this just happend to me like a couple nights ago and has been a ongoing thing now for a year or so.
It started like a year ago when my exes dad was sleeping in his tent trailer on the side of my yard.
A steep gravel road comes out of thick dense forest that curves around my house and leads to a steep drop off into more dense forest which has a stream at the bottom.
Sometimes I see deer and beer go running into the area with the drop off to go down and get water. Anyways one night he is asleep and hears what he swears is a person mumbling to themselves in a language he can't understand.
He looks outside and sees what he explains as a big ass dog. Bigger then anything he's ever seen. Now I blow it off because It sounds ridiculous and he doesn't sleep with his glasses on so I figured he just misidentified a coyote which we have around our house.
A couple of months later it's around one in the morning I let my dogs out and they are acting scared shit less I can't get them to go outside to potty because they are just too scared they refuse to leave my porch in fact my pug just shits right there on my porch. I bring them in and this is the first night I hear the squeeling, I was raised around livestock so I know what a pig sounds like but this was different imagine a piglet being slaughtered but run through some sort of audio distortion making it sound off.
It's hard to explain without a clip, it kept going on for like two minutes of course the second I grab my phone it stops. A couple months later in the bushes next to the steep incline I hear something huge busting through the trees recorded it but all I got was the sound of limbs busting.
Cut to last week I had taken my husband out for dinner and we are going around the last S curve to get to my house then I saw what Rich had saw. I didn't believe it at first because it was so odd, what kind of animal walks against traffic? Not only that it was even in the road it stayed on the shoulder.
It was bigger then any wild dog I've ever seen it was about four feet tall from paws to back and it had a slow deliberate walk like a AT-AT is the only way I can describe it. was to find somebody who has seen something similar but so far I've been unsuccessful. I've just been calling it "The Werepig" my gf just calls it "The Monster in the woods".
This is just a pretty generalized idea, but I feel like the majority of cryptids stay concealed because they are basically endangered animals with relatively small populations. They are also probably skittish and elusive by nature, so they avoid places with large amounts of people because of all the noise and such.
Humans pose a threat to cryptids just like we pose a threat to all other known animals. We destroy and pollute their habitats, making it harder for them to survive and thrive.
I enjoy documentaries about cryptids that try to keep things objective and focus mostly on the facts. I feel this makes them the most credible. Although I am also a fan of mockumentaries, as they're very entertaining and allow one to think how a creature would exist with more ability to guess at these things than to just say "well we're not really sure."
I carry my camera around a lot but that's about as far as it goes in terms of looking for cryptids.
I do plan to go searching eventually, I think it'll be a fun experience and I'll get some nice nature pictures in general but I don't expect to find much.
It's my opinion that cryptids are most of the time just undiscovered creatures that developed naturally but humans haven't extensively studied yet. Although I try to keep an open mind and don't think it would be too outlandish to suspect "otherworldly" intervention.
I would consider myself an environmentalist. I think we have the responsibility to stop habitat destruction for the sake of all the animals on Earth, possible cryptids included.
Cryptids as animals are almost definitely elusive and endangered, and we don't want to wipe out an entire species before even discovering it.
I think that the films & the media choose two versions of cryptids. There's the "scary" movie, like The Hollow (2015) that seem to be some kind of warning that cryptids are a naturally destructive force. Possibly that is a projection of our own feelings about our own monstrous destruction that you point out. There's this other side though--mostly in kid's films like the remake of Pete's Dragon, The Water Horse, Fern Gully, or E.T.--where kids have a privileged relationship with the creatures, protecting them from adult threats. It could be an exercise in building little environmentalists, as many children's books and films build implicit and explicit expectations for the world--acculturation.
The Panda was once considered a "cryptid". The Okapi was thought to be mythological until 1901.
But mostly ~200 years ago.
The gorilla wasn't confirmed as a real animal until 1847, for example. As to whether anything that has ever actually been called a cryptid has been revealed, I don't know. Certainly it's been done in retrospect with things like the Okapi, but that's pretty unsatisfying - it's just a late entry in the 1800s catalog, really. Rediscoveries and giant versions or dwarf version of known animals are very different from what in many cases would require whole new orders of animalia.
I believe the Giant Squid was once considered a cryptid, but it is not anymore. In fact, it is well documented in many shows. I believe it was first filmed back in Mexico.
It almost always stay very very deep underwater, hence making everybody believe it was a hoax. It was very elusive for many centuries. So far, the Giant Squid is all I know. It would be good if more can be found though. Someone should invent a machine that can photograph literally all areas of a lake at once to see if there are really river monsters, e.g. the Lochness monster.
I was house sitting my grandparents ranch in between madera and chowchilla towards the base of the foothills leading up to the sierra nevadas.
there is a creek/slough that runs along the back of the property that separates the neighbors property and my grandparents. It is thicket ed with bamboo and has always been a favorite fishing spot of mine. It was late afternoon and I decided to go give it a shot for the first time since water had come back through. I grabbed my fishing poles and hopped on the golf cart and started driving parallel to the slough where our huge pasture meets the beginning of the heavy bamboo thicket.
Coming up on a curve where the slough bends I made the curve and immediately slammed on the breaks and saw some sort of canid still almost as if it was a deer caught in headlights, it stood there and seemed to take note of me but not flee.
Almost as if it was not threatened by my presence.
It was hunched forward in stature almost like a hyena but not quite, It had wiry dark grey hair and walked in kind of a slinking motion, with its back off the floor I'm estimating about 5 to 5 and a half feet off the ground. It surveyed the area for a couple more seconds and slowly disappeared into the bamboo thick. I was perplexed as to what the hell this thing could be as the only known canids in my area are foxes and coyotes. And I had never seen anything like It before.
I became increasingly interested in what I saw and couldn't find much of anything on undiscovered canids sightings in California. But I did find a picture online of whats known as the shunka warakin that has a striking resemblance to what I saw that day. From what ive seen My best guess is that it was some sort of hyena-k9 hybrid.
I love Lost Tapes. The Monster of Monterrey episode was pretty spooky. The last few minutes in the deep water really get to me.
It definitely wasn't a high quality show, especially in the hands of Animal Planet.
If you read the imdb boards for the show there are a lot of people that seem to think the footage is real. It was bad sci-fi cheese on a somewhat reputable network for learning about animals. Maybe it would have been better as a Sy-Fy show, with a bigger budget. One thing that series needed was more moneyshots of the monsters.
So many episodes rely on the characters hearing spooky shit instead of actually seeing anything.
I've seen every episode on Netflix. There's 2 or 3 others I can't seem to find online though. I've watched so many that I start to notice the goofy cliffhangers they edit for commercial breaks. It's always, "OHHH WOAH DO YOU SEE THAT?? WHAT'S THAT???"
Commercial Just like the South Park Ghost Hunters episode but I still really like Destination Truth. I wish there were more.
There's one that I'll watch occasionally called Mountain Monsters. Fake as all hell, but it's fun to watch the gang of rednecks build their Scooby Doo traps.
I was driving at night down a dark, 2-lane, deserted road with some friends in my car.
There were no street lamps on this road and it was bordered on both sides by tall, overgrown trees.
The only substantial light came from my headlights. I was going probably about 20 MPH. Suddenly, I spotted some sort of animal crossing the road. My friend in the front seat saw it as well. Now, neither of us got a clear look at it, but we both thought it was odd-looking in a rather disturbing way. It looked hairless and flesh-colored, perhaps about the size of an opossum or a groundhog.
What was most strange about it was that, in the brief glimpse we had of it, it did not seem to have any discernible features aside from the general shape. It moved in a way that seemed very unnatural, almost like a weird ball of flesh sort of just scooting across the road.
At first I thought I was looking at some sort of rodent that didn't have any feet or eyes trying to crawl across the road. I cannot identify any known cryptid or even mythical creature which it might have been, and I haven't heard of any relevant stories or similar sightings. It was almost certainly just something quite normal that merely appeared strange in the particular conditions in which we saw it. In fact, the only "evidence" that anything out of the ordinary happened at all is that two people saw it and both reacted with equal surprise.
I have two theories, aside from it just being a completely normal animal of some kind that somehow appeared surprising due to the surrounding conditions:
- a diseased animal of some sort, perhaps having lost some or all of its fur, possibly an opossum, groundhog, or skunk
- one of those brown plastic grocery bags drifting slowly across the road and deforming slightly in the air as it went
Moments after we saw it we were discussing what we had seen, but as we had places to be we didn't bother trying to go back or look into it further. .