Aphrodite posted:

That doesn't really make it more fake than anything else in here.

Tujague posted:

Mongolian Death worm. Ten feet long, bright red, lives in the Gobi desert, barfs acid on you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_death_worm



Those fish are still alive. Tasmanian tigers were real. Chupacabras don't look like that.

quote:

One Sunda morn young Lambton went
A-fishing in the Wear;
An' catched a fish upon he's heuk
He thowt leuk't vary queer.
But whatt'n a kind ov fish it was
Young Lambton cudden't tell-
He waddn't fash te carry'd hyem,
So he hoyed it doon a well

Chorus
Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs,
An' aa'll tell ye aall an aaful story,
Whisht! lads, haad yor gobs,
An' Aa'll tel ye 'boot the worm.

Noo Lambton felt inclined te gan
An' fight i' foreign wars.
He joined a troop ov Knights that cared
For nowther woonds nor scars,
An' off he went te Palestine
Where queer things him befel,
An varry seun forgat aboot
The queer worm i' tha well.

But the worm got fat an' grewed an' grewed,
An' grewed an aaful size;
He'd greet big teeth, a greet big gob,
An greet big goggly eyes.
An' when at neets he craaled aboot
Te pick up bits o' news,
If he felt dry upon the road,
He'd milk a dozen coos.

This feorful worm would often feed
On caalves an' lambs an' sheep,
An' swally little bairns alive
When they laid doon te sleep.
An when he'd eaten aall he cud
An' he had had he's fill,
He craaled away an' lapped he's tail
Ten times roond Pensha Hill.

The news ov this myest aaful worm
An' his queer gannins on
Seun crossed the seas, gat te the ears
Ov brave an' bowld Sor John.
So hyem he cam an' catched the beast,
An' cut 'im in twe haalves,
An' that seun stopped hes eatin' bairns
An' sheep an' lambs an' caalves.

So noo ye knaa hoo aall the foaks
On byeth sides ov the Wear
Lost lots o' sheep an' lots o' sleep
An leeved i' mortal feor.
So let's hev one te brave Sor John
That kept the bairns frae harm,
Saved coos an' calves by myekin' haalves
O' the famis Lambton Worm.

Third Murderer posted:

I'm from New Jersey, so I guess I'm a little partial to our own local cryptid:



It sure looks stupid though.

Improbable Lobster posted:

If people are going to call the Tasmanian tiger a cryptid then they might as well called the Western black rhino or Rabbs' fringe-limbed treefrog a cryptid. poo poo isn't a mystery, it's just a tragic extinction.

Delivery McGee posted:

If people started claiming to have seen black rhinos after they were extinct, yeah, it'd be a cryptid. A living Thylacine these days is just as (un)likely to exist as Sasquatch or anything else in this thread. The Coelocanth doesn't really count because it was thought well extinct and then rediscovered, but if there had been unconfirmed sightings of it while it was still thought extinct, that'd count.

MisterBibs posted:

How can you breed a stable population off only two creatures?

Third Murderer posted:

I'm from New Jersey, so I guess I'm a little partial to our own local cryptid:

Delivery McGee posted:

Man, it looks dumb as hell, but that picture (in some Reader's Digest "Unexplained poo poo" book from the '70s) gave me nightmares when I was a kid.

Improbable Lobster posted:

If people are going to call the Tasmanian tiger a cryptid then they might as well called the Western black rhino or Rabbs' fringe-limbed treefrog a cryptid. poo poo isn't a mystery, it's just a tragic extinction.



Unfortunately, Ontario and Canada in general doesn't seem to have a ton of cryptids. Sure, there's the Ogopogo but not much else. After a bit of googling I did managed to find something kinda funny.

"September 5 – Another report of the appearance of the great snake or water monster in Lake Ontario has reached us. We have it from reliable citizens who reside on the Lake shore in Parma [New York], ten miles or so west of the mouth of the Genesee, that on Thursday last [possibly August 29] , just as sunset, this monster was seen in the water close to shore.

A drove of cattle went to drink, whereupon the huge monster raised his head above the water and approached the shore, intending no doubt to take an evening meal of fresh beef. The noise made by the animal as he came into shallow water frightened the cattle and they ran back from the beach in great fright. Half an hour later the same drove of cattle sought to drink at a place fifty rods west of the spot where they first went and were again driven away by the monster.

The occurrence drew to the beach several persons residing not far distant and caused a sensation. It won’t answer for anybody to go into that neighborhood and say that there is not a monster in the lake. Too many have seen the animal to doubt its existence. – Rochester [N.Y.] Union.
“The Ontario Sea Monster Again,"
Galveston, Texas, Galveston Daily News, September 5, 1867.

Unfortunately I can't find any other sources for this so it could very well be a hoax on its own.

canyoneer posted:

Now they've captured a breeding pair, bred a large captive population, and want to release them again on the original island. But first they have to kill all the rats, and convince the locals that they should share their island with a zillion giant stick insects.

canyoneer posted:

But some of them survived. Under a single bush, on a nearby island that looks like this.

Now they've captured a breeding pair, bred a large captive population, and want to release them again on the original island. But first they have to kill all the rats, and convince the locals that they should share their island with a zillion giant stick insects.

Beartaco posted:

Oh my god where is this island?

canyoneer posted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball's_Pyramid

Ball's Pyramid, Australia. The wikipedia article leads me to believe the shrub the insects were underneath is the only plant on the island

whiteyfats posted:

The Florida Skunk Ape, which lives in the swamps. Totally exists, but nobody notices 'cause Florida.

quote:

Prince Georges County is about 500 square miles of green fields dotted with suburbs, located just outside Washington D.C. in Maryland. Its less than a million inhabitants enjoy nature preserves, historic reenactments, an annual blues festival and a sparkling waterfront development on the Potomac. In other words, it’s fairly bucolic. And, of course, beneath the surface of every bucolic locale roils something dark and fierce. Meet the Goatman.

When scared teenagers whisper about Goatman, not all agree on the form he takes. Some say he was a man who kept goats and went mad after teenagers killed his flock, driven to seek revenge against any youngster. But perhaps the most titillating version traces the origin of Goatman to the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a sprawling USDA facility anchored by a big brick building appointed with white columns. In this version, a mad scientist is conducting experiments on a goat when something goes horribly wrong, turning him into a half man-half goat beast that is, naturally, hungry for blood....

RaceBannon posted:

I learned about the Creationist/cryptid connection from the Monstertalk podcast.

I had no idea beforehand. What a weird world we live in.

RaceBannon posted:

I learned about the Creationist/cryptid connection from the Monstertalk podcast.

I had no idea beforehand. What a weird world we live in.

MisterBibs posted:

How can you breed a stable population off only two creatures?

Improbable Lobster posted:

If people are going to call the Tasmanian tiger a cryptid then they might as well called the Western black rhino or Rabbs' fringe-limbed treefrog a cryptid. poo poo isn't a mystery, it's just a tragic extinction.

quote:

The Dahu is a legendary creature well known in France, Switzerland, and the neighboring regions. Its popularity began to soar toward the end of the 19th century and become famous during 20th century. Dahu is described as a mountain goat-like animal with legs of different sides having differing lengths to walk upright on the steep slopes of its mountain environment. It can only walk around the mountain in one direction.

Legend attributes various differing descriptions to the animal, including the laevogyrous dahu (which has shorter legs on the left side, and thus goes around the mountain counter-clockwise) and the dextrogyre dahu (which has shorter legs on the right side, and thus goes around the mountain clockwise).
It is also said that male Dahus have legs shorter on the right side and that females have shorter legs on the left side, thus making them walk in opposite directions around the mountains enabling to find each other and mate. Also, the male dahu has testicles that drag down onto the ground leaving a scent trail for members of the opposite sex to trace. Males also use the scent trails to find their next molestation victim, for dahus are known for harassing each other to assert dominance.

Catching a dahu involves two people, one with a bag at the bottom of the mountain slope and another who is good at making dahu sounds. The latter stands behind a dahu and makes the noise. When the dahu turns around to see, it loses its balance and rolls down the hill to the person with the bag at the bottom.

Another method is to have pepper ground onto a large stone; when the dahu, while grazing, comes and sniffs the pepper, it would sneeze and knock itself out against the stone.

SpaceGoatFarts posted:

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

Would 'moose in New Zealand' count as a cryptid thing? According to all official records, not a single moose lives in the entire country. However, there are stories that circulate every so often about people seeing them in the Fjordland region of the South Island. Fjordland, as the name suggests, is almost entirely made of fjords and glaciers, and is mostly uninhabited apart from park rangers and the occasional tourist operator.

nucleicmaxid posted:

They actually found moose hair in 2002 or something, which was likely from one of the last descendants of the moose that they released in the early 1900's. I don't know if that counts as a cryptid, but if it is, it's a very one.

Captain Mog posted:

I've always found the whole mythos and legends surrounding the Mothman legend to be absolutely fascinating. It's one progressively more creepy event after the other, especially if you take into account The Mothman Prophecies novel by UFOlogist and possible lunatic John Keel, who was investigating the Mothman at the time when the sightings were at their highest point and receiving national attention (it later inspired the sadly underrated film of the same name). I read the novel when I was in junior high and it was absolutely one of the most bizarre reads of my life. It has pretty much everything from men in black to psychic visions and weird phone calls. He was also there at the time of the Silver Bridge collapse that effectively ended all of the sightings. The strangest thing about this is the fact that so many people living in Point Pleasant stand by their encounters so adamantly, even in the face of immense scrutiny and ridicule. It's all very Twin Peaks-y.

That area is definitely one of the spookiest places in the country, that's for sure. It's worth a stop if you're ever on a cross-country tour one summer as there's no place quite like it.

Internet Kraken posted:

Don't really have to say it.



I guess the kraken is sort of "real" in the sense that every sighting of it was probably a giant or colossal squid, which are loving huge.



A species we know very little about since it lives in the deep sea. Most information about it comes from dissection of remains that wash up on shore. They've also been able to estimate the size of colossal squid based on only on the beaks fished out of the stomachs of sperm whales. But observing one live is an extreme rarity, as is the case for many deep sea species.The deep sea is really cool because we still know so little about it and many of the creatures that inhabit it. Naturally people have dreamed up all sorts of nightmare monsters that live there.

The kid in me still hopes that there is an impossibly huge cephalopod out there somewhere though.

Bertrand Hustle posted:

As intelligent as the normal sized ones are, a gargantuan squid or octopus would probably be way beyond humanity. Probably hiding from us because it's been watching us from the deep for the past century and decided we're crazy.

nucleicmaxid posted:

Probably not actually. That's a really weird theory.

Pesky Splinter posted:

I recall reading a book about the mountain Greymen, which had a collection of other cryptozoological/mythic creatures (I'll have to see if I can find it). It seems to be a result of inexplicable panic or paranoia caused by isolation in a desolation, and can be influenced by phenomena like the Brocken spectre.

quote:

Similar panic responses have been reported in many North American Sasquatch encounters, and explanations involving infrasound or pheromones have been advanced. Cryptozoologist Karl Shuker has expressed belief that the creature is the guardian of an inter-dimensional portal in his 1997 book, The Unexplained.

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

Yeah there's a guy called Ken Tustin who's convinced that there are surviving descendents of those original moose based on several hair samples, prints, droppings, antler casts and signs of grazing and he's apparently spent nearly 40 years trying to find them. At one point someone offered a $100,000 reward for "good visual evidence of a live moose in New Zealand" which no one has claimed yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i62UvWg-h2w