American Monsters: The History of America’s Most Persistent Urban Tales about Strange Birds, Serpents and Wolfmen

by Charles River Editors

Although cryptozoology is often scoffed at and widely considered a pseudoscience, one of the reasons it made men like Barnum rich and continues to fascinate people today is the fact that people realize they’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to identifying all the different forms of life on Earth.

As Martin DelRio pointed out in The Loch Ness Monster, “Animals previously unknown to science have been found more than once in the past hundred years. For instance, there's the megamouth shark (megachasma pelagios), a fifteen-foot-long creature weighing nearly a ton. The first specimen was discovered on November 15, 1976, when it was found entangled in the drag anchor of a U.S. Navy ship. The new creature wasn't described scientifically until 1983…The megamouth remains the only species in its genus, and the only genus in its order.”

Cryptozoology is the science that investigates as yet unconfirmed creatures, which investigators generally call “cryptids.” The word is made up of the Greek stem “kryptos” (hidden) and suffix “zoology” (study of animals), thus cryptozoology is the study of hidden, as-yet-undiscovered animals. It is important to be precise with the definition because there is a great deal of popular misconception of what cryptozoology is and what cryptozoologists do.

Some of the leading researchers are themselves scientists, with advanced degrees in zoology or biology, and yet reject mainstream science’s assumption that all large species have already been discovered and catalogued. Other cryptozoologists are not so careful, and the field is sadly filled with a large number of credulous, sloppy researchers.

Despite going through the awakening of learning and science called the Enlightenment, Europe still looked out on a vast world with many blank areas on the map. Who knew what could be hiding in those unexplored regions?

Cryptozoology also skips folktales that have no modern sightings and old legends like Pegasus that have no modern equivalents. While they may credit these stories with the possibility of truth, even the most credulous cryptozoologist doesn’t think they’ll find a dragon or Medusa.

And then there are the monsters no serious person was expected to believe in, made up to entertain the folks around the campfire or to scare children into good behavior. One of the most frightening of these was an old tale from the state of Missouri known as Raw Head and Bloody Bones. This was a particularly nasty spirit that slunk around homes in the Ozarks in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The story originated in England and was brought to America by the early settlers, which allowed it to linger for a time in the rough hills and forested valleys of the Ozark Mountains in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. It would hide in the closet or in the drain pipe, and if ...

Some people have cited these stories as proof Bigfoot is a real creature that has been known to people for as long as people have inhabited the North American continent. However, that isn’t quite as simple as it seems, because while some Native American tales do seem to speak of a real creature, other are equally clear that this man-like creature belongs to the spirit world and is endowed with supernatural powers.

The alternative name by which Bigfoot is also known, Sasquatch, is an Anglicized version of the term sasq'ets (“hairy man”), from Halq'emeylem, the dialect used by the Sts'ailes people in British Columbia in Canada (though other accounts suggest that this name may be derived from the term se’sxac, for “wild man”, in the same dialect). These people not only seem to believe that Sasquatch is a real creature, but also a spiritual totem, a protector and caretaker of the natural world.

There isn’t a clear distinction between the beliefs of Native American tribes. For some, such as the Hopi, Sioux, and Iroquois, this is principally a spiritual creature no different than many other forest spirits. But to a few tribes, including the Nez Perce, this is a real creature with whom they share the natural environment. Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that the Nez Perce live in the Pacific Northwest, the area which Bigfoot is said to inhabit, while the others live in distant areas where there is little or no evidence of Bigfoot presence.

Some describe a creature that is largely nocturnal, that forages for nuts, berries, fish, and possibly game in small family groups and communicates through grunting, howling or screeching cries and/or through the banging of fallen branches on tree trunks. Most maintain that this creature is very wary of humans, hides by standing completely still (sometimes behind trees) and whose presence may be characterized by a foul smell, sometimes described as rotting eggs.

That said, while these stories do sound like attempts to describe a real creature, many are also suffused with supernatural elements. For example, some describe how this creature can transform into another animal (including the wolf) and other versions claim that not everyone can see the hairy man – when a group encounters such a creature, some will see it while some won’t.

From the time that the first European settlers arrived in the Pacific Northwest in the late 18th century, there were occasional reports in local newspapers of contact with strange “wild men,” hairy, man-like creatures. Some seemed to be no-nonsense accounts of encounters with real but unknown animals. For example, in the early 1870s, a lone hunter wrote of hearing a loud whistle and then seeing at close range something that looked like a man, but was clearly not human. His description is worth noting because it predated large-scale interest in Bigfoot by more than half a century, yet it was uncannily similar to later accounts.

A fairly recent study[1] concluded that only less than 15% of all species still existing on planet Earth have been fully described, cataloged, and understood at the present time. That amounts to around 1.2 million known species, but it is estimated anything up to 7.5 million other species are still waiting to be discovered. Viewed in this context, the notion that people know everything about the planet and the species on it is clearly a fallacy. The truth is that unknown species vastly outnumber those that are known.

On Monday, July 25, 1977, 10-year-old Marlon Lowe was playing hide-and-seek with his friends in the back garden of his home near Kickapoo Creek in the small community of Lawndale, Illinois. It was summer break; the weather was fine, and Marlon and other kids from the neighborhood were enjoying being outside. Marlon’s mother, Ruth, was watching out of the kitchen window. It was a scene likely repeated around thousands of homes across America, but things were about to get extremely weird. Without warning, two gigantic birds swooped down on the Lowe’s garden.[2] They were seen by a number of witnesses who described them as black with a lighter ring around the neck, a six-inch long curved beak, and a wingspan of at least ten feet, considerably larger than any known bird in the country. The birds seemed to be interested in the kids playing in the garden. One boy jumped into a plastic swimming pool to escape, but Marlon wasn’t so lucky. One of the birds grabbed the shoulders of his shirt in its talons and carried him into the air. His horrified mother watched his kicking feet rise up and out of sight as she stood in front of the kitchen window. Luckily for Marlon, the bird dropped him at a height of around 20 feet, and he fell to the ground, shaken but unhurt. He ran into a neighbor’s house for safety, and the two birds flew off. One adult witness told reporters: “I’ve been around this planet 51 years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”[3]

This crazy story was reported in local and national newspapers, and Marlon became known as the “bird-boy.” He was so shocked by the event that, within less than one month, his red hair turned a mousy grey.

In the ancient past, there certainly were some very large birds living in North America. In 1983, during construction work at Charleston International Airport, South Carolina, the fossil of an unknown bird was discovered. It was named Pelagornis sandersi and found to be the only example discovered thus far of that particular species of prehistoric bird, a distant relative of today’s pelican. The startling thing about Pelagornis sandersi was its sheer size: it had a wingspan of almost 25 feet, making it the largest flying bird yet discovered.

If conventional science tells us modern humans and giant birds were never around at the same time, how do we account for the prevalence of the Native American thunderbird legend? Almost every Native American tribe includes this legend in their folklore. Many of the other animals described in the same folklore – such as wolves, bears, and big cats - are real, though in the stories, they are often attributed with supernatural powers. Is it possible the thunderbird legend actually originated with sightings of a real, gigantic, unknown bird?

John James Audubon was one of America’s first and foremost experts on birds. His grand plan was to document every bird in America, and as he was also a very capable artist, he aimed to produce images of every one of these birds in their natural habitats. His book, Birds of America, was originally published as a series between 1827 and 1839 and is generally considered to be one of the finest ornithological works ever published. It includes color plates of over 400 species of birds, each painted from a dead specimen mounted on wires to place it in a life-like position.

There is, however, a problem with this book - it includes paintings of birds that aren’t recognized as real by current ornithology. Most of them are fairly small birds, but one is very large indeed: a bird Audubon called Washington’s Eagle. There are only two species of eagle currently accepted as living in the United States, the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) and the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos). Nonetheless, in the early 19th century, Audubon and others became convinced there was a third and much larger species of eagle in America. Audubon first claimed to have seen one of these giant birds in 1814 while on a ship sailing on the Upper Mississippi. Over the next few years, Audubon had several more sightings of the giant bird, and then, around 1825, he shot and killed one in Kentucky and used it to produce a color painting used in his book. He named it Washington’s Eagle and as with all the specimens he collected, made meticulous notes on the bird. These included the fact that it was three feet and seven inches tall and had a wingspan of over ten feet, making it far larger than any other eagle in America.

Washington’s Eagle duly appeared in Birds of America, but not everyone was convinced. When the book was first published, Washington’s Eagle was generally accepted as being a real bird, and more than one museum claimed to have examples on display. However, by the time Audubon died in 1851, doubts were being expressed. The problem was that after some claimed initial sightings, no other respected ornithologists had caught a glimpse of the giant bird, and some people began to wonder if Audubon had been mistaken or even invented Washington’s Eagle.

A mistake is difficult to accept. Audubon was generally very careful about describing and measuring each species he found, and his description of Washington’s Eagle is no exception, providing a meticulously detailed account of the huge bird’s appearance, color, and plumage. Subsequently, some ornithologists claimed Audubon had actually been mistaken, and what had been shot and studied was actually an immature bald eagle (the bird Audubon examined had predominantly brown plumage, as do immature bald eagles). The problem with that theory was its size, as no bald eagle has ever had close to the wingspan Audubon described, and certainly not an immature specimen. There is, of course, another possibility: Audubon was correct in his description and painting of a very large raptor, but that would have been very rare in the early 19th century, and they may have become extinct soon after the publication of Birds of America. Was it possible that the sightings of this bird led to the Native American legend of the thunderbird?

In 1868, newspapers carried reports of an incident uncannily similar to that experienced by Marlon Lowe over 100 years later.[4] At a school in Tippah County, Mississippi, The Daily Phoenix reported that, as the children played outside during recess, their teacher was horrified to see a giant bird, which she described as “like an eagle,” swoop down and attempt to carry off eight-year-old Jemmie Kenney. The bird wasn’t able to carry the struggling boy far, and it dropped him before flying off. Sadly, Jemmie Kenney didn’t survive, though whether he was killed by the fall or injuries inflicted by the bird’s talons is not recorded.