a couple of cryptid sightings that were said to be hoaxes, but people swore were real.
The Enfield Monster.
The creature was first sighting in 1973 in Illinois in Enfield, a small town.It started on April 25
th
when a young boy, Greg Garrett, had been playing in his yard when
suddenly, a creature had appeared and stepped on his feet. Not much you
might think but the boys soft tennis shoes where torn to shreds Greg ran
into the house, crying hysterically. Now most parents would think it
was a cover story for the boy ruining his shoes and dismissed it but
half an hour later the creature was sighted again. Henry McDaniel was at
home on the same evening when he heard a scratching on his door. When
he opened it, he was met by a strange vision. He described it as "It
had three legs on it,a short body, two little short arms coming out of
its breast area and two pink eyes as big as flashlights. It stood four
and a half to five feet( 1.6 metres) tall and was greyish coloured. It
was trying to get into the house." McDaniel got his gun and opened
the door and fired. After his first shot, McDaniel said he knew that
he had hit it. The creature "hissed like a wildcat" and scampered away,
covering 75 feet( 25 metres) in three jumps. It disappeared into the
brush along a railroad embankment near the house. McDaniel called the
police and they on searching the property ,found tracks "like those of a
dog, except they had six toe pads." The tracks were four inches (10
cms) across on average. Then on May 6, Henry McDaniel was awakened in
the middle of the night by local dogs howling. He looked out and saw the
monster again. It was standing out near the railroad tracks. "I didn't
shoot at it or anything," McDaniel reported. "It started on down the
railroad track. It wasn't in a hurry or anything. The local White County
Sheriff Roy Poshard Jr. threatened to lock McDaniel up for spreading
stories , but McDaniel stuck by his story. Word got out and people
starting arriving at the town, the curious, the reporters and some
researchers, all hunting the monster. Five young men were arrested by
the Deputy Sheriff Jim Clark as "threats to public safety" after they
had opened fire on a grey, hairy thing that they said they had seen in
some underbrush on May 8. Two of the men thought they had hit it, but it
sped off, moving faster than they could.
Rick Rainbow, was then the news director of radio station in Indiana
and three other people also saw the monster near an abandoned house,
just a short distance from McDaniel's place. They only caught a glimpse
as it was running away from them, but they later described it as about
five feet tall(1.6 metres), grey and stooped over. Mr Rainbow did manage
to tape record its cry. A short time later, the sightings ended .
Loren Coleman investigated and said this :"I travelled to Enfield,
interviewed the witnesses, looked at the siding of the house the Enfield
Monster had damaged, heard some strange screeching banshee-like sounds,
and walked away bewildered." see :
http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/enfield73/
So was it hysteria as some suggested or was it a
sort of bigfoot or even as some had put forward an alien connected to
UFO activity that was also reported in the general area at that time?
Well the strange thing about it all is that in the summer of 1973, the
town of Murphysboro in Illinois
was also in the news for sightings of a strange creature. The creature,
called the “Murphysboro Mud Monster” appeared and then disappeared
just two weeks later Just as the Enfield monster had done. That story is here :
Most bigfoot sightings seem to occur in
clusters over a period of time so could the sightings have been related
bigfoot type creatures or just mass hysteria? We can all mistake things
especially in bad light. And just to add to the strangeness in 1941 and
1942, in the Mount Vernon area (about 40 miles away from Enfield)
there was a spate of reports about a "leaping" beast that was claimed
was responsible for several animal deaths in the region. Eyewitnesses
said it was vaguely baboon-like.
From England we have the story of :
The Brentford Griffin
In 1984 Kevin Chippendale spotted an unknown creature flying near the rooftop of a block of flats in the town of Brentford UK.
He described it as looking like "a dog with wings" and "having a long
muzzle and four legs with what looked like paws and a beak." He said it
looked like a griffin. Incidentally he was walking along Braemar Road near to the aptly named Griffin Park and the block of Flats was called Green Dragon Flats (apartments for our USA
readers). Mr Chippendale saw the creature again in the February of 1985
and said that it bore some resemblance to the creature painted on the
sign of the Griffin Public House.A friend of Kevin's, an Angela Keyhoe
also claimed to have seen the flying monster. She was on a bus journey
when she saw it sitting on the gasometer next to the Waterman's Art
Centre. She said it resembled a giant black bird. Several passengers on
the bus apparently saw the creature, and so did psychologist John
Olssen, one morning whilst he was jogging near to the Thames.
The story was featured in the press and also on The Six O' Clock news.
Then a letter appeared in the Fortean Times magazine, during the May of
1998, from a Mr Martin Collins who believed that such a monster may
well have been more than local hoax.
He wrote: “I first encountered the story of the Brentford Griffins while I was at St John’s School in the 1950s (note: some thirty years before the first sightings!). St John’s in those days sat in the shadow of Brentford’s football ground, Griffin Park.
Inquiring why there were so many griffin references in Brentford, I was
told that it was due to the family of griffins that lived on Brentford
Eyot, an island in the Thames.The story of how they got there was that
the first griffin was brought to Brentford by King Charles II as a gift
for his mistress, Nell Gwynn, who had a house in the Butts at Brentford.
One day the griffin was playing on the banks of the River Brent, which
flows past the Butts, and fell in. The hapless creature was washed down
the Brent into the Thames, finally
being washed up on Brentford Eyot. As it was assumed to have been
killed, it was left alone and was able to live on the Eyot for many
years – griffins having a lifespan of centuries.Then Sir Joseph Banks
brought back a griffin from a Pacific island where he had been with
Captain Cook. This griffin was originally housed in the Pagoda in Kew
Gardens, which is on the opposite bank of the Thames from Brentford Eyot
where it found a mate awaiting it.There was soon a whole colony of
griffins and they spread out from the Eyot all over the town of
Brentford, where they can still be seen to this day, if you look closely
enough..
Extract from :http://beastsoflondon.blogspot.com/2007/04/brentford-griffin.html
The popular writer Robert Rankin who grew up in
Brentford noted that the town sits within a mystical triangle formed by
the Thames, the Grand Union Canal and the M4 Rankin suggests that Brentford is a portal to the underworld and there fore seeing griffins is not all that odd.
Most people thought it was a hoax or our old friend mass hysteria. At the time the sign for a local bank was a Griffin and so it could well have been that on a hoarding which people had mistaken for a real creature.
The thing with both stories is that all
the eye witnesses swore what they saw was true and real. But we all know
that suggestion plays a big part in our minds and once someone sees
something, often others follow. The mind acquaints what it is seeing
with what it has been told and therefore what it can’t identify must be
that strange creature that everyone is talking about. We can fool
ourselves some thing is real or happened when it didn’t because our
memories are fallible. We will swear it is true because we think it is
and will pass any lie detector test, but it doesn’t mean it really
happened or was really there It is not a lie because we have convinced
ourselves . Or the alternative is these things are real and then we
should really be worried!
