Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Keep your eyes peeled for more on this legend Wednesday and Friday.

If there’s anything our humble website has consistently supplied, it’s wicked band names. Peruse the site’s archives and you’ll find any number of stage-ready esoteric idioms referring to manimals, animen, lake monsters, alchemists and bigfeet. And today, I’ve got a good one for you, so all you pale faces with the triangle haircuts and emotional hematomas listen up: Indrid Cold. Or “Blood Roof.” There’s no story behind Blood Roof, though. I just made that up now. Indrid Cold, on the other hand, is a name that was telepathically whispered into the jittering mind of a petrified man named Woodrow Derenberger (terrible f***ing band name) as he stared into the black eyes of a creature unlike anything he had ever encountered.

Before we get there though, you need to hear about these two snot-nosed Jersey kids. The year was 1966. The place: Elizabeth, New Jersey. It was the beginning of October and James Yanchitis and Marvin Munoz were heading home after a long day of whatever. (Let’s say walking the local railroad tracks to stick-prod a corpse and, as a result, come of age.) As they turned onto Fourth Street, the topic of conversation probably turned from girls onto the recent reports of nearby UFO sightings and a rumor that, earlier that same evening, a tall green man had chased one of their neighbors down the very road they were travelling. As the talk turned back to how much a girl’s boobs would bounce if she were being chased by a tall green man, the boys saw something that befuddled and terrified them – standing behind a sizeable wire fence, which separated the residential streets from the steep hill leading up to the bustling Jersey turnpike, was a giant, looming figure decked out in shiny green coveralls.

According to the boys, the man guy thing, who was bald and beady-eyed and well over six feet tall, turned toward them and pulled his lips up into a gargantuan smile. Needless to say, they made like bananas and split. And then they made like bloggers and didn’t stop blathering on about the “crazy thing that happened to them today,” which is how they attracted the interest of a journalist named John Keel. Keel, who met with the boys three days after the incident and heard all about the mystery man’s giant black belt and apparent lack of ears and a nose, had recently undertaken a massive, nationwide study of UFOs and related paranormal phenomena. Soon after chatting up the Jersey boys about the hulking brute of a weirdo that Keel dubbed the Grinning Man, the journalist met with West Virginian Woodrow Derenberger, who supplied him with a different moniker for the smiling interloper.

Want more Grinning Man? Find him AFTER THE JUMP!

Derenberger claimed that he’d been innocently tooling along Interstate 77 (not doubt imagining a tall green man pursuing a naked lady) when he heard a loud crashing sound and, looking in the rearview, witnessed a bizarre vehicle shredding balls down the highway behind him. The zany car, which Derenberger described as looking like an “old-fashioned kerosene lamp chimney,” tore past him and immediately screeched to a movie-worthy sideways halt, so as to block off the entire road. According to Derenberger’s testimony, the thing that climbed out of the chimney-mobile was immensely tall, sporting shiny green coveralls and wearing an absurd parody of a grin. It was at this point that the figure introduced itself, telepathically of course, as Indrid Cold, and began to interrogate the wigged out motorist about recent UFO activity in the area.

Before leaving the frightened West Virginian to puzzle over the strange encounter, and secretly dream of one day owning his own asphalt-crushing lamp chimney, Cold promised Derenberger that he’d see him again.

Keel scoured the details of both Grinning Man encounters. In the kids’ story, the manthing had been bald. But Derenberger described him as having slicked-back hair. Was there more than one smile-sporting fashion-ignorant giant on the loose? Was one of them a character from Wacky Races? Every witness agreed that the stranger sported a discomforting smile, and both meetings seemed linked to UFO activity. Was the Grinning Man (or men) as ridiculously stricken with paranoid sky-watching as the rest of 1960s America? Isn’t the phrase “Blood Roof” vivid and evocative?

The Kolchakian reporter’s second-hand dalliances with the Grinning Man were far from over – their next supernatural tango would coincide with the biggest case of the Keel’s career.

Wednesday: Indrid and Mothman – Another Suitable Band Name

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