A few years ago, I fell down a deep Wikipedia rabbit hole of weird cryptids, starting with the well-known bigfoot and digging down all the way to the Fresno pants. Cryptids are defined as animals that cryptozoologists believe may exist somewhere in the wild but are not believed to exist by mainstream scientists. Cryptozoology is a pseudoscience that primarily runs off of horrible quality photos, stories, and myths. Although I know these creatures don’t exist, looking into their stories is incredibly fun for me, as I love weird and creepy stories, and today I will introduce you to some of the weird creatures in the even weirder field of cryptozoology!
From Point Pleasant, West Virginia, we are starting off with the folklore of Mothman, which is my favorite. Mothman was popularized by John Keel in 1975 in his book The Mothman Prophecies which in 2002 was adapted into a film (which I can’t imagine was a very good horror film). The lore behind Mothman is that on November 15th, 1966, a report came in of a creature the size of a man with glowing red eyes, who was spotted in Point Pleasant. Over the next few days, more and more of these sightings came in, and people started describing it more as a 7-foot bird. In December of 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing 46 people, and this incident started the myth of Mothman, as people said the giant man-moth hybrid was the reason behind the collapse. Now the town has embraced the weird story, and in 2002, it started its annual Mothman Festival, which brings in many of the town’s tourists.
On December 12th, 2014, a couple driving in Carmel saw what they approximated to be a 7- foot-tall slender, gray creature. One other sighting in Yosemite National Park had the same report, but at a much smaller height, only 1-2 feet tall. These creatures are mostly legs as their upper bodies are very small, which is how their name, the Fresno Pants, AKA the Fresno Nightcrawler or the Carmel Area Creature, was coined. .The 2 aforementioned sightings have been the only sightings of these weird creatures, but people are constantly creating more lore for them and even making stuffed animals that supposedly look like these creatures, how cute!
The Chupacabra is folklore in parts of the Americas. The name Chupacabra comes from the Spanish word chupar (to suck) and cabras (goats), as people believed these creatures were responsible for the death of goats on their farms. Sightings have been reported since the 1970s, starting in Puerto Rico. They have also been reported in Maine and Chile as well as many places in between. Some of the weird histories behind chupacabras include el Vampiro de Moca (the vampire of Moca), which started because people thought the deaths of their goats were due to a satanic cult that was draining their blood. All of the animals were reported to have been drained of their blood by a series of small circular incisions across their bodies. We know now that this creature is entirely fake; still, it has been a major part of pop culture, debuting in album names and episodes of TV for years.
In Ohio folklore, the Loveland Frog is one of the most well-known creatures. The Loveland Frog is apparently a humanoid frog standing at about 4 feet tall. This legend all started in 1972 when a Loveland police officer reported to his colleague that he had seen an animal that fit the description of the frogman. In 2014, this cryptid’s story was made into a musical called Hot Damn! It’s The Loveland Frog. Thismyth was supposedly debunked in 2016 by an officer who supposedly shot the “frogman” and said it was just a large iguana missing its tail. Again in 2016 (because that was apparently a wild year for the Loveland frog myth) some students playing Pokemon Go said they saw a frog stand up and walk off on its hind legs, but it was just a kid in a frog costume.
There are so many weird types of cryptids that I didn’t talk about in this article, but please look them up on your own. Some of them are absolutely insane, with such weird implications you wonder how people even believed them. There is some weird folklore out there, and I hope this helps you get into a super weird Wikipedia deep dive.