One of my Finnish readers, Tapio Mäkinen, alerted me to an expedition to the Waldviertel region of Austria in search of the Alp. He is looking for interested parties to join him once he arrives on location. His website is The Finnish Hunter. He states: "We're leaving Saturday August, 27th and staying two weeks. First we're going to spend two-three days in Vienna to assemble local resourses, but then we're (as soon as possible) going to Zwettl and on out into the woods." Tapio can be contacted through his website.
His description of this cryptid (edited for comprehension):"For you who not are familiar with the Alp it's an ancient creature. It's described in old books and art like "Nachtmahr" (“Night-mare”) by Johann Heinrich Füssli (1802). It was first mentioned in the 16th century and most of the myths about this creature were made up during the 19th century.
The Alp is a sort of huge bat with humanoid features with longer legs and arms. Since there are no clear pictures of this creature one has to rely on eyewitnesses when it comes to it's appearance.
It's covered in fur and is believed to be closely related to flying foxes. The humanoid features are hard to explain but it might be a misunderstanding (it has arms). Most likely it's a thicker part of the humerus and radius bone that might look like arms.
The size of the Alp is disputed and there is a misconception that they are the same size as a full grown man. There is no evidence that this would be the case, quite the opposite. The proportion between the body and the wings are 1:5 or 1:6. An Alp the same size as a full grown man would need a wingspan of about 10 meters to fly. This has never been recorded. The wingspan is more likely 4-5 meters and this would give it a length of about one meter.
There are many differences between a flying fox and an Alp but this is the closest relative. The wingspan of a flying fox is just under 2 meters, so the Alp is bigger.
Pteropus or Flying Fox
The myth about the Alp being a vampyre originates from the myths about vampyre bats. There are bloodsucking bats but they are very rare. It was during the 19th century the myths about the Alp as a vampire began. There were no records of the Alp being a bloodsucker before 1817. The myths about vampyres from the 18th century through the beginning of the 19th century incorporate other creatures and present them as vampires. The stories that the Alp is a blood sucking vampyre has never been proved. There are also myths about the Alp being a shapeshifter and haunt it's victims by entering their mind and giving them nightmares (the appearance of the Alp is enough to give you nightmares, I'll admit that).
My extensive research shows that the Alp is a distant relative to the flying fox. It's extremely shy and has a very long lifespan. There are creatures that can reach almost 200 years. The explanation that the remains of a dead Alp have never been found is that it's a very small population, they live long and in isolated areas. There are probably only 6-8 individuals left and they are spread out over central and eastern Europe. Where they breed, how they nest and other question remains unknown."
A recent sighting
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THE ALP - DEMON OF NIGHTMARES
The Alp, from German lore, is a vampiric spirit, or demon, who can shape-shift. They are often described in german legends as appearing in nightmares as a bogeyman or an incubus.
Alps are considered to be a butterfly vampire and a released by the horerczy demon. (A horerczy is a German demon that releases vampiric butterflies out of his mouth.) Alps suck the breath out of humans. Not only do they appear as butterflies, they can also take the form of cats, pigs, birds, and sickly dogs. They also always wears a magical hat that gives the alp supernatural power and invisibility.
The alp are said to wait until people are asleep and will cause awful dreams. It enters the sleepers mouth as a form of mist or a snake and attacks with its evil eye. They also can sexually molests both males and females, drinking blood through the nipple of men and women. They also drink milk from women’s breasts as well as from cows. If you are a woman and want protection against the alp, it is said if you place your shoes next to your bed pointing them towards the door. It is also said that if a child’s mother used a horse collar to help with the difficulties of childbirth while that child was born, that child is at a high of becoming an alp. - bloodylexicon.com
AN ALP IS CAPTURED
"A cabinetmaker in Bühl slept in a bed in his workshop. Several nights in a row something laid itself onto his chest and pressed against him until he could hardly breathe. After talking the matter over with a friend, the next night he lay awake in bed. At the stroke of twelve a cat slipped in through a hole. The cabinetmaker quickly stopped up the hole, caught the cat, and nailed down one of its paws. Then he went to sleep.
The next morning he found a beautiful naked woman in the cat's place. One of her hands was nailed down. She pleased him so much that he married her.
One day, after she had borne him three children, she was with him in his workshop, when he said to her, "Look, that is where you came in!" and he opened the hole that had been stopped up until now.
The woman suddenly turned into a cat, ran out through the opening, and she was never seen again." - Bernhard Baader, "Alp," Volkssagen aus dem Lande Baden und den angrenzenden Gegenden - 1851
Hey, it's the weekend. Time for a bit of fun...Squonk!
Few people outside of Pennsylvania have ever heard of the quaint beast, which is said to be fairly common in the hemlock forests of that State. (Honestly, I was born and raised in Pennsylvania and I had never heard of this creature.) The range of the squonk is very limited. It has a very retiring disposition, generally traveling about at twilight and dusk. Because of its misfitting skin, which is covered with warts and moles, it is always unhappy; in fact it is said, by people who are best able to judge, to be the most morbid of beast. Hunters who are good at tracking are able to follow a squonk by its tear-stained trail, for the animal weeps constantly. When cornered and escape seems impossible, or when surprised and frightened, it may even dissolve itself in tears. Squonk hunters are most successful on frosty moonlight nights, when tears are shed slowly and the animal dislikes moving about; it may then be heard weeping under the boughs of dark hemlock trees. - "Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods" - William T. Cox - 1910
Mr. J. P. Wentling, formerly of Pennsylvania, but now at St. Anthony Park, Minnesota, had a disappointing experience with a squonk near Mont Alto. Wentling who one fine day at the turn of the century hid near its home after observing it and laying a trap for it, he snatched it up into his bag. As he was returning to the local village to show his friends what he had found in the woods, he noticed the leather bag he was carrying dripping from several cracks in the bottom making it noticeably lighter and of a strange shape. As he set it down on the ground, the legend suggests he suspected some trickery, but as he untied the top a strange liquid very much like water (or tears) spilled onto the soil at his feet. Cursing his bad luck, Wentling returned back to the village with nothing but the tale of his adventure and a soaked bag. - Unexplainable.net
The "scientific name" of the squonk, Lacrimacorpus dissolvens, comes from Latin words meaning "tear", "body", and "dissolve".
The Squonk is probably the world's ugliest animal. So ugly, in fact, that it spends most of its life crying over its cruel fate. Eventually many squonks just dissolve into a puddle of tears. You can read more about this sorry fellow and others like him in Richard Svennson's book "Fearsome Critters."
The Squonk (according to the BBC)
The Squonk (Lacrimacorpus dissolvens) is a legendary creature from the Hemlock forests of north-central and north-western Pennsylvania. The earliest stories about the squonk are lost to history, but the legend probably dates back at least to the late 19th Century, when Pennsylvania's importance in the lumber industry was at its peak, relying heavily on hemlock trees.
Legends
Squonks are very shy, very ugly animals. Their skin is ill-fitting, and covered with warts and moles. Because they know they are so ugly, they weep almost constantly, and try to avoid being seen.
The one well-known story about squonks has to do with how they are hunted. Apparently, squonk skin is valued by some, but they are very difficult to catch, because of their extremely retiring nature. They can be most easily tracked on nights with a full moon, when their tears form glistening trails on the ground.
Sometime around the year 1900, a man named JP Wentling2 was able to successfully catch a squonk. Mr Wentling followed a trail of tears, and when he heard a nearby squonk weeping under a hemlock tree, he lured it by imitating the creature, presumably by weeping. He caught the squonk in a bag, and carried it home, while it sobbed pitifully in his sack. As he carried his prize home, he suddenly noticed that the bag was lighter, and on opening it, found that there was nothing inside but tears and bubbles.
Squonks will apparently dissolve completely into tears anytime they are cornered or threatened; this is the source of their scientific name, Lacrimacorpus dissolvens, from the Latin words for 'tear', 'body', and 'dissolve'.
Squonks in Literature and Music
William T Cox published a book in 1910, called Fearsome Creatures of the Lumber woods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts. In this book, he described the squonk, telling the story related above. The book was an encyclopaedic collection of legendary animals from United States folklore. Sadly, Fearsome Creatures is out of print, and rather difficult to find.
Jorge Luis Borges, the Nobel Prize-winning Argentinean writer, used Mr Cox's book as a source when compiling his Book of Imaginary Beings in 19693. This book has descriptions of 120 fantastic and legendary creatures from many different cultures, mostly European and New World.
Borges opened the preface of his 1969 edition with a sentence that may resonate with some h2g2 Researchers: 'As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.' His book has been illustrated and hypertextualized by students in Greece, and may be found here.
In 1974, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan released their third LP, Pretzel Logic. This album featured the song 'Any Major Dude Will Tell You', a bittersweet acoustic ballad, offering consolation to someone whose world seems to be falling apart. Fagen puzzled his studio musicians with the line:
Have you ever seen a squonk's tears? Well, look at mine. People on the street have all seen better times.
Exactly why Messrs Fagen and Becker chose this image to use in this song is as mysterious as most Steely Dan lyrics, and as they typically refuse to answer questions about their songs, fans continue to speculate. It seems likely that 'The Dan' learned about squonks from Borges' book. Genesis
In 1976, the band Genesis released their first LP after Peter Gabriel left the group - the first to feature Phil Collins as frontman. This album, A Trick of the Tail contains the song 'Squonk'. This song is basically a retelling of the story of Mr Wentling, squonk hunter. That Collins is using the story as some kind of allegory seems clear, especially from the final verse:
All in all you are a very dying race Placing trust upon a cruel world. You never had the things you thought you should have had And you'll not get them now, And all the while in perfect time Your tears are falling on the ground.
What Mr Collins is actually getting at is left to the reader to speculate. It is not known whether Genesis were inspired to find the story of the squonk by hearing 'Any Major Dude', or whether they discovered it independently, but the story in the song is clearly taken from Mr Cox's work, probably via Borges' book.
Squonks Today
At the time of writing of this entry (October, 2002), people continue to read Borges, and to listen to music from the 1970s. Squonks are being discovered by more and more people. The name turns up, here and there, as a username or domain name on the Internet somewhere, in the name of Squonk Opera, a performing arts troupe in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area, and in other unexpected and unrelated contexts. Perhaps we are standing at the threshold of a veritable squonk renaissance!
One shadow looms over this prospect, however. The squonk's habitat, in the hemlock forests of Pennsylvania, is severely reduced. Most of the hemlock trees were logged by 1915, and the species has become just an occasional sight in the area's hardwood forests. It is not known whether squonks rely on hemlock trees, but as their range decreases, it can only mean hard times for any surviving squonk populations. The only hope for the squonk's survival may now lie in the imaginations of dreamers, poets, and those who treasure the legends of the past. - www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2
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The Blue Ridge Mountains area was settled by German immigrants beginning in the 1730s. Early accounts describe the community being terrorized by a monster called a Schneller Geist, meaning "quick spirit" in German.
It has been suggested the legend was resurrected in the 19th century to frighten freed slaves.
Reports of a strange flying beast known as the Snallygaster first appeared in Frederick County in early February, 1909. The story was carried prominently in Middletown's Valley Register, a weekly newspaper, for about a month, when the story mysteriously died.
In the early issues, the flying beast seemed to be everywhere at once: New Jersey, West Virginia, Ohio, and headed this way. It was reported to have created quite a stir in New Jersey, where its footprints were first discovered in the snow.
The first person to see it, James Harding, described it as having enormous wings, a long sharp beak, claws like steel, and one eye in the middle of its forehead. He said it made shrill screeching noises and looked like a cross between a tiger and a vampire.
A vampire may have been a good description, for it was reported to have killed a man, Bill Gifferson, by piercing his neck with its sharp bill and slowly sucking his blood.
It was also seen in West Virginia, where it almost caught a woman near Scrabble, roosted in Alex Crow's barn, and laid an egg near Sharpsburg, where it was reported some men had rigged up an incubator to try to hatch it.
T.C. Harbaugh, of Casstown, Ohio, wrote a letter to the Valley Register in early 1909, telling of a strange beast that flew over his area making terrible screeching noises. Harbaugh described it as having two huge wings, a large horny head, and a tail twenty feet long. He said it looked as though it was headed this way.
Sure enough, the Snallygaster was first sighted in Maryland by a man who fired a brick-burning kiln near Cumberland. The strange beast was seen cooling it's wings over the outlet of the kiln. When the beast's sleep was disturbed by the man, it emitted a blood-curdling scream and angrily flew away.
It was also shot at near Hagerstown, sighted south of Middletown at Lover's Leap, and seen flying over the mountains between Gapland and Burkittsville, where it was reported to have laid another egg...big enough to hatch an elephant.
Sightings of the Snallygaster were creating such a commotion that at one point it was reported that President Theodore Roosevelt might postpone a trip to Europe so that he could lead an expedition to capture it.
Apparently the Smithsonian Institute was also interested in the beast. From the description provided by a sighting at Shepherdstown, West Virginia, they determined the strange beast was a Snallygaster.
The last sighting in Frederick County in 1909 occurred near Emmitsburg in early March. Three men fought the terrible creature outside a railroad station for nearly an hour and a half before chasing it into the woods of Carroll County.
Twenty-three years passed before the Snallygaster appeared again in Frederick County.
First reports were received from just below South Mountain in Washington County. Eyewitness accounts claimed that it flew toward them from the Middletown Valley.
The beast was often seen flying back and forth over the area and was described as being as large as a dirigible, with arms resembling the tentacles of an octopus. The creature appeared to be able to change its size, shape, and color at will.
Although the creature made no attempt to harm any of the residents of the Valley, most people sought the safety of their homes as it flew overhead.
All descriptions seemed to indicate it was the Snallygaster, last reported in these parts on March 5, 1909. As the life expectancy of a Snallygaster is only about twenty years, the most logical explanation seemed to be that the latest sighting was the offspring of the 1909 creature, possibly hatched from one of the eggs laid near Burkittsville.
Since the Snallygaster appears so rarely, the Middletown Valley Register requested that local residents sighting the creature provide as accurate and detailed a description as possible for scientific purposes.
Two such residents, Charles F. Martin and Edward M. L. Lighter, were able to provide the necessary information. While driving a truck on the National Pike just east of Braddock Heights, they spotted the Snallygaster flying about twenty-five feet overhead. They thoroughly confirmed the descriptions published the previous week.
The Snallygaster finally met his end in a way some might envy. The creature was flying near Frog Hollow in Washington County when it was attracted by the aroma of a 2500-gallon vat of moonshine. As the beast flew overhead, it was overcome by the fumes and dropped into the boiling mash. A short time later, revenue agents George Dansforth and Charles Cushwa arrived on the scene. They had received information about the still, but were rather startled at the sight of the dead monster in the vat.
The two agents exploded five hundred pounds of dynamite under the still, destroying the remains of the Snallygaster and John Barleycorn's workshop.
A great deal has been written about the Snallygaster since 1909. It has appeared in countless articles in the Middletown Valley Register, Frederick News Post, and other area newspapers. Is has also appeared in the Baltimore Sun, National Geographic, and Time Magazine.
In 1976, the Washington Post sponsored an unsuccessful search for the Snallygaster, as well as other strange Maryland creatures.
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Snallygaster: German "schnell geiste", a Pennsylvania Dutch term meaning "quick spirit" or "fast spirit" often associated with those strange draughts that slam doors, topple over lightweight objects, or scatter papers. The visual or physical appearance of the Snallygaster is confusing since there are several variation narratives, some having roots in the dragonlore of the early settlers. Thus, the Snallygaster more often has similarities to dragons, green and scaled, and winged.
Tales exist around the South Mountain region where the Snallygaster is a monstrous bird preying on young children. Literary accounts of the Snallygaster were printed in the local newspapers. These narratives were most likely invented tales by two rival editors. To end the rivalry caused the Snallygaster demise; sent plummeting headlong into a boiling vat of whiskey. Such a just end for this unseen spirit. Of interest to scholars is the nature of the various tales likely invented, those which were patterned after Dragonlore, the absence of Native American influence, and its connection to Pennsylvania Dutch lore.
NOTE: even though the Snallygaster is said to be the 'Maryland Monster' you rarely hear much about it...though there have been a few 'hunts' conducted within the Patapsco and Cunningham Falls State Parks in recent years. I even heard that a Snallygaster den was located near Camp David at one time. Believe what you may...Lon
Sources: "Ghosts and Legends of Frederick County" - Timothy L. Cannon and Nancy F. Whitmore www.monstropedia.org www.pantheon.org "Don't Eat the Devil: A Dirty Hands Guide to the Meat of Baltimore" - 1998 - Rob Wallace and Chris Lease www.baltimoremd.com www.unknown-creatures.com americanmonsters.com "Weird Maryland: Your Travel Guide to Maryland's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets" - 2006 - Matt Lake
To be honest, I have never been confident or comfortable with the claims of the well-known freshwater cryptids throughout the world. The Loch Ness Monster has the most extensive history and legend thus making it, to me, the most credible of the lot...though I still have trouble believing in it's existence. Since the modern story of this creature is well known I'd like to offer a bit into it's background...then leading up into the present day.
Existence of the creature known as the Loch Ness Monster was recorded in Celtic and Norse folklore, though accounts of sightings can be traced back to St. Columba in 565 AD.
Loch Ness is a large loch of over twenty-one square miles and an unfathomable 800 feet deep. It is one of several lochs that became interlinked when the Caledonian Canal was completed during the 19th century opening out into the North Sea.
Loch Ness, Scotland (marker)
The water of Loch Ness is very murky because of the high concentration of peat and the loch's great depth. Many believe its bottom is interspersed with large caves in which Nessie rests in. While many scientific studies have been undertaken to hunt for Nessie and to make topographical images of the bottom of Loch Ness by use of sonar surveys, these studies have been unable to prove or disprove the existence the monster.
St. Columba and the Monster
The earliest legend about the Loch Ness monster recorded is the story by Adamnan of St. Columba's encounter with the beast.
Guilty for being partly responsible for the death of many men in the Battle of Cul-drebene, St Columba set out to mainland Scotland on a pilgrimage to spread Christianity across the land.
During this time, on his way to visit with the Pictish king in Inverness, he encountered some Picts burying what remained of one of their own people - badly savaged by a creature in the Loch.
The dead mans boat lay on the other side of the water, so Columba ordered one of his followers to swim over and retrieve the boat.
During this the servant was attacked by a creature that reared out of the Loch to attack the swimmer.
Columba commanded the beast to return to whence it came and it vanished beneath the waters of the Loch leaving the swimming man unharmed.
St.Columba and the lake beast
Sightings
The most common description of Nessie is that of a large dinosaur-like monster who holds a great resemblance to a Plesiosaur. It is usually said to be about 40 to 45 feet in length with long, slender neck, a "head like a horse," a long tail, humped back and flippers in place of legs and feet. The back varies according to the sighting. Some reports say it has a single hump while others say it has two.
Often seen on the western edge of Loch Ness in the vicinity of the ancient Urquhart Castle, sightseers have in this century supposedly taken many photographs of Nessie. In all, there have been at least three thousand reported sightings of Nessie since 1933 although there are several recorded sightings from the 1800s.
Supposed underwater image of the Loch Ness Monster
The earliest police reports of sightings begin in October 1871 in which D. Mackenzie told how the creature moved slow, looked like a log at first but then the back came into view which resembled "an upturned boat." This description has been used repeatedly to describe the back of Nessie.
The next recorded sighting was by Roderick Matherson in 1885 in which he said the creature "was the biggest thing I ever saw in my life." In 1888 Alexander Macdonald saw the creature as well. In 1889 a "great horrible beastie" was reported to be in the loch by several people the same day.
There were sporadic reports of Nessie for several years but April 1933 saw the beginning of an all-new era. Between April 1933 and August 1934, over 50 sightings were reported with the majority of these being by more than one person at a time. A London surgeon, Robert Kenneth in 1934, took the most famous of Nessie photos. Then Nessie seemed to take a break and the next recorded sighting wasn't until 1936. With few sightings during the 1940s the Loch Ness monster began being seen again on a regular basis during the 1950s.
Dr. Robert Rines (left)
In 1972 and 1975 Dr. Robert Rines of the Academy of Applied Sciences in Boston used side scan sonar to take full body shot photos of a large object with what could be flippers. When Dr. Rines returned to Loch Ness in 1990 he was unable to find the object or creature again.
In the following article, Virginia Tech science professor emeritus Henry Bauer believes that a family of large aquatic cryptids still occupies the lake, and it’s only a matter of time before their existence is proven:
Henry H. Bauer
newsadvance - By Darrell Laurant - Henry Bauer has something in common with me, and most probably with you — he’s never seen the Loch Ness Monster.
In his case, however, it isn’t from lack of trying. The Virginia Tech science professor emeritus has made a number of trips to Scotland hoping to catch a glimpse of the world’s most elusive aquatic beast, only to be disappointed. But not disheartened.
“Almost all of the sightings have been random,” he said, “and they tend to catch people by surprise.”
In other words, you can’t meet “Nessie” by appointment. That is, if he or she actually exists.
There appear to be three possibilities:
-The Loch Ness Monster is nothing but a figment of some Scotman’s imagination, a legend that has morphed into a mass hallucination among the believers.
-There was a Loch Ness Monster once upon a time, but now it’s dead.
-A family of Nessies still occupies the mile-wide, 20-mile-long lake, and it’s only a matter of time before their existence is proven.
Bauer describes himself as “about 95 percent certain” of the third option. He will be one of the speakers at an “UFOs at the Lake Conference” at the Mariner’s Landing Resort on Smith Mountain Lake, which is a neat coincidence. A movie in production called “Lake Effect” has been filmed there, and one of its components is a Nessie-style monster.
The producers of “Lake Effect” didn’t enlist Henry Bauer as a technical advisor, but they should have. As the pursuit of Nessie has changed from hobby to obsession, he has read everything he can find on the beast, pro and con.
“I’m a scientist,” he said, “and so I have an open mind, both ways. I’m just trying to help get at the truth.”
The initial spark for Bauer was a chance encounter with a book by Tim Dinsdale, described as the only person ever to capture the Loch Ness Monster on film. You’ve probably seen a famous still photograph from that footage, a grainy image of what appear to be eel-like loops protruding from the water of the Loch.
Naturally, that photo has come under withering fire from debunkers. It’s a boat, it’s a sturgeon, it’s an imperfection in the film.
“I took a year’s sabbatical in 1972,” Bauer said, “to study at the University of Cambridge in England. Naturally, I took a side trip to Loch Ness, Dinsdale happened to be there, and I met him.”
Bauer leans toward the theory that the Loch Ness Monster (or monsters) is a prehistoric creature that somehow became landlocked when the Ice Age closed off Loch Ness’ former connection to the ocean.
“There is another body of water called Loch Morar, also near the ocean, and there are legends surrounding creatures there, too,” Bauer said.
If you’re picturing Loch Ness as a small body of water, think again. This is no glorified farm pond.
“It’s 700 feet deep at one point,” Bauer said.
Nor is it surrounded by Loch Ness Monster tourist attractions.
“There aren’t any summer cottages and only a few hotels,” Bauer said. “The local planning committee is very conservative, and they want to keep the place pretty much like it’s always been. You can buy a Nessie doll in some stores, but that’s about it.”
Obviously, there are Nessie questions with no current answers. Since there have been sightings since the 1930s, the creature either has a very long life span or it has reproduced. And if one of the beasts has died, why was no carcass ever found?
On the other hand, Bauer said, no one has been able to explain certain sonar findings that appear to show large objects in motion.
For all its size and presumably carnivorous diet, Nessie has never tried to eat one of its human neighbors, or even a tourist. Rather, the beast seems reclusive and shy, appearing only by chance and disappearing just as quickly.
Or else this is all a hoax. Like any true scientist, Henry Bauer just seems to be enjoying the puzzle.
“I guess you’d say I’m into oddball science,” he said with a chuckle.
There seems to be renewed interests in the 'wildmen' of Asia...probably the best known is the Yeti. But there have been expeditions into the more tropical areas of south central Asia as well. In this post, I want to concentrate on mountainous central Asia, specifically those hominids or 'snowmen' that are said to exist in the Pamir Range of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. These hominids go by several monikers...the Barmanu, the Tajik Yeti, the Almysty, the Golub-Yavan or simply the Gul.
In August 2001, the Russian magazine Karavan + I published an article about the killing of a wild man on the old Soviet-Afghanistan border. According to the author, border guards of the Kevran unit in the Pamir Mountains saw a "Snowman" during the winter of 1967/68. They reported their observation to their superior, Kuzkov, the officer in charge of the unit. He did not, at first, pay any attention to it.
The soldiers of the next watch again saw a creature and reported the fact. Subsequently, the duty officer accompanied the soldiers to the spot and personally observed the creature. Kuskov informed his superior officer, a colonel in Khorog – a settlement on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. News about this reached the Central Asia Command where, in February 1968, a high-ranking officer gave the order, ‘Catch him or, if that isn’t possible, eliminate him!’. Thereupon, the border guards shot the creature and took it to the border post. The body was stored in a woodshed. A subsequent article 3) in Karavan + I in September 2001 on the happening disclosed that the body was taken to Moscow in great secrecy.
The magazine questioned two scientists to establish what had happened to the remains of the "Snowman". One of these was Georgy Skvorzov, director of the programme Animals in inhabited settlements and, according to Karavan, for many years a collector of information about the ‘Snowmen’.
[Karavan:] Georgy, do you believe in the existence of the Snowmen?
[Skvorzov:] Of course. The Snowman has not only just been seen once in the mountains of Tibet, in the Pamir Mountains, Siberia and the northern Caucasus. In recent time these sightings have been fewer. Probably these very cautious creatures are hiding from the advancing human civilisation.
[Karavan:] Do you know about the affair at the end of Winter 1968 when our border guards killed a Snowman in the Pamir Mountains and brought his body to the capital? Did scientists get their hands on this specimen?
[Skvorzov:] We have slightly different information if we are talking about the same event. According to my information the body of a Snowman was found by a shepherd in the Pamir Mountains in autumn 1968. But at that time our scientists only received pieces of the fur and the eye-teeth.
The magazine confided that their editor had been visited by an ex-border guard called Andrej. He had served in the Pamir Mountains during the 1960s and had confirmed the killing of a "Snowman" at the place mentioned. Further information about what happened to the body or about the fur and eye-teeth was not given.
In the Russian Newspaper Simbirskij Kur'er (Simbirsk Courier), Arsenij Korolev reported in 2002 among others about a 1982 expedition of the Tajik Academy of Science in the Hissar Mountains in the western Pamirs. The academy was equally involved in the 'snowman' problem. According to Korolev, in the 1980s, many adventure lovers came to Tajikistan in search of snowmen. During their holidays, media workers organized themselves into groups and came to the Hissar Mountains. A great number of publications followed as a result and the local press was full of stories concerning the Gul' He writes: “Only few, however, knew that this puzzle would be solved by the scientists of the Tajik Academy of Science." Tatjana Vasileva, at that time a scientist at the academy, is quoted as following: “Despite all that, the scientists were not inactive. Of course we were inquisitive to follow the traces of the snowman, particularly so when this legends was just close to us. But the leading stuff of the Academy was against an official expedition. The only thing that we could do was to organize an expedition that was dealing with soil profiles. At the same time, we could also search for traces of the snowman."
Cryptozoologist George M. Eberhart's description of the 'Wildman'
At the beginning of May 1982, a ten member expedition left for the Hissar Mountains. Flora and fauna related materials were collected and examined to find possible eyewitnesses of the snowman. The expedition team noted that the locals themselves would reluctantly talk about the Gul. Often, they changed the subject quite abruptly. In most cases, no personal experiences would be reported except for encounters through another person. The expedition found no traces of "Snowmen".
Furthermore, Korolev reported about an encounter with a police chief of Tadshikabad who spent the weekend with friends in the mountains: “After lunch, the friends went to the river for a bath. The policeman was tired and fell asleep. He only woke up because someone was shaking his car. He looked back and saw a Gul beside his Shiguli. The Gul was pushing the Shiguli forward. Then, the creature placed its hands at the rear windscreen of his car. Full of fear, the policeman shot up and the Gul ran away. But the prints of his hands at the rear windscreen of his car have remained. A Tajik detective has taken these prints and has forwarded them to the police department of criminal investigation."
A guide Surob stakes his honor on the wild man's existence. “I saw his footprints, bigger than the man’s, in snow.”
The road slides upwards from Dushanbe and starts to disintegrate. Surob gestures towards a sad-looking town to our right. “That’s town where I was born, after collapse Soviet Union, people started banging, stealing, breaking everything, proving they themselves are the Yetis.” He bristles when I suggest the Yeti may be a peasant mirage. “They swear on the Koran. Why should they lie? They know nothing, they have nothing, they swear by Allah they have seen it.” I back down.
We pull up at a shack for a pit stop. This is where the valley begins. I am peckish. Soviet-style sweets are displayed in plastic bags. “What’s the best one?” I ask in Russian. The proprietor dashes to a side room and brings me a Snickers bar. My guide wants to hurry, but an old man with an unwashed beard and one strikingly yellow tooth asks for a ride up towards his village. Surob asks him if he is from here. “He from here. Now I will gather the information.”
The peasant knows about the Yeti. “Ten years ago, I saw him. I was climbing a hill to gather firewood and I saw somebody. I go hey, hey, but then he started running towards me. It was the Yeti, covered in black wool, with breasts like the woman’s…”
I ask him to swear on the Koran that he saw the Yeti. Raising his hand to heaven the old man insists and gives me his Islamic word. “I don’t know about other people, but I saw it. It was shouting with anger, rarghh, I was shouting with fear, eeee, and I run.” The countryside changes dramatically as we talk. The road has become a dirt track. The car is swerving and sidling as it climbs up the barren gullies. The old man insists he saw the Yeti. Everyone knows somebody who has in the nearby villages. “When I got back to the village, my father started reading the Koran to me, as protection.”
Nature is starting to blossom in rich abundance. Cherry blossom hangs off the crags. Shoots of wild onions sprout out of the dark earth. “Look,” says Surob. “Look at the herbals, the Yeti is eating the herbals, this is why he lives here.” Coloured tips of wild flowers, blues, reds, purples, grow among the jagged browns, reds and greys of the mountains. Another curve. A stark, barren river valley. “Hey, they saw him too.” Surob stops the car and gives traditional greetings to two middle-aged men driving the traditional clapped-out Lada.
“Yeah, I had fight with him,” says the hunter. “He has wool, black wool, and these breasts…” And he wolf-whistles. His companion, a chubby man in a sizeable skullcap, butts in. “Oh yes, I was up in the glade, and he attacked my donkey. It was very frightening. He looked like a wild man — or a clever monkey.” The sightings occur in the same places. Regularly.
In 1983 Dimitri Bayanov of the Darwin Museum led an expedition to Tajikistan. He visited the site near Lake Pairon where two women, Geliona Siforova and Dima Sizov, had reported seeing a wild woman sitting on a boulder 10 yards (9 m) from their tent. It surveyed them for a long time, making munching sounds. They did not dare to approach it, and in the morning there were no traces of footprints or hairs.
Bayanov also visited the area of Sary Khosor and talked with Forest Service workers, who said they often had reports of wild men. Two years previously, a shepherd had driven his sheep back down from the mountains two months early because he had seen a big black 'gul' or wild man near his pasture. It had frightened his dogs and he had not dared to stay. Another Tajik had told the officers of an encounter five years earlier with 'a giant hairy man, very broad in the shoulders, with the face like that of an ape'.
The Forest Service takes these reports seriously enough to prohibit its employees from spending the night alone in the mountains, for fear of these wild men.
Bayanov had no personal encounter with wild men, but he concluded his 1982 expedition report by saying:
"The abundant signs I witnessed of local fauna, particularly omnivores such as bears and wild pigs, indicate enough food resources for the presumably omnivorous hominids the year round. The 93 percent of the Tajik Republic's territory taken up by mountains is virtually devoid of permanent human population, so the latter poses no special danger to wild hominids. The long and continuing record of purported hominid sightings, supported by these new accounts, leads me to the conclusion that such creatures do exist there."
The newspaper Vechernaja Kazan, from Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, Russian Federation, shared the following in August 2001: “A hunter from the Narynsk province [Kyrgyztan] discovered tracks of an unknown being in the mountains. Scientists were able to take a photo of these tracks - length: 45 cm, width: 35 cm. Experts assume that the hominid (if it was one) came here from the neighboring Pamir, where Tajik rebels have caused him to shy away.”
As well in 2006, Vladimir Smeljanskij reported in the Russian newspaper Rabochaja Gazeta about a business trip to Tajikistan. In the village Sary-Chashma close to the Afghani border, a teenager told him about an encounter. He claimed it happened to his father in the early 1990s. At the time, his father was working as a cowherd. One evening, he noticed that a cow was missing. As he was searching for the cow in the dark, he came across a ravine, fell, and caught himself on a vine. He called for help. Suddenly, he heard a snort. At first he thought it was the missing cow. Then, in the light of the moon, he saw a figure: “… large head, short torso, unbelievably long arms, bent yet strong legs, and very large feet. And the entire body was covered with dark brown fur.”
The being came to the edge, held a stick down for the man and easily hoisted him up. The two stood there a few seconds face to face. The man saw huge hands with thick fingers, ears close against his skull, and small eyes. The being was a little taller than 1.5 meters and with his broad shoulders seemed almost square. The being apparently reached for the knife on the herder’s belt and ripped it away. As an exchange, he gave him his stick. The being then turned the man around by grabbing his shoulders and gave him a light shove. In the village, at first everyone was skeptical of the herder’s story. But then the elders remembered: “In the Pamirs, you really do meet these half-man, half-animal beings. Sometimes it helps the herders, who think of it as a mountain spirit. But only a few have been lucky enough to see it.”
The newspaper Vechernaja Cheljabinsk published the following report in 2001. The author was visiting locals in the southern part of Kyrgyzstan, near the border of Tajikistan. A local hunter, Aslanbek (his last name is not given), told the following story: “Early in the morning, I was on the lookout for ducks in a gorge, close to the lake. Suddenly, I felt a strong fear. It was foggy, but I felt like someone was close by. There was something in the wind, the fog parted, and I saw an Almysty. He was big, about two meters, and bent over like an old man. He was completely covered in dark gray hair and stared at me. I stared back for a few minutes, and was afraid to move. I expected him to kill me. The elders tell how an Almysty can kill from a distance. But this one turned around and disappeared in the canyon after a few minutes. I ran away from there. Since then, I don’t want to go hunting anymore…” The encounter is said to have taken place in 2000.
In the winter of 2002, Pakistan newspapers reported that the 'Russian UFO Digest' (Rossiskij Ufologicheskij Daidjest) reported a new wildmen event in Pakistan. A 20 year-old citizen of the Pakistan village of Kharipur, Radschu, left his house and heard strange sounds from the bushes in front of it. Suddenly an aplike male creature, about 1,20m high, covered with thick black coat, came out of the bushs and attacked and scratched him. Radschu cried and run bag into his house. The 'wildmen' fled from the apple garden when other men using torches began to search around Radschu´s house. Eyewitnesses reported about the high shrill cries of the creature. Old villagers remembered they has seen such "strangers from the mountains" many times in the past, particulary in winter, when they came into the villages in search for food.
A another 'wild man' hominid is thought to live in portions of eastern Afghanistan as well as the Shishi Kuh Valley in the Chitral region of North Pakistan. The Barmanu, which translates as “The Hairy One”, is often thought to be related to early hominids and descriptions generally resemble the Neanderthal. As is the case with other sightings of man like hairy hominids, accounts of this creature are often accompanied by tales of a horrible stench, a trait which is attributed to the creature’s wilderness lifestyle and hair covered body. Legends of this creature have been told by the locals for centuries, but it was not until the early 1990’s that the legend would receive international attention.
During the early 1900’s several Spanish expeditions into the Shishi Kih Valley region of North Pakistan learned of the Barmanu through retelling of the legend by local people. The tales of the Barmanu eventually caught the ear of zoologist Jordi Magraner who traveled to the region with medical doctor Anne Mallasse and another team member. Between 1992 and 1994 Magraner and his team detailed not only eyewitness reports but personal experiences including grunting noise thought to have been made by a primitive voice box as well as discovering ape like foot prints. Magraner was killed by one of his Pakistani guides on August 2, 2002.
Sources: www.unknownexplorers.com "Again the "Snowman" - Rossiskij Ufologicheskij Dajdjest (Russian UFO Digest) - January, 2003 Gurov, Boris - "Snowman Against the USSR" - Karavan + I - August 19, 2001 Gurov, Boris - "On the Tracks of Snowman" - Karavan + I - October 10, 2001 Khakhlov, Vitaly - "On the "Wild Men" in Central Asia" - The Commission for the Study of the "Snowman" Question - 1959 Eberhart, George M. - "Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology, Volume 1" - 2002 standpointmag.co.uk www.andras-nagy.com Smeljanskij, Vladimir - "Mountain Spirit" - Rabochaja Gazeta - May 24, 2006 www.tajinfo.ru Makarov, Vadim - "Atlas of the Snowman" - 2002
The recent devastation in Japan once again proves how vulnerable humanity really is when facing Mother Nature's wrath. The one factor that ties our species together is the genuine emotional unity that is expressed when one of our own confronts diversity.
The Japanese may have been mortal enemies to several nations a mere seventy years ago but because of human exoneration and compassion, these former adversaries are now embraced as friends and allies.
As well, each culture has it's own degree of strangeness and oddities. Because of it's tradition and mindset, Japan's uniqueness prevails independently from the rest of the world.
The following posts are previous submissions I have made over the past several years:
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I received an email from a reader in Japan recently who asked if I had any knowledge of actual cryptid / humanoid encounter reports or activity in his country. He stated that there were hundreds of spirit sightings and ghost legends...but he rarely heard of people encountering unknown creatures. It was an intriguing challenge...so I promised to conduct some research and post my findings. The following anecdotes and stories are a few interesting accounts:
A FOREIGN WOMAN IN THE HOLLOW BOAT
Tokagawa Shogunate, Japan - February 22, 1803
Possibly the first written account referencing alien symbols and a possible humanoid encounter is a story in Japanese folklore. The story takes place on February 22nd in the spring of 1803. Offshore from a beach called Hara-yadori in the territory of Ogasawara Etchuu-no-kami (4000 koku'), who occupied a position named "Yoriai-seki" of Tokagawa shogunate at that time, a kind of boat was observed from the beach. People approached this boat using their small boats and eventually caught it. They towed it to the beach.
The boat was round and resembled a kind of kou-hako (a box used to burn incense). Its diameter was more than 3 ken (5.45 in). On the upper part of the boat, there were glass-fitted shoji (windows with lattice) and they were shielded by chan (a kind of waterproofed putty made from pine-tree gum). The bottom of this ship was reinforced by separated iron plates. This structure may protect the boat from destruction by sunken rocks. Since the glass-fitted shoji was transparent, the people could see the inside the boat, where they found a woman with strange features. Her hair and eyebrows were red, and her face was pink. It seemed that long white hair was added to her original hair.
This foreign woman held one square box whose size was about two shaku (60 cm) in her hands. It seemed that this box was very important to her because she held this box constantly, and she prohibited anyone from approaching it.
The objects found in this boat were investigated by the people. There was about two shou (3.6 liters) of water in the small bottle. There were two pieces of carpet, cake-like food, and kneaded meat. While people discussed what to do about this boat, the woman observed them peacefully.
Another similar description of an incident was found:
On March 24, 1803, a strange boat drifted ashore on a beach named Haratono-hama in Hitachi state in Japan. The boat was hollow and its shape was similar to a rice-cooking pot. It had a kind of rimmed-edge at the center-level part of the boat. In the part above this edge, the boat was painted in black and had four small windows on four sides. All shoji (windows with lattice) were shielded by chan (a kind of waterproof putty made from pine-tree gum). The lower part of the boat was reinforced by steel bars. These bars looked to be made of Western-made iron of the highest quality. The height of the boat was one jyou, two shaku (3.64m) and its diameter was one jyou, eight shaku (5.45m).
A woman (or girl) was found inside this boat and her age appeared around twenty. She was about five shaku (1.5m) tall and her skin was white as snow. Her long hair vividly hung on her back. Her facial features were incomparably beautiful. Her clothes were strange and unrecognizable and her language was not understood by anyone. She held a small box in her hands and prohibited anyone from approaching this box.
JAPANESE CRYPTID WOLVES
Reports of small wolf-like canids came out of the Chichibu district of Japan in 1998. At least seventy people reported wolf howls in 1994, and there have been at least twenty-six claims of wolves seen from 1908 to 1978, all in the Aomori and Oita regions in northernmost Japan, not to mention prints, howls and scat. Several sightings have also been made on the Kii peninsula. In 1936a man in Hongu supposedly captured a wolf pup, but released it in case a parent attempted to retrieve it. The Honshu wolf (Canis lupus hodophylax) a dwarf subspecies of wolf just over a foot tall and deemed extinct since 1905 due to a rabies epidemic, fits the general description. Attempts to record wolves howling, by playing wolf howls to prompt them in 1995 were unsuccessful. Possibly these sightings are just misidentification of feral dogs. However, though Japan is heavily populated, its mountainous terrain would make it possible for a hidden population of wolves – in this case, small wolves - to survive without public acknowledgment. - Cryptid Canids
THE KAPPAS
SLIMY FOOTPRINTS
At around 11 PM on August 1, 1984 in the town of Tsushima in Nagasaki prefecture, a squid fisherman named Ryu Shirozaki was walking home from the local pier after work. As he passed near the Kuta river, he came upon a small group of children playing at the water's edge. While it was not entirely uncommon to encounter people fishing in the river at night, it was rather surprising to see youngsters there.
As Shirozaki approached the children, he was struck by how bizarre they appeared in the moonlight. He could make out swarthy faces, unusually spindly arms and legs, and glistening skin. Suspicious, Shirozaki called out to them as he neared, but they seemed startled and quickly disappeared into the water.
The next morning when he returned to the same spot, Shirozaki discovered a set of moist, teardrop-shaped footprints on the nearby pavement. The prints, which appeared to consist of a slimy substance that had begun to coagulate under the hot morning sun, stretched for about 20 meters. Each footprint measured 22 centimeters (about 10 in) long and 12 centimeters (5 in) wide, and they were spaced about 50 to 60 centimeters (about 2 ft) apart.
Shirozaki and a few curious onlookers immediately suspected the footprints belonged to a kappa. People began to gather around as the news spread quickly through town, and all agreed the prints belonged to a kappa. In the minds of many residents, the footprints confirmed the existence of the river imps they knew through local legends.
When police forensic investigators arrived on the scene, they determined that the slimy footprints consisted of an unknown secretion. They took a sample to the lab for analysis, but the results unfortunately turned out to be inconclusive because the sample was too small. The police eventually dropped their investigation, and the mystery of the slimy footprints was never solved.
THE UNCLEAN GUEST
Another recent kappa encounter occurred on June 30, 1991 in the town of Saito in Miyazaki prefecture, when an office worker named Mitsugu Matsumoto and his wife Junko returned home for the evening. Upon opening the front door, the Matsumotos were confronted with a strange smell inside their home. Inside, they found dozens of small, wet footprints around the front door and in the hallway, bathroom, and two tatami rooms. At first they suspected a burglar, but they soon realized nothing had been stolen.
The police briefly surveyed the house, but found nothing except a floor soiled by 30 footprints, each measuring about 7 centimeters long and 6 centimeters wide, and having 4 or 5 toes. To Matsumoto, the footprints did not look human, nor did they appear to belong to any animal he could imagine.
Later that night, as Mrs. Matsumoto was putting laundry away, she discovered an unusual orange stain on some clothing. The next morning, as Matsumoto inspected the house more closely, he discovered a deposit of orange liquid on the portable stereo in the tatami room. He took a sample to the local public health center for analysis, and the results indicated the liquid had an extremely high iron content and a chemical composition resembling spring water.
Troubled by the incident, Matsumoto decided to visit a shaman. After listening to Matsumoto's story, the shaman encouraged him not to worry, explaining that the kappa indigenous to the nearby swamp enjoyed playing the occasional prank on local residents. The kappa were harmless, the shaman told him.
Harmless, perhaps, but Matsumoto found the kappa difficult to clean up after. He tried using detergent, paint thinner and gasoline to remove the footprints and orange stains, but nothing seemed to work. Sources: Shin-ichiro Namiki, "Nippon No Kaiki Hyaku", 2007
TSUCHINOKO - THE CRYPTID SERPENT
In 2000, Yoshii, Okayama, Japan was in the news, as people were flocking to the region to hunt for the tsuchinoko, a chirping reptile-like cryptid bearing at least some resemblance to a snake or a long, thick lizard. A 20 million yen reward from the Yoshii Municipal Government was the source of all the excitement.
Tsuchinoko fever hit Yoshii on May 21 after a farmer cutting grass swore he saw a snake-like creature with a face resembling the cartoon cat Doraemon slither across his field. The farmer slashed the creature with his weed whipper, but it fled into a nearby stream and escaped. Four days later, 72-year-old Hideko Takashima was talking with a couple of friends in Yoshii when she found what she thought was one of the creatures lying dead next to the stream a tsuchinoko reportedly had dived into to escape from the farmer. She picked it up and buried it.
Yoshii Municipal Government officials heard the rumors of a tsuchinoko and headed out to look over the local woman’s find. They exhumed the body and forwarded it to Kawasaki University of Medical Welfare to be examined. Kuniyasu Sato, the professor who analyzed the reptile, said that the animal may indeed have been the tsuchinoko, but “scientifically speaking, it was a kind of snake.”
Meanwhile, Mitsuko Arima, an 82-year-old from Yoshii, says she saw a Tsuchinoko swimming along a river on the morning of June 15.
“I was surprised. I just pointed at it and asked ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ It didn’t answer me, but just stared. It had a round face and didn’t take its eyes off me. I can still see the eyes now. They were big and round and it looked like they were floating on the water,” Arima says. “I’ve lived over 80 years, but I’d never seen anything like that in my life.” - The Top Cryptozoology Stories of 2000 NOTE: there are a few links that may also be of interest Zuiyo Maru Cryptid and The Yamapikarya – Japan’s Mystery Cat Also, below is an interesting humanoid report that I thought I'd throw in here...Lon
THE FANGED HUMANOID
Kofu, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan - February 23, 1975
Between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m., two seven-year-old boys named Kono and Yamahata watched a luminous orange UFO approach Kofu, Japan while making a "ticking" sound. It landed on three ball-shaped legs in a nearby vineyard. The object was a domed disc, five meters in diameter and six feet high. The boys got very close to it, and discovered the surface of the object was silver colored and had strange characters embossed on its surface.
A ladder extended out of the craft down to the ground, and a humanoid creature slightly over four feet tall disembarked. It wore a silver uniform and carried something that looked like a gun. His skin was dark brown and he had large pointed ears, but his large head had no facial features: no eyes, nose or mouth. It merely had wrinkles on the "face" and three silvery two-inch long "fangs" where the mouth should be. Both boys could see one more smaller humanoid in the cockpit. The being that had emerged reached out and touched one of the boys, patting him twice on the shoulder and uttering words "like a tape recorder running backwards." The boy who had been touched sat down, paralyzed either by the touch or fear, but his companion took him on his back and carried him from the vineyard. They then ran to one of the boy's homes and informed their parents, who could at first see the orange light pulsating in the vineyard. Then it disappeared as they watched. Two concrete posts were found pushed over at the landing site.
Sources: CUFOS files; APRO Bulletin; David F. Webb & Ted Bloecher, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports, case 1975-10 (A1391), citing Hayashi Ichinan and Yoshihiko Honda
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The Aokigahara Forest
“The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night” - Friedrich Nietzsche
mentalfloss - It’s perhaps the most obvious setting for a horror movie imaginable — and it’s real. And incredibly grim. There is a thick, in places nearly impenetrable forest around Mt. Fuji, and it’s the most popular place for suicide in Japan. It’s the second most popular spot in the world behind the Golden Gate Bridge. From Vice, who sent a video crew there:
The Aokigahara Forest is the most popular site for suicides in Japan. After the novel Kuroi Jukai [The Black Forest, written by Seichō Matsumoto in 1960] was published, in which a young lover commits suicide in the forest, people started taking their own lives there at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year. The site holds so many bodies that the Yakuza pays homeless people to sneak into the forest and rob the corpses. The authorities sweep for bodies only on an annual basis, as the forest sits at the base of Mt. Fuji and is too dense to patrol more frequently.
If you’re sensitive, you might want to skip this fascinating but hugely morbid video. VBS.tv’s crew follows a geologist through the forest, and they find a number of grisly surprises.
From October 2008:
The most haunted location in Japan is believed to be a dark, dense forest which lies at the base of Mt. Fuji called Aokigahara. Aokigahara is an infamous place for suicides and many feel that it is a sinister place. "The perfect place to die." That's how Aokigahara was described in Wataru Tsurumui's bestselling book The Complete Manual of Suicide. In 2002, 78 bodies were found within it, replacing the previous record of 73 in 1998. More than a few of them were even carrying copies of Tsurumui's book. No one knows how many bodies go undiscovered."
Locals and scavengers occasionally look for the bodies of those who have commited suicide. When they search, they tie some tape to a tree near the path and then let it out as they go into the forest so they won't get lost. This tape is all over the forest around the path.
CNN - Aokigahara Forest is known for two things in Japan: breathtaking views of Mount Fuji and suicides. Also called the Sea of Trees, this destination for the desperate is a place where the suicidal disappear, often never to be found in the dense forest.
Taro, a 46-year-old man fired from his job at an iron manufacturing company, hoped to fade into the blackness. "My will to live disappeared," said Taro. "I'd lost my identity, so I didn't want to live on this earth. That's why I went there."
Taro, who did not want to be identified fully, was swimming in debt and had been evicted from his company apartment.
He lost financial control, which he believes to be the foundation of any stable life, he said. "You need money to survive. If you have a girlfriend, you need money. If you want to get married, you need it for your life. Money is always necessary for your life."
Taro bought a one-way ticket to the forest, west of Tokyo, Japan. When he got there, he slashed his wrists, though the cut wasn't enough to kill him quickly.
He started to wander, he said. He collapsed after days and lay in the bushes, nearly dead from dehydration, starvation and frostbite. He would lose his toes on his right foot from the frostbite. But he didn't lose his life, because a hiker stumbled upon his nearly dead body and raised the alarm.
Taro's story is just one of hundreds logged at Aokigahara Forest every year, a place known throughout Japan as the "suicide forest." The area is home to the highest number of suicides in the entire country.
Japan's suicide rate, already one of the world's highest, has increased with the recent economic downturn.
There were 2,645 suicides recorded in January 2009, a 15 percent increase from the 2,305 for January 2008, according to the Japanese government.
The Japanese government said suicide rates are a priority and pledged to cut the number of suicides by more than 20 percent by 2016. It plans to improve suicide awareness in schools and workplaces. But officials fear the toll will rise with unemployment and bankruptcies, matching suicide spikes in earlier tough economic times.
"Unemployment is leading to this," said Toyoki Yoshida, a suicide and credit counselor.
"Society and the government need to establish immediate countermeasures to prevent suicides. There should be more places where they can come and seek help."
Yoshida and his fellow volunteer, Norio Sawaguchi, posted signs in Aokigahara Forest urging suicidal visitors to call their organization, a credit counseling service. Both men say Japanese society too often turns a cold shoulder to the unemployed and bankrupt, and breeds a culture where suicide is still seen as an honorable option.
Local authorities, saying they are the last resort to stop people from killing themselves in the forest, have posted security cameras at the entrances of the forest.
The goal, said Imasa Watanabe of the Yamanashi Prefectural Government is to track the people who walk into the forest. Watanabe fears more suicidal visitors will arrive in the coming weeks.
"Especially in March, the end of the fiscal year, more suicidal people will come here because of the bad economy," he said. "It's my dream to stop suicides in this forest, but to be honest, it would be difficult to prevent all the cases here."
One year after his suicide attempt, Taro is volunteering with the credit counseling agency that helped him get back on his feet. He's still living in a shelter and looking for a job. He's ashamed, he said, that he still thinks about suicide.
"I try not to think about it, but I can't say never. For now, the will to live is stronger."
"To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill." - Aristotle
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The Himuro Mansion Haunting
According to urban legend, lying just beyond the city of Tokyo is one of the most haunted locations in all of Japan. The exact location of the Himuro Mansion (or Himikyru Mansion as it is sometimes known) is widely unknown but the legend puts the mansion in a rocky region just beyond the city limits of Tokyo.
The mansion is said to have been home to one of the most gruesome murders in modern Japanese history. Local lore has it that for generations, the Himuro family had participated in a strange, twisted Shinto ritual known as “The Strangling Ritual” in order to seal off bad karma from within the Earth, every half century or so.
The most popular version of the tale states that bad karma would emerge each December (other versions simply say “toward the end of the year”) from a portal on the Mansions grounds. In order to prevent this, a maiden was chosen at birth by the master of the household and isolated from the outside world in order to prevent her from developing any ties to the outside world, which would in turn, jeopardize the effect of the ritual.
On the day of the Strangling Ritual, the maiden was bound by ropes on her ankles, wrists, and neck. The ropes were attached to teams of oxen or horses to rip her limbs from her body, quartering her. The ropes used to bind her appendages would then be soaked in her blood and laid over the gateway of the portal. They believed that this would seal off the portal for another half century until the ritual had to be repeated.
During the last recorded Strangling Ritual it is said that the maiden had fallen in love with a man who tried to save her from the ritual. This “tie” to Earth tainted her blood and spirit and ruined the ritual altogether. Upon learning of the maidens love, the master took up his sword and brutally murdered all of his family members, before finally, in fear of what would soon happen, fell upon his own blade.
This is the basis of the “haunting” of the Himuro Mansion. Local legend has it that these souls of the murdered family wander the mansion attempting to repeat the failed ritual using whomever enters the abandoned building. Blood splashes on the walls are reportedly seen, as if they were flicked from the blade of a sword that had recently sliced through flesh. Many have reported seeing spirits and apparitions dressed completely in white, rinsing cloths and preparing the grounds for the ritual.
Interest in the Himuro Mansion has peaked due to it’s inclusion into the back story of the popular game, Fatal Frame. Here is a quote from Makoto Shibata, Chief Producer of Fatal Frame, regarding the legend:
“In an area outside Tokyo, there lies a mansion in which it’s said seven people were murdered in a grisly manner. On the same property, there lie three detached residences that surround the mansion, all of which are rumored to have ties to the mansion’s troubled past. It’s said there is an underground network of tunnels that lay beneath the premises, but nobody knows who made these tunnels or what purpose they served. Many inexplicable phenomenons have been reported occurring on the property. Bloody handprints have been found splattered all over the walls. Spirits have been spotted on the premises… even in broad daylight. A narrow stairway leads to an attic where a spirit-sealed talisman is rumored to be locked away. Men have sought this talisman, only to be found later with their bodies broken and rope marks around their wrists. There’s a crumbling old statue of a woman in a kimono, but its head is missing. If you take a photo of a certain window, a young girl can be seen in the developed picture. These incidents have provoked fear in the people of Tokyo, and many believe that those who live near this area will become cursed. The deaths of those seven people are unexplained to this day.”
Now, the question is, did any of this really happen? Probably not. The core allure of this legend is also it’s silver bullet. If such a grisly murder did occur (sources put this between 30 and 80 years ago) in such recent times, where is the record?
It is highly unlikely that no police station or newspaper have records of this mass murder taking place just outside of Tokyo.
Regarding the mystery of the location, some believers have offered the notion that the Himuro family has once again taken ownership of the mansion and is currently living there.. but that conflicts with the legend in that all family members were supposedly murdered AND the “firsthand accounts” of events witnessed on the property by locals and researchers.
Another peculiarity of note is that Tecmo advertised the game in North America with the tagline: “Based on a true story,” but without on the original Japanese release. Because of this, some have theorized that the entire legend was fabricated by the game developers.
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The Monster Mummies of Japan
Lurking the halls of Buddhist temples and museums across Japan are a host of monster mummies — the preserved remains of demons, mermaids, kappa, tengu, raijū, and even human monks. Here are a few remarkable specimens for the adventurous and brave at heart.
- Demon Mummies
It might seem odd that Buddhist temples in Japan house the occasional stray mummified demon (oni), but then again it makes sense to keep them under the watchful eye of a priest, instead of letting them prowl the streets.
Zengyōji (善行寺) temple in the city of Kanazawa (Ishikawa prefecture) is home to the mummified head of a three-faced demon. Legend has it that a resident priest discovered the mummy in a temple storage chamber in the early 18th century. Imagine his surprise.
Nobody knows where the demon head came from, nor how or why it ended up in storage.
The mummified head has two overlapping faces up front, with another one (resembling that of a kappa) situated in back. The temple puts the head on public display each year around the spring equinox.
Another mysterious demon mummy can be found at Daijōin temple in the town of Usa (Oita prefecture).
The mummy is said to have once been the treasured heirloom of a noble family. But after suffering some sort of misfortune, the family was forced to get rid of it.
The demon mummy changed owners several times before ending up in the hands of a Daijōin temple parishioner in 1925. After the parishioner fell extremely ill, the mummy was suspected of being cursed.
The parishioner quickly recovered from his illness after the mummy was placed in the care of the temple. It has remained there ever since. Today the enshrined demon mummy of Daijōin temple is revered as a sacred object.
A much smaller mummy — said to be that of a baby demon — was once in the possession of Rakanji Temple at Yabakei (Oita prefecture).
Unfortunately, the treasured mummy was destroyed in a fire in 1943.
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- Mermaid Mummies
In Edo-period Japan — particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries — mermaid mummies were a common sight at popular sideshow carnivals called misemono. Over time, the practice of mermaid mummification blossomed into an art form as fishermen perfected techniques for stitching the heads and upper bodies of monkeys onto the bodies of fish.
The mummy pictured below is a prime example of a carnival mermaid. It appears to consists of fish and other animal parts held together with string and paper.
The mummified creature was obtained by Jan Cock Blomhoff while serving as director of Dejima, the Dutch trading colony at Nagasaki harbor from 1817 to 1824. It now resides at the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden.
Another old mermaid mummy exhibited at a museum in Tokyo several years ago appears to belong to the founder of the Harano Agricultural Museum.
The mummy’s origin is unknown, but the collector says it was found in a wooden box that contained passages from a Buddhist sutra written in Sanskrit. Also in the box was a photograph of the mermaid and a note claiming it belonged to a man from Wakayama prefecture.
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- Kappa Mummies
Like the mermaid mummies, many kappa (river imp) mummies are thought to have been crafted by Edo-period artists using parts of animals ranging from monkeys and owls to stingrays.
This mummified kappa, which now resides in a Dutch museum, appears to consist of various animal parts put together in a seamless whole. It is believed to have been created for the purpose of carnival entertainment in the Edo period.
Another mummified kappa can be found at Zuiryūji temple in Osaka.
The 70-centimeter long humanoid purportedly dates back to 1682.
Another notable kappa mummy can be seen in a seemingly unlikely place — at a sake brewery in the town of Imari (Saga prefecture).
According to a company brochure, the mummified kappa was discovered inside a wooden box that carpenters found hidden in the ceiling when replacing the roof over 50 years ago.
Reckoning the creature was an old curiosity their ancestors had passed down for generations, the company owners built a small altar and enshrined the kappa mummy as a river god.
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- Raijū
With a limited scientific understanding of the sky above, the common person in Edo-period Japan looked upward with great awe and mystery. Supernatural creatures called raijū (雷獣) — lit. “thunder beast” — were believed to inhabit rain clouds and occasionally fall to earth during lightning strikes.
The earliest known written records of the raijū date as far back as the late 18th century, though the creature appears to borrow characteristics from the nue — a cloud-dwelling, illness-inducing chimera first described in The Tale of the Heike, a 12th-century historical epic.
Details about the raijū’s appearance vary. Some Edo-period documents claim the raijū resembled a squirrel, cat or weasel, while others describe it as being shaped more like a crab or seahorse.
However, most descriptions agree that the raijū had webbed fingers, sharp claws, and long fangs that, by some accounts, could shoot lightning. The beast also sometimes appeared with six legs and/or three tails, suggesting the ability to shape-shift.
One illustrated document tells of a raijū that fell from the sky during a violent storm on the night of June 15, 1796 in Higo-kuni (present-day Kumamoto prefecture).
Here, the raijū is described as a crab-like creature with a coat of black fur measuring about 11 centimeters (4 inches) thick.
Another notorious encounter took place in the Tsukiji area of Edo on August 17, 1823. Two versions of the incident offer different descriptions of the beast.
One document depicts the raijū as being the size of a cat or weasel, with one big bulging eye and a single long horn, like that of a bull or rhino, projecting forward from the top of its head.
In the other account, the raijū has a more roundish look and lacks the pointy horn.
In Volume 2 of Kasshi Yawa (”Tales of the Night of the Rat”), a series of essays depicting ordinary life in Edo, author Matsuura Seizan writes that it was not uncommon for cat-like creatures to fall from the sky during thunderstorms. The volume includes the story of a family who boiled and ate one such creature after it crashed down onto their roof.
Given the frequency of raijū sightings, it should come as no surprise that a few mummies have turned up.
In the 1960s, Yūzanji temple in Iwate prefecture received a raijū mummy as a gift from a parishioner. The origin of the mummy, as well as how the parishioner obtained it, is a mystery.
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- Tengu Mummy
Another legendary supernatural sky creature is the tengu, a dangerous demon often depicted in art as being part human and part bird. The Hachinohe Museum (Aomori prefecture) in northern Japan is home to a tengu mummy, which is said to have once belonged to Nambu Nobuyori, a Nambu clan leader who ruled the Hachinohe domain in the mid-18th century.
The mummy, which appears to have a humanoid head and the feathers and feet of a bird, is believed to have originated in the town of Nobeoka (Miyazaki prefecture) in southern Japan. Theories suggest the tengu mummy made its way north after being passed around between members of Japan’s ruling samurai families, some of whom were deeply interested in collecting and trading these curiosities.
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- Self-Mummified Monks
A few Buddhist temples in northern Japan are home to “living mummies” known as sokushinbutsu (即身仏). The preserved bodies are purportedly those of ascetic monks who willingly mummified themselves in the quest for nirvana.
To become a living mummy, monks had to undergo a long and grueling three-step process.
Step 1: For 1,000 days, the monks would eat a special diet of nuts and seeds, and engage in rigorous physical training to strip the body of fat.
Step 2: For another 1,000 days, they would eat only bark and roots in gradually diminishing amounts. Toward the end, they would start drinking tea made from the sap of the urushi tree, a poisonous substance normally used to make Japanese lacquer bowls, which caused further loss of bodily fluid. The tea was brewed with water from a sacred spring at Mt. Yudono, which is now known to contain a high level of arsenic. The concoction created a germ-free environment within the body and helped preserve whatever meat was left on the bone.
Step 3: Finally, the monks would retreat to a cramped underground chamber connected to the surface by a tiny bamboo air pipe. There, they would meditate until dying, at which point they were sealed in their tomb. After 1,000 days, they were dug up and cleaned. If the body remained well-preserved, the monk was deemed a living mummy.
Unfortunately, most who attempted self-mummification were unsuccessful, but the few who succeeded achieved Buddha status and were enshrined at temples. As many as two dozen of these living mummies are in the care of temples in northern Honshu.
The Japanese government outlawed the practice of self-mummification in the late 19th century.
The Japanese believe that all humans have a spirit or soul called a reikon. Ghosts are yurei, meaning “faint spirit.”
If a person dies in a sudden or violent manner, the reikon is thought to transform into a yurei, which can then bridge the gap back to the physical world.
The yurei tend to remain near where they died. They usually appear between 2 and 3 a.m., which is like the western world’s bewitching hour of midnight, and a time when the veils between the world of the dead and that of the living are at their thinnest.
Many Japanese ghosts are connected with battlefields and military bases. Here are some to chillingly consider.
Atsugi Naval Base
Located two hours south of Tokyo, Atsugi Naval base has a secret past, which includes the fact that it was a CIA U-2 Base, which housed the U-2 flown over Russia by Gary Powers in the early 1960s. In 1957, Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of John F. Kennedy, was stationed at Atsugi as a Marine radar operator.
The spirit of a young man who wanders aimlessly from room to room is said to haunt the naval base. It is believed that he is the ghost of a young marine who was killed in a car accident back in the 1960s
Atsugi: The Corrosion Hangar Bay
Located on the other side of the naval base, this hangar stands over an older one that was used by the Kamikaze pilots of Imperial Japan. Here, many pilots killed themselves in disgrace after Japan’s final surrender to the allied powers.
It is said that doors slam and disembodied red eyes float about.
Field Hospital- Kanagawa Prefecture
Located on the military base named Sagami Depot, this hospital has been the site of several unexplainable occurrences.
The building is hardly used, but nightly security checks reveal raised windows and locked doors that had been previously unlocked.
Many of the military police who patrol the building have reported hearing someone or something walking around inside.
Iwakuni- Barracks 1687, Room 301
A few years ago, a Marine living in that room committed suicide. He broke the mirror in a fit of drunken rage and slit his wrist with one of the shards of broken glass.
Since then, there have been reports from other soldiers staying in the room that sometimes very late at night when looking into the mirror, the dead marine stares back from somewhere deep inside.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
It should come as no surprise that these two sites of such terrible tragedy are haunted by the unfortunate souls who perished during the nuclear bomb attacks at the end of World War II.
Ghostly voices are heard at twilight crying and screaming for help.
Okinawa: Camp Hansen- Gate #3
After darkness falls, every weekend a soldier with blood all over his World War II fatigues and a cigarette in his hand would ask the gate guard: “Gotta light?” The MP would oblige and as soon the cigarette was lit, the soldier would disappear.
Whether you believe this or not, gate #3 at Camp Hansen is closed because of this reported haunting.
Tokyo: Akasaka Mansion
Many guests have reported seeing specters standing at the end of their beds, white mists coming in through the air vents and sudden changes of temperature in their rooms.
Some have reported a feeling of someone stroking their heads while they sleep, and one person claimed she was dragged from her bed to the other side of the room and then back again. Scratch marks on her back the next day corroborated her story.
Yokosuka Naval Base: Gridley Tunnel
It is thought that the ghost of this narrow, one-way tunnel that runs through a hill is that of a Samurai warrior who was on his way to avenge the death of his lord when he was ambushed and cut down in the tunnel. Because he failed in his mission, he can’t leave his place of death.
Visions of the samurai as reported by passing motorists have caused several accidents in the tunnel over the years.
Himuro Mansion: Tokyo Outskirts
The basis of the survival horror video game series that deals with ghosts, exorcism, and dark Shinto rituals, “Fatal Frame,” Himuro Mansion was the site of a brutal family murder and sacrifice.
Many weird happenings have been reported in and near the old mansion; including apparitions of those who once lived there, bloody handprints and sprays of blood, which mysteriously appear on the walls.
Sometimes, a small girl in a kimono is seen in one of the windows. To add to the mansion’s mystery, no one knows the significance of the vast tunnels the run underneath.
Yokohama: Ikego-The Middle Gate
The Middle Gate marks the spot where a concentration camp from the World War II era once stood. Here, thousands of Chinese and Korean people were put to work and then killed by the Japanese army. Today it serves as a U.S. military housing base.
There are five incinerators on the premises and three gates that separate it from the Japanese community. At the middle gate, patrol guards have reported hearing voices and footsteps, and have described the feeling of being watched by unseen eyes.
One recurring vision concerns a Japanese soldier from World War II in a brown uniform with no legs floating between the middle and back gates.
These incidents are part of a much bigger picture, as there are many more haunted spots in Japan. Most but not all date back to the era of World War II.
If you plan a visit to one of these spooky places, whatever you do, don’t go alone!
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Kangaroo Sightings Persist In Japan's Mayama Mountains
It may seem odd, but the locals swear it is true. People in a Japanese mountain region have reported a number of kangaroo sightings, and journalists are now trying to stalk the marsupials.
The descriptions given by the apparent eyewitnesses seem close enough. For years they have spoken of a beige animal with large ears, one to 1.5 metres tall, that stands by the roadside and then hops away.
The sightings were all reported in the Mayama mountain district of Osaki city in Miyagi prefecture, a community of 441 households, located about 350 kilometres north of Tokyo.
The city has received about 30 reports of "kangaroo-like animals", including three cases since December, when the mountain area was often covered in snow, said local official Tetsuya Sasaki.
"People aged in their 40s to their 60s have said they have spotted what looked like kangaroos while travelling to and from work in the early mornings and evenings," said Mr Sasaki.
Rumours about kangaroo sightings started about seven years ago, and television crews and newspapers have set up hidden cameras in the district, but have so far failed to capture an image of a kangaroo.
As a joke, "some people have put up 'kangaroo crossing' signs on their roadside properties," Mr Sasaki said.
Kangaroos are on show at many Japanese zoos and can be imported by individuals.
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Ju-on: The Grudge and Kayako Saeki
When you mention strangeness in Japan, you first think of Ju-On: The Grudge... the classic Japanese horror tale and film. Here are links for further information: Ju-on and Kayako Saeki
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