Creature Feature

Easter Greetings – with evil rabbit.

Appreciate a Dragon Day We appreciate dragons with a gallery of draconine images.

Skrats and How to Make Them Skrats! You too can make your own helpful domestic spirit from a few common household objects!

Creature Feature: The Mexican Mine Monster A missionary who lived for years in Mexico tells of a terrifying encounter with something giant and snake-like in a Guerrero mine.

Creature Feature: The Maggot in the Churchyard Man-sized in Maggot. A Yorkshire postman is confronted with a human-sized maggot haunting a churchyard and spreading disease to the neighborhood.

Creature Feature: The Woman in Black of New Orleans. A macabre entity that terrorized the citizens of New Orleans, believed to be an omen of death.

An engaging feature of the papers of the past is the “what-is-it.” This is a monster, sometimes of plausible animal appearance and behavior; sometimes an alien creature seemingly hybridized from a variety of species. Today we look at a few of these colorful “what is its.”

Creature Feature: A Banshee at Sea The crew of a windjammer far from land hears a “howling out of the darkness a most frightful, wailing cry, ghastly in its agony and intensity.” Was it a banshee?

In 1861, on a slow-news day, a journalist scribbled a story about a wildman. Suddenly people began reporting encounters with the tall, hairy creature. Was it a hermit, a wendigo, a lunatic, an idiot, or a true monster?