Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

a.) Said to prowl the dry air above the deserts of the American Southwest, these winged creatures appear to propel themselves using jets of flame that light up the night sky.

b.) During the 1980s, two American carnival owners spent countless hours trying to hunt and capture this legendary 8-foot-tall avian monster.

c.) Usually sighted in the vicinity of swamps and rivers, this African pterosaur-like beast is known for sinking boats and attacking locals.

Answer AFTER THE JUMP…
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There’s no shortage of explanations for the demise of the newspaper industry. Could one more be the complete lack of face to face confrontation with paranormal creatures like zombies?

We at Weird Things lament the days when a brassy gal like Inez Wallace would leap feet first into adventure and track down an actual zombie and find out the supernatural and scientific explanations.

Check out these excerpts from her May 3rd, 1942 column in the Milwaukee Sentinel:

Although I rode a short distance each day into the mountains, I had practically given up hope of ever seeing a Zombie.

Then, one sultry afternoon, I was riding slowly toward Haiti’s capital when I saw HIM. Or, perhaps, I should say IT.

He was standing at a spot where a cane and a cocoa plantation met – just standing.

What did this creature look like you ask?

His face was neither the bronze of the Jamaican Negro nor the ebony black of the Haitian I had come to know in these mountains. The color was a sickly gray – like fresh Russian caviar and his skin, drawn tight over his bones, resemble old parchment.

There could only be one conclusion!

The thing before me was a ZOMBIE!

Read on for all the exhilarating details: The Milwaukee Sentinel – Google News Archive Search

This comes from The Metro.co.uk:

The young teenagers were playing by the waterfront in a Panama lake near Cerro Azul when the bald beast emerged from a cave behind a waterfall. They started screaming as it shuffled out “as if to attack them”.

Locals told Panama news the monster was like “Gollum from Lord of the Rings”…

But in a “desperate bid to defend themselves” four children grabbed rocks from the beach and hurled them at the beast.

After offing the beast, the children threw the body in the water and confessed to their parents what they’d seen. The carcass of crazy creature was later found picked apart by buzzards. Like, really, picked apart considering only bleached bones remain of what looks to be a completely intact, if waterfall dwelling, Gollum.

We might never get to examine this anomaly in a laboratory but at least those Central American youths had the times of their lives beating a rare creature to death before carelessly tossing it into a lake.

Hat tip to the one and only Brian Brushwood for this link.

By 1901, when the Australian colonies federated, the British Empire had shifted its focus from grand expedition and cryptid scavenger hunts to international treaties and the prolonged security of its infrastructure. The veil of mystery, which had once encircled Australia’s coasts and settled upon its interior like a half-opaque fog, was lifted; regional governments were installed and the population began to increase. The bunyip’s roaring call was drowned out by metallic pounding and ANFO ignition from prospering mines, and the creature returned to its home in Aboriginal Dreamtime mythology, which itself was slipping away like vapor as the indigenous people were slowly absorbed into modernity.

Around the same time, amid the economic depression of the 1890s, Australia became host to a growing population of swagmen, or “swaggies” – itinerant workers roving the countryside in search of manual labor. First appearing during the gold rush of the 1850s, swaggies remained a gruff, tattered fixture of Australia’s social landscape through the 1930s. Often taking to the swamps to live unencumbered, solitary lives between jobs, swaggies were frequently mistaken for bunyips. In the evening especially, with the sky fading from a tentative orange to an assertive purple, swaggies bathing among the reeds, their ragged silhouettes stuttered and blurred by splashing water and waving plant fronds, inhabited the bunyip’s form – and maybe always had.

Meanwhile, as Australia was mapped, its animals catalogued and its wilderness demystified, people began to notice that fur seals, usually confined to the southern river systems, frequently swam upstream during floods and subsequently found themselves trapped in the interior swamps. Before long, their similarity to the supposed bunyip – the dog-like face, furry body and barking vocalizations – was recognized.

Reality tends to inure itself to unexplained creatures. Cryptids burrow down into newsprint, gambol through songs and hibernate in dreams until something fundamental, the burden of proof maybe, gets twisted around, so that Bigfoot and Nessie and the Mothman are all living, breathing entities, cavorting the globe, waiting for a piece of definitive contrary evidence to wipe them away. Meanwhile, the bunyip is waiting to exist. After more than a century without a major sighting, what was once bunyip debunking has grown up into bunyip explaining and the creature, though alive and well in stories, has been sucked off the Earth like water drained out of a swamp.

For the Aborigines, a nomadic civilization with a rich creation mythology built largely upon storied creatures, the bunyip legend was a sensible way of explaining minor frightening unfamiliarities in an otherwise familiar world. For the British, the impulsive belief in the rarely seen animal represented just another potential conquest begging to have men and resources hurled at it, as had been done (unsuccessfully) with the legendary African Eden, Timbuktu, and (eventually successfully) with the storied Northwest Passage (to colonial Britain, the lack of supporting evidence was less a quiet caution meant to regulate enthusiasm than a booming challenge meant to incite it).

The first major colonial bunyip coup occurred in 1821 when explorer Hamilton Hume discovered a mysterious skeleton in a small lake. Hume attested that the remains were similar to those of a hippopotamus, but clearly belonged to a previously undiscovered animal. With bunyip mania sweeping Australia, it’s easy to understand why the anonymous bones were immediately attributed to the elusive aquatic predator, thereby, kick-starting a rash of reports and sightings that would wear on well into the 1890s.

As the Britons fumbled through swamps and creek beds, chasing after every mysterious sound and interviewing Aborigines about suspected bunyip lairs, the contested biology of the animal slowly began to coalesce into the generally agreed upon, though wholly arbitrary, physiology of the modern bunyip – a dog’s head and clawed seal flippers attached to a shaggy, furred body. The British were also eager to disregard accounts of the bunyip’s ferociousness, discounting them as merely a byproduct of the Aborigines superstitious nature. Faith in the bunyip’s docility only strengthened as hunters continued to return alive (though empty-handed) from their expeditions.

In the end, the reasoned, scientific British relationship with the bunyip wasn’t all that different from the supposedly savage, paranoid Aborigine one – the creature became a catch-all scapegoat for any unexplained aspect of the natural world, be it sound or bone or whispered legend. One of the more revealing bunyip fiascos of the mid 1800s occurred in the swamps of Greta, a marshy area of Victoria where residents repeatedly reported hearing strange noises. After multiple fruitless sweeps of the wetlands, the swamps were simply drained, after which, the noises stopped. The conclusion reached by the settlement – The bunyip relocated. Or it died. Either way, it was clearly real. And stealthy as all hell.

Friday: Bunyips today

For decades, the Nain Rouge leap-frogged one disaster to the next, always arriving in time to pre-empt tragedy with some goggle-eyed nose thumbing before evaporating into the high drone of an emergency broadcast signal, and for decades, from one disaster to the next, Detroit marshaled and rallied and summoned hope up out of the ashes and bones of the city’s past. In July of 1967, everything changed.

What should have a been a routine raid on an illegal bar turned into a five day riot that ended with the deployment of National Guard and U.S. Army troops. Fueled by festering racial tensions that were only exacerbated when the Detroit police, a source of friction to begin with, started making mass arrests, the riot surprised the entire country – urban living statistics coming out of Detroit portrayed it as a diverse, racially integrated wonderland. (Ultimately, the fault didn’t lie in the numbers, but in rampant, unquantified everyday prejudice, including frequent racially based mistreatment of consumers by local merchants.) In the wake of the confrontation, which was supposedly preceded by several chortling visits from the hyperactive Nain Rouge, even the most adept statistician couldn’t argue with the 43 deaths, 467 reported injuries, 7,200 arrests and more than 2,000 immolated buildings.

Like a wounded, shell-shocked Veteran, the city never fully recovered. The crime rate skyrocketed in the 1970s and the town’s social fabric unraveled. Through much of the decline, the cheeky red gnome didn’t issue so much as a somber Bronx cheer.
For more than two and half centuries, the Nain Rouge seemed conjoined to the city, genetically tethered to it by a thin band of fiction, sharing whatever municipal organ secretes narrative dopamine in the wake of urban injury. But it’s hard to define the identity, the personhood, of a city. It lives in constant symbiosis with its citizens and the culture they mold and consume and re-mold, defining the place as it, in turn, defines them. The Nain Rouge was an identifying aspect of Detroit since its founding, a lodestone of a socio-cultural foundation that many believe to have crumbled in 1967.

After the riots, local and state government banded together to form a committee meant to revitalize – to redefine – the city. In defiance of history, they called the group “New Detroit.” In the last three decades, only a single Nain Rouge sighting has been reported.

On July, 30, 1763, during Pontiac’s Rebellion, amid all the fort sieges and small pox blankets, the Nain Rouge was supposedly sighted dancing and cavorting along the banks of the Detroit River, following alongside Capt. James Dalyell’s boat. The next day, Dalyell and his men were ambushed by Pontiac’s troops, who killed 20 Brits and wounded 34 others, causing the river to run red with blood.

In 1805, three years after the legislature of the Northwest Territory officially incorporated Detroit, multiple Nain Rouge sightings were allegedly reported. Then, on June 11, 1805, a stable fire burned the entire city to the ground.
These stories of the jaunty, smirking red gnome share a commonality that Nain Rouge tales, if recounted by a responsible author, all contain – “supposedly,” “allegedly” and the lack of even cursory information about the witness(es). This trend continues on through the decades as the swarthy dwarf makes appearance after non-specific appearance, with each visitation followed by a citywide tragedy. In short, it starts to feel less like the Nain Rouge is predicting disaster and more like disasters are predicting new Nain Rouge stories. Each person who, from the banks of a bloody river or the ashes of the city, declares that they saw the Nain Rouge adds a swath of flesh to the skeletal fairytale that crossed the Atlantic, until finally, the growing populace of a burgeoning metropolis has constructed a living monster to press into civil service.

For media reporting on a local tragedy, Nain Rouge sightings become diverting fluff pieces that can get snuck in between death tolls and damage-to-dollar conversions. They’re (marginally) topical and so thoroughly entangled with the city’s history, the reports almost validate the depth and severity of the human suffering that has taken place; after all, if the event weren’t a true and utter disaster, the Nain Rouge would not have appeared.

For the people, the Nain Rouge’s disaster-presaging existence and appearances can create communal comfort through the assurance that the events were unavoidable and that the city is on a path – chaos doesn’t reign, and Detroit survived every prior visitation of the creature with the fortitude and confidence to face him again. The Nain Rouge belongs to the city, and until the day he doesn’t arrive to smile and laugh and mock its defeats and misfortune, Detroit remains intact.

Friday: The Nain Rouge today

While families and merchants kept their distance from the sandy, devil-beleaguered expanse of New Jersey forest known as the Pine Barrens, deserting soldiers, runaway slaves, moonshiners and fugitives adopted the land as sort of a misanthrope’s Eden.

Along with the motley assortment of local outcasts and reprobates, the American Revolution found rogue British loyalists, known as Pine Robbers, taking up residence in the Barrens and banding together with other social malcontents to conduct violent, fiery raids on surrounding towns.

To civilians, the criminal element alone was enough of a reason to avoid the shadowy bowers and acidic sands of the area, but law enforcement wasn’t discouraged that easily.

Cue the Jersey Devil.

Once the criminals and recluses began to understand the enduring power the folktale still held over New Jersey, they began to actively propagate the legend, spreading horror stories about bizarre disappearances, grisly murders and repeated devil sightings whenever they encountered outsiders. As the image of the devil became clearer, and its existence realer, to the people of New Jersey, its wings and hooves manifesting out of the fir needles and sand like some hysteric collective fever dream, the odd patchwork of wanted outlaws and undesired tramps also began to solidify into its own insular community, surviving on fish and the sale of sphagnum moss and pine cones. Among regular society, these bucolic, devil-guarded misfits became known derogatorily as “Pineys,” a moniker they soon came to embrace and, like the stories of their unholy protector, whisper proudly out into the American air.

In the early 20th century, after years of spreading tales of the Jersey Devil, the Pineys themselves became a fixture of New Jersey lore. Dr. Henry Goddard used the genealogy of a Piney family as the basis for a massive eugenics study, concluding that the Pine Barrens’ checkered history had led to a genetic line of feeble-minded idiots, proving that (according to Goddard) idiocy is, in fact, a hereditary trait. Using the study, which, after being published in book form, became immensely popular among the public, Goddard campaigned for the forced isolation of people shown to have the supposed idiot gene.
Eugenics would go on to die an ignoble death, regarded as a misguided pseudoscience, while, among the fir trees and cedar water marshes of the Pine Barrens, the Jersey Devil still stalked and snorted and flexed his leathery wings.

Friday: The devil today

In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how Sam Malone on Cheers and Al Swearengen on Deadwood both manipulated the politics of an entire town from behind the counter of a bar. But with monsters. Enjoy.

This week:
“Bigfoot is blurry.”

South Park, Episode 1×03, “Volcano”

The Six Million Dollar Man, Episodes 3×16 and 3×17, “The Secret of Bigfoot”

Bigfoot has always occupied a unique place in the pantheon of American cryptids. And I use “American” very deliberately here to suggest that, while sasquatches and yetis and abominable snowmen are found (and feared) the world over, Bigfoot is a specifically American cultural institution. Even the name “Bigfoot,” a simple, almost cute, descriptive moniker, suggests what ultimately seems to be the larger mystery that Americans wrestle with when they ponder the elusive, hirsute giant. It isn’t “Is he fact or fiction?,” but rather “Is he friend or foe?”

Both South Park and The Six Million Dollar man mused upon this question. One employed the query in revealing larger truths about pop culture’s grip on folklore. The other simply provided an answer… a weird, ridiculous answer.

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Tear Up The Town is a weekly column investigating the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

For two warm spring nights in 1977, a monster trolled the quiet streets of Dover, Delaware, haunting passersby with its large, almost-featureless head and glowing, empty stare.

When one considers that none of the witnesses to the so-called “Dover Demon” (dubbed as such by the press) were in direct contact immediately before or after the alleged sightings, and all of their descriptions of the creature varied slightly (orange eyes versus green eyes, etc.), an orchestrated hoax seems unlikely. But a microcosmic case of teenage mass hysteria built around a confused infant moose and a pop cultural zeitgeist that piled a brand-new sensationalist Leonard Nimoy television program onto known UFO tracking at a local airforce base, a rampaging serial killer and an imminent star war?

Many skeptics believe it isn’t a coincidence that all three witnesses (Bill Bartlett, age 17; John Baxter, age 15; and Abby Brabham, age 15) to the spindly, large-eyed, four-foot-tall, melon-headed creature, which was witnessed clambering along Dover roadsides on April 21st and 22nd, 1977, were adolescents; even after disregarding the high school prank theory, some experts believe the Dover Demon, a veritable celebrity among American cryptids, was probably a woefully misidentified baby moose. Others admit the possibility that it could have been the product of a covert genetic engineering experiment. Sure, certain spirit hunters and cryptophiles with a new-age bent believe that the witnesses’ age demographic suggests that the alleged creature was related to a poltergeist, appearing only to those whose hormones and bio-rythyms were in continuous flux, and phrases like “extra-terrestrial” and “inter-dimensional being” have been tossed around, but the same trixy pubescence that collectively robs the witnesses of credibility also helps explain how a demon was born.

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