Archive for the ‘weird’ category
January 6, 2014
– – Things went to the dogs or at least the canids on a recent episode of Monsters and Mysteries in America. For those partial to werewolves, the first segment presented the Beast of Bray Road, a wolf-like creature seen more than 100 times in Wisconsin since the 1940’s. Incidents involving the beast seemed to peak in the 1980’s, when a Lori Endrizzi encountered an upright creature consuming road kill along a road that she was traveling home; it appeared to be developing interest in the woman as a second course before she managed to get her stalled car started and escape. A later encounter was also profiled that occurred in 2006 when a Steve Krueger was picking up deer carcasses when something rocked his truck and helped itself to both a deer carcass and an ATV ramp in the bed of his pickup! He gunned his truck and also escaped, although the missing ramp later couldn’t be located.
A second segment profiled the Dogman, more of a spirit-based creature seen near Holly, Michigan with more than 100 sightings of similar cryptids across the world. A 2005 incident was presented where a repo man was driven off by a man-dog type hybrid which drove him off the property he had entered to reposess a Cadillac.
Lastly and perhaps most terrifying were the accounts of the Wendigo, a rather nasty entity with a taste for human flesh rooted in North American legends and said to frequent the North Woods of the Great Lakes region. The Wendigo takes over people like an infection, possessing them with a cannibalistic hunger so intense that the creature is said to chew off its own lips and gnaw on its fingers. A case was presented where a Cree Indian in the 1870’s had killed and eaten his own family, claiming at his own hanging that he was no longer a man but rather possessed by a Wendigo. In a modern case from 2008, a border on a Greyhound bus attacked a fellow traveler, decapitated him, paraded around the bus with his victim’s head like a trophy, and supposedly ate pieces of flesh from his victim…again supposedly possessed by the Wendigo, which in its true form appears as a frozen, cadaverous monster…truly scary stuff!
Categories: anthropomorphic, furry, strange happenings, television, unexplained, unidentified, weird
Tags: Beast of Bray Road, Dogman, Wendigo
Comments: 6 Comments
December 23, 2013
– – It’s not easy to come up with an hour’s worth of strangeness to feed an audience every week, but Monsters & Mysteries in America tries its best to give us a steady diet of it. Three segments of a recent episode occurred in or near the Bridgewater Triangle in Massachusetts, where apparently trolls don’t just frequent the internet, but may also be found trying to lure people into the forest. The Pukwudgie is described as being a three to four foot high creature capable of speech who can’t attack intended victims directly, but tries to entice them to follow to some foul and unimaginable fate. Cases presented involving the Pukwudgie included a 1995 encounter when a man and his dog heard a creature supposedly say “We want you,” and a 2008 event when a video camera is said to have captured an image of one at the edge of the forest.
A second segment “Alien Brood” centered on twin sisters who reported being repeatedly abducted by aliens as children with successive abductions occurring into their adulthood. When children, the sisters contended that they were visited by aliens at night who paralyzed and levitated them and took them into a spacecraft, with injuries found by the sisters on their bodies the next day. As adults, the sisters reportedly were subjected to alien “reproductive procedures” and turned into “breeders” for the production of alien “gray”-human hybrids. One 2007 encounter was termed especially violent, and one sister reported meeting a hybrid child during a later abduction.
The third segment involved three sightings of the “Dover Demon” over two nights by teenagers in April of 1977 in the Massachusetts town of Dover. The creature is said to have a huge head almost the size of his body with no visible mouth and large, glowing eyes. Described as neither human nor animal, the unidentified cryptid resembles the Gollum in the Lord of the Rings saga…
Categories: aliens, anomalies, cryptozoology, speculation, strange happenings, television, unexplained, weird
Tags: aliens, Monsters & Mysteries, Pukwudgie
Comments: 6 Comments
September 27, 2013
– – I would be remiss if I did not include at least one post about Cousin Itt, since who could be more hairy or furry than he? A recurrent but not main character on The Addams Family television series and movies, Itt was a character not created by cartoonist Charles Addams but rather by the producer of the series. The cousin of Gomez Addams, Itt was a short individual completely covered with long, thick hair that completely obscured any underlying features. He typically wore sunglasses and a hat, usually a derby. Itt’s speech was rapid, high-pitched gibberish understandable to any member of the Addams family but not to anyone else.
Cousin Itt did not routinely reside at the Addams mansion, but was a regular visitor there and at times occupied a room, one scaled down to his height and size. Itt was reputed to be highly intelligent, and had a variety of skills and talents, including singing. Itt was quite a lady’s man, and did at one time sire a child, whose name appropriately was “What,” supposedly the first word out of the gynecologist’s mouth when the child, who resembled a tiny Itt, was delivered.
Itt could be the life of any party. My favorite episode depicted Gomez asking Cousin Itt what was under his great mop of hair. Itt’s response was, “roots!”
Categories: absurdities, anomalies, bizarre, Brilliant but twisted, furry, television, weird
Tags: Addams Family
Comments: 3 Comments
July 17, 2013
— As an episode of the Weird or What series hosted by William Shatner would remind us (Aliens Walk Among Us), some candidates for new and unknown species have been nothing more than the products of creative taxidermy, fueled by the simple public desire to believe. The desire to believe is an incredibly powerful thing, intoxicating and seductive. If we are not careful, that desire can cause us to suspend reason and logic.
I would like to believe in monsters. They are intriguing, can be romantic, and give me a warm fuzzy feeling inside! Existentially, we all ask, “Is that all there is?” Assuming the existence of monsters can give many of us the intangible thing that we seek, the hope that there is something more beyond the evidence of our senses. Feeding the public desire and demand for monsters has been a lucrative occupation for centuries, leading in the era of P.T. Barnum to the manufacture of the Fiji Mermaid, a sewn-together linkage of a monkey’s upper body with the lower body of a large fish. In far more recent times, the Metepec Creature served a similar function, with the skinned and otherwise altered remains of a spider monkey or similar primate masquerading as an unknown species or alien.
To show the relative ease of creating an otherworldly-appearing corpse, a taxidermist on the Weird or What Show took a skinned squirrel and paired it to the skull of a small primate which had been additionally modified to make it appear even more human-like. The results were both stomach-churning and disquieting, looking as convincing as many specimens submitted as “proof”of unknown life or aliens. Dare to believe, but never forsake science and credibility. Occam’s Razor is a good litmus test; the simplest explanation is usually the correct one…
Categories: bizarre, controversial, cryptozoology, fantasy, furry, mysteries, strange, weird
Tags: Fiji mermaid, Metepec creature, Weird or What
Comments: 2 Comments
June 25, 2013
– – I love the notion of accursed artifacts, articles from antiquity bearing some kind of spell, curse, or enchantment. Because of this, I think it’s totally cool that an ancient Egyptian statuette in the Manchester Museum in Great Britain is rotating seemingly on its own, and sensibly away from visiting tourists! This ten-inch high statue, an offering to Osiris the ancient Egyptian God of Death, dates back to about 1800 BC, and has been in the museum’s collection for about 80 years.
Some, of course, are claiming that supernatural forces are behind the statue’s rotation, while physicist Brian Cox offers the explanation that the movement is a function of differential friction, where the subtle vibrations of passing foot traffic make the statue move; the statuette only moves in the daytime during museum hours. But before we call out the Hardy boys or arm mummy nemesis Brendan Fraser with a gun, perhaps we should harken to the inscription on the back of the figure, and provision it with the beer, bread, and beef that it’s calling for from one of the many excellent English pubs about…
Categories: bizarre, strange happenings, weird
Comments: 5 Comments
June 21, 2013
— Ah, the stories, the wonderful fantastic tales that could be shared if Dorothy from “Oz” and Alice from “Wonderland” could sit down together, and compare notes on a pleasant summer afternoon! I’d surely pull up a chair to listen in to that conversation!
Alice could open by relating how she followed a white rabbit with a watch who seemed much preoccupied with the time, while Dorothy could share an encounter with a cowardly lion. Alice might speak of meeting a hookah-smoking caterpillar, while Dorothy could regale us with descriptions of flying monkeys. There would be reports of animal abuse, too, such as Alice’s description of a croquet game with flamingos used as mallets, and Dorothy’s account of a green-hued witch threatening her small dog.
Some of the strangest furry encounters in literature have been described or related by children, or by those with child-like, open minds. Weird shit, indeed, and oddly compelling…
Categories: animals, anthropomorphic, Brilliant but twisted, fantasy, furry, furry literature, weird
Tags: animal, fantastic, Oz, Weird, Wonderland
Comments: 4 Comments
May 14, 2013
– – Pity or perhaps envy William Shatner, who just can’t seem to get away from aliens and other unexplained phenomena; on the new Syfy show Weird or What?, the man best known for playing James T. Kirk on the original Star Trek series seems to be thoroughly enjoying himself! The show makes for enjoyable viewing if only to see Shatner, who knows better than to take this stuff or himself too seriously.
An episode of the show concerned parallel dimensions, touching also on crystal skulls and shadow people, who are the stuff of urban legends. Speculation is lively as to whether the dark, featureless silhouette-type figures are spirits, aliens, or visitors from one of those alternative dimensions. Commendably, a scientific explanation was offered by a credentialed individual that perhaps reported sightings of shadow people are really, after all, shadows, with the human brain hard-wired to see patterns in ambiguous stimuli presented to it. Still, eyewitnesses reporting having seen such figures refuse to believe that they are a mere trick of the light.
As William Shatner himself has noted in an interview, the line between being amusing and intriguing is a fine one, and the show is successful in presenting weird stories in an entertaining fashion. For a guy who’s 82, “the Shat” is where it’s at!
Categories: anomalies, speculation, television, unexplained, urban legends, weird
Tags: Shadow People, Weird or What
Comments: 2 Comments
May 9, 2013
– – I’m always interested in unidentifiable mystery carcasses washing up on shore! It’s better still if bathers are on the beach when it happens. Submitted for your approval is this rather ferocious and prehistoric-looking specimen which washed up on Pukehina Beach in New Zealand…and no, I did not make up the name “Pukehina,” although it serves my purposes well. About 9 meters in length with the lower part of the body mostly entrails from an attack, speculations soon surfaced that the remains were some kind of sea monster. It probably didn’t smell like roses, either!
A marine mammal expert, however, has identified the remains as most likely being those of a killer whale, or orca. When creatures wash ashore in a severe state of decomposition, they really don’t look their best, you see, and may not even look much like they did in life. Bizarre-looking carcasses have been misidentified as sea monsters or even dinosaurs for generations. Some masses of tissue brought up by the sea are so far gone as to be called, “blobsters.”
In 1896, for example, a massive, six-foot-high “fleshy corpse” came ashore at St. Augustine, Florida. After lots of speculation and probably gagging, a naturalist of the time decided that it was some kind of giant octopus previously unknown to science. Then in 2003, something 40 feet long weighing 13 tons washed ashore on a beach in Chile. Labeled the “Chilean Blob,” the remains were determined to be whale blubber. More recently in 2008, I’m sure we can all remember the Montauk Monster, although this was much more modestly sized, being by most estimations the remains of a raccoon or a boxer dog. Hopefully some more good stuff will wash up sometime soon, giving us material to write about!
…Anyways, there’s gotta be a really memorable bad movie for the Syfy channel lurking amidst all of this talk of fleshy corpses and bizarre-looking carcasses…Attack of the Blobster, maybe, I dunno…
Categories: bizarre, creature features, events involving animals, mysteries, strange happenings, weird
Tags: blobsters, unidentifiable corpses
Comments: 2 Comments
April 30, 2013
– – Mysterious shadows, screams in the night, hairy hominids, and a hair-raising sense that something is watching me…these are a few of my favorite things! Few cryptic creatures are as laughably strange, however, as is the Sheepsquatch, a crossover between mutton and man reported throughout West Virginia and in the southwestern region of Virginia.
Also known as “the white thing,” Sheepsquatch is described as a goat-faced, ram-horned Bigfoot clone that’s about the size of a bear with completely white, wool-like fur. The head is long and pointed like a dog’s, sporting long saber-like teeth. The creature has horns like those of a young goat, which some observers have mistaken for a second set of eyes. Curiously, the front limbs of Sheepsquatch are reported to end in paw-like hands, similar to those of a raccoon but larger. Bringing up the rear is a long and hairless tail. As a topper, this “sheep that’s gone savage” is reported to smell like sulfur! No wonder it’s elusive…
Categories: animals, anomalies, cryptozoology, furry, Uncategorized, unexplained, unidentified, weird
Tags: Sheepsquatch, the white thing
Comments: 3 Comments
April 23, 2013
– – Seldom are cryptids described as goat-like, but the “Goatman” of Western Kentucky is an exception. As characterized on the Discovery Channel’s show, Monsters and Mysteries in America, the Goatman is reputed to have hypnotic powers of a sort, to be able to imitate voices, and to entice people to climb the Pope Lick railroad trestle to lure them to their doom.
The Goatman is reportedly a hybrid creature, part man and part goat who is also associated with Louisiana, Maryland, and Texas. Urban legends tell of the Goatman killing young lusting couples in parked cars as well as family pets. Goats have traditionally been associated with Satan and satyrs, and the Goatman as might be expected from such linkage is also reputed to be a bit, heh, horny, breaking into houses and raping the occupants regardless of their sex. This is not Gabby Goat of Looney Tunes fame, a one-time sidekick of Porky Pig. Both Goatman and Gabby have an attitude, but that’s as far as the comparison goes.
Accounts of the creation of the Goatman vary, with some describing him as being a sideshow freak escaped from a circus train wreck, another considering him a genetic mutant or experiment, and still another regarding him as the product of a farmer’s unnatural attraction to his livestock…but such stories get my goat, Ahahahaha!
Categories: animals, anthropomorphic, cryptozoology, furry, unexplained, unidentified, urban legends, weird
Tags: the Goatman, urban legends, Western Kentucky Goatman
Comments: 3 Comments
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