Ten American Cryptids, State by State

On the night of November 15, 1966, two young couples from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, told police they had seen a tall, winged figure with glowing red eyes near the old TNT area, a former World War II munitions site outside town. They said they sped away at around 100 miles per hour and the creature kept pace. The local paper ran the story the next day, and the name Mothman soon followed.

Over roughly the next year, people filed about two dozen reports in all. Then, on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River at Point Pleasant collapsed, killing 46 people. The disaster was a structural failure, but writer John Keel later tied it to the sightings in his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies, which turned a local scare into a national legend.

The skeptical explanation came early. A wildlife biologist at West Virginia University, Robert L. Smith, suggested the witnesses had seen a sandhill crane, a large gray bird with a red patch on its head that could have strayed from its migration route. The local sheriff thought a big heron was more likely. No physical evidence of a winged humanoid was ever found. Today Point Pleasant has a Mothman statue, a museum, and a festival every September.

Washington takes its Bigfoot seriously. In 1969 Skamania County passed an ordinance making it illegal to harm a Sasquatch, and a 1984 amendment made a deliberate killing a felony. The county is also home to Ape Canyon on Mount St. Helens, named for a story from July 1924 in which miners said ape-like creatures threw rocks at their cabin and tried to break in overnight. The miners fired their guns and abandoned the claim the next day.

The name Bigfoot itself began with a hoax. In August 1958, a bulldozer operator in Humboldt County, California, found huge footprints near his equipment, and the local newspaper coined the word. When Ray Wallace died in 2002 in Washington, his family said he had made the prints using carved wooden feet. The most famous evidence of all, the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, was shot near Bluff Creek, California. A Washington man, Bob Heironimus, later said he was the figure in the film wearing a costume; Bob Gimlin has called that claim false.

Decades of sightings, casts and grainy video have never produced a body, a bone, or a verified DNA sample. Some scientists argue a few footprint casts deserve study, but no specimen has ever surfaced.

Florida's version of Bigfoot is said to be a hairy ape about 8 feet tall that lives in the state's swamps and smells awful, like rotten eggs, manure and, as the name suggests, a skunk. Reported sightings peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, and a handful still trickle in each year from the Everglades and other wild areas.

The legend once reached the state capitol. In 1977, a state representative from Fort Myers, Paul Nuckolls, introduced a bill to make it a misdemeanor to harm or possess anthropoid or humanoid animals. It cleared a committee but was withdrawn before a House vote, and a second try the next year also failed.

The most famous evidence arrived in December 2000, when an anonymous woman mailed the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office photos of an ape-like figure crouched among saw palmetto near Myakka. She called the animal an orangutan. Believers say the animal looks too big for an orangutan. The woman never came forward and the photos have never been independently checked, which leaves a hoax or an escaped animal as explanations. Black bears, which do live in Florida, are another likely source of sightings in the dark. No skunk ape has ever been caught, killed or found dead.

On the night of April 21, 1977, three teenagers driving on Farm Street in Dover, Massachusetts, a quiet town southwest of Boston, saw something climb along a low stone wall in their headlights. The driver, Bill Bartlett, described a thin creature with long limbs, a large melon-shaped head with no visible nose or mouth, and glowing orange eyes. He later drew a sketch that became famous.

The same night, a 15-year-old named John Baxter said he saw a similar figure in the woods and watched it for a few minutes before backing away. The following night, two more teens reported a brief glimpse of a creature with bright green eyes. The Boston newspapers picked up the story in May, and the Dover Demon has been a fixture of New England lore ever since.

That is the whole case: a cluster of brief, nighttime sightings over about two days, with no tracks, photos or physical traces. The witnesses did not appear to be seeking attention. Skeptic Martin Kottmeyer proposed that the teenagers saw a young moose, whose head shape and eye placement in poor light could match the drawings. Others suggest an ordinary animal or a prank. Nobody has ever proved what they saw.

In early May 1971, two couples renting a house near Fouke, a small town in southwestern Arkansas, said a hairy creature about seven feet tall with red eyes had reached through a window and attacked one of the men at the house. The men fired at it but found no blood. Officers found odd tracks and scratches. Reporter Jim Powell wrote it up for the Texarkana Gazette, a follow-up coined the name Fouke Monster, and wire services spread it nationwide.

The legend's real engine was a movie. In 1972, filmmaker Charles B. Pierce released The Legend of Boggy Creek, a docudrama shot in and around Fouke that dramatized local sightings. It reached a far bigger audience than any newspaper and turned the town into a destination for monster hunters.

Looking closely, the evidence is thin. Researcher Lyle Blackburn found no printed mention of such a creature in the area before Powell's 1971 article, even though many later accounts described earlier encounters. The 1971 footprint casts showed three long toes, a foot shape that matches no known primate. Later casts looked more ape-like, a pattern skeptics read as improving hoaxes. Everything else is eyewitness testimony, which cannot be tested.

Lake Champlain stretches about 125 miles between Vermont and New York and dips into Quebec. Its resident monster, Champ, is described as a long-necked, humped serpent anywhere from 20 to 80 feet long. You will often read that the explorer Samuel de Champlain saw it in 1609, but that claim traces back only to a 1970 magazine article. Champlain's journals describe a large fish, which scholars identify as a gar.

Real reports go back to the 1800s. An 1819 newspaper described a huge serpent, and sightings in 1873 drew national coverage. P.T. Barnum offered rewards for the creature, dead or alive. In the early 1980s, lawmakers in both Vermont and New York passed measures offering Champ symbolic protection, and the minor league Vermont Lake Monsters are named for it.

The star evidence is a 1977 photograph by Sandra Mansi showing a dark neck and hump above the water. Investigators found that the spot was a shallow bay, roughly 14 feet deep at most, a poor hiding place for a giant animal, and suggested the object was a log or tree trunk rising to the surface. Mansi had discarded the negative and could not relocate the exact spot. Large fish such as sturgeon and gar, floating debris, and waves remain the likeliest culprits.

Bray Road is a quiet rural road outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin, and for more than three decades it has been tied to one of the strangest cryptids in America: a creature that looks like a wolf but stands on two legs. Witnesses describe something 6 or 7 feet tall, covered in grayish-brown fur, with a wolf-like head and glowing eyes, moving on all fours and on its hind legs.

Reports from the 1980s spread by word of mouth until 1991, when Linda Godfrey, a reporter for the Walworth County Week, a weekly supplement to the Janesville Gazette, was assigned to look into them. She started out skeptical but came to believe many witnesses were sincere. Her stories put the creature in the news nationwide and led to her 2003 book on the Beast. She went on to write many more books on cryptids, and a horror movie based on the legend came out in 2005.

No one claims the beast has hurt anyone, and it has left no body, bones or verified photos. Skeptics point to more ordinary animals seen briefly at night: wolves, large dogs, or a black bear with mange, which can look strange and upright. Hoaxes and the power of suggestion once the legend became famous likely account for the rest.