Cryptids, anyone?

[Memphremagog]

If anyone's interested, I've actually seen the Mothman. Saw it when I was 13, the night before my house burned down back in February 2004. And no, I don't live in West Virginia. Funny thing, based on where I live you'd think Champy would be the most likely cryptid for me to catch a glimpse of, but nope. No, I saw the Mothman.

Really? That's something I would like to hear about..

[Memphremagog]

Wanted poster seeking the capture of the Jersey Devil after it supposedly rampaged through the Pine Barrens area of New Jersey circa 1887:

[Big Bad Wolf]

It wasn't long after my birthday actually. Maybe a week or two. It was late, but I was wide awake watching TV in my room. I heard a noise outside and caught movement in the corner of my eye, out the window. I got up and went to the window and there it was.

It was doing the Spider-Man crouch, perched on a tree branch in the back yard. This is a tree that my sister and I and the neighbor's kids all used to play on together so I have a pretty good sense of scale about it, and this thing was easily bigger than a person, though it clearly had a somewhat humanoid shape.

A car drove by out in front, and for a moment the headlights illuminated its huge reflective red eyes. I remember thinking they were like reflectors on a bicycle. Afterward I tried to rationalize it that for some reason there was a bike in the tree and I just imagined the rest, but that didn't explain how once the car drove by it got spooked and lept from the branch, taking off with those massive wings and flying away.

I didn't get a whole lot of sleep that night. Even at 13 years old I knew better than to tell anybody about it or they wouldn't believe me. By then I was already on my journey to becoming the horror fan I am today, so I knew how that would go. The next morning, my grandma asked me if I wanted to go with her to the family headquarters (her mom's house, where a few of her siblings also lived and some of my cousins). Too scared to stay home, I went with her.

While I was at the family HQ later that evening (it was typical for us to stay all day like that sometimes), just chilling in my cousin's room watching TV in the dark, my cousins burst in and yelled, "Your house is on fire!" Sure enough, that night my house burned down.

Later on, some time in the next couple days, I found out some things. My grandpa came home to discover the fire had started after leaving to go to a local spring for water. Since he left and no one else was home, our two dogs were tied outside in the yard. But he wouldn't have left if I'd been home that day. So because I left to visit my cousins, my grandpa got bored and left, and he tied our dogs outside.

In other words, because I saw the Mothman, I wasn't in the house when the fire started. Nor was my grandpa, or our dogs.

I didn't know the Mothman was a famous cryptid until later. Me always being on the lookout for cool scary movies, another relative recommended The Mothman Prophecies. I always like to read up on the internet about things that interest me, so I got online to check it out. That's when I realized that what I saw was not a dream, or something I imagined in my head. I knew I'd seen the Mothman.

Now, the fire was caused by a really old, janky circuit breaker box in the basement that the electrician we hired had procrastinated on actually fixing or replacing. For all I know, if we had been home, we might have caught the fire and stopped it from burning the whole house down. Or maybe we would have all died. I don't know. I know some people think the Mothman actually causes disasters, too.

I prefer the less cynical option. I prefer to think that the Mothman was warning me, and in doing so it saved my life. I don't know if it's an angel, or an alien, or some other weird thing we can't comprehend yet. But I know it's out there. I've seen it.

[Kidagain]

Thanks for the story BBW, I seem to recall that the Mothman appears before something tragic happens.

[Big Bad Wolf]

Thanks for the story BBW, I seem to recall that the Mothman appears before something tragic happens.

Based on my research that seems to be the case. It's hard to tell what's truth, what's just superstition, and what's completely fiction, but I've heard stories that it's been sighted before all kinds of tragedies and accidents. Why this is, I can't even begin to hypothesize.

[Count Zero]

i saw a shadow man when i was 8 years old living up in CT

it looks a lot like this sketch i pulled from a google search:



i awoke in the middle of the night - not sure what time. i got out of my bed & walked down the hallway into the living room...from there i turned the corner into the kitchen to find this this shadow against the far wall directly across from me.

i froze for a moment & then turned tail back to my bed. i hid under the covers petrified until i eventually fell asleep.

i had forgotten all about it up until about a decade ago. an episode of coast to coast jogged my memory.

[Memphremagog]

It's interesting that you should depict the apparition that you saw as wearing a hat as these days the shadow people are sometimes divided into two catagories: one being the shadow person, the other being called Hat Man, Apparently the shadow being wearing a hat has been seen hundreds of times by witnesses who basically all give the same description of him, except sometimes he sports red, glowing eyes. Creepy, to say the least.

[long live kong]

i saw a shadow man when i was 8 years old living up in CT

it looks a lot like this sketch i pulled from a google search:



i awoke in the middle of the night - not sure what time. i got out of my bed & walked down the hallway into the living room...from there i turned the corner into the kitchen to find this this shadow against the far wall directly across from me.

i froze for a moment & then turned tail back to my bed. i hid under the covers petrified until i eventually fell asleep.

i had forgotten all about it up until about a decade ago. an episode of coast to coast jogged my memory.

I had a very similar experience once when I was in my early twenties. I awoke to see a 'shadow' of a man sitting at the end of my bed. I definitely wasn't dreaming, I was wide awake and hadn't been drinking. The room was quite dark but the shape of the figure was clearly defined. He was actually crouched as if sat on the end of my bed and looking down towards my bedroom wall, then it actually moved and appeared to look right at me. I kind of cringed with fright then and it seemed to just fade out. I'm not saying it was a ghost, it could have simply been a very vivid hallucination but it happened exactly as described.

[Big Bad Wolf]

Funny thing, I saw it too once. I always chalked it up to a ghost for a while, but I'm pretty sure it was a hallucination. Under sleep deprivation I've seen some really weird things. I once lied there in bed terrified that goofy retro robots were going to attack me, complete with flashing lightbulb eyes and accordion arms and everything. One time I thought there was a goblin sitting in my chair.

Until I saw The Mothman Prophecies I honestly worried that that's what that was. But then I thought about it, and realized...I got up from my bed and looked out the window, you know? No way I dreamed that.

But the shadow figure in the black suit? I might have dreamed that. Or not. I don't know. Sometimes I like to use "ghost" the same way I use "UFO". Perhaps I should call it an "Unidentified Humanoid Apparition" instead? A UHA?

[Memphremagog]

Dubious photo purportedly showing the Goatman of Maryland in woods near Washington DC.

[Memphremagog]

http://youtu.be/6vm2CR2W6Iw

Interesting video showing footage of some familiar cryptids, although the vampire one is very dubious..

[Scatter]

Yeah..... the fact that a video of a vampire made in the last decade isn't sparkling makes me suspicious

[Memphremagog]

The fact that is looks a lot like video editing made me suspicious.

[Memphremagog]

Eyewitness drawing of the Flatwoods Monster, a being supposedly deposited after a UFO sighting in Flatwoods, West Virginia on September 12,1952

[Memphremagog]

A look at the cryptid action figure set from a few years back, featuring Sasquatch, the Mothman, Nessie, the Jersey Devil and the Chupacabra: