Cryptids & Monsters
8 case files in Cryptids & Monsters. Each lays out the claim, the origin, the evidence on every side, and an honest verdict — every point sourced, so you can judge for yourself.
A leaping, fire-breathing entity called Spring-heeled Jack terrorised Victorian England, springing over walls and clawing victims with metallic hands
Beginning in the autumn of 1837 and peaking in early 1838, residents of the villages ringing London — Barnes, Blackheath, Lewisham, and later the East End — reported a tall, cloaked figure that could leap over walls and hedges, breathed or spat blue-white flame, had eyes like red balls of fire, and clawed at people with cold, metallic hands before bounding away. On 9 January 1838 the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan, read out an anonymous complaint at the Mansion House, and the newspapers turned a scatter of scares into a named menace: Spring-heeled Jack. Two attacks that February — on eighteen-year-old Jane Alsop in Bow and on Lucy Scales in Limehouse — gave the panic its most vivid testimony. Sightings recurred for decades, including at the Aldershot army camp in 1877, while cheap serial fiction transformed Jack from a suburban terror into a caped, superhuman anti-hero.
Read the case file →A mysterious 'Beast' larger than a wolf killed roughly a hundred people in south-central France in the 1760s
Between the summer of 1764 and the summer of 1767, a series of ferocious attacks in the former province of Gévaudan — in and around today's Lozère, in the Margeride mountains of south-central France — left roughly a hundred people dead, mostly women and children tending livestock. Witnesses described a beast larger than a wolf, with a reddish coat and a dark stripe down its back. The killings drew national attention, dragoons, professional wolf-hunters, and finally two royal expeditions ordered by King Louis XV. Large wolves were shot in 1765 and 1767, and the attacks stopped — but the identity of the 'Beast' has been argued over ever since.
Read the case file →A winged humanoid creature called Mothman stalked Point Pleasant, West Virginia
For thirteen months in 1966 and 1967, residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia described a large, grey, winged humanoid with glowing red eyes near an abandoned munitions site. The sightings stopped the same night the Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River, killing 46 people, a coincidence that turned a local scare into a national legend.
Read the case file →A winged, hoofed creature called the Jersey Devil haunts the New Jersey Pine Barrens
A winged, hoofed, horse- or goat-headed creature said to haunt the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, traditionally born of a cursed 'Mother Leeds' in 1735. A week of panicked sightings in January 1909 made it a national sensation — one later traced to a newspaper hoax and, further back, to a colonial-era political feud that had nothing to do with any animal at all.
Read the case file →Bigfoot (Sasquatch) is a real undiscovered ape living in North America
The most enduring cryptid in North America — an Indigenous 'wild man' tradition, a 1958 media sensation later confessed as a hoax, one grainy 1967 film that still divides experts, and a century of footprints and sightings with no body, bone, or verified specimen to show for it.
Read the case file →El Chupacabra is an undiscovered blood-drinking predator
A creature blamed for draining the blood of goats and other livestock, first reported in Puerto Rico in 1995 and later reimagined in Texas as a hairless, dog-like animal — with an origin story, and a physical explanation, that both trace cleanly back to real, documented sources.
Read the case file →The Bloop was a giant sea creature or secret military project
In 1997, NOAA's Pacific hydrophones picked up one of the loudest sounds ever recorded in the ocean — a noise so powerful it briefly looked biological, and so mysterious it spawned a cottage industry of giant-squid and secret-submarine theories. The real source, confirmed years later from NOAA's own Antarctic recordings, was ice.
Read the case file →The Loch Ness Monster is a real creature in a Scottish lake
A vast, deep, peat-darkened loch in the Scottish Highlands is said to hide a large unknown animal — possibly a surviving plesiosaur. Its most iconic photograph turned out to be a toy submarine, and a 2019 DNA survey of the entire loch found no evidence of any reptile in the water.
Read the case file →