when sighting a creature potentially new to science, apparently), but failed to kill it. Word of the lake creature spread, bringing in lots of tourist traffic to the small town of Inman. Like other aquatic monsters, of course, Sam failed to make any major appearances, so interest soon dried up.

According to sources, Sinkhole Sam is/was a creature called a "foopengerkle", though exactly what  that is is never explained. As to how Sam got into such a small land-locked lake, some speculate that it was a prehistoric creature that inhabited a cavern at the bottom of the lake and only came to the surface as the wetlands were drained.

For my interpretation of Sinkhole Sam, I imagined it as a gigantic caecilian-- a snake or worm-like amphibian (order Gymnophiona). Caecilians are mostly found in warmer parts of South and Central America, Africa and South Asia. Although most are burrowers, those in the order Typhlonectidae are aquatic. If Sam is one of these animals, or more likely a colony of them, it could survive the winter months in deep hibernation buried in the mud at the bottom of the lake as frogs and salamanders do.

Most caecilians eat small, subterranean prey such as earthworms, springtails and other invertebrates.  But a large aquatic species like the 15 foot long foopengerkle would likely subsist on the huge colonies of birds that stop off at this important watering hole during their migration.  When the lake was part of an extensive wetland system, the foopengerkles may have been abundant-- perhaps playing an important role in the food chain similar to otters or alligators.  As the waters have been drained away, the population must have plummeted until  now when only a tiny remnant colony remains in Lake Inman. If they have not already gone extinct.

Sources:

http://www.americanmonsters.com/site/2010/06/the-legend-of-sink-hole-sam/

http://www.thekansan.com/article/20100612/NEWS/306129943

Prairie: A Natural History by Candace Savage

The Montauk Monster-- New York

In July of 2008, a strange carcass washed ashore in the district of Montauk on the South Shore of Long Island.  The creature was hairless and squat, with a mammalian body, but a beak like a bird.
Lots of speculation ensued.  Some thought that it might be a  genetic experiment from the nearby Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Others thought perhaps it was a turtle without it's shell-- a rumor quickly proven false since a turtle's spine is attached to its shells, thus the animal cannot be removed from it. Many concluded that it was simply a raccoon that had lost its fur and part of its face due to long immersion in water.

As often happens with stories of mysterious carcasses washing up on shores, the Montauk Monster was eventually taken by a local resident and soon disappeared before too many people had a chance to examine it.

The original picture of the Monster.  Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

So what was this bizarre creature? The dead raccoon hypothesis seems most likely.  The overall squat body closely resembles a raccoon's, as do the long, fine fingers.  The apparent "beak" is likely the exposed  front part of the skull.  The effects of prolonged exposure to sun and salt water, and the natural processes of decay, can make even the most common animal nearly unrecognizable.

Witness, for example, the Zuiyo-maru carcass, an apparent plesiosaur carcass hauled up by a Japanese fishing trawler in 1977:

Image taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Though this carcass was thrown overboard before it could be examined by scientists, it was most likely the badly-decayed remains of a basking shark rather than a prehistoric reptile.  The lower jaw and gills of these sharks often fall away soon after death, leaving behind a smaller head (actually just the brain case) and apparent "neck" created by the spinal column.

For my rendition of the Montauk Monster, I tried to imagine how it would live if it had been a genuine unknown animal.  I like the idea of it using its beak to pry up the tough bark of pine trees like a porcupine using its incisors or an extinct "shovel-tusker" elephant like Amebelodon.

The Melon Heads-- Connecticut

Okay, finally getting to the Melonheads.  I've been putting off talking about these guys because I really don't like the mythology surrounding them. And you'll see why in a moment.  Although some folklore purists may not like it, I've decided to create my own story behind these elusive beings, incorporating some other semi-famous pieces of "weird" New England.

First, the original lore.  The stories vary somewhat, but the gist of the myths involve an old asylum for the criminally insane where the doctors carry out horrific experiments upon the patients.  After years of torture, the patients escape and murder the doctors, burn down the asylum, then flee into the surrounding woods.  They live out there for years, hidden from civilization, growing more and more savage.  Their gigantic heads are either a pre-existing hydrocephalic condition or caused by decades of inbreeding.  They attack people on lonely wooded roads, dragging them back to their lairs to devour them.

Hopefully by now you can see why I dislike this mythology. The biggest problem I have is that this story relies primarily on the lazy, hurtful stereotype of the mentally-ill as being dangerous and savage.  People struggling with mental illness have enough prejudice to deal with, without being turned into cannibalistic boogeymen.  Even worse are the versions of the story where the Melonheads' enlarged craniums are caused by hydrocephalism.  Because having a debilitating disease naturally makes you a monster, of course.

I should mention that there's another version of the Melonhead story that portrays them as the descendants of an exiled Colonial-era family who hid in the woods and, once again, degenerated into sub-human cannibalistic monsters due to inbreeding.  Still not really any better.

So, here's my version of the Melonhead origin story:

In 1852, Pastor and Spiritualist John Murray Spears began claiming he was in touch with "The Association of Electrizers", a coalition of spirits that included Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson and other famous persons. Their reason for contacting him, so he claimed, was to bring new technology to mankind and create an age of spiritual and social prosperity. The key to this revolution was the creation of a mechanical Messiah dubbed the "New Motive Power". 

Spears gathered his followers to a shed in Lynn, Massachusetts, where they built their Messiah out of machined rods and other bits of copper, zinc and magnetic iron.  To give the thing life, one of Spears' female followers even underwent a "spiritual pregnancy and labor".

 Once everything was in place, Spears followed through the ritual as dictated by the Electrizers to finally bring his New Motive Power to life. 

But nothing happened.  The machine failed to work.

Except, it did.

For what Spears didn't know was that the beings who called themselves the Electrizers had given him instructions not for a new Messiah, but for a machine to create a gateway between two worlds.  Their universe was dying and they were trying to escape into ours. 

The gateway itself had actually been built centuries ago before any European had set foot in the New World.  Its builders were a mystery, for none of the local First Nations had done it.  Perhaps the gate was created by the same unknown people who built the tower off of Brenton Point in Rhode Island (which I'll talk about more in my Rhode Island entry).  The gateway was a stone-lined well dug into a hill in what would one day be Goshen, CT.  Two passageways ran off the main well.  One was merely a drain to keep the well from flooding. But the other led to a vast underground chamber where the forgotten race had assembled a massive mechanical apparatus that would link the two worlds. 

Why it wasn't activated centuries ago isn't clear, nor is it known why the Electrizers used a pastor in Massachusetts to create their power source instead of someone closer to the actual gateway.  Perhaps time and space weren't obstacles for this ritual.  Whatever the reason, when the ritual to awaken the New Motive Power was  conducted, the mechanism in the well came to life. A small group of beings slid through into our world, but something went wrong.  The power to the mechanism was cut off prematurely, and the resulting energy feedback caused the chamber to cave in.  Some of the beings managed to escape the well before the apparatus and its chamber completely collapsed.  But their connection to the old universe was cut off, buried under tons of stone. 

Today the well is known as the Goshen Mystery and can be found in an old cemetery.

Though similar in appearance to humans, the Electrizer beings were actually another species of hominid that had become the dominate species in their reality.  Their most obvious difference from Homo sapiens were their enlarged skulls, which developed at puberty.  Knowing their appearance would make it difficult to blend in with human society, the Melonheads (as they were dubbed by the few people who saw them) hid in the woods, doing their best to eke  out a living.  Inevitably, they were distorted into  the monstrous boogeymen of the familiar tales due to human fears of the strange and unknown.  But in truth these beings are no worse nor better than any other human being.  Over the years, they have made contact with a select few sympathetic humans who have helped them improve their lives and have even on occasion intermarried (or at least interbred) with them.

For this drawing, I wanted to avoid the "feral boogeyman" look that the traditional folklore depicts and instead show them as just normal people-- albeit normal people from a different dimension and species than Homo sapiens.  The long dark ridge in the background is one of the basaltic dikes of the Metacomet Range which are ubiquitous throughout Central Connecticut. 

Sources:

http://www.damnedct.com/the-melon-heads

http://www.weirdus.com/states/ohio/fabled_people_and_places/melonheads/

(this is the Ohio version of the myth.)

To learn more about Reverend John Murray Spear, check out these pages: 

http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2014/06/the-bizarre-mechanical-messiah-of-john-murray-spear/

http://whofortedblog.com/2010/08/10/the-new-motor-building-the-god-machine/

And here's a site about the Goshen Mystery Tunner:

http://mysterious-hills.blogspot.com/2006/01/goshen-tunnel-enigma.html

I originally heard about the Tunnel and Revered Spear from the book Curious New England, by Joseph A. Citro and Diane E. Foulds.  It's got a lot of pretty cool, sometimes creepy, places and things to see in all six New England states.

The Palos Verde Blue Space Brains (Runner-up: Fresno Nightcrawlers)-- California

Late at night in August of 1971, two residents of Palos Verde, CA-- Peter Rodriguez and John Hodges-- got into their car after leaving a friend's house and flicked on the head lights to discover two bizarre, brain-shaped beings squatting in the road in front of them.

Frightened, the two men sped away into the night.  After dropping off Rodriguez, John Hodges drove home only to discover that this normally 10-minute trip had taken almost 2 hours.  As often happens in cases of alien encounters, Hodges had a large gap of "missing time", where he could not explain where he'd been or what he'd been doing.

After letting the strange events of that night marinate in his mind for five years, Hodges finally decided to undergo hypnotherapy to try to discover more of what happened.  Under hypnosis, he "recalled" that one of the brains had said to him:

"Take the time to understand yourselves.  The time draws near when you shall need to.  You shall not remember this incident until we meet again."

      --quoted from Americanmonsters.com

Regressing further into his "lost" memories, Hodges discovered that the brains had been waiting for him at his home after he dropped Rodriguez off.  Somehow they transported him to a metal room full of computers where he encountered several seven foot-tall web-fingered gray-skinned beings.  These creatures explained that the brains were actually just organic translators to allow them to communicate with Earthly life.  As often happens with these types of alien encounters, the gray beings warned that humanity must learn to control it's dangerous power or face obliteration-- though whether by our own hands or by the advanced technology of another race is not clear.

I initially learned of the Space Brains from an article on non-gray aliens at Bogleech.com, which features illustrations by Eric Kowalick-- also known as Monster-Man-08 on Deviantart.  I didn't want my version of the brains to look like just a copy of Kowalick's already pretty cool design, so I tried to give them a more wrinkled, almost brain coral-like look.  Plus insect-like walking limbs (which, admittedly, were inspired from a creature in an old adventure from Dungeon magazie called "The Night Parade").

Runner Up: The Fresno Nightcrawlers

Although the Palos Verde Brains are the "official" (at least according to my goofy little blog) cryptids of California, I also found the recent phenomenon of the Nightcrawlers cool and weird enough to give them an honorary "Second Banana" status.

Information about these cryptids is spotty, and mostly found piecemeal on various blogs and wikis across the web, but here is what I've managed to gather:

In 2011, a video appeared on Youtube supposedly showing two strange, bulbous-headed creatures drifting across a lawn in Fresno, CA.  The beings' lower bodies are either made of two strips of cloth-like material, or they have a pair of billowing, pant-like legs.  The video is too grainy to see them clearly.

  A few months later, another video appeared supposedly showing a pair of the creatures walking down a hill in Yosemite.  The second set of creatures are a bit clearer and appear to be nothing but round heads on a pair of bendable, stilt-like legs.

The videos gathered enough notoriety that they were eventually featured in one of the Syfy Channels paranormal investigation shows.  There are even rumors of "Native American legends" about the creatures going back at least a hundred years, though no one has yet provided a more detailed account of what these stories are actually about, or where they come from.

Looking at the videos, it seems pretty clear that the creatures in the first video are nothing more than cloth puppets similar to classic Halloween ghosts being pulled along on strings.  The second video is a little harder to identify, though, as one commentator has pointed out, it is possible that the beings are just CGI.

Even if the Nightcrawlers are pretty obvious hoaxes, though, I think they still deserve a place in California cryptid folklore, if for nothing more than their unusual and rather haunting appearances.