Tag Archives: cryptid

Arizona Bigfoot

Informant’s Background:

My informant, JA, is a undergraduate student at the University of Southern California. He moved from his family home in Arizona to attend college in Los Angeles. His family is of German ancestry.

Context:

I (AT) am a close friend of JA, and he comes over to hang out at my apartment often. I asked him if he had any folklore he could share and this story was his response.

Performance:

JA: “So anyways I’m in my psych class, professor to be left unnamed for confidentiality reasons, err, and he’s been like a perfectly good professor the whole semester, like very informative, very smart well-informed guy, older guy, and then he’s like-this last class he’s like yeah I went hiking and I saw bigfoot one-hundred-percent and I’m one-hundred-percent confident in this.”

AT: “What was the story exactly?”

JA: “Uhm… The story was, I’m trying to remember all of the details, but mostly that he was hiking in the woods in like a relatively uhm… popular-not even relatively popular, just like a-some place in Arizona like a wooded area that the guy hikes a lot etc and he was just like yeah I saw him there and he was bigfoot, and he was like eight feet tall and yeah, I’m like a hundred percent certain of what I saw.”

Informant’s Thoughts:

JA: “That was all the detail he really gave on the story. I wasn’t really sure if he was shitting us, but he seemed to believe it and he waited to tell it to us at the end of the year and then that was the last class I had with him and then I haven’t spoken to that professor like since so it wasn’t like a gotcha or anything.”

Thoughts:

Stories of Bigfoot are fairly common throughout the United States and Canada. I think this example is interesting because of the context in which the story is presented, and more specifically, the way in which it is presented. In my analysis of this performance, I thought a lot about the lack of information given by my informant. It seems to me that the informant had a very skeptical attitude towards the narrative his teacher was presenting, and framed the whole re-telling of that narrative in a way that implied that the teacher’s story was not to be believed, or that he was crazy, that he broke off from the normal at the last day of class. It occurred to me the link between the negative viewing of the original storyteller’s narrative by our informant and the lack of the actual ability to recount much of the original storyteller’s (the professor) narrative. To put it simply: the informant did not care about the bigfoot story. To the informant, the story was that the teacher was crazy, or weird, and that he presented this narrative on the last day of class, and how crazy that was. But what is lost is much of the original storyteller’s bigfoot tale. I think it’s very interesting how much a narrative can change depending on who is telling it, as in this case the entire narrative is reframed from what was originally intended by the professor’s telling of the story.

Indrid Cold

Text:

Informant: Ok, so this guy. Oh my god. I’m obsessed with him. I love him. Basically, in West Virginia — the same place my boy Mothman is from– this guy got into a car accident. He was saved from the wreckage by this guy who had a really creepy smile. He just kept smiling. The guy who crashed his car was like “Woah who are you?”, and creepy smile guys was like “My name’s Indrid Cold”, but Indrid Cold didn’t use his mouth. He told the guy telepathically. The reigning theory on this guy Indrid Cold/ The Smiling Man/ The Grinning Man is that he’s come from a race of aliens who all smile and grin. He was the one to try and first contact Earth. I heard about him on a podcast years ago, and I’ve been obsessed with him ever since. While I don’t know if he was an alien, I know deep in my heart that he existed. 

Context:

I asked a group of friends to share what they knew about cryptids. This was one of their replies.

Thoughts: I’m considered myself fairly well-versed in the world of cryptids, but upon learning of Indrid Cold I learned that there were ones I had never heard of.

Momo, or the Missouri Monster

Main Piece:

“I think in the 70s it was, I know the name of the town because it’s called Louisanna, Missouri. It’s on the Mississippi river in the south of the state and in the 70s apparently a few people reported seeing a very tall, like 7 to 8 foot tall, ape-like swamp creature in the woods- they also called it a swamp ape. But the distinguishing feature of this thing was it had a very huge like bulbous onion shaped head, but like an upside down onion though, so like big and bulbous- and it had shag all over it and like big, big like freakishly huge red eyes because it’s a shitty B-Movie monster pretty much. So it’s like Bigfoot but with a big onion head and it reeks because it lives in a swamp near the river. For a brief period in the 70s and 80s, I think it was, people got really into the idea- it became called Momo, Missouri Monster, from the state abbreviation monster.”

Background:

The informant is a 21-year old male from Kansas City, Missouri who has lived there for the majority of his life. His family comes from southern Missouri, near Joplin and the Ozarks. The town in question for this piece, Louisiana, apparently tried to profit off this cryptid very shortly after its sightings similar to other towns who use Moth man or Bigfoot sightings to drive tourism, however Momo was not nearly as successful as those previous examples. The town remains a relatively quaint and small town.

Context:

I overheard this story when the informant was talking to a group about cryptozoology and I asked him to share it again with me for the sake of transcription. The exact exchange occurred in his room a few hours later.

Thoughts:

This piece appears to be another example of the common cryptid of Bigfoot. A large, ape-like creature that is elusive and on the fringes of society. Furthermore, these creatures are typically very smart and nearly human-like but not quite enough to warrant describing it as human. I feel there are a lot of these types of legends ranging from Bigfoot to Sasquatch and I feel this creature is another attempt to fit into that mold. What differentiates it and what makes this monster interesting, in my opinion, is how Momo is shaped to specify Southern Missouri. The Mississippi River is a huge part of the culture of Southern Missouri and so the monster being based out of a nearby swamp of the Mississippi River makes a lot of sense. What I like most about this legend is how it is clearly an attempt to cash in on the cryptid craze of Bigfoot and similar legends. While undoubtedly some people believe they saw the monster, the town quickly moved to monetize the creature and tourism surrounding it. However, compared to similar towns that attempt to make a tourism industry out of a local legend, this one did not work nearly as well, which makes it interesting to me. Finally, Momo is interesting as it fits the entire culture of Southern Missouri and the Ozarks as it is a creature on the fringe of society, which reflects the often isolated communities that exist in this area. Compared to a heavily urbanized city, a legendary monster like this is far more likely to appear in areas with lots of forest and mountains with small isolated communities, such as those in the Ozark Mountain range.

Lone Pine Mountain Devil

Informant: Meagan is a 23-year-old screenwriter, born and raised in San Diego. She is an active member of various ghosthunting and cryptid-related groups, although she admits that she is not sure if she fully believes in them.

Main Piece:
Informant: “There are certain types of cryptids that are known as ‘old-worldly’. They’re creatures that should be extinct but aren’t. Apparently, in the mountains of California, there’s a pterosaur-like creature with like…the head of a T-Rex.”

Interviewer: Is the head the same size as a T-Rex’s?

Informant: “No, no…here, let me draw it for you. It’s hard to explain.” See below for drawing. Some people say it has feathers, some say it doesn’t. But one thing’s for certain, and that’s that it’s carnivorous. It leaves very distinct bite marks on its prey. And sometimes it…sort of turns its prey inside out, but mostly it’s known for the bite marks.”

EPSON MFP image

Background Information about the Performance: The informant learned of this piece through various online communities of cryptozoologists. The informant noted that she was interested in hiking around the area where the cryptid has been sighted.

Context of Performance: Often, stories of this cryptid are told as personal experiences on online forums or cryptid-related books.

Thoughts: Upon further research, I learned that the Lone Pine Mountain Devil was created by a team of Youtubers for a video in 2010. However, it is important to note that it is still very widely believed by the crytozoologist community, showing how an authored work can become folklore. The informant also noted that the Lone Pine Mountain Devil and the Jersey Devil were often considered related in some way, showing how two separate elements of folklore can become tied together.

Mothman (Urban legend)

Mothman is a cryptid (animal or plant whose existence has been suggested but has never been documented convincingly by the scientific community). The Mothman legend consists of several sightings of a creature in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, during the period of November 15, 1966 to December 15, 1967. The creature was described as being as tall as a man, but with bird-like ten-foot wings and eyes that glowed like “bicycle reflectors,” and multiple people saw it and even claimed it was following their cars or flying over the forest. The sightings of Mothman stopped after the Silver Bridge disaster, in which the aforementioned bridge collapsed on December 15, 1967 during rush hour traffic, resulting in the deaths of 46 people. Because sightings stopped after this point, it has been suggested that the Mothman frenzy had something to do with the bridge collapse.

INFORMANT: Many of the people who reported seeing the Mothman have been kept anonymous and are perhaps apocryphal, like the sources of many urban legends. However, some people did report it to the police, including Mr. and Mrs. Roger Scarberry and Mr. and Mrs. Steve Mallette, whose sighting is perhaps the most well-known. They were driving near the “TNT Area,” known for its historical usage as a place where munitions and explosives were built and stored in bunkers during WWII. They reported sighting to the police, as did others in the vicinity who claimed to see the cryptid over the coming year, but nothing came of it; the police were never able to view it themselves, nor was anyone ever able to convincingly document a sighting.

ANALYSIS: The Mothman legend is one of the more famous urban legends, having even been turned into a book and subsequent movie called The Mothman Prophecies. Noted folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand notes that “recountings of the 1966-67 Mothman reports usually state that at least 100 people saw Mothman with many more “afraid to report their sightings” but observed that written sources for such stories consisted of children’s books or sensationalized or undocumented accounts that fail to quote identifiable persons.” The most likely explanation for the Mothman is that it is a sandhill crane (which could easily grow to a size larger than a man) which had wandered from its typical migration route. Also, many speculated that the collapse of the Silver Bridge was connected to the Mothman. Infrasound is a phenomenon in which “exposure to low frequency sound vibrations which we cannot detect may also have considerable impact on humans.” Among the side effects are hallucinations. People have proposed the theory that in the year leading up to its collapse, the Silver Bridge may have been emitting these low-frequency vibrations and causing town-wide hallucinations (perhaps including the Mothman), but this has never been satisfactorily proven. Whatever did happen in Point Pleasant, during the time period of the so-called Mothman, the town has now commemorated it with a lovely statue.

 

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