Almanac of Cryptids

Bear Lake Monster

In 1868 a Mormon leader wrote that a giant serpent swam in Bear Lake on the Utah-Idaho line. He later called it a lie. People kept seeing it anyway.

Beast of Bray Road

A quiet country road outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin, gave America its most famous werewolf. Witnesses describe a wolf-headed thing that kneels over roadkill and sometimes stands up on two legs.

Bigfoot

A tall, hair-covered figure walking upright through the forests of North America. More people say they have seen it than any other cryptid, and science has yet to find a body.

Champ

America's answer to Nessie, said to swim between New York, Vermont and Quebec. Even P.T. Barnum wanted its hide.

Chupacabra

Dead goats with puncture wounds, a spiny creature seen in Puerto Rico, then hairless 'monsters' in Texas. The chupacabra is the youngest of the great cryptids, and it changed shape on the way north.

Dover Demon

Three teenagers, two nights, one wealthy Boston suburb, and a pale creature with a watermelon head and glowing eyes. Then the sightings stopped.

Flatwoods Monster

A light falls from the sky, a group of kids climbs a hill, and a flashlight beam finds a ten-foot figure with a glowing face. September 12, 1952 still has West Virginia talking.

Fouke Monster

A hairy arm through a screen window on a spring night in 1971, and a small Arkansas town that became a movie set. The Boggy Creek legend helped invent the Bigfoot film.

Jersey Devil

Legend says it was born the thirteenth child, cursed by its own mother, and flew off into the Pine Barrens. In one week of January 1909, reports of it closed schools across South Jersey.

Kelly-Hopkinsville Goblins

On an August night in 1955, two families in rural Kentucky said small glowing creatures besieged their farmhouse for hours. Gunfire, they said, just knocked them over.

Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp

In the summer of 1988 a teenager said a seven-foot green thing with red eyes jumped on his car near a South Carolina swamp. Within weeks, the whole country knew the name Bishopville.

Michigan Dogman

A man's body, a dog's head, and a howl like a human scream. A radio DJ's 1987 prank song turned out to have listeners with stories of their own.

Momo, the Missouri Monster

In July 1972 three children in Louisiana, Missouri, said they saw a huge hairy thing at the foot of Marzolf Hill carrying a dead dog. For a few weeks the river town was the monster capital of America.

Mothman

Red eyes in the headlights, wings folded on its back, and a small river town that never forgot. Mothman reports ran through Point Pleasant for a year, then the bridge fell.

Pope Lick Monster

A half-man, half-goat said to haunt a towering railroad trestle outside Louisville. The legend is told as a warning, and the trestle itself has killed people who went looking.

Skinwalker

A Navajo belief that many Diné people would rather outsiders left alone, and a Utah ranch that borrowed its name. This page covers the modern lore and treats the tradition with care.

Skunk Ape

Florida's swamp ape, named for a smell witnesses never forget. Its biggest champion runs a research headquarters and campground in the Everglades.

Snallygaster

Western Maryland's winged dragon: a German settlers' 'quick ghost' that a small-town newspaper turned into a sensation in 1909, and that has refused to go away since.

Thunderbird

A bird big enough to lift a child. The name comes from powerful Indigenous traditions, but the modern cryptid lives in tall tales, a lost photograph and one terrifying summer evening in Illinois.

Van Meter Visitor

For five nights in the fall of 1903, the businessmen of a small Iowa town said a winged, glowing creature came out of an old coal mine. They said they shot at it, and that it did not seem to care.

Almas

Central Asia's 'wild man': a hairy, human-like figure from Mongolian and Caucasus folklore that Soviet scientists once went looking for in earnest.

Beast of Gévaudan

Between 1764 and 1767 something killed scores of people in the mountains of south-central France. The king sent his best hunters. It took three years and a local farmer's gun to end it, and nobody fully agrees on what it was.

Bunyip

Something bellows in the billabongs of southeastern Australia. Aboriginal tradition named it; colonial newspapers chased it; a mystery skull put it on display in Sydney in 1847.

Loch Ness Monster

A long neck, a hump in dark water, and a Highland loch deep enough to hide almost anything. Nessie is the world's most famous lake monster.

Mokele-mbembe

Deep in the Congo swamps, some explorers have gone looking for a living dinosaur. What they found were stories, blurry film and a long argument about where the legend came from.

Mongolian Death Worm

A worm under the Gobi sand that kills with venom or a jolt of electricity. That is the legend. Expeditions have used thumpers, explosives and patience, and come home empty-handed.

Ogopogo

A long, humped shape in Okanagan Lake, a music-hall name, and a much older Syilx spirit of the lake. Canada's best-known lake creature.

Orang Pendek

A small, powerful ape said to walk upright through the Sumatran rainforest. It is one of the few cryptids that serious field researchers say they have seen themselves.

Owlman of Mawnan

In 1976 two sisters on holiday in Cornwall said a huge feathered bird-man hovered over a village church tower. Britain's answer to Mothman was born, and so was an argument about who was behind it.

Sea Serpents and the Kraken

For centuries sailors swore to giant serpents rising beside their ships and many-armed monsters pulling boats down. A navy captain's report in 1848 made headlines. A camera in 2004 finally caught one monster alive.

Thylacine Sightings (Tasmanian Tiger)

The last known Tasmanian tiger died in a Hobart zoo in 1936. People have been reporting striped dog-like animals in the Tasmanian bush ever since.

Wendigo

A being of winter, hunger and greed from Algonquian tradition, long before it became a horror-movie monster. Its real story is about how people survive hard winters together.

Yeti

Big footprints in high Himalayan snow, and a creature the Sherpa named long before Western climbers arrived. The Yeti is the mountain cousin of Bigfoot.

Yowie

Australia's hairy giant of the eastern ranges. Colonial papers called it the Yahoo; today it has a statue, a park and a footy team in Queensland.

Ape Canyon, Mount St. Helens

In the summer of 1924, gold prospectors on Mount St. Helens said seven-foot 'ape-men' bombarded their cabin with rocks all night, and the gorge has carried the name ever since.

Linked to: Bigfoot

Bear Lake

A turquoise lake on the Utah-Idaho line whose serpent was invented by a newspaper writer in 1868, admitted as 'a wonderful first-class lie', and then kept being seen anyway.

Linked to: Bear Lake Monster

Big Thicket

A tangled mix of pine forest, bayou and cypress slough in East Texas where hunters, motorists and a churchyard visitor have described tall, dark, hairy figures crossing their path.

Linked to: Bigfoot

Bluff Creek

A remote creek in the Six Rivers National Forest where the name 'Bigfoot' was born in 1958 and where, nine years later, two cowboys filmed the most argued-over 59 seconds in cryptozoology.

Linked to: Bigfoot

Bray Road, Elkhorn

A quiet farm road outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin, where drivers since the 1980s have described a six-to-seven-foot wolf-headed thing that stands up on two legs.

Linked to: Beast of Bray Road

Bridgewater Triangle

Some 200 square miles of swamp and forest south of Boston where locals report giant birds, hairy figures, huge snakes and little tricksters, all inside the borders a cryptozoologist drew on a map.

Linked to: Bigfoot, Thunderbird, Pukwudgie

Everglades and Big Cypress

Along the lonely Tamiami Trail through the Big Cypress swamp, a tiny town has a skunk ape research headquarters, and a fire chief's 1997 photo of a dark upright figure still sparks arguments.

Linked to: Skunk Ape

Flatwoods

On a September evening in 1952, a group of boys chased a falling light up a hill in Braxton County and met something ten feet tall with a glowing face and a choking mist.

Linked to: Flatwoods Monster

Fouke and Boggy Creek

A small Arkansas town near Texarkana where a hairy, red-eyed creature reportedly reached through a window in 1971, and a low-budget film turned the bottomland swamps into Bigfoot legend.

Linked to: Fouke Monster

Honey Island Swamp

One of America's least-altered river swamps, on the Louisiana-Mississippi line, where a retired air traffic controller said he met a gray-haired, yellow-eyed giant in 1963 and left behind a reel of film.

Linked to: Honey Island Swamp Monster

Kelly and Hopkinsville

For one long August night in 1955, a farm family near Kelly, Kentucky, said small glowing-eyed creatures kept creeping up to the house, and they kept shooting at them.

Linked to: Kelly-Hopkinsville Goblins

Khumbu and Everest

The high Sherpa valleys below Everest, where climbers photographed giant tracks in the snow, monasteries kept a 'yeti scalp', and the Abominable Snowman got its English name.

Linked to: Yeti

Lake Champlain

A 107-mile lake between Vermont and New York where a long-necked 'serpent' has been reported since the 1800s, and where one 1977 snapshot still divides believers and skeptics.

Linked to: Champ

Loch Ness

A dark, deep Highland loch holding more water than every lake in England and Wales combined, and the world's most famous lake monster since a 1933 newspaper story.

Linked to: Loch Ness Monster

Louisiana, Missouri

A Mississippi River town where, in the summer of 1972, children and a fire chief said a seven-foot hairy thing with a pumpkin-shaped head walked out of the woods, and a posse went hunting for 'Momo'.

Linked to: Momo, the Missouri Monster

New Jersey Pine Barrens

More than a million acres of pine, sand and cedar swamp in the most crowded state in America, and the home, legend says, of a winged devil born at Leeds Point in 1735.

Linked to: Jersey Devil

Okanagan Lake

A long, deep lake in British Columbia's wine country where the Syilx people honor a spirit of the water and settlers, tourists and video cameras have chased a serpent called Ogopogo for 150 years.

Linked to: Ogopogo

Point Pleasant

A small river town where, in late 1966, couples, firemen and families described a man-sized winged thing with red eyes, and a year later a bridge fell into the Ohio River.

Linked to: Mothman

Pope Lick Trestle

A tall railroad bridge over a creek on the edge of Louisville is home to a goat-man legend, and to a real, repeated tragedy: people who go looking for the monster keep getting killed by trains.

Linked to: Pope Lick Monster

Scape Ore Swamp, Bishopville

A blackwater swamp in rural South Carolina where, in the summer of 1988, a teenager said a seven-foot green creature with red eyes jumped on his car, and the whole country came looking.

Linked to: Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp

Skinwalker Ranch

A fenced-off cattle ranch in Utah's Uintah Basin where owners and researchers have reported glowing orbs, vanishing cattle and large, red-eyed animals that bullets did not seem to stop.

Linked to: Skinwalker, Michigan Dogman

Willow Creek

A river town of about 1,700 people in the Trinity River country that calls itself the Bigfoot Capital of the World, and backs it up with a museum, a festival and a highway named for the beast.

Linked to: Bigfoot