It’s a new year and a new chapter of the Bestiary, and that chapter is a corker. (I rather hope the year won’t be, except in the most positive sense, but we won’t go into that.)
Let’s talk about cryptids. These creatures live on the border between myth and reality. Maybe they’re legends; maybe they’re memories of species long extinct. Maybe they don’t exist at all, except in the popular imagination. And maybe they’re real, but science hasn’t confirmed their existence, or at least their persistence into the modern era.
Science out of the mainstream is a different proposition. That’s the realm of individuals who claim to study cryptids. Cryptozoologists, in a word. Like ufologists and parapsychologists, they inhabit the fringes of science, tipping over (and sometimes well over) into pseudoscience. That’s Fox Mulder territory: The Truth Is Out There. And I Want to Believe.
I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the big-ticket cryptids. The Loch Ness Monster. Bigfoot (and Sasquatch and the Yeti and their amazing number of relatives). Fans of The X-Files may recall the chupacabra and the Jersey Devil. And let’s not forget one of my favorites, the Mothman. I’m rather partial to the Thunderbird, too, and the Mongolian Death Worm.
There is a lot of folklore out there about monsters and strange creatures unknown or little known to science. Just about every place on the planet has stories of mysterious beings, often monstrous, sometimes benign, that may live among us, or more often inhabit the lands outside of human settlements. They live in lakes or in the mountains; in the forest or the jungle. They fly over us; they hide themselves in the deeps of the sea or far underground.
They never quite present themselves to scientific proof. Occasionally a bit of fur or hide or scales may (supposedly) defy DNA analysis. Hunters may find a lair in the woods or high on a mountain, that doesn’t quite fit the habits of more usual species. And of course there are the plaster casts of giant primate-like feet that have been made everywhere from North America to the Himalayas.
Since we’re genre fans here, we don’t have to prove anything scientifically—unless we want to. We can explore the wide range of cryptids on land, in the sea, and in the air. They are everywhere. Some of them, with enough time and persistence, might even yield solid, incontrovertible proof that they do, in fact, exist.
What is your favorite cryptid? Have you come across one that’s not on the usual radar? Any favorite books (nonfiction included) or films or television programs that might lead us in interesting directions? I have a list of course, but it’s just the beginning. There’s so much out there, and so many possibilities.
Judith Tarr is a lifelong horse person. She supports her habit by writing works of fantasy and science fiction as well as historical novels, many of which have been published as ebooks. She’s written a primer for writers who want to write about horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzans, a clowder of cats, and a blue-eyed dog.
I enjoy Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid series. Cryptids are everywhere, mixing more or less successfully with ordinary humanity. A group hunts them down as evil, but a breakaway group, the Price family, is fighting to protect the cryptids from the crusaders.
The guy on the motorcycle looks like Red Skull. Now, that’s a Marvel movie, I’d enjoy.
Do Giant Squid count as cryptids? What about Coelacanths? Or other things for which proof of their continued existence were a long time coming.
I believe Dean and Sam Winchester from “Supernatural” could tell everyone a thing or two about various cryptids. Heck, the wendigo still give me the creeps.
Of course, when speaking about favourites, who would not love Nessie? As well as the unicorns and werevolves, already wonderfully being covered in this series? It would also be lovely to think that some Tasmanian wolf still existed out there.
Skunk Ape, the Pepe Le Pew of the Bigfoot community, doesn’t get enough love.
@2:
More like ghost rider after a fight with Jason Voorhees, or a bath
Will you review Cryptozoo, Judith. That movie is… something.
@3:
The giant squid and coelecanth count as cryptids as far as cryptozoologists are concerned. They’re both constantly used as examples of animals science didn’t believe existed or thought had died out long ago. Which is true, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t mean it’s likely that giant ape-like creatures could live in literally every mainland US state without real proof or a body ever being found.
My personal favorite cryptid would be Cephalopods Of Unusual Size. They wouldn’t have to be a whole lot bigger than already known to qualify as true monsters, and there’s plenty of room to hide in the deep dark sea.
@3, 8 – Giant squids were cryptids until they started washing up on Newfoundland shores in the late 19th Century. They were known as kraken (krake is the singlular) in Scandinavian folklore, and thought to be huge enough to pull down vessels. Willy Ley had a good chapter on this in his Exotic Zoology, which is still a good read after all the years since it was published, for the giant squid and other former or current cryptids.
The Golden Age of cryptozoology was probably the 20th Century, when the exploration of little-known corners of the world was just coming to an end, and stories of strange beasts living in obscure places were examined systematically by people such as Bernhard Heuvelmans (his On the Track of Unknown Animals and In the Wake of the Sea Serpents are still considered to be classics, although they’re very expensive and on re-reading he seems a bit credulous). Nowadays just about everyone is carrying a camera with them all the time, and still we don’t see good clear pictures of a Sasquatch or a long-neck sea serpent. And ever-growing human numbers are circumscribing the empty places where cryptids were always thought to lurk. Cryptids will probably continue to fade into myth as the 21st Century goes by.
My favorite cryptid? Champ, in the beautiful Lake Champlain. There are a surprising number of cryptids hiding (very effectively) in northern New England. They likely cross over into New York, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Ontario, where they are equally impossible to find.
Do I think Champ or any of New England’s many cryptids (see http://www.strange-new-england.com/category/monsters-ghouls/) exist? No, but they are fun ;)
The Myths and Legends podcast always ends with a Creature of the Week, many of which qualify as cryptids.
Back in Virginia we had Chessie (sea serpent said to look like a giant eel). Here in Cascadia, we have Caddy the Cadborosaurus (more of your prehistoric marine reptile type). Of course, we are also ground zero for Bigfoot- small rural towns, especially along the coast, are full of Bigfoot chainsaw sculptures.
My favorite would have to be T. Kingfisher’s (Ursula Vernon’s) Jackalope Wives.
https://apex-magazine.com/short-fiction/jackalope-wives/
This one has an SF-fannish connection: there’s a musical group, The Flash Girls, consisting of Lorraine Garland (formerly Neil Gaiman’s personal assistant) and Emma Bull* (author of many fantasy works, including the seminal urban fantasy War For the Oaks). They put out 3 albums, in 1993, 1995, and 2005, the second, Maurice and I, has a cut “Yeti”, written by Neil Gaiman.
The premise of the song is that a party in the Himalayas searching for the elusive yeti engages a native guide, who they slowly realize might be one of the cryptids they’re looking for, and who confirms this in the final line of the song (“Me yeti!”).
*(Also a member of another band, Cats Laughing, of which the author Steven Brust is also a member.)
Hi Judith! I was deeply into cryptids as a kid. The cryptid I was most into was the Mokele-Mbembe, a purported living sauropod dinosaur-type cryptid located deep in the Congo. I was hooked ever since I saw an article about it in Ranger Rick magazine in 1981 when I was 5. See https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=EVE19811210-01.2.50
A prominent biochemist from the University of Chicago, Roy Mackal, spent much of his later career searching for the Mokele-Mbembe. https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/roy-mackals-wild-speculation
This cryptid was the basis for the movie Baby:Secret of the Lost Legend. A paleontologist made a parody blog post about the discovery of the M-M based on the movie, which is hilarious if one knows paleontological inside baseball https://web.archive.org/web/20110404210316/https://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2011/04/science_meets_mokele-mbembe.php
See also https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/misreading-the-mokele-mbembe-the-mokele-mbembe-part-1/
I was so into the prospect of living dinosaurs I got into intense discussions and even arguments about it with my father, godmother, random strangers, etc… :)
I look back at the subject with rueful fascination…I did parlay it into an undergraduate thesis and a MA thesis on early discoverers of dinosaur fossils, William Buckland and Edward Hitchcock, fascinating figures worthy of posts on their own.
@15 I used to love reading Ranger Rick at my school library. Thanks for the reminder of a pleasant childhood memory
My favorite cryptid is Nessie. The famous photo (which we now know was faked) had me completely fooled for many years. I still think it has an eerie, grainy photo realistic look to it.
I loved shows like “In Search Of” and hoped it was all true. Maybe I was hopelessly gullible or maybe I just had not learned to be skeptical of tv but having Leonard Nimoy as the narrator basically was Spock speaking in my child’s mind. And I knew Spock was an honest, intelligent scientist. So I believed it all.
The book “The secret history of the Jersey Devil” by historian Brian Regal is excellent. He does not believe the Jersey Devil as a cryptid is real. But he gives and excellent exploration of the history of where and when (and why) the stories arose in print and word of mouth.
Cryptids are so much fun! I love the folklore around them. My favorites are the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp, the Loveland Frogman, and the Michigan Dogman.
Thank you all for the great suggestions, and do keep them coming if new ones occur to you. I’m making notes as I go.
@19 – Karl Shuker’s a zoologist who maintains a blog (https://karlshuker.blogspot.com/) on current and past cryptids. His archives are worth poking around in.
And Darren Naish, another zoologist, takes the odd look at cryptids as well, among other topics having to do with vertebrate zoology, past and present – https://tetzoo.com/
@20 Ooo, thank you!
Count me as another fan of the Mothman. I encountered The Mothman Prophecies (film) at a pivotal moment in my adolescence and the whole vibe of it really struck me. I love the conception of it as some kind of embodied force of nature that makes itself known to us as a harbinger of disaster.
Also must give love to a more contemporary cryptid, the Fresno Nightcrawler. You may never be able to wear pants again.
I guess being from the PNW, it would have to be Bigfoot. I also like how Jim Butcher uses the Sasquatch.