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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   481 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 22, 2025

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One of my favorite parts of living in the middle of nowhere is the prevalence of cryptids in the local folklore.

Obviously you have your rock star cryptids like the Mothman and the Hopkinsville goblins, but the more obscure ones are great too.

In Northern West Virginia and Southern PA, people have reported sightings of an enormous snapping turtle that ranges in size from "as big as a man" to "twenty feet long". Sometimes it has two heads to match its monstrous size.

Obviously, there isn't a turtle half the size of a city bus tooling around the Monongahela, but sometimes I wonder if an unusually large alligator snapping turtle wandered north of its usual range. I remember living in Tennessee and seeing a local farmer pull one out of his pond that was nearly as big as I was, and he told me that it wasn't the largest one he'd ever seen.

Farther south, there's the Grafton monster, which is described as a giant, bipedal creature with no head. The most likely explanation I've heard for it is that a local black bear got into somebody's whiskey still, which was then witnessed by the still's owner (who had also gotten into it).

Do you have any local cryptids that haven't worked their way up to the national stage? Do you think they have a plausible natural explanation?

I could swear I've seen seagulls too big to fly, render purely landborne by their diet of leftover McDonald's fries.

Ogopogo is your bog-standard lake monster with a cool name. I'd have assumed it was invented to sell cute snake plushies at souvenir shops, if not for its apparent long history:

According to Ben Radford, the Ogopogo is "more closely tied to native myths than is any other lake monster." The Secwepemc and Syilx natives regarded the Ogopogo, which they called the Naitaka, as "an evil supernatural entity with great power and ill intent."[7] The word "n'ha-a-itk" has various translations, such as "water-demon", "water god", or "sacred creature of the water".[8] In native lore, Naitaka demanded a live sacrifice for safe crossing of the lake. For hundreds of years, First Nations would sacrifice small animals before entering the water. Oral traditions often described visiting chief Timbasket, who rejected the required sacrifice, denying the existence of the demon. Upon entering the lake on a canoe with his family, Naitaka "whipped up the surface of the lake with his long tail" and the canoe and its occupants were sucked to the bottom of the lake. The Naitaka was often described as using its tail to create fierce storms to drown victims. In 1855, settler John MacDougal claimed that his horses were sucked down into the water, and nearly his canoe before he cut the line.

Do you have any local cryptids that haven't worked their way up to the national stage? Do you think they have a plausible natural explanation?

In and around the Blue Mountains in New South Wales there's the Lithgow panther, over 500 sightings of which have been reported in a 20-year period. Big cat sightings have been reported around the region for about a century, and there are a range of explanations for how one might have ended up in Australia, such as specimens from the exotic animal trade or travelling circuses getting loose within the country.

This is actually a more interesting story than most of the cryptids that often make their way into local folklore because there have actually been government enquiries into the subject - four in fact - a number of which actually state it was "more likely than not" that a big cat lived in the area based on scat and hair study. The most recent report, written in 2013 by an invasive species expert, concluded no evidence of a big cat in the Blue Mountains, but he later privately disclosed to the ABC that the existence of a small population was possible. Wiki article here.

Now this one isn't local to me, but there's also the obvious example of the thylacine, where the idea that it may still be extant in remote parts of Tasmania persists with many sightings of it to boot. There are even sightings reported on the mainland, in some cases. Some of the sightings in question are by zoologists and other experts, with the most famous being Hans Naarding's assertion in 1982 that he did see a thylacine and that it was unmistakeable. This analysis of sightings suggests it may have persisted until the 1980s and that there is still "a small chance of persistence in the remote south-western wilderness areas" of Tasmania.

Really I would say these examples of cryptids are actually... fairly plausible, as far as cryptids go. As for me? I'm still a firm skeptic, but of all the cryptids out there, these are the ones I'm most likely to believe in.

This reminds me of the mountain lion in the Eastern US.

The official stance from the federal and state wildlife agencies is that, excluding a small relict population in Florida, the mountain lion has been extirpated from the East Coast and has been for decades.

Despite this, local sightings persist and at least two have been struck by cars in the last twenty years. I have a relative who claims that one was hunting his sheep. He called the local game commission who told him that it didn't exist and that shooting it would be against the law. He claims to have taken a shot at it and winged it, and nothing has hunted his sheep since.

He's also an inveterate story-teller and drunk, so take that with a grain of salt.

range of explanations for how one might have ended up in Australia, such as specimens from the exotic animal trade or travelling circuses getting loose within the country.

I remember stories about 30+ pound black feral housecats in the outback. Is this related?

I've seen a number of stories on the internet where someone states they found mountain lions outside the accepted range and the response from the government is "nope but actually yes it's just rare and I don't want to deal with the paperwork."

I can't say for sure if this is a meme or refection of reality.

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