Somewhere in the northwoods darkness a creature walks upright
And the best advice you may ever get is don't go out at night!
--Steve Cook, "The Legend" (1987).
"Every small town has something like this happen."
--graveyard worker, Halloween (1978).
I was going to recap Free Comic Book Day, but then I realized that I was mostly repeating what I wrote last year on the subject. I have been filming the local event for thirteen years, missing only 2018, due to conflicting travel plans and 2020, because of a global pandemic. This year's video may be found here. At this point, many people recognize me, if not as a local author (hey, that has happened), but as that local nerd event video guy.
The book in progress, co-created with D.S. Barrick, features a lot of local cryptids, one poltergeist, a mysterious tunnel, some purported otherworldy visitors, and a few things that defy any easy classification. We're compiling the most interesting and, generally, the lesser-known things that go bump in the night.
The cryptids and their kin differ wildly, not just in appearance, but type.
Some begin with specific incidents, fleeting, fear-inducing glimpses of things that emerge shrieking from the night. The Flatwoods Monster, the Etobicoke Poltergeist, and Bunny Man, for example, have authenticated starting points. In each case, multiple witnesses encountered something. Tentative rational explanations exist, but those explanations are never the ones that capture the popular imagination. The lore grows from there. It can even grow backwards through time. After his cursory early-1970s appearances, Bunny Man quickly acquired an impressive backstory, filled with very specific historical and geographical details. All of these can be easily refuted, after-the-fact creations of folkloric storytellers who weren't concerned with actual history or geography. The original encounters remain. He's one of my favorite community horrors and genuinely creepy, even if the name suggests that Fairfax County, Va. slept in on the day they handed out local monsters.
Actually, he shares that quality with a lot of local monsters.
The Loveland Frog Man owes its existence mainly to two sightings, one in 1972 and at least two earlier ones in 1955. I've gone to great lengths—and to Loveland—to determine what might have happened. A plausible explanation exists for the ’72 encounter. What the witnesses saw in 55 remains anybody's guess. I was happy to unsnarl a few details from the popular accounts, and offer some fresh hypotheses for why it became, specifically, a frog, when none of descriptions sound especially anuran.
The Pope Lick Goat Man (aka the Pope Lick Sheep Man, the Pope Lick Monster) has a hilarious sobriquet, though a somber associations. "Pope Lick" is a geographical location, named, reputedly, for a family with the surname "Pope." People, mostly young people, have frequently tried to cross the railway trestle on a dare, which is a truly terrible idea, monster or no. Many have died taking up the dare. That can be verified.
The monster itself remains a more elusive. Many accounts now claim the creature has been a legend for generations, but if it has, no one thought to write anything down prior to 1979. I wondered about contagion: could the publicity that surrounded a Goat Man in Maryland in the early 1970s, combined with the deaths at the Kentucky trestle, created this caprine creature? Perhaps, but the earlier versions of the Pope Lick Monster, prior to the 1990s, speak mainly of a Pope Lick Sheep Man.
A number of stories exist to explain Kentucky's woolly whatsit, but the creature itself remains unseen. Okay, sure, in recent times, long after the tale proliferated, a couple of out-of-state writers made dubious claims of encountering the horny beast, but I discount their testimony. The earlier accounts of a monster involve people who have heard of a sheep or goat man or, frequently, have heard a story about someone (never identified) who saw the monster. The Goat Men (Maryland has at least three, and Texas has at least one) seem to spring up, always near some kind of bridge, with no one actually seeing anything. What Kentucky's has is persistence in local lore and tourism, and a low-budget film debut that left a lasting impression.
Indie filmmaker Ron Schildknecht assures me that he is "no authority on the legend." Perhaps not, but in the late 1980s, he made a fun, short horror movie based on a legend he'd grown up hearing. The fictitious mini-movie created and solidified lore that now gets repeated as fact. I have also spoken with a young academic who wrote a folklore paper on the subject, and am attempting to contact the owner/operator of the relevant tourist attraction.
Pope Lick's monster is one of several cryptids for which we have lore, but no reliable sightings whatsoever.
Other creatures are clearly the product of hoaxes. The Nith River Monster of Ontario and the Black Flash of Provincetown began this way. Someone was looking to draw attention for a local festival, in the first case, and to give people a good October scare, in the second. From such things legends can be born. Michigan Dogman was whelped as an April Fools' Day joke. The original lyrics of Steve Cook's 1987 song, "The Legend", now get taken at face value and repeated as fact, though he has long acknowledged that he cooked up Dogman's detailed history as a joke, an attempt to give Michigan a state monster. Later rereleases incorporate sightings that since have been reported, and Cook has grown more circumspect in his comments. A song about a real monster sells more downloads, and profits from that song now benefit animal-related charities.
I consider it a kind of litmus test for online sources about cryptids. Anyone who repeats the Dogman's pre-1987 history as though it were documented fact or authentic legend has done no actual research and should not be trusted.
Other mysteries grow from a combination of factors. The Jersey Devil's history features folklore (if we are to believe some researchers, possibly developing from rumours surrounding a vilified local family), actual reported sightings, and at least one significant, well-documented hoax. The sinister devil has since crept out of the Pine Barrens and entered movies, comics, literature, gaming and, of course, serves as the mascot for an NHL team.
And then we have beasts of a purely folkloric nature. We're currently investigating Wisconsin's hodag. The goofy-looking official state monster began as a logger's tall tale and has never really been taken as more than that. Yes, it was photographed and later displayed at the first ever Oneida County Fair, but those hodags were taken about as seriously as the numerous images that may be found around Rhinelander, Wisconsin, which has fully embraced the beast. Visitors can now drink hodag beer, vodka, and soda, and eat "Hodag paw" pastries, while choosing from a bewildering range of hodag products and cheering on the Rhinelander Hodags.
We mostly stay away from the monstrous A-listers like Nessie or the Ogopogo, but some cannot be avoided. Mothman has gone Hollywood in recent decades, with a wildly successful annual festival and more appearances in fiction than he ever made in reality. The location of the original sighting remains creepy, even in daylight. Bigfoot we address mainly as a means to discuss the various and diverse ape-monsters supposed to haunt North America. The individual manifestations have more character and charm, I think, than the notion of a single primate species so shy that it has even managed to stay clear of the fossil record. Some are deeply rooted in the lore of various First Nations, cultural constructs that have been uprooted by attempts to prove that a literal sasquatch exists.
I retell the stories with an ear and eye to the campfire. They belong to those midnight societies, people trying to scare each other before they put out the fire and walk through the night to their bunks. But I also dig deep and attempt, after the telling, to separate fact from folklore and fabulism. Barrick's job has fewer restraints; he's drawing his version of what people said they saw. His depictions, variously fearsome, ridiculous, or both, appear to emerge from the depth of the night.
We hope to have a pitch-worthy draft by summer, just in time for campfire season.