The Tragedy of the Cryptids

Why are many cryptid tales associated with tragedy? Or, why are certain tragedies linked to cryptids? Some might say a cryptid is a curse, but it more likely is a symbol of the things we fear or about which we are anxious or guilty. There are plenty of examples.

Blaming the cryptid

It was Christmas, 2024. Two Oregon men “failed to return from a trip to look for Sasquatch” in the Gifford Pinchot Forest in Washington, authorities said. Rescuers spent Christmas facing dangerous conditions during the search until the men were found deceased. From the news reports, the two apparently were not equipped for the cold and wet weather.

It was never made clear if they were on a Bigfoot hunting excursion or just out for a short Holiday hike. The Bigfoot connection may have just been a flippant comment they made regarding their trip, or perhaps they were cryptid enthusiasts who hoped to glimpse the creature in an area with reported encounters. The unfortunate outcome was subsequently linked with the cryptid, often in headlines, which seemed to be out of proportion, as if belief in Bigfoot was the cause of death. Several commenters on the news stories, unsurprisingly, were cruel, mocking the men based on speculation about their behavior. Worse than that, some people took the tragedy even farther by saying that the men didn’t die from exposure, but from some other cause that officials are covering up. This is one of several examples of cryptids connected to tragedy.

There are various examples of cryptids associated with curses, death or destruction. This is unsurprising considering that cryptids are legends, and legends often have morbid twists as part of the drama. But the more surprising cryptid connections occur when the creature is celebrated in spite of or as part of the tragedy. The primary examples of these are stark: Mothman and the Pope Lick Monster. As noted in previous posts in this series, Mothman is the enigmatic, winged humanoid and the Pope Lick Monster is a Goatman. Let’s start with the cursed, evil, but maybe useful, highly-celebrated, harbinger of doom: Mothman.

AI art screengrabbed from a bad TikTok. (Not sorry.)

Mothman and the Silver Bridge

On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River, connecting Point Pleasant, WV to Gallipolis, OH collapsed. Most people know this terrible story: rush hour, forty-six people perished as their cars plunged into the icy water. The official investigation pegged the eye-bar failure. Lack of engineering redundancy meant the structure failed with it. However, the legend evolved to either blame the Mothman or its curse, or credit the creature as a warning of approaching doom.

Many people also know that the Mothman Festival is a big deal, drawing over 10,000 vistors to the small town every year to celebrate the big bird-moth-like being. How did we get from such heart-breaking tragedy to a giant town party with cosplayers and a shiny fantastical statue in the center square?

In 2008, Joseph Laycock, a scholar of religious studies, and sometimes of monsters, wrote about the weird acceptance by Point Pleasant of a legend that caused the town such pain and gave it a dark reputation. (Cite: Fieldwork in Religion, 3.1, 2008) To start, we must consider the context of the town of Point Pleasant.

So frequently, cryptid tales are backdated to the time when white settlers encountered the indigenous peoples. (That’s it’s own tragic tale – the lands haunted by Mothman and many other cryptids belonged to indigenous people who often were misappropriated by a manufactured legend, or erased entirely.) During the Revolutionary War times, a battle between the Virginians and the natives resulted in the death of the Shawnee Chief Cornstalk, who was murdered as a result of a diplomatic mission to Fort Randolph. Legend is that he cursed the land. Eventually, Cornstalk and Mothman legends were associated.

Prior to the bridge tragedy, the town suffered an economic downturn, flooding events, and a nearby mining disaster.

In the “Year of the Garuda” as labeled by The Mothman Prophecies author John Keel, the town was plagued by not only the monster, but by UFO sightings and the appearance of strangers, dubbed Men In Black by Keel. The MIB reportedly intimidated, threatened, robbed and assaulted the locals. If you lived in Point Pleasant at this time, you may have been threatened more by the UFO reports than the “monster”. Newspaper reporting leans much less on the “Big Bird” and more on the rash of UFO claims during this time. Keel’s book, from 1972, reframed the Mothman-UFO flap as a time and place of “high strangeness” with the Mothman as the star. (Cite: Dr. Jeb Card, personal comm.) [Addition: Corroborated by Richard Estep who said locals did not connect the bridge disaster to the “Big Black Bird” at the time, either. See MonsterTalk.]

With the collapse of the Bridge, the Mothman essentially disappeared from sight. The community, left in shock, tried to make sense of the disaster. Laycock notes that Mothman would have remained “a local demon” if the bridge collapse didn’t happen. But the association propelled Mothman from a mysterious menace to a supernatural death messenger – like that of the Irish Banshee. Mothman perhaps helped to fill in the vacuum of meaning felt by the residents as they struggled to move past the disaster.

In later decades, Mothman moved from being a threat to being a symbol of the town’s identity – its “monstrous patron”. While the Mothman now has a gleaming anthropomorphic statue in a prominent location in town, and its own museum, festival, and traditions, the people who died at the Silver Bridge are less commemorated. The bridge event was situated in service to the Mothman, who became the spirit of the town. With a boost from the 2002 film that rejuvenated the tale, and the growing embrace of Pop Cryptids nationwide, Point Pleasant treated the winged monster much like a religious icon that was viewed with sacred meaning. Mothman symbolized events that shook their town beyond their control.

I would gladly become a monstrous patron of a capable scholar who could write the definitive bio of Mothman and his impact – it’s crazy stuff.

Pope Lick Monster

The Fisherville area of Louisville, Kentucky, location of the train trestle associated with the Pope Lick monster, has a love/hate relationship with the infamous goatman. Legend tripping teens and tourists bypass the fences and warnings in an attempting to traverse the active train trestle bridge (which is 90 feet high and 772 long) to have their own experience. I could not get an accurate count of the dead, but, since 1968, it appears that at least 10 people have been killed by trains crossing the bridge or falling from the bridge to avoid a train. Several more were injured or nearly killed.

As with Mothman, a film boosted the legend. The 1988 short film The Legend of the Pope Lick Monster by local Ron Schildknecht put it into an easily relatable package, introducing the idea that the goatman can hypnotize you, and suggesting that you can hang from the bridge while the train passed (few people have the strength to do this). Thanks to worldwide connectivity networks, the legend spread beyond the town, becoming an attraction for thrill seekers.

Some sources say that Schildknecht regrets that the film added to the lore and that he didn’t intend to make dangerous trespassing a fad. But I’m getting mixed messages. In what seems like a brazen affront to those that have been hurt or killed, the filmmaker’s website features quotes by the Norfolk Southern Railroad about the film,

“It undermines our efforts on behalf of safety when movies like this are made.”
— spokesman for Norfolk Southern Corp.

The festival to celebrate the Pope Lick Monster legend is fairly new. There is also a Halloween attraction (that mentions the Schildknecht name associated with the sensationalized origin story). This all feels disrespectful to the memory of those who died and perhaps increases the odds that more people visit and venture into harm’s way. Supporters of the events say they don’t celebrate the darkness. I’m not sold. Imagine if you were part of an affected family witnessing a yearly entertainment event centered on the legend and location where your child met their demise. This controversy seems to be dividing the community. Sadly, cryptid capitalism will likely win out.

Because of its location, the area around the creek is said to be cursed land because of the bloodshed that occurred from removal of the native people. Do these communities still struggle with the guilt of history, past and current? Does the heavy weight of industrialism and depression help create the “monster” that haunts the town? By using monstrous symbols, communities try to find a way to compartmentalize, process, and move on.

The Pope Lick Monster appears to be the cryptid with the highest death count. Of course, no one was really killed by the goatman. It is a choice to make the effort to put oneself in harms way.

I recommend checking out Episode 3 of Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal, a recent series that covered the despair of those left to deal with the Pope Lick reputation.

Linking cryptids

Cryptid legends, when examined in depth, can reveal tragic connections that the casually interested person would not typically notice. I’ve collected more examples.

• People who disappear in rugged areas, particularly in National Parks of the US have been exploited by Bigfoot writer David Paulides under the umbrella of his book series “Missing 411”. Paulides doesn’t explicitly say that the people may have been taken by Bigfoot, serial killers, aliens, or something even more outrageous. He misleads the reader and lets your imagination fill in the gaps by mystery mongering, playing fast and loose with facts, and framing the incidents as cover-ups. It’s non-credible, mean-spirited, and ghoulish, and should be dismissed as such.

• It’s not uncommon to see news stories about people who do heinous things linked to their seemingly outlandish beliefs about aliens, conspiracies, demons, or their interest in cryptids. Sometimes the media makes spurious connections that the audience latches onto. The Christmas 2020 suicide bomber of Nashville, Tennessee supposedly believed that “Reptilians” or “Lizard People” were in charge of the government – an idea made popular by David Icke. I’d recommend, again, the Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal episode that linked the paranoid idea of Reptilians to the legend of Lizard Man of Bishopville/Scape Ore Swamp.

• The Not Deer legend of Appalachia is the relatively recent tale of deer that behave weirdly with the speculation that they are not actually normal deer but shapeshifters trying to lure you into the woods. The legend has been influenced by the spread of a prion disease or other typical deer illnesses that cause the animal to suffer and eventually die. The supernatural explanation is far more popular than than natural one.

• Ol’ Greeneyes, while a debatable “cryptid”, has its own festival now in the town where the Battle of Chickamauga took place. The creature is said to be a ghoul or a ghost of a dead soldier who haunts the battlefield. It seems a strange mascot for a cryptid celebration but the event has been successful. As with other cryptid festivals – the cryptid is the excuse to gather round the town center and re-experience the historical past.

• The legend of Zana, the wildwoman, has been completely misconstrued by those who believe that she was not a modern human but possibly an Almas (a cryptid hominid) captured in the late 1800s. It is far more likely that she was of African decent, captured, kept in slavery in Abkhazia. White male cryptozoologists treated this story of her life as a mystery for them to solve and show that relict races existed.

• The Beast of the Land Between the Lakes is a story based on fiction. But the truth of the project that formed the park lands was tragic to many families. Starting in 1964, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) began to condemn the 170,000 acres that would later be flooded. Some 800 families were forcibly removed by eminent domain. They sacrificed their land and livelihoods, their communities were ruined, and their ancestors’ graves abandoned. The consequences of that destruction still reverberates. Is the “beast” a manifestation of revenge for this callous treatment?

• The eruption of Mt. St Helens in 1980 is one of the first national disasters I recall as a child watching the news. It resulted in the death of a USGS geologist, Harry Truman, a resident to refused to leave his homestead, and 55 others who perished from the mudflows, hot ash and gas. Tales were told of Bigfoot around the mountain. After the eruption, someone started the story that the Bigfoot population had been decimated, an entirely baseless story. In the late 90s, the story of the Batsquatch encounter apparently prompted another piece of creative fiction – that the Batsquatches were let loose from their underground abodes via the volcanic eruption.

• The tale of the Wendigo (and its many variations) from Algonquin-speaking first nations in Canada and US, has been heavily appropriated in fiction, films, and as a cryptid. The brutal association with murder and cannibalism has been changed drastically for use in various media and commercial purposes. I’m not qualified to speak about its traditional use but the Wendigo wasn’t a Bigfoot, it didn’t have antlers, it doesn’t imitate human voices or shapeshift and it’s not part of Appalachian folklore. It is a spirit creature that embodies the threat of starvation for northern peoples who faced this circumstance. Yet, the creatures has become so popularized and commodified, an offensive stench rises from the fictionalized garbage content of awful fan art, horror flicks, and AI generated TikTok shorts.

The traditional vs new version of Wendigo.

Capitalizing on tragedy

There are not unreasonable arguments on both sides of the debate regarding capitalizing on past tragedies via cryptid festivals. Are cryptid festivals like those in Point Pleasant, WV and Fisherville, KY capitalizing on the deaths of others? Or are they serving as complex social means of moving beyond the haunted town histories? There likely are some instances where the intent was positive, to memorialize the tragedy in a respectful way, that later got out of control. And I have inklings that this conflict also occurs in other cultures, where monsters represent real tragedies.

The list above certainly has additional examples. Ghost stories are frequently a means of remembering a death or an unresolved tragedy or crime. Another example of banking on dark history is the commercialization of the town of Salem, where 25 people suffered and died in the witch trials that became the basis of a tourism branding as the tasteless and tacky “witch city”.

It’s difficult and often entirely inappropriate to police or suppress art (including books, films, etc.) and social responses to trauma. People will attempt to rationalize a disaster even via seemingly irrational scapegoats.

It can be difficult to reject participating in an interesting modern event because it is tainted by the events of the past. Culture evolves where we recreate or reenvision the past with a new framing. I don’t know that there is a right answer here – each person will have their own response. It’s imperative, however, that we not let the history of the tragedies be ignored, forgotten, or overtaken entirely by cryptid legends.

This is post 8 of the 12 Days of Cryptids.

#12DaysOfCryptids #Bigfoot #cryptidFestival #LandBetweenTheLakesBeast #Missing411 #mothman #PopeLickMonster #tragicCryptids #wendigo

We need to talk about Dogman

Dogman, a hairy humanoid, bipedal creature with a canid-type head, started its upward climb in cryptid popularity in the early 2000s. It was relatively invisible in cryptid literature prior to the work of one person: Linda Godfrey. Today, the dogman is one of the hottest mysterious animals on social media and podcasting where hundreds of stories have materialized from people who claim to have experienced this creature. Why did the dogman cryptid rise to prominence in the last 20 years? And why is modern cryptid investigation enamored with this highly paranormal creature?

We need to talk about the dogman and what it has done to modern cryptozoology.

Dogman as a para-cryptid

Starting in the 1990s, the cryptid scene was been overrun by the dogman/werewolf/canid-humanoid theme. The stories originated in the American Midwest, first in Wisconsin – thanks to Linda Godfrey’s coverage of the Beast of Bray Road. Then the Michigan Dogman legend rose to prominence across the Great Lakes area. Godfrey’s subsequent books expanded to include stories of “American Werewolves” and “Real Wolfmen”, encompassing the ancient ideas of the Egyptian god Anubis, the Rougarou legend of the southern states, and any mention of an anomalous wolf creature. Now, accounts of the “dogman” or equivalent creatures, can be found nearly nationwide.

Let’s take a step back and look at this big picture. There is nothing about the dogman descriptions or accounts that suggests it is an unknown animal that can be captured and scientifically identified. Nothing about it is biologically plausible. Consider that Bigfoot (if it was discovered to be an actual unclassified hominin) would not break the boundaries of biology as we know it; but the dogman would.

Canids (dogs or wolves, in this context) did not evolve robust bodies, human-like torsos, become bipedal, and change the functionality and morphology of their forelimbs to become arms with elbows, with long fingers and claws. This cannot naturally occur in a few years time, or may never occur if the genetic setup is not there to begin with.

An alternative would be that the animal described is not dog-like, but a baboon or kangaroo. (No one, however, is running with those latter suggestions). Therefore, the only option that one must accept in order to believe in a literal dogman, is that it is a non-natural creature, not a zoological one. Here is where the conversation leaps from the realm of “scientific” cryptozoology (if that ever existed) and lands entirely in the para-cryptid zone.

America’s werewolves

Godfrey’s coverage of the Bray Road Beast and other associated creature sightings and anomalies was commendable and in good faith. She talked to witnesses, taking their details at face value. She believed their accounts and tried very hard to lend a credible framing to the very strange body of dogman anecdotes. Her documentation, however, does not make the creature a reality. It remains unresolved what some people experienced when they described a dogman encounter.

Even with Godfrey’s documentation, we have nothing but stories. We can’t tell how truly reliable any of that information is. Many of the experiences of dogman were recounted from decades ago. Some of the tales are clearly exaggerated, as the level of detail reported was hardly possible in the dark or from far away as described.

Until Godfrey published the accounts, there were no well-documented examples that sounded credible or verifiable. Why would that be unless the animal suddenly appeared in the cultural setting?

As with Bigfoot, misidentification is always a possibility. Mangy bears, in particular, look surprisingly dog-like. Normal canids – large dogs, coyotes, wolves – are also likely to be involved. It is hard to convince people, however, that they may have been mistaken about what they think they saw.

A black bear suffering from mange.

Hoaxes

The next necessary consideration is hoaxing. Unfortunately, influential hoaxes have tainted the stories of dogmen throughout their history.

The Defiance werewolf created a local panic in the Ohio town when, in 1972, Ted Davis reported to the police that he had been attacked by a “werewolf” wielding a wooden board. The creature was seen a few times, which, in turn, sparked many other residents to also say they saw it. But then it disappeared without a trace, leading to the most obvious conclusion that it was a person in a mask. When dogman tales ramped up online, this old story was resurrected and attached as further evidence of similar creatures, regardless of how weak it was.

The Gable film was uploaded to YouTube in 2007. It was made by filmmaker Mike Agrusa to look like it was taken in the 1970s. The “found footage” showed the camera person observing and being attacked by a large canid with the backstory that he was killed. For years, people argued about its authenticity as a real depiction of a cryptid, until it was revealed to be a hoax in 2010. Some newer fans of the subject never got the memo, or refused to believe it was faked.

The Michigan Dogman began its life as a song called “The Legend” released in 1987 by disc jockey Steve Cook at WTCM-FM in Traverse City, Michigan. It was intended as an April Fool’s joke, based on some legends in Michigan – an 1887 tale from Wexford County, MI where two lumberjacks claimed to see a man-dog creature, and a 1937 story from Paris, MI, where Robert Fortney said he was was attacked by wild dogs, one of which walked on two legs. A few additional accounts of strange creatures were mentioned from the intervening years but none were authenticated. Cook was astonished at the outpouring of stories that were triggered by his re-invigoration of the legend. Cook eventually collaborated with Agrusa for the Gable film.

The basis of much of the dogman lore is dubious or outright bogus. But the current hot spot for dogman tales comes from a wildlife area that has a dark history of its own.

LBL Beast

The lore of the beast in the Land Between the Lakes National Park (Kentucky-Tennessee) is a metaphorical “dog’s breakfast” – this was a term one of my former bosses used to describe a situation that was a complete mess. The LBL and its “beast” tales have served at the focus of dogman stories since about 2018. The stories now even attribute multiple deaths to the beast. Because park officials deny that these deaths have anything to do with attacks by unknown animals (or that they even happened at all), a stench of conspiracy-mongering permeates the tales.

Only one actual murder is associated with the park: Carla Atkins and Vickie Stout’s bodies were found in LBL in October of 1980. They were killed with a shotgun. Their killer was never found.

There are other famously retold stories: a family massacred in 1982, a hunter pulled from his tent and mauled, a camping family terrorized by huge creatures. The details are unclear or outright manufactured. The locals got annoyed. According to those that have lived there for decades, there is no actual folklore of a beast. It’s been manufactured – more like “fakelore”.

In 2004, a fictional story, written by “Jan Thompson” on a website that collected other stories, called Jan’s Tales, featured the tale of “The Beast of LBL”. This short story manufactured a folkloric history of a wolf-like bipedal beast and the bloody massacre of a family of three at their RV camping site (with the extra detail that the remaining child was missing). Various officers and the coroner were involved in the gruesome scene. Then the twist:

All types of samples were placed in plastic bags, marked as evidence, and carefully stowed away.  As they were packaging up what appeared to be one of the fathers [sic] arms, one of the doctors noticed  something wrapped between the dead fingers.  Some tweezers slowly untangled a clump of long, gray and brown hairs.  This too was placed in a bag, marked and put away to be analyzed at a lab later.    

This story is fiction, yet it was repeated as fact. Horror filmmakers got wind of the legends and planned a movie called The Beast of LBL. I can’t find that the film was ever released but no one had anything positive to say about the parties involved in it.

[Producer] Vervoort said community reaction to the project has mostly been positive. He said he’s producing the movie because he saw a business opportunity and jumped on it. “I think it’s a case of jealousy because they’re not the ones doing it. And I saw an opportunity to create a story and I’m going with it,” Vervoort said.

Capitalizing on a fictional story promoted as real? Sounds familiar.

Fake images of Dogman are everywhere online. Even if absurdly obviously fraudulent, people click on them to comment that they believe it is real.

Dogman expands to be everywhere and everything

Linda Godfrey’s efforts to collect dogman tales, unfortunately, turned her into an advocate for its reality. Her books were overly credulous. For example, she referenced Jan Thompson’s fictional tale as if it was factual. (Others did the same.) Eventually, she entertained supernatural explanations because the stories were so weird and were multiplying that it all was too much to consider dismissing them. The supernatural slide became more appealing as natural explanations didn’t add up. She was convinced that something was going on.

There was something going on: the dogman creature had resonated with popular culture about mysterious creatures and propagated. Even though the infamous TV show Monster Quest ended its run in 2010 with the reveal of the Gable film hoax, people loved the dogman story too much to give it up. The MQ end was just the beginning for the run of the dogman.

Small Town Monsters (the primary, serious producers of cryptid documentary content) jumped on the dogman train, producing multiple media pieces exaggerating and repeating the tales from the Midwest, LBL, Texas, and New Mexico. (Some programming consisted solely of witness reports filmed for the other features, loosely tied together). Unmentioned in their films is an explanation for expansion of accounts of dogman/werewolf creatures throughout the 2000s. It simply didn’t exist before this. In an attempt to account for this sudden appearance, Ron Murphy, a prolific paranormal writer, said that he thinks earlier accounts might previously been categorized as Bigfoot encounters but could have been dogman because we didn’t have a “frame of reference” then. This hypothesis fails because it ignores the facts that dogman descriptions, while often highly varied, usually include mention of a long muzzle and ears, as well as digitigrade legs. Bigfoot has small, usually unmentioned, ears, a distinctly flat face, and a human-like footprint.

That lack of prior dogmen sightings is far more likely cultural – because it was invented and promoted in the late 90s into the 2000s. We see social contagion at play -when people are hearing the associated stories and then interpreting their experiences in that framing. Another interviewee (from STM’s The Dogman Triangle) remarks that he heard of accounts from podcasts, which got him interested in the subject. This reveals how influential cryptid podcasts and social media (particularly YouTube) are in spreading the word and pulling new people into the topic.

America’s new werewolves

The trajectory of the dogman’s popularity exemplifies the move of the field of cryptozoology away from zoological cryptids towards the culturally-derived cryptid. If there are no zoological rules to be applied, then anything goes. The dogman, in its various forms, was open to addition of fun and dramatic embellishments of its story. Much was made of the creatures’ association with burial mounds and cemeteries (like Anubis), its demonic characteristics, association with Satanism and the occult and Christian references. The idea of the shapeshifter was an obvious tie-in considering its extraordinary behaviors (such as running alongside cars) and ability to not be captured. Even the fantastical story of the Hexham heads, so-called magical artifacts from the UK, were tied to the lore. Considering that LBL is a US National park, the dogman existence became a conspiracy where officials must be barred from speaking about the sightings, missing persons, and unexplained deaths.

Eventually, people described the dogman in terms of movie monsters from An American Werewolf in London, Silver Bullet and Dog Soldiers. There is significant crossover with tales of Bigfoot, Goatman, and Rougarou. Even modern chupacabra depictions are converging on the Dogman type.

Social media reveals countless AI renderings of dogman videos. Ambiguous photos are said to be of dogman.

A screengrab from a (manufactured) video of the “Black Walker”, reportedly taken in Vermont in 2009. Many people consider this evidence. In reality, such a creature would be biologically impossible.

Dogman now has a reputation as a violent predator. In the LBL area particularly, believers suggest that the Dogman territory is in the North while Bigfoot’s is in the South. Sometimes they fight. Alternatively, some suggest Bigfoot protects the area and people from the dogmen. Or, maybe they work together. Or the dogman manifests via human energy. Or it travels through portals to an alternative dimension. The absurdity knows no bounds.

I find the cultural aspects of dogman, as a contemporary legend, fascinating and deserving of research and discussion. However, whenever I talk of cryptozoology as having almost entirely cultural value, I am told that it aims to be a scientific endeavor to explore possible unknown animals. We have various investigation teams searching for a prowling, predatory, magical, grave-guarding, biological impossibility, with no legitimate scientific evidence for its existence. This is, in no way, scientific.

With the Dogman as one of the most popular cryptids right now, those calling themselves cryptozoologists have some explaining to do. Those attempting to hold the line of cryptozoology as a serious “science-based” effort must address the Dogman problem. The evidence consists of unverified stories based on fictional foundations to describe a biological impossible creature. Yet, they aren’t addressing it. Instead, they continue to commodify it with media and merch, but no rational investigation. I can’t take that seriously.

Suggested reading: The Tale of the Dogman at Tetrapod Zoology

This is post 7 of the 12 Days of Cryptids.

#12DaysOfCryptids #BeastOfBrayRoad #dogman #LandBetweenTheLakesBeast #LindaGodfrey #werewolf