Before Jack the Ripper terrorising Blackeheath, there was Spring Heeled Jack. Part bogeyman used to scare small children, part mysterious criminal. He was popularised in Penny Dreadfuls – cheap serialised booklets, where he was depicted almost as a comic book anti-hero. Wonderful name, Penny Dreadfuls… I wonder what the modern online equivalent is?
Picture the scene in 1837 – poor Polly Adams, slightly the worse for wear staggering around Blackheath Fair, when a terrifying figure leaps out of the darkness, like the devil himself, with glowing eyes, and vomiting blue flame…
But was he real? Or just the product of an early mass hysteria? From the Black Cat Press:
He was also the first of his kind. While legends of strange phantoms have existed since the beginning of history, Spring Heeled Jack was the first to enter the official record as a real phenomenon, or at least as one whose witnesses could be found and would testify to the veracity of their experience. Part of this may have been due to the changing culture of the early nineteenth century, and the rise of mass printing technology, the first newspapers were largely responsible for the general publics awareness of the events, but there was also something unique about him. There were other similar changes at the time too, for instance the first identifiable witnesses to the infamous ‘phantom horse and carriage’ and the classic ‘haunted mansion’ also date to the early nineteenth century, perhaps for similar reasons, and even the aforementioned Bigfoot was first spotted in Canada in the mid 1830’s according to some researchers, but none captured the public imagination as Jack did. He can in many ways be regarded as Britain’s patron saint of weirdness.
Now, my much more appealing alternate theory. In the 1830s, the Marquis of Waterford developed a top secret version of what is now known as Power-Bocking. Rather than selling them to the public, and making his fortune, he decided to terrorise young maidens by leaping out at them instead. Just look at the video below, and imagine one of these heading straight for you as you wandered over the Heath in the dark… Eeek!
2) Living Dinosaurs We were all awestruck by the incredibly realistic digital effects of the Jurassic Park movies, and tantalized by the possibility that cloning of long-extinct dinosaurs might one day be possible.
But what if dinosaurs are still alive? What if some dinosaurs have somehow survived extinction to coexist with us today? Some people believe they actually might have. Living dinosaurs!
For over 200 years, rare but fascinating reports have filtered out of the dense isolated rain forests of Africa and South America that native tribes - some of which live very much as they have for thousands of years - were familiar with large creatures that can only be described as resembling sauropods, like the apatosaurus.
The tribes had names for them, such as jago-nini ("giant diver"), dingonek, ol-umaina, and chipekwe. In 1913, Captain Freiheer von Stein zu Lausnitz, a German explorer, was told by Pygmies of a fearsome creature they called mok'ele-mbembe ("stopper of rivers"). This is the description of mok'ele-mbembe provided by the natives:
During an expedition to search for mok'ele-mbembe in 1980, cryptozoologist Roy Mackel and herpetologist James Powell allegedly showed pictures of local animals to the natives, all of which they correctly identified. When they showed them an illustration of a large sauropod, they identified it as mok'ele-mbembe.
Aside from the testimony of these tribespeople (which some skeptics have written off as making fools of the white man), the evidence for living dinosaurs is scant. Supposedly, a few explorers have found extraordinarily large footprints (as large as a Frisbee), and in 1992, a Japanese expedition is said to have about 15 seconds of film footage taken from an airplane that shows some large shape moving in water, leaving a V-shaped wake. Unfortunately, it could not be identified.
Recent expeditions in search of mok'ele-mbembe have taken place. They explored the Likoula region of the Congo for four weeks with the official mission objective of a "scientific investigation and analysis of reports of a living dinosaur." Unfortunately, again, they returned empty-handed. New expeditions will undoubtedly continue to search for living dinosaurs. The prospect of actually documenting a find is just too tempting.
3. The Loveland LizardIn 1972, a police officer was driving at night along Riverside Road, when he saw what looked like a dog on the icy road. He pulled over, and shone his headlights on it. It suddenly stood up, jumped over the guardrail, and fled down the embankment into the Miami River. The officer described the creature as being 3 or 4 feet tall, with leathery skin, and a frog or lizard-like face. He returned to the police station and got another officer to go back with him to check out the spot later that night, where they saw scrape marks on the hill going down to the river.
The second sighting occurred two weeks later. Another police officer was driving into Loveland, when he saw an animal in the road. Thinking that it was an animal hit by a car, he stopped to move it. It suddenly stood up, but in a crouched position, then hobbled over to the side of the road, stepped over the guardrail, while keeping his eyes on the officer. The officer was so shocked at the creature he saw that he pulled out his gun and shot at it. His bullets missed and it escaped but his description matched that of the first officer.
Neither of the officers filed an official report of the thing, but word of their sightings leaked to the media, and the legend of the Loveland Frog was born. Investigators began to speculate about the possibility of a secret race of lizard men inhabiting Ohio’s rivers.
4. The Dover Demon Dover, Massachusetts was the location of the sighting of a bizarre creature for a few days beginning on April 21, 1977. Although the creature, which became known as "the Dover Demon," was only seen by a few people in this short period of time, it is considered one of the most mysterious creatures of modern times.
The first sighting was made by 17-year-old Bill Bartlett as he and three friends were driving north near the small New England town at around 10:30 at night. Through the darkness, Bartlett claimed to have seen an unusual creature creeping along a low stone wall on the side of the road - something he had never seen before and could not identify. The other boys did not see it, but it was obvious to them that Bartlett was shaken by the experience. When he arrived home, he told his father about his experience and sketched a drawing of the creature.
Just a few hours after Bartlett's sighting, at 12:30 a.m., John Baxter swore that he saw the same creature while walking home from his girlfriend's house. The 15-year-old boy saw it with its arms wrapped around the trunk of a tree, and his description of the thing matched Bartlett's exactly.
The final sighting was reported the next day by another 15-year-old, Abby Brabham, a friend of one of Bill Bartlett's friends, who said it appeared briefly in the car's headlights while she and her friend were driving. Again, the description was consistent. This is the creature they allegedly saw:
Subsequent investigations into this unusual case turned up no hard evidence for the reality of the creature, but neither was there evidence of a hoax nor a motive for perpetrating one. Skeptics suggested that what the teenagers saw was a young moose, while UFOlogists who looked into the case wondered if there was an extraterrestrial connection.
There aren't many people who take seriously the existence of elves and fairies in today's society. Yet there are people who will swear on the heads of their grandchildren that they have seen them with their own eyes - just as plainly as others have seen ghosts, Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster.
The stories of elusive little people are as ancient as civilization itself and can be found in virtually every culture on Earth. Most familiar to us are the legends of elves, dwarfs, leprechauns and trolls from Europe and Scandinavia. They have been the subject of dozens of children's fairy tales, books, myths and inebriated tales. William Shakespeare made them central characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
On a summer night in 1919, 13-year-old Harry Anderson claimed to have seen a column of 20 little men marching in single file, made visible by the bright moonlight. He noted they were dressed in leather knee pants with suspenders. The men were shirtless, bald and had pale white skin. They ignored young Harry as they passed, mumbling something unintelligible all the while.
In Stowmarket, England in 1842, a man claimed this encounter with "faries" when walking through a meadow on his journey home: "There might be a dozen of them, the biggest about three feet high, and small ones like dolls. They were moving around hand in hand in a ring; no noise came from them. They seemed light and shadowy, not like solid bodies. I... could see them as plain as I do you. I ran home and called three women to come back with me and see them. But when we got to the place, they were all gone. I was quite sober at the time."
Elves and fairies were considered quite real in past cultures, and were a familiar part of their rich folklore. In today's technological society, perhaps, we've simply replaced them in our imaginations with little gray aliens.
6). Mothman
For about 13 months beginning in November, 1966, a series of bizarre sightings took place around the area of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Aside from a spate of UFO reports and claimed poltergeist activity, several witnesses came forward with descriptions of an astonishing creature that may have been the focal point of all the weird goings-on. As detailed in John Keel's classic book, The Mothman Prophecies, hundreds of witnesses allegedly saw a large, winged humanoid being.
Here is how they described it:
Dubbed Mothman by a localnewspaperman, the creature seemed to have a peculiar affect on those with whom it came into contact: they began to "channel" information from what Keel called "ultra-terrestrial" entities. Keel himself was affected in this way, receiving "prophecies" from some unknown origin that were, more often than not, oddly less than accurate.
Weird stuff indeed.
