🦶 Cryptids
＋ File sightingThe Yara-ma-yha-who is a spirit of the wild fig tree, not an animal waiting to be found, and it reaches us through one traceable line: the Ngarrind...
The burrunjor is described as a giant bipedal reptile roaming the remote country of Arnhem Land, in Australia's Northern Territory, and it is usual...
The impundulu is a Xhosa witch's familiar, and everyone who wrote it down was told so. The colonial doctor Matthew Hewat listed it in 1906 among th...
Ninki Nanka is not a missing species; in its own tradition it is a genie. A colonial report of 1906 on Mandinka custom, quoted by the Gambian histo...
Popobawa is filed in cryptid catalogues, including this one, and it does not belong there. It is a collective panic that anthropologists documented...
The Lake Van Monster has something almost no cryptid has: a signed confession. On 8 June 2025 the journalist Mehmet Çetingüleç published a column t...
Bakunawa is usually introduced as the Philippine moon-eating dragon. In the oldest books that contain the word it is not a dragon, and it is barely...
The manananggal of Philippine folklore is a woman who at nightfall detaches at the waist, sprouts bat wings and flies off to feed, leaving her legs...
The Penanggalan is a Malay birth-spirit, not an undiscovered animal, and nobody has ever proposed a zoological candidate for her. Her name is built...
Nure-onna (濡女, “wet woman”) circulates today as a three-hundred-metre sea serpent with a woman's head, who lures travellers with a baby that turns ...
Akkorokamui is the giant octopus said to be the lord of Uchiura Bay — Funka Bay, Volcano Bay: three names for one sheet of water in south-west Hokk...
The gashadokuro is a giant skeleton said to assemble itself from the unburied bones of the war dead and the starved — and unlike almost any other m...
Kuchisake-onna, the "slit-mouthed woman", is not old folklore but a rumour with a traceable start date. A woman in a face mask stops a passer-by, u...
Gef the Talking Mongoose was reportedly a small, weasel-like animal, invisible to almost everyone, that spoke in a high voice and claimed to live i...
Krampus, the horned, chain-rattling companion of Saint Nicholas in Alpine folklore, punishes misbehaving children while Nicholas rewards the well-b...
The dahu is the animal at the end of a French practical joke: a newcomer is taken out after dark, posted with an open sack between his knees, and l...
Lake Brosno, in Tver Oblast, is said to hide a scaly, five-metre 'Russian Nessie' that ate part of Batu Khan's army on its way to Novgorod in the t...
Storsjöodjuret, the Great Lake Monster, is said to live in Storsjön, the lake that Östersund and the island of Frösön share in central Sweden. Its ...
Lagarfljót is a long glacial river in East Iceland that widens into the lake Lögurinn beside Egilsstaðir, and something in it has been reported for...
Am Fear Liath Mòr, the Big Grey Man, is said to haunt the summit plateau of Ben Macdui, at 1,309 metres the highest of the Cairngorms and the secon...
Morgawr is the sea serpent said to haunt Falmouth Bay, and it is the rare cryptid whose whole history can be dated. There is no old Cornish traditi...
The oldest surviving account of the afanc of the River Conwy is a letter written in 1693 by the naturalist Edward Lhuyd, printed a century and a ha...
In Gaelic tradition the each-uisge is not an unidentified animal. It is the deep, still loch, given four legs. The fullest account is John Gregorso...
The nuckelavee has one source. Everything written about it descends from four pages published in January 1891, when Walter Traill Dennison, a farme...
Black Annis is a blue-faced hag of Leicestershire folklore, said to have lived in a cave in the Dane Hills, on the western edge of Leicester. Her n...
The Barghest of northern English folklore is not an animal, and the printed record says so from the start. The earliest definition anyone has been ...
Black Shuck is the spectral black dog of East Anglian folklore, said to roam the coastline, churchyards and lonely lanes of Norfolk and Suffolk as ...
Spring-heeled Jack is the demonic, athletic figure who terrorized Victorian London and its suburbs beginning in 1837, described in newspaper report...
The Nguruvilu or fox-snake is a water being of Mapuche tradition, tied to the fords, pools and whirlpools of the rivers of La Araucanía and of Neuq...
The Ucumar is the man-bear of northwestern Argentina and southern Bolivia, and its name settles most of the argument before it starts. Ucumari in Q...
The Chullachaqui is a shape-shifting forest being of the Peruvian Amazon, told above all in San Martín and Loreto. Its name is Quechua: González Ho...
Yacumama, "mother of the waters" in Quechua, is the immense serpent said to guard the oxbow lakes and slow rivers of the Peruvian Amazon. Both halv...
Minhocão is the augmentative of the Portuguese minhoca, earthworm, and it has named two different animals. In a note read to the Académie des Scien...
The encantado is not an animal waiting to be discovered. The animal is Inia geoffrensis, the Amazon river dolphin, described to science long before...
The squonk is not a sighting, it is a signed joke — and the signatures are the interesting part. Its entire life fits on page 31 of Fearsome Creatu...
In 1673 Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet saw two monsters painted on a limestone bluff above the Mississippi near present-day Alton, Illinois: a...
Memphre is the serpent said to live in Lake Memphremagog, the 40-kilometre glacial lake that carries the Quebec-Vermont border down the middle of i...
Lake Manitoba's monster is one of the few whose name can be dated to the week. It is a portmanteau of Manitoba and the Ogopogo of Okanagan Lake, an...
Cadborosaurus is one of the few sea monsters with a datable birthday. On 5 October 1933 the Victoria Daily Times gave its front page to Major W. H....
Montana's Flathead Lake is the largest natural freshwater lake by surface area in the western United States outside Alaska, and stories of a long, ...
The Bear Lake Monster has a birthday, an author and a newspaper. In the summer of 1868 Joseph Colton Rich — son of the apostle who colonised the va...
The waheela is a huge white wolf-like animal said to live in the Nahanni Valley of Canada's Northwest Territories. Everything ever reported about i...
This is one of the very few cryptid files with a physical specimen in it: a mounted, dark, wolf-like animal in a glass case at a small museum outsi...
Newport, Arkansas spent the summer of 1937 charging visitors twenty-five cents to stare at a bend in the White River. The story did not start with ...
The Ozark Howler is said to be a bear-sized black beast with shaggy fur, glowing eyes, a goat-like beard and horns, whose cry carries down the holl...
In July 1948 two men fishing on Fulk Lake, near Churubusco in north-eastern Indiana, said they had seen a snapping turtle the size of a dining tabl...
On the afternoon of Tuesday 11 July 1972, in the Mississippi river town of Louisiana, Missouri, Doris Harrison, 15, heard her younger brothers Terr...
The rougarou of French Louisiana is not an animal waiting to be described. It is a person: someone bitten, cursed or condemned for his own conduct,...
The yee naaldlooshii is not a creature. In Diné (Navajo) belief it is a person: a witch of what Clyde Kluckhohn called Witchery Way, a neighbour wi...
The sigbin is a Visayan familiar spirit, and almost everything popularly said about it is younger than the name. The oldest dated mention we have b...
The aswang is not one creature. It is a family of beliefs spread across the Philippine lowlands and highlands, whose names and shapes change from l...
The tikbalang is one of the best known beings of Philippine folklore, and its written trail is unusually long: the word is already in Juan de Plase...
The ropen is a flying creature said to live on Umboi Island, in the Vitiaz Strait of Papua New Guinea, and to give off a brief glow at night. Almos...
The ahool is a giant bat reported from the mountain forests of western Java, above all the slopes of Mount Salak, and the version of the story that...
Orang pendek means "short person" in Indonesian: a ground-dwelling, bipedal primate, roughly 80 to 150 cm tall, covered in dark hair with a mane do...
Everything published about the giant spider of the Congo Basin descends from a single family memory. In October 2001 the small journal North Americ...
The mngwa is a giant cat reported from the coastal villages of southern Tanzania, and its entire file rests on one man. Captain William Hichens, na...
Inkanyamba is not a monster blamed for storms. In isiXhosa it is a word for the storm. The English-Xhosa Dictionary published by Oxford University ...
Grootslang is Afrikaans for "big snake", and a big snake is what the earliest records describe: a very large serpent in the lower Orange River, on ...
The emela-ntouka is an animal said to live in the swamp forests north of the Equator in the Republic of the Congo: elephant-sized, semi-aquatic, wi...
The kongamato reaches us through one book, one chapter and one afternoon. In 1923 Frank H. Melland, magistrate of the Kasempa District of Northern ...
The chonchón is the flying head of a kalku, a Mapuche sorcerer: it comes off at night, its outsized ears beating like wings, and crosses the dark a...
El cuero — "the hide" — is an aquatic being of Mapuche and Chilean tradition, described as an octopus the size and shape of a cowhide stretched fla...
The imbunche is the deformed being that Chilote tradition places inside the caves of the brujos, above all the Cueva de Quicaví. Its written record...
The colo colo of Chilean folklore is a creature nobody has seen. That is not a turn of phrase: when the folklorist Julio Vicuña Cifuentes tallied h...
The trauco is a forest being of the Chiloé Archipelago in southern Chile: small, misshapen, dressed in quilineja creeper, his feet shapeless stumps...
The camahueto belongs to the folklore of Chiloé, the rain-soaked archipelago off southern Chile, and to the mainland shore around the Río Maullín. ...
The Mapuche pihuicheñ — printed as pihuychen, piguchén, piuchén and, only late and rarely, peuchén — is a winged serpent that whistles as it flies ...
Nahuelito is the supposed long-necked animal of Lake Nahuel Huapi, in the Argentine Andes, and one of the few cryptids whose entire biography can b...
The lobisón — also lobizón, and luisõ in Guaraní — is the River Plate werewolf, and its defining rule is a birth order: the seventh consecutive son...
The Curupira has a first appearance that can be dated, and it does not say what this page used to claim it said. It is a Latin letter written by th...
The mapinguari is a giant, foul-smelling forest being of the Brazilian Amazon: long reddish hair, upright on its hind legs, a monkey-like face, fee...
The Nachzehrer of northern German folklore is a corpse that consumes, and by consuming pulls the living after it. The name is nach (after) plus zeh...
A lindworm is the serpent-dragon of Northern European tradition: wingless, or with a single pair of clawed forelimbs, coiled around a hoard, and kn...
Lariosaurus is a real animal, and that is the strange part. It is a small Middle Triassic marine reptile, a nothosaur of about 60 cm to 1.3 m, whos...
El Coco is not a creature anybody has ever reported seeing. It is a word Spanish-speaking adults have used for five centuries to frighten children....
The Nuberu — also nubeiru, renubeiru or ñuberu, and "el Escolar", the Scholar, in San Martín de Luiña, Pola de Allande and Grandas de Salime — is t...
Basajaun is not a forest monster. The name comes from Basque baso (forest, upland) plus jaun (lord), and the word entered writing in 1715 not as a ...
The cuélebre is the winged serpent of Asturian mythology, known also in Cantabria — where it is called culebre — and in León as culuebro, culebrón ...
The Tarasque is the dragon of Tarascon, on the Rhône between Arles and Avignon, subdued by Saint Martha in a medieval saint's life. The six bear-cl...
The Wolpertinger is Bavaria's horned hare: a taxidermy chimera of hare, antlers, wings and fangs, sold in inns and souvenir shops and displayed in ...
The Tatzelwurm is the short, thick, cat-faced serpent of Alpine folklore, reported with two stubby forelegs and no hind legs from Switzerland, Aust...
The Beast of Gévaudan (1764-1767), France's Massif Central, where a creature killed around a hundred people, mostly children and adolescents tendin...
The Owlman of Mawnan is a winged, man-sized figure with owl-like features said to have been seen in 1976 above the tower of St Mawnan church, a med...
The Beast of Bodmin Moor is a large black cat-like animal reported on the granite uplands of Bodmin Moor, in Cornwall in south-west England, since ...
Morag is the creature reported from Loch Morar, on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands: at 310 metres the deepest freshwater loch in the Briti...
The Kelpie is a shape-shifting water spirit from Scottish folklore, most often a beautiful black or grey horse that lurks near lochs, rivers, and s...
The nahual (or nagual) reaches popular culture as "a sorcerer who turns into an animal", and that summary flattens what the sources say. In the old...
The ahuizotl is not a monster hunter's quarry but a being of Nahua religion, set down in detail in Book 11 of the Florentine Codex, the encyclopedi...
Tahoe Tessie is the nickname of a supposed serpentine creature in Lake Tahoe, on the California-Nevada line. The nickname is documented and recent:...
Goatman is the name shared by two unrelated American legends. In Prince George's County, Maryland, a goat-headed figure was blamed for the death of...
Dobharchú is the ordinary Irish word for an otter. It is what the dictionaries say: Cormac's Glossary explains it as dobur, water, plus cú, hound; ...
The banshee, from the Irish bean sí meaning 'woman of the fairy mound,' is a spirit woman whose mournful wail or keening cry is said to foretell an...
Selkie is the Orkney and Shetland word for seal, and the folklore attached to it is narrower than the version that circulates online. Walter Traill...
The con rit is a Vietnamese sea monster with an unusually thin paper trail: the entire case rests on one interview. On 15 September 1921, Dr A. Kre...
The taniwha is not a cryptid, and nobody in Aotearoa New Zealand is waiting for a specimen. It is a being of te ao Maori, the Maori world: a powerf...
The bunyip is a fearsome creature said to lurk in the billabongs, swamps, creeks and waterholes of the Australian outback. Descriptions vary widely...
The barmanou is a hair-covered wild man reported by shepherds in the Hindu Kush of northern Pakistan — the Chitral district and its neighbouring ra...
The yeren 野人, or "wild man", is the hairy, upright, red-haired ape-man reported from the forests of Shennongjia, in north-western Hubei. What sets ...
The almasty is the wildman of the Caucasus: a hair-covered, speechless, upright figure reported from the mountain villages of Kabardino-Balkaria an...
The Hibagon (ヒバゴン) is a dark-haired, ape-like biped reported around Mount Hiba, in what is now the city of Shōbara in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. ...
The tsuchinoko is Japan's fat snake: a creature 30 to 80 centimetres long with a midsection as thick as a beer bottle, a small triangular head, and...
The kappa is a water-dwelling creature from Japanese folklore, usually described as roughly child-sized, with green or yellow scaly or slimy skin, ...
The Jackalope is a whimsical hybrid creature of American folklore, depicted as an ordinary jackrabbit sporting a pair of antelope or deer-like horn...
The Fresno Nightcrawler is the rarest thing in cryptozoology: a creature whose origin can be dated to the month. In November 2007 a man in south-ea...
Altamaha-ha — “Altie” — is a serpent-shaped river monster said to live in the tidal creeks and abandoned rice canals at the mouth of the Altamaha R...
The wampus cat is usually introduced as an ancient Cherokee legend: a woman who spied on a men's ritual and was condemned to wear a panther's skin....
On the night of Wednesday 25 April 1973, Henry McDaniel, a fifty-year-old antique dealer in the village of Enfield, Illinois, heard something scrat...
The Pope Lick Monster is a Kentucky legend about a part-man, part-goat creature said to live beneath a railway trestle east of Louisville, and it i...
The Honey Island Swamp Monster is a hairy, upright animal, said to stand about seven feet tall and to have large amber eyes, reported from the floo...
The Fouke Monster is a Bigfoot-type creature reported in the creek bottoms around Fouke, a town of some 800 people eleven miles south of Texarkana,...
The Hodag is a squat, spiny beast from Wisconsin lumberjack folklore, described as having the head of a frog, the face of an elephant-like grin ful...
The Snallygaster is a winged monster of western Maryland folklore, usually pictured as half bird and half reptile, with an enormous wingspan and gr...
The Michigan Dogman is a cryptid of the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan, described as a seven-foot bipedal animal with the head of a dog or wo...
The Wendigo is a gaunt, emaciated humanoid of Algonquian folklore, said to stand far taller than a man, with grey or ash-colored skin stretched tig...
The Kraken is a legendary sea monster of Scandinavian folklore, imagined as a colossal, tentacled creature capable of dragging entire ships beneath...
The Mongolian Death Worm, known locally as olgoi-khorkhoi ('intestine worm') for its resemblance to a cow's intestine, is described as a thick, dar...
The Yowie is the hairy man-beast of eastern Australia's forests and ranges, routinely described as taller and heavier than a person, foul-smelling ...
In April 1948 four people in Illinois told United Press they had seen a bird bigger than an airplane. The best-known of them, Col. W. F. Siegmund, ...
The Skunk Ape is Florida's answer to Bigfoot: a large, hairy, ape-like biped said to roam the swamps and hammocks of the Everglades and other wetla...
The Loveland Frog is an Ohio legend tied to the town of Loveland, along the Little Miami River, with roots reaching back to a 1955 account by a loc...
The Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp is a modern Southern legend rooted in Bishopville, Lee County, South Carolina, dating to the summer of 1988. The ...
The Beast of Bray Road has an unusually precise birth certificate: pages 28 and 29 of The Week, a Walworth County Sunday paper, on 29 December 1991...
The Dover Demon is one of the shortest-lived but most vivid cryptid cases in American folklore, born from a single weekend in the quiet suburb of D...
The Flatwoods Monster, also nicknamed the "Braxton County Monster," refers to a tall figure reportedly seen near Flatwoods, West Virginia, in Septe...
Champ is the name given to a supposed lake monster inhabiting Lake Champlain, on the border of New York, Vermont, and Quebec, generally described a...
Ogopogo is the name given to a long, serpentine lake monster said to dwell in Okanagan Lake, British Columbia, usually described as a dark, multi-h...
Mokele-mbembe is the animal said to live in the rivers and swamps of the Likouala, in the north of the Republic of the Congo: elephant-sized, with ...
The Jersey Devil is a chimeric creature said to roam the sandy Pine Barrens of New Jersey: a kangaroo-like body on hooves, small forelegs, bat-like...
The Yeti, popularly known as the Abominable Snowman, is an ape-like, bipedal creature said to roam the high snowfields and forested valleys of the ...
Mothman is a winged, humanoid creature said to have haunted the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, described by witnesses as roughly man-...
The chupacabra, literally "goat-sucker," is a legendary predator blamed for killing livestock and draining their blood through small puncture wound...
Bigfoot, also called Sasquatch, is a towering, hair-covered, ape-like humanoid said to roam the dense forests of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, ...
The Loch Ness Monster, affectionately nicknamed "Nessie," is the best-known lake monster in the world, said to inhabit the cold, peat-darkened wate...