Scary Monsters and Super Creeps: In Search of the World's Most Hideous Beasts by Dom Joly

A couple of years ago I read Joly's amazing "The Dark Tourist". It was at once informative and laugh out loud funny. Learning about the touristic "delights" of "taboo" destinations, such as discovering that you can ski in Iran, as an absolute joy. I guess Joly was hoping to recapture that perfect travel book balance again with Scary Monsters and Super Creeps. Unfortunately he fails on one front.

This book is still laugh out loud funny. I was desperately containing snorts of laughter on the train to and from work. For that along it is worth the read, Joly has a way of seeing the world that makes his grumpy old man character seem endearing rather than tiring. However his "search" for some of cryptozoology's biggies (he calls them the "Big Six"), leaves a lot to be desired.

If you want to find out about the culture of foreign airports, basic infrastructure and how big a fool Joly sometimes felt as he gets himself into allsorts of scraps ("Are you looking for Ogopogo?" is all I'm saying!) then this is the book for you. If you want to know anything about the veracity of the tales about the "Big Six", look elsewhere.

He does take a video of a "sighting" of Ogopogo but he doesn't even take basic steps to try and work out what it really is. Here's a video that could, you never know, blow this case wide open. Or it could be some fish having a bit of a fight (which hey, might have been enlightening!). But he just moves on. He never makes it past the nearest village to Mokele Mbembe's purported location, he spends lots of time in Hiroshima and Nagasaki rather than actually looking for the Hibagon and he doesn't, understandably, get to the sort of altitudes in Nepal where the yeti is mostly reported from. And we hear more about his hot tub social encounters in Inverness than the Loch Ness monster.

It all felt very half-hearted and that just made it feel a little pointless. A shame really as it is still pretty hilarious. 

Bigfoot: The Ruby Creek Incident

George and Jeannie Chapman and their children were an Amerindian family who, in September 1941, lived in Ruby Creek, British Columbia.

They lived close to the railway, upon which Mr. Chapman worked. Mid-afternoon, one September day, the oldest Chapman child (who was 9) came running into the house stating there was a cow coming down out of the woods. He was agitated enough for his mother to decide to take a look at what could have upset him.

There were some bushes bordering the nearby railway tracks and she spotted what appeared to her to be a bear moving among them. She called her younger children, who were playing near the tracks, to her side and then watched with horror as the creature reached the tracks and she saw it for what it really was; a gigantic 7 1/2 foot tall man covered in light brown, 4 inch long, hair. She described it to Ivan Sanderson shortly before her death thus:

Mrs. Chapman told me that the creature was about 7½ feet tall. She could estimate its height by the various fence and line posts standing about the field. It had a rather small head and a very short, thick neck; in fact really no neck at all, a point that was emphasized by William Roe and by all others who claim to have seen one of these creatures. Its body was entirely human in shape except that it was immensely thick through its chest and its arms were exceptionally long. She did not see the feet which were in the grass. Its shoulders were very wide and it had no breasts, from which Mrs. Chapman assumed it was a male, though she also did not see any male genitalia due to the long hair covering its groin. She was most definite on one point: the naked parts of its face and its hands were much darker than its hair, and appeared to be almost black.

It continued to approach and, whilst she stood her ground, she ordered her oldest child to round up his siblings and get a blanket. Believing the creature may be after the children, she decided to use a blanket to shield them. When the creature was about 100ft from her, she held the blanket aloft and backed away with her children out of sight behind her down the river nearby and then they fled towards the village.

She hoped by concealing the children in this way, the creature may not pursue them but instead busy itself by searching the house for them. Her instincts proved correct as it did search the house and then an outhouse where it broke apart a very large saltfish barrel allowing them to make their escape.

Mr. Chapman meanwhile returned home from work. He found the outhouse door broken, and very large footprints milling around the property. Concerned, and with the stories he knew of "sasquatch" he searched the property for his family. He found their tracks by the river and saw no large footprints following them but his relief was tempered when he then stumbled upon more large footprints disappearing back into the bushes near the railway.

Over the following week fresh footprints were found around the house each morning, the dogs were heard to become very over excited at night and the couple heard unnerving noises outside. Being sensible folk, they decided to leave their house and did not return.

Later investigation details can be found here and a little video with some more details on those is below.



Further Reading 



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The Open-Minded Skeptic

It's quite funny really. I started this blog during a, thankfully, brief period of unemployment whilst thinking about how I could make a popular blog about a subject I found interesting. I didn't realise how successful that'd be. I've not made as much money as from other blogs I've made (but £20 isn't anything to sniff at!) but this blog has proven to have a life of it's own. Even when my posts became sporadic and robotic, the visitor numbers have not faltered. It's the most popular and most subscribed to blog I've ever started.

So firstly, thank you to all of you who continue to subscribe (optimistic of you given my posting track record!). You are stars!

And for any newbies, let me set out my stall:

I'm a skeptic. I don't believe in sky fairies or an afterlife. I don't believe 99% of stories about cryptozoological creatures or UFO visitors or ghosts. So you might think I'm the worst person to write about the weird and unusual but in fact I bloody love the paranormal. I enjoy the stories, and I believe it's a skeptics job not to scoff at such reports but to look at them further to find out the truth behind them. Even if the truth is that people made them up, that's still a fascinating insight into the human psyche isn't it?

And I have a history. Like any good character in a horror movie, I have a dark secret from my past. And that keeps me open-minded.

Bigfoot in a garden? Or a blackbird in flight? 

This year I will return to blogging here, on various subjects but mainly on one that continues to enthral me: the mystery apes of North America (or the bigfoot or sasquatch to most people). I'm going to try and find answers to questions that have always aggravated me, such as why have we found no bigfoot remains? (I've already found interesting statistics on just how few other KNOWN great apes corpses and fossils are found). It's going to be a fun journey, and I hope you come along for the ride...

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Knobby Of Cleveland County

The year is 1979 and we're paying a visit to Cleveland County, North Carolina. Something odd is afoot. Strange noises "like a woman screaming" have been heare d in the woods and Forest Price found his full-grown goat, Bill, dead due to a broken neck.

Last Sunday morning, Forest Price found his full-grown goat, Bill, dead of a broken neck.

"I didn't see it happen. I don't know how it happened. All I know is that something just killed the hell out of Bill and now I've got to get me another goat," he said.

A few days earlier, Price said, something frightened his animals, causing a mule to beak a rope and escape.

Yeap. Sure enough, there were reports of a bigfoot about, first seen by 88-year-old Minnie Cook near her house on December 21st 1978. Knobby became a big hit with local news and radio programmes who used "searches" for this elusive beast as publicity stunts. Pretty soon after the initial flurry of reports, Knobby disappeared.

Until....

Timothy Peeler called 911.

Peeler, of Vanada Drive in Casar, is a self-proclaimed “South Mountain man.” He’s surrounded by woods and a ridge worthy of postcards.

It was June 5 when Peeler supposedly spotted a man-beast, upwards of 10 feet tall, that screeched like “a night bird” and grunted in the warm night air.

The creature sported dark hair, Peeler said, with a grey beard stretching to its navel.

Authorities were dispatched that morning around 3 a.m., according to a report from Cleveland County Communications.

Deputies filed a suspicious person report after investigating the incident. Source: Shelby Star

 Here's a clip from a local news station on the latest sightings:



FYI There is a sighting from the early 70s in the exact same area, so perhaps there is more to this than just a lot of hot air.

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The Beast Of Bray Road

Werewolves have been part of the myths and legends of our ancestors for centuries, leading to a great deal of fear (and no doubt a great deal of mob "justice" on misidentified "werewolves"). But for all the terror movies can add to a subject (just see our reactions to sharks after Jaws came out) in the case of werewolves they have served only to make them an ever more distant, fantasy concept. But perhaps, just perhaps, there is more to the legends than meets the eye... 


Werewolves??, I hear you cry with derision. Well maybe that's not the best word for it as it comes attached with all sorts of transformational baggage. Instead think of bipedal wolves, the canine equivalent of bigfoot perhaps, or a "wolfman". Whatever gets you in the mood. 


Today we shall be concentrating on a particular example, a creature known as the Beast of Bray Road (pretty damn awesome name if you ask me!), but in case you think tales of wolfpeople are somehow isolated incidents then please take a look here and here.


Sightings of the Beast started in earnest relatively recently in the late 1980s, although there are some older reports. Bray Road is near Delavan, Wisconsin and is the location of the first few sightings, hence the name of the Beast, although sightings have been reported across Wisconsin, northern Illinois and Michigan. 


In 1989 Lorianne Endrizzi was driving along Bray Road when she thought she saw a person hunched over by the roadside. She slowed down to take a closer look. She was no more than six feet away from it. Endrizzi clearly saw a beast with grayish brown hair, fangs, pointed ears and glowing yellow eyes (which is what you'd expect a canine's eyes to look like when reflecting headlights). "His face was … long and snouty, like a wolf" she said. Unusually she reported that this muscular creature was crouched on it's rear legs whilst holding a prey animal in it's human like hands (sketch can be found at top of this page)


She had been prompted to report her story only after hearing rumours of a more recent encounter (the year then being 1999) from a lady named Doristine Gipson. On 31st October 1999 Doristine was on Bray Road, about half a mile from where Lorianne had had her own encounter a decade before, when she felt her right front tire leave the ground as if she had hit something. She stopped the car and had a look on the road but could see nothing. But as she looked around, peering into the darkness, she saw a form race towards her. She managed to throw herself back into the car but as she tried to pull away the creature jumped onto the bonnet. Thankfully it had been raining and the wetness of the car and the movement meant it slid straight back off and she was able to escape. Later that evening she was taking a girl trick or treating and had to drive past the spot. She again saw a form lying on the side of the road where she had left it but quickly rushed away as the form began to move again.


There are older reports:  

"It all started one night in 1936 when a lone man driving down a dark stretch of US 18, just east of Jefferson City, saw a strange, hairy creature that stood at least six feet high and had a canine muzzle and strange three-fingered hands.

The beast was digging up one of the many Native American burial mounds that dapple Wisconsin’s countryside. The witness, a local named Mark Schackelman, drove on, but returned the next night to see if he could find evidence of the creature. Schackelman reports walking over to the mound, only to find the man-wolf standing there, stinking of decaying meat and growling a strange, three-syllable word that sounded like “Gadara.” The witness goes on to report that, understanding the creature to be some agent of evil, he began praying and slowly backing away until he reached his car and was able to escape." Source

And then:

Year: 1964

Location: Jefferson County, Wisconsin

Dennis Fewless was driving along Highway 89 around midnight when he saw a figure running across the road. When his headlights caught sight of the creature, it was eerily similar to werewolf seen in 1936 just a couple of miles away. Large and muscular, it stood around seven feet tall, covered in dark brown hair, with a dog-like face.

Fewless saw the creature run across the road, jump over a barbed-wire fence, and disappear into a corn field.

Fewless waited until the sun was up the next day to return to the scene of the werewolf sighting. He had hoped to find tracks to prove the size of the beast, but the ground was too hard. He was able to find the place in the cornfield where the werewolf had entered. The stalks of corn were broken and askew in such a way that supported the theory that a man-beast of massive size had been there. Source

There are further sightings listed here. Plus a few theories as to what the creature might be (in brief: a wolf, a coyote, a dog, a shunka warak’in, or a hoax). Personally? The sightings last for extremely short periods of time, usually in poor visibility and in the sort of lonely places one might start to let their imagination wander. I know, I know, this is all very dismissive and every paranormal researcher out there is preparing to hit me over the head with a piece of electronic equipment but... I've seen things myself. I know the human mind can see all sorts of things. There are plenty of brilliant and interesting stories here. But are there any wolfpeople in Wisconsin? I don't think so. But hey, I would say that! Linda S. Godfrey is the resident expert over there, and I'd suggest you check out her books to see what you think.  

Further Reading

Hunting the American Werewolf Linda S. Godfrey (UK Amazon Link)

The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin's Werewolf Linda S. Godfrey (UK Amazon Link)

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Red Eyed Beasts

I'll never forget my encounter with the Shadow Man. I will admit that I can now, rarely, sleep with the door open which is a vast improvement on the past and owes much to the gentle coxing of my ever patient other half, but most nights I just stare into the darkness around my closed bedroom door and wonder what might be behind it. My major issue has always been those red eyes. And I'm disturbed by how often these red eyed monsters appear in the world of the paranormal.

Bigfoot for instance. Here are just a few reports:

Red Eyes At The Window

8 Foot Tall And More Red Eyes

More Red Eyes At The Window (I have a phobia of exposed windows at night as well as open doors and yes... that is a proper phobia not a "oh that slightly worries me" sort of fear so maybe I should stop right now...)

The British Man Monkey is even more consistently described with red eyes.

Our old friends, the Ghostly Black Dogs, are regularly described as having red eyes. And our new friends the Alien Big Cats... RED EYES

More information and analysis can be found here with mentions of other cryptids with red eyes and some rather wonderful theories to explain this phenomenon (including science... ooo...)

So there we have a theme. A rather worrying and concerning theme, especially for someone like me who deeply dislikes 1) glowing red eyes and 2) silly non-scientific theories to explain things. I can reason away bigfoot sightings as being of an unknown great ape, I can explain Alien Big Cats as an introduced species. But how can we explain away all these red eyes? I still think Three Men Seeking Monsters by Nick Redfern puts forward the most interesting theory. Could it be all these creatures are one and the same entity? Or at least entities. The Cormons, a group of monsters from another dimension who feed off our emotional reaction to them and take many forms to encourage different emotions... angels, fairies, monsters, aliens, UFOs. Could all our favourite fortean creatures simply be disguises for emotional vampires, and are we, by way of simply talking about them, perpetuating a never ending feeding cycle?? Makes my head hurt, especially at this time of night.

Rabbits: Not As Cute As You Thought!

But I thought I'd just point out... red eyes are everywhere. And they might be watching you!! Night night, sleep well ;)

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Focus On: Bigfoot

Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is a source of mirth and disapproval among many in the scientific community. This would be bearable if this was not added to by the large amount of false reports and outright hoaxes attached to the Bigfoot legend. The most recent Dyer and Whitton hoax only goes to show the sort of misdirection people are prepared to throw in the way of serious investigation for their own personal gain.

But the case for the existence of Bigfoot is compelling, even if we are far from proving it. Stories from across North America show a high level of consistency in the detail. Now of course the description of Bigfoot is well known across the world and it's not inconceivable that people are lying. But the quantity of quality stories means that at least a few are seeing something. What that something is, now that is the real question. Is it misidentification of other animals such as beers, moose etc.? Or is it that there is some form of giant ape like creature roaming the forests of the North American continent?

I've got a couple of favourite stories when it comes to the Bigfoot. One is a Sasquatch story from early on in the 20th Century and is quite famous: Ruby Creek. This is one of the few Bigfoot stories that actually left me feeling a little creeped out. But I've always had a terror of anything peering inside windows. This story, if true, certainly shows that Bigfoot is an animal and has it's own agenda. Some stories paint the Bigfoot as a passive creature without emotion. An observer. This story makes a mockery of that concept.

The other story I quite like is actually very banal. It's just a normal sighting from King County, Washington, USA. But the detail of the creature is great. Again the natural actions of the creature gives this story a grain of truth.

So what do you think? Do you think there's a creature out there that hasn't been discovered? Or is it just a bunch of stupid people, mistaken people and liars making the whole thing up?