WANTED: Known as 'La Bête' but kills under three aliases. Reddish brown with dark ridged stripe down the back. Resembles wolf/hyena but big as a donkey. Long gaping jaw, 6 claws, pointy upright ears and supple furry tail - mobile like a cat's and can knock you over. Cry: more like horse neighing than wolf howling. Last seen by people mostly now dead.
Wolf, werewolf, hyena, baboon or mesonychid: In many respects the beast of Gévaudan was like other creatures in the annals of cryptozoology - but for one: historical records indicate that, over a 4 year span, it (or 'they')
killed around 100 people - eating most of them.
[more inside]
posted by rongorongo
on Apr 5, 2011 -
42 comments
There is a remote part of the Congolese jungle, called the Bili forest, where local legend has long told of a breed of giant apes that eat lions, catch fish and howl at the moon. To his surprise Dutch researcher Cleve Hicks
found them. In fact they are large chimps but they appear to have a number of behavioural differences from other groups seen in the wild. (
More information from Wikipedia).
posted by rongorongo
on Jul 16, 2007 -
33 comments
The opening sequence of an X-files episode, or real life? There is a lot of
Strange News on the internet, but I particularly like ones that could be the beginning of an
X-files episode, potentially only the tip of an even stranger iceberg, yet are reliable and well documented, with
photographs of the mysterious blob, or
x-rays of strange events that the person in question can't shed light on. As a kid I once played in snow that,
much like this, soon turned out to be silk, and similarly read urban-legend-like news articles of a home suddenly plagued by thousands of large poisonous spiders, coming up from underneath it, stumping experts as well for the species was never known to be anything but solitary. I assume that frequently, the explanation is found but never makes the news, leaving the mystery unresolved to the rest of us. Many, like
Monkey-man attackers,
baby zombies and
strange killer grasshoppers have a death toll or leave scars, directly or indirectly.
There are plenty of people trying to present themselves as
real life x-files, but I'm more interested in well documented events which stand out as bizarre and creepy, without having any of that pushed upon them, and (with a bit of reckless imagination) hint at something bigger - preferably with photo goodness. You no doubt have links of your own. Why not share the better ones. (Or even make up a brief x-file-like mystery around a weird link, then post the link as if to show the story really happened :-)
posted by -harlequin-
on Jul 31, 2005 -
14 comments
Loch Ness Tooth • "In March (2005) my roommate and I went to the U.K and spent our last two days at Loch Ness. The boat rental season hadn’t started so we hired a local who took us on a private boat tour. After a few hours we came across the remains of a dead deer. The animal had literally been ripped in half - hind quarters gone, its spine was broken and severed. There were huge bloody gashes, teeth marks and a bizarre bony protrusion sticking out of an exposed rib. It was a tooth - about 4 inches long, barbed and very sharp!"
posted by dhoyt
on Jul 14, 2005 -
50 comments
Screw
bigfoot. Researchers at Cornell say they have
found the ivory-bill.
[K]nown as an ornithologist's "Holy Grail," [r]esearchers from Cornell University, along with others, reportedly have found the ivory-billed woodpecker in the Big Woods of Arkansas, a rare bird that was last seen in the United States in the 1940s and was believed to have become extinct.
More on the story
here. A digression into the legend
here.
posted by piskycritter
on Apr 28, 2005 -
34 comments
It's a jackelope! Or maybe an antefeline! Or perhaps a lupursa or... heck, I don't know what this strange creature wandering Bill and Gayle Kurdian's back yard is, and neither does the curator of the North Carolina Zoo.
posted by headspace
on Jun 3, 2004 -
40 comments
