Jump scare preparation

I'm currently working my way through a rewatch of the old television series Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

The show was only on for one season (1974-1975, so when I was fourteen or so years old), and the main character was played to awkward, bumbling perfection by Darren McGavin.  

I dearly loved this show when I was a kid, and was devastated when it was cancelled, but in retrospect I have to admit that the worst episodes of its run are pretty dreadful.  Like the one I watched just yesterday while I was working out, called "The Vampire."  You will probably be unsurprised to learn that it's about a vampire.  (The show also had episodes called "The Zombie" and "The Werewolf" named for analogous reasons.  Some of the episodes had intriguing and creative titles, but these were not amongst them.)  "The Vampire," though -- well, to swipe a line from the inimitable Dorothy Parker, "to call the plot 'wafer-thin' would be to give grievous insult to wafer-makers."  The titular vampire attacks a few people, the cops are skeptical that it's the work of a vampire, the usual hijinks ensue, and Kolchak eventually dispatches her with a cross and a stake through the heart.

Roll end credits.

On the other hand, some of the best episodes of the show are downright brilliant -- and scary as hell.  "The Energy Eater" is about a thing that haunts the basement of a new, cutting-edge hospital facility, sucking up electrical energy; the scene where Kolchak is running down a long hallway being pursued by it, and behind him one by one the light bulbs are bursting, gradually plunging the place into darkness, is absolutely terrifying.  "The Spanish Moss Murders" features a guy in a sleep study whose brain waves are being manipulated -- inadvertently bringing his nightmare to life, a hideous swamp creature called Père Malfait who is made entirely of dripping clumps of Spanish moss.  

But none of them had the impact on me as a teenager that "Horror in the Heights" did.  The monster in that one lures you in by impersonating the person you trust the most.  I'll never forget one scene, where an elderly couple unexpectedly runs into their rabbi while they're walking home late one night from a movie theater.  The scene starts out from their point-of view -- you see the smiling, paternal face of the rabbi as he walks down the sidewalk toward them.  But then the camera swivels around the trio, and when it gets to the side, you can see that only the front half of the rabbi is human -- the back half is a hulking, hairy beast.  It's wearing the rabbi's form like a full-body tie-on mask.

It's incredibly effective -- and is one of the creepiest scenes I have ever watched.

It's honestly kind of puzzling that I watch scary shows, though, because I am seriously suggestible.  When the movie The Sixth Sense first was released on DVD, my girlfriend (now wife) and I watched it at her house.  Then I had to make a forty-five minute drive, alone in my car at around midnight, then go (still alone) into my cold, dark, empty house.  I might actually have jumped into bed from four feet away so the evil little girl ghost wouldn't reach out from underneath and grab my ankle.  I also might have pulled the blankets up as high over me as I could without suffocating, following the time-tested rule that monsters' claws can't pierce a down comforter.

So yeah.  I might be a skeptic, but I am also a great big coward.

This was why I found some research that was published in the journal Neuroimage so fascinating.  It comes out of the University of Turku (Finland), where a team led by neuroscientist Lauri Nummenmaa had people watching movies like The Devil's Backbone and The Conjuring while hooked to an fMRI scanner.

They asked the participants (all of whom said they watched at least one horror movie every six months) to rate the movies they watched for suspense and scariness, count the number of "jump scares," and evaluate their overall quality.  The scientists then looked at the fMRI results to see what parts of the brain were active when, and found some interesting patterns.

As the tension is increasing -- points where you're thinking, "Something scary is going to happen soon" -- the parts of the brain involved in visual and auditory processing ramp up activity.  Makes sense; if you were in a situation with real threats, and were worried about some imminent danger, you would begin to pay more attention to your surroundings, looking for clues to whether your fears were justified.  Then at the moment of jump scares, the parts of the brain involved in decision-making and fight-or-flight response spike in activity, as you make the split-second decision whether to run, fight the monster, or (most likely in my case) just piss your pants and then have a stroke.

Nummenmaa and his team found, however, that all through the movie, the sensory processing and rapid-response parts of the brain were in continuous cross-talk.  Apparently the brain is saying, "Okay, we're in a horror movie, so something terrifying is bound to happen sooner or later.  May as well prepare for it now."

What I still find fascinating, though, is why people actually like this sensation.  Even me.  I mean, my favorite Doctor Who episode -- the one that got me hooked on the series in the first place -- is the iconic episode "Blink," featuring the terrifying Weeping Angels, surely one of the scariest fictional monsters ever invented.

Maybe for a lot of us, it's so when it's over, we can reassure ourselves that although we might have problems in our lives, at least we're not being disemboweled by a werewolf or abducted by aliens or whatnot.  I'm not sure if this is true for me, though.  Because long after the show has ended, I'm still convinced that whatever horrifying creature was rampaging through the story, it's still out there.

And it's looking for me.

So maybe I shouldn't watch scary shows.  It definitely takes a toll on me.  I remember when I saw the episode of The X Files called "Patience," about this extremely creepy humanoid bat-creature that was one by one hunting down the guys who had killed its mate years earlier.  At the end of the episode there's only one of them left alive, and he's gone to a cabin on a little island in a lake out in the middle of nowhere to hide.  There's a fire going in the fireplace, everything is deathly quiet.  He's freaking out, of course, jumping at the tiniest noise.  So when there's a thump and a smoldering piece of wood rolls out onto the floor, he is terrified at first, but then (very cautiously) goes to investigate.  No, nothing over by the fireplace, nothing up the chimney.  So he turns around...

... and the bat thing is standing right behind him.

Man, it was ages before I recovered from that scene.  That evening I was damn close to telling my dogs that they could just pee on the rug, because there was no way in hell I was opening the back door to let them out.  Who knew what could be out there?  Bat things, Weeping Angels, evil ghosts, invisible energy-suckers, swamp monsters covered with dripping Spanish moss.

Or... worst of all... maybe even the person I trust most, walking slowly toward me out of the darkness, wearing a big reassuring smile on their face.

****************************************

Creating the Rake

It's seldom that we can pinpoint the exact moment of origin of an urban legend.  Much more commonly, they start out from a campfire tale that spreads and changes, as if the people passing it along were participating in a giant, freewheeling game of Telephone, until somehow just about everyone knows some version of it and no one really has any idea where it started.

"The Rake" is one of the exceptions.  Like Slender Man, Ben Drowned, and the Black-eyed Children, the Rake began as creepypasta -- scary, allegedly true, first-person accounts that were created and shared online.  The Rake first appeared in 2013, with the following post at 4Chan:

Here’s what we’ve got so far: Humanoid, about six feet tall when standing, but usually crouches and walks on all fours.  It has very pale skin.  The face is blank.  As in, no nose, no mouth.  However, it has three solid green eyes, one in the middle of its forehead, and the other two on either side of its head, towards the back.  Usually seen in front yards in suburban areas.  Usually just watches the observer, but will stand up and attack if approached.  When it attacks, a mouth opens up, as if a hinged skull that opens at the chin.  Reveals many tiny, but dull teeth.

So yeah.  As an Official Paranormal Researcher (at least according to the stoned guy I met in the haunted underpass a few days ago), I can confidently say that if I saw anything like this, I would respond by looking the monster straight in the eyes (all three of them), and then proceed to piss my pants and have a stroke.  Because I may be a Paranormal Researcher, but I am also a great big coward.

Be that as it may, the Rake spread around the internet at a high rate of speed, once again showing the accuracy of Charles Haddon Spurgeon's quip that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots."  To be fair, a lot of people sharing stories of the Rake knew they were fiction and never claimed otherwise; but pretty soon, it started to slip over into that foggy boundary region where the story ends with "... and my cousin's best friend's aunt swears she actually saw it happen."

One of the most common photographs associated with the Rake, although this thing seems to have the standard number of eyes and other facial features.  For what it's worth, I remember seeing this photo maybe twenty years ago -- where it was claimed to have been a monster someone caught on a hunting trailcam in my home state of Louisiana.

From a post that everyone knew was fiction, to an urban legend at least some folks were trying to claim was real, the Rake has now arrived at full-blown cryptid status, where there are YouTube clips wherein it supposedly was captured on video:

Okay, I have to admit a couple of those clips are pretty freaky, and make me glad that (1) it's daytime, and (2) my dog Guinness is right here by my side.  Although it bears mention that Guinness is a bigger scaredy-cat than I am, so I'm not sure how much help he'd be if the Rake actually showed up in my front yard, especially given that our yard is not so much "suburban" as "in the middle of abso-fucking-lutely nowhere."

But I digress.

Where it gets even funnier is that people who talk about how the Rake is real, when confronted with the very certain date of its creation, say, basically, "yeah, we know, but it's still real."  They say that the Rake is a tulpa -- a fictional creature that became real because so many people were putting their creativity and mental energy into imagining it.  Aficionados of The X Files may remember the simultaneously hilarious and terrifying episode "Arcadia," where Mulder and Scully find themselves battling a tulpa created to keep people in an upscale gated community from breaking their homeowners' agreement about things like putting up cutesy garden statues and whimsical house adornments.  Even more grim than that is the claim that Lovecraft's evil pantheon are tulpas -- that so many people are obsessed with Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth and Tsathoggua and the rest of the gang that the Elder Gods are now out there, ready to kill you in various eldritch ways, especially if you live in an accursèd house in Providence with a gambrel roof.

Sorry to bear the bad news if you just moved into one of those.  I don't make the rules.

In any case, I don't think we have much to worry about, with regards to the Rake.  It pretty clearly didn't exist even in fiction prior to 2013, despite any back-dated video footage to the contrary.  The worst I'm expecting to see if I look out into my yard are chipmunks, rabbits, and the occasional fox.  That I'll bring Guinness along if I go out at night is purely for the purpose of giving him some companionship. 

Really it is.

****************************************

Waves

For this week's Fiction Friday, a short story that was inspired by something that my son and a friend saw while walking along the Delaware River while they were students at Salem College in Carney's Point, New Jersey.  The description of what they saw is pretty much as it happened and was related to me.

The explanation of it, however, is pure fiction.

I hope.

****************************************

Waves

October gloom hung low over the Delaware River, wisps of mist rising from the murky, oil-slicked water to vanish into the uniform gray of the clouds.  Nick Dominique and Brady Elkano tramped silently through the knee-high grass, boots making squelching noises in the muddy ground that sloped at an imperceptible angle down toward the river’s shore.

“Whose stupid fucking idea was it to come down here today?”  Brady pulled his scuffed khaki jacket around him and shivered.

“Yours,” Nick said.

“Well, I’m freezing my ass off.”

“It’s not that bad.”  Nick was tall and lanky, his bony limbs never quite covered by shirts and pants that always seemed too wide in the waist and too short in the arms and legs.  He ran fingers through unkempt curly brown hair.  “Better than playing computer games in the apartment all afternoon.”

“At least the apartment has heat.”  Brady was compact and sturdy and dark, and turned a wry eye on his friend.  “There’s nothing down here but trash anyway.”

“I dunno.  There’s the stuff from the military depot.  Jake Warshawski said he found some kind of old air pump.  It was half-buried in the mud, but he took it out and cleaned it up and he said it needed a few parts but looked like he could get it working.”

“What do you want with an air pump?”

Nick laughed.  “Dude.  You know what I mean.  There’s not gonna be another air pump.  I just mean, you never know what we might find.”

Brady shivered again.  “You should drop out of college and be a junk collector.”

By this time, they were at the river’s edge.  On the other side they could see the skyline of Wilmington, Delaware, vague and fogged and surreal, its perpetual noise and bustle and traffic deadened by distance and still air.  The water flowed smoothly, silently, only a few eddies showing turbulence as it flowed over unseen obstructions.  Nick picked up a rock from the mud and sent it skittering across the surface, leaving a trail of circular waves before disappearing with a plunk.

“I think my boots are leaking,” Brady said.  Nick ignored him, and picked up a stick to poke around in the ragged, brown stalks of dying grass.

“What are you looking for?” Brady said, after watching him for five minutes.

“I’ll know when I find it.”

Brady swore under his breath. “My boots are leaking.”

“Take ‘em off.”

“You are ridiculous.”  But both boys wandered along the shore, kicking at washed up garbage and branches, every once in a while leaning over to fish something interesting out of the saturated soil.  Nick found a gear wheel missing two teeth, rinsed the grime off of it in the river, and shook it dry.

“What’re you gonna do with that?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Upstream they came on a long concrete jetty, sticking out into the river like a finger.  On the upstream side the mud was thicker, and there were pieces of net, a chunk of a Styrofoam cooler, and an old wooden sign that had the words “Keep Out” painted on it in stenciled black letters.  Brady stepped up onto the jetty and walked the thirty or so feet until it began to look crumbled and unsafe, and stood there, looking out over the river.  Nick stayed nearer to shore, poking around in the mud, still looking for interesting finds that the current might have washed his way.

That was when he noticed something shiny.

It was a mere pinpoint, like a speck of glitter on the surface of the black, smelly ooze.  He was still holding a stick he’d found earlier, and he pushed at it, and it didn’t move.  He could feel that the speck was just the top bit of something large and solid, so he lay down on his belly on the rough cement surface of the jetty and reached his long fingers down into the frigid mud.

Whatever it was had a smooth surface, and it was stuck more firmly than he expected.  He pulled on it, and felt it give a little.  Then with a thick slurping sound, it came loose, and sat, dripping sulfur-smelling goo, in the palms of both hands.

He swiveled around and dunked it in the comparatively cleaner water on the other side of the jetty.  Now the whole thing showed itself to be a gleaming metal ring, about two inches wide and perhaps five across.  It was heavy, gold in color, and had an inscription around it that said:

AQUA * VITAE * EST *VITA * SAPIENTIAE * AQUA * MORTIS * EST * MORS * SAPIENTIAE

He stared at it, frowning.  Nick had taken a couple of years of Latin in high school, and he recognized the word for “water,” but the rest of it didn’t make much sense.  He thought vita meant “road,” but something about that didn’t sound right.

Honestly, at the time he was taking Latin, he’d been far more interested in hiking and climbing trees and learning to shoot a bow and arrow than in memorizing conjugations and declensions.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

He stood up, gripping the ring tightly, as if he were afraid it would escape from his hand.  “Hey!  Brady!  You gotta see what I found.”

His friend turned, his expression unreadable in the gloom.  Nick walked down the jetty, his long stride closing the distance quickly.

“What is it?” Brady said as Nick approached.  His voice sounded ready to be unimpressed.  “Something else for your trash collection?”

“No.  This is really cool.”  He held out the ring.

Brady’s dark eyebrows rose.  “Wow.”

 
“Told you.”

Brady took it, and peered at the writing that encircled the outside.  “What does that mean?”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

“Well, it’s interesting.  You think it could be some kind of Indian artifact or something?”

“Could be,” Nick said, but he sounded doubtful.  “Did the Indians around here cast stuff in gold?”

“You think that’s gold?”

“It’s heavy enough to be.  But it's got a Latin inscription.  I don't think the Indians would have written in Latin.”

Brady frowned, and handed it back.  “I wonder if we should, like, contact a museum or something.”

“Maybe.”  Nick held it up in the thin, gray light.  “I wonder what it was for?  It’s too big to be a bracelet.”

Brady shrugged, and looked out over the river again. Nick continued to stare at the metal ring, which is why he didn’t see what was happening until he heard Brady’s voice saying, “Nick, what the fuck is that?”

Nick peered past his friend, and at first thought he was looking at some sort of optical illusion, a trick of the odd, attenuated light or the rank mist that hung low over the water.  But it was unmistakable.  The river water had bubbled up, like there was some sort of disturbance underneath it, as if a giant head was about to surface.  Waves rolled off of it, making soft slushy noises and proceeding outward in all directions.  The boys stood still, watching.  Already the first and smallest ones were rocking against the tip of the jetty, splitting and turning down the sides until they dissipated against the mud.

“We should get out of here,” Brady said.

For once, Nick didn’t argue.  Brady shoved past him, taking off at a jog down the cement wall, Nick following him at a fast walk.  They reached shore in a few seconds, and Nick turned over his shoulder to look out over the river.  The disturbance was still there, like a dark, wet hill, churning waves now slopping against the shore.  But nothing else was visible of whatever it was that was causing it.

Brady kept at his jog all the way across the grassy meadow, and up toward the road where Nick’s truck, an aging Toyota pickup, was parked.  When they scrambled up the embankment, both boys turned back toward the river, but the low scrubby trees along the road obscured their view.

It wasn’t until they were both in the truck, the engine coughing into life, that Nick spoke.  “That was creepy.”

“No shit.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I have no idea.”

“Maybe a big fish or something.”  He pulled the truck out onto the road, and accelerated back toward town.

Brady gave Nick a scowl.  “A fish?  How big a fish would it have to be?”

“I dunno.  You got a better suggestion?”

“No.”

“Okay, then.”

They made the rest of the drive in silence.  Even Nick was happy to step back into the warmth of the house where he and Brady rented rooms, both leaving their mud-caked shoes on the front porch.

“I’m hitting the shower.”  Nick pulled off his jacket and threw it on the couch in the living room.

“Let me know when you’re done,” Brady said, plopping down in a rocking chair and turning on the television with a remote.  “I’m next.”

Nick trotted up the stairs, his sock-clad feet making little noise on the wooden steps, and went into the bathroom.  He shucked his damp, dirt-splotched clothes and turned on the shower, giving it a minute for the antiquated water heater to pump some warm water up to the second floor, then he stepped in.

The heat felt delicious on his skin, but he noticed something else almost immediately.  At first, he thought he was overhearing Brady downstairs listening to the television, but he quickly realized it couldn’t be that—there was no way it would be audible from this far away, not with the door closed and the water running.

But he heard a voice.  Thin, low, but clearly audible.

Where did you put it?  I can’t see it.  I can’t.  Where is it?  Where did you put it?

Over and over, a monotonous drone, repeating the same words over and over.  The voice had a strange, rolling accent, but he couldn’t place what sort.  It sounded antiquated and stilted and vaguely British, the sort of accent you might expect from a second-string actor in a Shakespearean play.

Nick stood there, the water cascading over his skin, his shower forgotten for a moment.  He frowned, listening, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from, but it seemed not to be localizable.  He turned the water off, hoping to hear it more clearly.

As soon as he did, the voice stopped.

Nick stood there in the shower, naked and dripping wet, his face a study in confusion.  After a moment, he turned the faucet on again.

The voice started again, as soon as the hot water hit his skin.

He hurried through the rest of his shower, then dried off and cinched the towel around his waist. He picked up his filthy clothes and walked back to his room, pitching them into the hamper.  There was a loud clunk as the pocket of his trousers hit the side of the hamper, and he reached in and pulled them out again, extracting the gleaming metal ring.

He stared at it for a moment, then set it on his dresser, and got out dry clothes and began to dress.

Where did you put it?  I can’t see it.

When he was fully dressed, he picked up the ring again, looked at the inscription, and then sat down at his computer.

Twenty minutes of messing about with Google Translate later, he had scrawled on a piece of scrap paper the words “Water Life Is Life Wisdom Water Death Is Death Wisdom.”  Vita evidently meant “life,” not “road.”  But he was no closer to figuring out what the mysterious words meant.

He went to the window, where gray light was filtering in through the grimy glass pane, and turned the ring over in his hand.  Bits of river mud still clung to the surface, now drying to a gray-brown, fouling the inside of the ring where there were other, fainter engravings.  Nick went back into the bathroom.  From the upstairs landing, he could hear Brady’s television show still playing.  Either his roommate had forgotten about showering, or (more likely) had fallen asleep in front of the television.  Nick pulled a couple of pieces of paper towel from a roll hanging on the wall, turned on the tap, and put the ring under the stream.

And immediately the voice was back, but with a more sinister tone. There it is.  Who are you?  What are you doing with it?  Give it back.

Nick jerked his hand out of the water as if he’d been stung.  There was water dripping from the ring into the sink, and in rhythm with the water drops, he heard clipped bits of words. it… give… where… you?... NOW.

He retreated into his room, drying the ring on the edge of his shirt, listening for the voice and hearing nothing but silence.

Nick looked at the inside of the ring.  There were shallow grooves running the circumference of the ring, but they were difficult to see.  The metal was polished smooth, whether through artifice or through long use was impossible to tell, and it had all but eradicated the markings.  He squinted at them, and thought he could make out the rippling contour of a long body.  At first, he thought it was a snake, but after some turning of the ring this way and that, he could make out the impressions of jointed legs ending in claws.  A dragon, perhaps.

Still holding the ring, he trotted downstairs to the living room.  His roommate, as expected, was lying sprawled in the recliner, eyes closed and mouth hanging open, a game show of some kind playing unheeded on the television.

“Hey, Brady,” Nick said.

Brady opened one eye, blinked, and said, in a slurred voice, “You done with the shower?”

“Yeah.  But that’s not why I woke you up.  Take a look at this.”  He handed the ring to his friend, who peered at it, then looked up and shrugged.

“Yeah?”

“I think this ring is…”  He had started to say cursed but stopped in time; it sounded ridiculous, even to him.  “...weird,” he finished.

“Weird how?”  Brady gave him a wry eye.  “Some kind of artifact, maybe.”

“Look, dude, just get up, I need to show you something.”

Brady gave a groan and stood up.  Nick led him into the kitchen, then put his hand out for the metal ring.  Nick turned the faucet with a squeak, and the water began to flow over the ring.  Immediately the monotonous droning voice began again, in the middle of a sentence, as if it had been speaking, unheard, the whole time.

yours.  Give it back.  Now.  It must come back to me.  I will find you.  You must not keep it.

Brady jumped, and said, under his breath, “Holy shit.”

Nick shut the tap off, and once again, the voice broke up into fragments.

I will find you.  You must not… ring…  Give… I… find… keep…

And then it stopped.

"You heard it, too."  It was not a question.

Brady looked at his friend with wide eyes.  "Yes."

"This has to do with the thing we saw in the river."

"All we saw was a bunch of waves."

"Yeah, but something was causing them.  There was something under there."

Brady didn't have an answer to that.

"What should we do?" Nick asked.

"I dunno.  Give it back?"

"Throw it into the river?"

"That's what I'm thinking."  Brady's voice shook.

"What if it's valuable?  And besides, suppose there is some kind of, um, thing, there in the river.  How could it get it back?  There's no way it could know where we are."

"You didn't notice how the voice broke up when the water stopped?"

"Yes."

"And there were pieces of it whenever a drip hit the sink."

"Okay," Nick said.  "I see where you're going.  Whenever the water makes a connection, it can talk to us.  But that doesn't mean it knows where we are."

"All water connects.  The water goes down the sink, into the sewer, then to some kind of treatment plant, then out to the river.  It's linked all the way.  If it can talk to us, it can find out where we are."

"When I was in the shower, I heard the voice, but all it did was ask questions about the ring.  When I put the ring itself under water, it said, 'There it is.'"

"There you go," Brady said.  "There's no reason to think that it doesn't know where we are."

"Not if the ring is away from the water."

"You need to throw it back, dude."

"I dunno."  Nick could hear the doubt in his own voice, and wondered if he was just making excuses to keep it.  "If it's worth something, we should try to find a museum to buy it from us.  I'd split the money with you."  He smiled, even though it looked a little shaky.  "Even though I'm the one that found it."

"Okay, I guess.  But I don't think it's a good idea.  This is freaky."

There was no arguing with that.  But Nick looked at the gold ring, with its strange, archaic words, and his heart beat a little faster.  Not yet.  It could wait until he'd thought more about this.

***

Sleep was restless that night.  There were no dreams, or at least none of note, but Nick tossed and turned, troubled by a vague anxiety that things weren't right.  Several times he found himself lying in bed, listening, hearing nothing, but all of his senses on alert.  Finally at around four o'clock he drifted off into a doze, but he got up at six feeling unrefreshed, hoping that a shower and coffee would wake him up.

He walked into the bathroom, and had turned on the tap before he remembered about his experience from the previous day.

He turned the water off, and got dressed.  He could skip a day's shower.

Nick put coffee on, being careful about getting his hands under the stream from the tap, and was standing listening to the comforting gurgle from the percolator when it registered that the ring was gone.

He'd left it on the counter, he was certain of that, after his demonstration to Brady that the voice in the water was real.  But the counter was empty, except for the dirty dishes from last night's dinner.  Frowning, he went up the stairs, his bare feet making little noise on the steps, and knocked on Brady's bedroom door.

No answer.

"Hey, Brady, wake up."

Still no answer.

"Dude, did you take the ring?  I hope you didn't get any smart ideas about throwing it back on your own. 'cuz I'll be pissed if you did."

Silence.

Nick opened the door.

 
What struck him first was the damp chill in the air.  The window stood wide open, and a cold breeze was blowing in.

The next thing he saw was that Brady wasn't there.

Nick walked in, feeling an icy sensation that the winter air was insufficient to cause.  Brady's bedsheets were rumpled, as if he'd slept in it, but the blanket and bed surface were soaking wet.  From the mattress came the heavy smell of river water.  There was also a wet spot between the window and the bed, cool and slick under his feet.

"Brady?"  His voice came out in a breathless whisper.

No answer, not that he expected one.

Nick ripped apart Brady's room, becoming more and more frantic, pitching aside sodden textbooks and piles of clothing, pulling boxes out of his closet, opening drawers in his desk.  He finally found the ring in Brady's sock drawer.

It couldn't see the ring, because it wasn't underwater.  But it found Brady.  It found him, and took him away.

Nick went to the bathroom, walking like a somnambulist, turned the tap on, and dunked the ring under the stream.  Instantly the voice started again, thin and whispery and evil.

There it is.  I knew he had it hidden.  Give it back.  It is not yours.  Give it back.

"What did you do with Brady?"  Nick said, his breath coming in tight, painful whistles.

He is here with me.  You will be soon.  You will stay with me forever.

"Where are you?"

You know.  And I know where you are.  Give it back.  It is not yours.

A catch formed in his throat, an angry sob that wanted to exit, but Nick kept it behind clenched teeth.  "You killed him."

He will be here with me forever.  So will you, very soon.

"I'll give you your fucking ring back.  Why do you want it so much?  So much that you would kill?"

Because it is mine.  It has been mine since I came here.

"How long have you been here?"

Longer than I can remember.  Years uncounted, I have been here. I will be here when you are gone.  Unless I bring you here to be with me.  Then we will stay here together forever.

Nick turned off the water, and the voice was cut off.

Still holding the dripping gold ring in his hand, he went to the closet and grabbed his jacket, pulling it on as he walked outside and toward his truck.  He grabbed something else as he walked, from where it leaned against the wall of the garden shed, and tossed it into the bed of the truck before he got in.

He kept himself from thinking as he drove toward the Delaware River and the jetty where he'd found the ring the previous day.  If he let himself think, he'd fall apart.  There was time for falling apart later.  Now, he had a task to accomplish.

As he scrambled down the embankment into the wet field that bordered the river, he saw drag marks.  Something large had passed this way, very recently.  The dead grass was crushed and slimy with mud in a great swath between the river and the highway.  As he walked toward the jetty, his boots squelching in the ooze, he saw once again the bubble of water about twenty yards out, rising from the flat surface of the river.  There was something under there, something that sensed his approach and was coming to meet him.

Something that perhaps resembled the serpentine design on the inside of the ring. But he didn't let himself think about that, either.

He walked out onto the jetty, reached the end, stood there, leaning out toward the oil-slicked water.

"You want your goddamn ring back?" Nick shouted.  "Here you go."

He set the ring down on the stone, and hefted the sledgehammer he'd brought from the garden shed.  There was a sloshing noise, and the disturbance began to move, accelerating toward shore.

Nick raised the steel head of the sledgehammer high, brought it down on the glittering surface of the ring.  It took three strikes, during which time the raised blob of water began to boil and churn.  White waves of turbulence streamed away from it, like the bow wave of a boat.  But on the third hit, the ring split in two, twisting and blackening, and there was a smell of sulfur that quickly dissipated on the winter breeze.

The raised hemisphere of water collapsed.  A few small waves lapped the shore, and then the river flowed on smoothly, its surface flat and glassy and gray under the cloud cover.

***

A woman walking her dog found Brady Elkano's body washed up on a gravel spit downstream two days later.  An autopsy determined that he had drowned, although there were some unexplained gouges in the skin of his left leg.  Suicide was suspected, but given Brady's personality, it didn't seem plausible.  Nick argued against that explanation with particular vehemence, although he didn't have any better explanation for why his friend had apparently hiked down to the river in the middle of the night to go swimming wearing nothing but a pair of boxers.

Brady's parents came a week later to take his belongings, his father sternly silent, his mother weeping quietly as they boxed his clothes and books and personal items.

By that time, his bed had dried out, although a year later, when Nick Dominique graduated from college and moved to Colorado, the air in Brady's room still carried the faint stink of river mud.

 **********************************

Neil deGrasse Tyson has become deservedly famous for his efforts to bring the latest findings of astronomers and astrophysicists to laypeople.  Not only has he given hundreds of public talks on everything from the Big Bang to UFOs, a couple of years ago he launched (and hosted) an updated reboot of Carl Sagan's wildly successful 1980 series Cosmos.

He has also communicated his vision through his writing, and this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is his 2019 Letters From an Astrophysicist.  A public figure like Tyson gets inundated with correspondence, and Tyson's drive to teach and inspire has impelled him to answer many of them personally (however arduous it may seem to those of us who struggle to keep up with a dozen emails!).  In Letters, he has selected 101 of his most intriguing pieces of correspondence, along with his answers to each -- in the process creating a book that is a testimony to his intelligence, his sense of humor, his passion as a scientist, and his commitment to inquiry.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The monster in the mist

I thought that after writing this blog for ten years, I'd have run into every cryptid out there.  But just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about one I'd never heard of, which is especially interesting given that the thing supposedly lives in Scotland.

I've had something of a fascination with Scotland and all things Scottish for a long time, partly because of the fact that my dad's family is half Scottish (he used to describe his kin as "French enough to like to drink and Scottish enough not to know when to stop").  My grandma, whose Hamilton and Lyell ancestry came from near Glasgow, knew lots of cheerful Scottish stories and folk songs, 95% of which were about a guy named Johnny who was smitten with a girl named Jenny, but she spurned him, so he had no choice but to stab her to death with his wee pen-knife.

Big believers in happy endings, the Scots.

Anyhow, none of my grandma's stories were about the "Am Fear Liath Mòr," which roughly translates to "Big Gray Dude," who supposedly lopes about in the Cairngorms, the massive mountain range in the eastern Highlands.  He is described as extremely tall and covered with gray hair, and his presence is said to "create uneasy feelings."  Which seems to me to be putting it mildly.  If I was hiking through some lonely, rock-strewn mountains and came upon a huge hair-covered proto-hominid, my uneasy feelings would include pissing my pants and then having a stroke.  But maybe the Scots are tougher-spirited than that, and upon seeing the Am Fear Liath Mòr simply report feeling a little unsettled about the whole thing.

A couple of Scottish hikers being made to feel uneasy

The Big Gray Dude has been seen by a number of people, most notably the famous mountain climber J. Norman Collie, who in 1925 had reported the following encounter on the summit of Ben MacDhui, the highest peak in the Cairngorms:

I was returning from the cairn on the summit in the mist when I began to think I heard something else than merely the noise of my own footsteps.  For every few steps I took I heard a crunch, and then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own.  I said to myself, this is all nonsense.  I listened and heard it again, but could see nothing in the mist.  As I walked on and the eerie crunch, crunch, sounded behind me, I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest.  Whatever you make of it I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Ben MacDhui and I will not go back there myself I know.

Collie's not the only one who's had an encounter.  Mountain climber Alexander Tewnion says he was on the Coire Etchachan path on Ben MacDhui, and the thing actually "loomed up out of the mist and then charged."  Tewnion fired his revolver at it, but whether he hit it or not he couldn't say.  In any case, it didn't harm him, although it did give him a serious scare.

Periodic sightings still occur today, mostly hikers who catch a glimpse of it or find large footprints that don't seem human.  Many report feelings of "morbidity, menace, and depression" when the Am Fear Liath Mòr is nearby -- one reports suddenly being "overwhelmed by either a feeling of utter panic or a downward turning of my thoughts which made me incredibly depressed."  Scariest of all, one person driving through the Cairngorms toward Aberdeen said that the creature chased their car, keeping up with it on the twisty roads until finally they hit a straight bit and were able to speed up sufficiently to lose it.  After it gave up the chase, they said, "it stood there in the middle of the road watching us as we drove away."

So that's our cryptozoological inquiry for today.  I've been to Scotland once, but never made it out of Edinburgh -- I hope to go back and visit the ancestral turf some day.  When I do, I'll be sure to get up into the Cairngorms and see if I can catch a glimpse of the Big Gray Dude.  I'll report back on how uneasy I feel afterwards.

****************************************

Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week was about the ethical issues raised by gene modification; this week's is about the person who made CRISPR technology possible -- Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna.

In The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, author Walter Isaacson describes the discovery of how the bacterial enzyme complex called CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to edit genes of other species with pinpoint precision.  Doudna herself has been fascinated with scientific inquiry in general, and genetics in particular, since her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix and she was caught up in what Richard Feynman called "the joy of finding things out."  The story of how she and fellow laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier developed the technique that promises to revolutionize our ability to treat genetic disorders is a fascinating exploration of the drive to understand -- and a cautionary note about the responsibility of scientists to do their utmost to make certain their research is used ethically and responsibly.

If you like biographies, are interested in genetics, or both, check out The Code Breaker, and find out how far we've come into the science-fiction world of curing genetic disease, altering DNA, and creating "designer children," and keep in mind that whatever happens, this is only the beginning.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Dog days

Yesterday, we found out that the president of the United States ordered his lawyer to commit perjury before Congress, and has taken his "Oh, yeah, well you're a great big poopyhead!" style of interaction to new levels with revealing the details of a (formerly) secure visit to the troops in Afghanistan by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, presumably to get back at her for denying him the opportunity to deliver his State of the Union speech.

Oh, and there's another "caravan" on the way.  And Ivanka Trump has been tapped to help select the next leader of the World Bank.

*looks around desperately for something, anything, else to think about*

Okay, folks, today we're going to consider: why have sightings of "dogmen" been on the rise lately?

Yesterday we considered eyewitness accounts of seeing pterodactyl-like flying creatures, which is weird enough.  But now we're having to contend with scary visitations by bipedal canines.

As if the quadrupedal kind weren't enough trouble.  Our rescue dog, Guinness, is a truly wonderful guy, but his nickname of "El Destructo" is well earned.  In the past two weeks, he's chewed up a bottle of red ceramic underglaze, a visitor's shoe, a magazine, a pillow, and a single piece from a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.  About the latter, I'd almost have preferred if he'd eaten the whole puzzle; having one piece gnawed is just maddening.

Oh, and he swiped a chunk of gourmet cheese off the counter and ate the entire thing.

Do NOT let this innocent expression fool you.

So the idea that there might be intelligent bipedal dogs, perhaps even with opposable thumbs, is kind of alarming.  But that's just what people have been seeing.

Starting with an anonymous (of course) eyewitness in northern Arkansas, who two months ago saw a fearsome doglike creature while driving home from his job as a roofing worker.

"I came across this evil-looking wolf creature," he said.  "It was carrying something in its hands, like a leash or a rope.  It was standing on two feet on the left side of the road.  It was gray, maybe seven feet tall, three hundred pounds."

That, in the words of a friend of mine, is "a big bow-wow."

Then there's the guy in Colorado who was driving home with his own dog, and saw Fido's scary cousin.  He'd stopped the car and let his dog out to pee, but evidently that was the last thing on her mind.  "She wouldn’t do her business," he said.  "She started barking.  At first I thought she was barking at the traffic, but there was no traffic."

The fact that he even considered the explanation that she was barking at traffic that wasn't there makes me wonder about his reliability as a witness, but let's hear the rest of his testimony.

"I noticed five lights hovering in the sky in the distance...  I quickly put the dog in the car and went to investigate.  The lights rose higher and then got smaller and zigzagged, then vanished."

This did not calm his dog down, and in fact, she seemed even more scared than before.  Then...

"I tried comforting her, and that’s when I noticed something moving in the corner of my eye.  I looked up and saw something running behind my car, through the taillights... It had red fur and a tail, but it also had a human face...  It's hard to describe."

Understandably, the guy hauled ass back out onto the road, but he adds that his dog was still terrified when they arrived home, and he had nightmares for several nights thereafter.

There were other sightings in the last couple of months in Michigan and California, the latter by a retired Air Force security officer who was in a park with her daughter and saw "a large male dogman," six-and-a-half to seven feet tall, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, long arms, dog-like legs, a tail, and amber eyes.  She pulled a gun on it, and started speaking to the thing in her native language (she is Shoshone), and that stopped it from advancing on them.  She and her daughter hightailed it back to their car, and got home safely.  She decided to return the next day with her husband, and see if she could find more evidence (or possibly see it again), and there was no certain trace of the dogman, but they did find a cat skeleton "stripped clean down to the bones."

Skeptic though I am, if I'd seen something like that, I don't think you could pay me enough to return to the same spot.  So major props to her for doing this, and I'm glad that the Shoshone-speaking cat-eating dogman of California didn't harm any of them.

But as far as our initial question -- to wit, why there have been more sightings of dogmen lately -- the only thing I can come up with is that the dogmen have decided we humans had our shot at running the world, but we've fucked things up so royally that they're going to take matters into their own, um, paws.  Maybe they'll team up with yesterday's pterodactyls to form a really New World Order.  Myself, I say let 'em.  Can't be any worse than what we have now.

Of course, if the dogmen are anything like Guinness, they will stubbornly refuse to even consider running the government until you throw the ball for them 459 times, and follow it up by saying "whoozagooboy?" and giving them a dog cookie.

So that's today's cryptozoological news.  And now, sad to say, I've dithered around long enough, and I should probably gird my loins and check the news.  Who knows what might have happened in my absence?  Maybe Donald Trump threw a mud pie at Nancy Pelosi.  Maybe Mitch McConnell finally decided that his title of "Senate Majority Leader" means he should actually lead the Senate.  Maybe Ivanka Trump will be appointed to replace Sarah Huckabee Sanders as White House Spokesperson, given that Sanders is allegedly resigning, probably because she's used up her quota of egregious lies, so now has no option other than telling the truth.

And we can't have that.

But in any case, be on the lookout for dogmen, but play it safe.  A seven-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound dog could do a lot of damage to shoes and jigsaw puzzles.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Clothes make the monster

In new developments in cryptozoology, today we consider: when Bigfoot wears clothes.

The reason this comes up is because of an article by the ever-entertaining Nick Redfern over at Mysterious Universe, which has the title "Further Accounts of Clothed Monsters."  My first reaction was, "Further?  I didn't know that was a thing in the first place."

But it turns out that this isn't the first time Redfern has considered the possibility, and he references an article he wrote a year and a half ago called "When Bigfoot Gets Stylish," which begins thusly:

Without doubt, one of the most bizarre aspects of the Bigfoot phenomenon is that relative to nothing less than clothed Bigfoot!  It’s one thing to encounter such a creature.  It’s quite another, however, to see it fashionably attired in pants and shirts...  Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman says: “In the 1960s and 1970s, reports from the American West would occasionally surface of hairy bipedal Bigfoot being seen with tattered plaid shirts and ragged shorts on their bodies.  In some research, there were intriguing attempts to relate these to files of paranormal encounters with sightings of upright entities said to be wearing ‘checkered shirts.’  (Within parapsychology, there is a subfield of study regarding ‘checkered shirted ghosts.’)  Investigators generally did not know what to make of these Sasquatch wearing plaid shirts, but dutifully catalogued and filed them away, nevertheless.”

I have three questions about this:

1. Where does Bigfoot get his clothes?  I mean, I can accept seeing Bigfoots wearing shirts and pants, but you very rarely ever see them in the clothing department at Macy's.  Maybe they order them online or something.
2. There's a "subfield" of paranormal studies specializing in ghosts in checkered shirts?  That seems like kind of a narrow field of study, as if a psychologist decided only to use test subjects who were wearing argyle socks.  You'd think it'd limit your access to data pretty considerably.
3. So Bigfoots like plaid, eh?  No pinstripes or paisley or hoodies or NFL jerseys or anything?  Someone really needs to work with them on their fashion sense.  Not that I have anything against plaid (or, honestly, have that much room to criticize), but if that's all you wear it becomes a little monotonous.

The more recent article, though, gives us some additional examples, such as a family in Colorado whose car was attacked by "a hairy man or hairy animal... (who) had on a blue-and-white checkered shirt and long pants," a woman in Barnstaple, England who saw a "large black dog... (that) walked on its hind legs... and was covered in a cloak and a monk's hood," and a woman in Kent, England who saw a "hulking figure... (who) had a loincloth around its waist and furred boots."

So that's kind of alarming.  Not that monsters are adopting clothes, but that given the choice, they're deciding to wear blue-and-white check, monk's hoods, loincloths, and furry boots.  I mean, it's not that I'm expecting them to wear Armani suits, but even by my own dubious standards of sartorial elegance, this seems a little odd.

It also occurs to me, apropos of the plaid-wearing Bigfoots, that we might be talking about... people.  I say this from personal experience, given that my mom's family comes from the bayou country of southeastern Louisiana.  You know those folks on the This No Longer Has Anything To Do With History Channel, on the show Swamp People?  Yeah, those folks are all cousins of mine.  Seriously.  I have a photograph of my great-grandfather, along with his wife and ten children, wherein he could easily be mistaken for a Sasquatch in overalls.  I have heard from the older members of my family that he was a genuinely nice guy, but he certainly had the "hirsute" thing taken care of.

In any case, the whole thing throws us back into the realm of "the plural of anecdote is not data."  Unfortunately.  Because it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the field of cryptozoology.  It's also nice to think that in a harsh winter, the Sasquatches have some woolens to keep themselves warm, when their pelts, loincloths, and cloaks aren't enough.

Floating naked ghoul alert

It's been a long while since we've had a good report of cryptid activity, so I'm pleased to bring you a doozy today.  This one comes from the town of Lithia (near Tampa), Florida, so if you come from near there, you might want to be on the lookout.

The (unnamed) source of this peculiar story, which appeared yesterday on the phenomenally wacky site Phantoms and Monsters, says he was out walking his dog late one night last week, when he saw (and smelled) something pretty peculiar:

I was walking late one night with my German Shepherd, when I smelled an overwhelming stench of road kill.  I looked over into the woods near my home and saw a naked pale white man-like thing crawling in the woods.  It was on its hands, feet and knees about 3 inches above the ground.

So, we're already put on notice that this is going to be a pretty bizarre story.  I mean, look at the features of this thing we've already had thrown at us, in the first three sentences:

• naked
• pale
• crawling on all fours
• floating three inches off the ground
• smells like roadkill

Let's do a little thought experiment here.  Picture yourself walking a backroad in Florida late one summer night.  Heavy, humid, still air, thick underbrush on both sides of the road.  Crickets singing, a stray mosquito whining in your ear.  The only other sound is your footsteps, and your dog's panting.  You see a naked white ghoulish creature floating in the woods, and it smells like decomposing flesh.

What do you do?

I'll bet you my next month's salary it's not what this guy did.  To wit:

I changed hands with my flashlight which my dog's leash prevented me from immediately shining it in that direction.  In the 2 seconds it took to change hands and shine the light on this thing, it had moved 20 feet to near a tree it was trying to hide behind.  It saw my light as it was swinging towards it and quickly crunched into a cannon ball like posture, and balanced on its toes & balls of its feet, hiding its face and held perfectly still.

So, let's add two more charming characteristics to our cryptic-of-the-week:

• can move twenty feet in under two seconds
• freezes and hides its face whenever you look at it

What we have here sounds like the love child of a zombie and a Weeping Angel.  If you needed something else to populate your nightmares.

But to me, the most amazing thing isn't what the guy reports he saw, but what he thought upon seeing it.  Not only did he not do what I would have done when he first spotted the thing, namely, piss his pants and then have a stroke, he calmly aimed his flashlight at it, and decided... that it must be a mime:

I got a overwhelming feeling that if I kept shining the light on it, that it would look up at me with glowing eyes and a weird face. So I continued on with my walk. I thought maybe it was a teenager doing a mime, but there was no one taking a picture and this thing had a oddly pronounced spine and was absolutely hairless.

Again, "Oh, hey, I bet that's a naked teenage mime" would have to be the very last thing I'd think of, in his situation.  Be that as it may, he thought that was a serious enough possibility that he calmly finished his walk with his dog (both of them got home unscathed), and proceeded to do an internet search:

I went home and looked on the internet to see if this is something kids are doing now (painting themselves white, shaving all hair off, rolling around in road kill and crawling around late at night in woods).

I teach teenagers, and I can say with some authority that no, this is not something that teenagers do.

But he did find a photograph from a cryptid report in Louisiana three years ago that looked like what he'd seen:

Then he asks if this may have been a cryptid called a "Rake," and if anyone knows more about it.

I didn't, so I did a bit of searching, and in short order, I found out that the Rake is yet another fictional entity of the same origin as Slender Man -- the site Creepypasta (here's their page on the Rake).  So whatever the guy saw, I can say with some authority that it wasn't the Rake, given that the Rake doesn't exist.

Of course, my suspicion is that the Lithia Floating Naked Ghoul probably doesn't, either.  Starting with the guy's bizarre reaction to an apparition that would have most of us screaming like a little girl and running for home so fast you couldn't see our feet, in the fashion of a Looney Tunes character.  Also, what about his dog?  I don't know about your dog, but if my dog scented a creature that smelled like roadkill, he'd be frantic to go make friends, because roadkill is basically doggie cologne.

So I sort of doubt the entire account.  But I would, of course.  Actually, I'm strongly suspecting that there were some mind-altering chemicals involved.  But if I'm wrong, and you're down near Tampa, keep your eyes peeled.  If you see any stinking naked ghoul mimes, be sure to let me know.

Brazilian werewolf alert

Every once in a while, I'll run into a story that just gives me the shudders, despite my generally rationalistic approach.  All this does, of course, is to highlight a truism about the human condition; when it comes to a fight between logic and emotion, emotion usually wins.  We like to flatter ourselves, and think that our highly-developed prefrontal cortices make us smarter than our non-human cousins, but when it comes to a real throw-down match between the parts of the brain, I'm putting my money on the limbic system every time -- the part of the brain that, along with the hypothalamus, governs the "four F's" of behavior: feeding, fighting, flight, and... mating.

A story this week out of Brazil highlights the third "F" -- which stands for the flight response.  It could also stand for "fear," because that's what usually motivates an animal running away.  The story, which comes out of the town of São Gonçalo de Campos, near Feira de Santana, in the state of Bahia, is about a rather terrifying cryptid that has been sighted more than once in local neighborhoods.

Even the government officials are taking it seriously.  Apparently, for the last two weeks there's been a curfew in the town; no one is to be outside after 9 PM.  It started when a man identified only as "Pingo" described seeing a five-foot-tall black monster, which ran at him; Pingo turned and fled, escaping (he said) only by the narrowest of margins.  At first, the other villagers made fun of him -- until others had similar encounters.  Locals are calling it a "werewolf."

All of this would have been nothing more than another tale of "I saw something real, really I did" if it hadn't been for the footage captured on a home security camera.  Watch it for yourself:

Here's a still:

Okay, yes, I know.  There are no such things as werewolves.  There's no reason why this couldn't have been faked.  It probably is a guy in dark clothes jumping around in front of the homeowner's security camera, in order to keep the whole scare going.  Who knows?  Maybe it's even "Pingo," who dreamed the story up to have his fifteen minutes (or in this case, more like two weeks) of fame.

But I have to admit that watching this video gave me some very irrational shudders right up the spine.  There's something about the way the creature moved that just doesn't look... human.  I'm probably being suggestible, I realize that; our fight-or-flight responses have been programmed through millions of years of evolution to shriek at us, whenever we see a shadowy shape in the dark, "DEAR GOD IT'S A PREDATOR RUN FOR YOUR LIFE OR YOU WILL BE MESSILY DEVOURED."  The chances of it being anything other than a hoaxing human are very small.

Even so, if I lived in São Gonçalo de Campos, I would definitely abide by the curfew.  I probably would also deadbolt my doors shut at night.  Maybe it is only Pingo playing a prank; that's what my prefrontal cortex is telling me.  But if I lived anywhere near where this thing had been seen, my limbic system would outshout my prefrontal cortex without even breaking a sweat.

Why anecdote isn't enough: the strange story of Clarita Villanueva

When I was a kid, I was big fan of books with names like Strange True Tales of the Supernatural and World of the Weird.  These books often had seriously nightmare-inducing cover illustrations, stories that were (to a twelve-year-old, at least) pantswettingly terrifying, and that important little word on the spine: "Non-fiction."

I still enjoy many of those stories, all these decades later, but now it's solely for their entertainment value.  Some of the most memorable ones have all of the hallmarks of a great Tale For Around The Campfire -- a scary monster or ghost, an innocent victim, brave people trying to combat the forces of evil and bring order back to the world.

One of the ones I still recall to this day is the tale of Clarita Villanueva.

According to the best-known version of the story, Clarita was a young Filipina girl in her upper teens, living in poverty in Manila in 1951.  One night in May, she was found on the street, having an apparent seizure, by a policeman, who (not knowing what else to do) took her off to the local jail to "sleep it off."  But during the middle of the night, the girl began to shriek, claiming that a "bug-eyed man" all in black had floated through the bars and was biting her.  The policeman ran to her cell, and found the girl writhing on the floor, and bite marks -- surrounded by saliva -- were appearing on her arms, and in one case, on the back of her neck.

Whatever was biting her, though, was invisible to everyone but Clarita herself!

The policeman got the girl calmed down, and summoned the medical officer on duty in the jail, one Dr. Lara.  Dr. Lara arrived just in time to see the girl go into hysterics again, this time saying that the bug-eyed guy in black had returned, this time bringing a friend.  The doctor, too, saw bite marks appear on her skin.

The doctor, in an understandable state of fear, had the girl transferred from jail to a local hospital, where he saw to it that her wounds were treated.  She gradually relaxed, and the attacks weren't repeated.  She remained at the hospital for six weeks, gaining strength, and her fear of the strange creatures diminished.  Eventually, she was released, and (as far as the story tells) led a completely normal life thereafter.

The reason for the attacks, and who the mysterious creatures were, were never explained.

So, anyway.  See why this one scared me?  Everything about it is classic backbone-shivering horror, even down to the fact that no one ever figured out who her attackers were.  But now, forty-odd years later, I've come to think of this as the perfect example of why skeptics should not rely on anecdotal evidence.

Because if you do a search for "Clarita Villanueva," you'll come up with (literally) hundreds of versions of the tale.  The one I've related was the one popularized in those books I was so fond of as a child, but it's not the only one.

You have your religious versions.  Those seem to have been launched by a Christian evangelistic minister named Lester Sumrall, who had worked in Manila and probably heard the story there, but who claimed he actually saw, and treated, the girl.  In his version, Clarita Villanueva was a prostitute whose mother had been "a fortuneteller by vocation... holding seances, communicating with the dead, and using clairvoyance to predict to sinful people what they could expect in the future."  In this version, Clarita was not just being tormented by the monsters, she was (more or less) possessed by them; at one point, she shouted out "in a cold and inhuman voice" at one of her jailers, "You will die!" and the guy died four days later.  Dr. Lara finally called in a minister -- in Sumrall's original version it was Sumrall himself, but in others it's a Catholic priest -- and the minister after a "three-day confrontation with the devil inside her" expelled the evil spirits, and she fell to her knees with a smile and said, "The evil one is gone."

Then you have the "Reptilian Alien" version of the story, in which Dr. Lara is female (her first name is given as "Marianna"), and the creatures are interdimensional aliens from another world.  Cautions are given that these extraterrestrials are "non-emotional creatures intent on performing acts that are considered by humans as evil or malicious."  In this version, no religious folks of any kind were involved; the attacks subsided on their own.

A third version takes a psychic angle on the whole thing.  Here, Clarita Villanueva was a "vagrant" who was arrested for living on the street.  It occurred in 1952, not 1951, as the other versions claimed, and the attending doctor was male again -- "Dr. D. Mariano Lara."  In this version, she also was given an exorcism, but before that was apparently receiving information as well as bite marks from the creatures -- prior to the exorcism she was speaking in English, but afterwards didn't understand the language at all!

And so on.  Some versions call her "Carlita," not "Clarita."  The girl's age varies from 15 to 23.  The outcome differs wildly, from her returning to her poverty-stricken existence, to her finding Jesus and devoting her life to religion.  Even the inimitable Jack Chick took a crack at the story, in his bizarre über-Christian "Chick Tracts:"

All of this is why anyone who is interested in more than a quick scary story -- i.e., fiction -- needs more than anecdote to be convinced.  Human memory being what it is, not to mention the human capacity for embellishment and outright lying, a story by itself proves nothing.  In order to believe something -- or even to determine if there's anything there to believe -- we need hard evidence, something beyond the vague reports of one, or ten, or even a hundred people.

And the problem goes deeper than that, because (of course) these aren't all independent reports.  A researcher, with adequate time and energy, might be able to track all of these versions backwards and see where they'd come from, developing (as it were) a cladistic tree for this odd urban legend.  Ultimately, we might find the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all of the versions of the Clarita Villanueva story, and see what form it took.

But even then, there's no guarantee that it was true in the first place.  There may have really been a girl named Clarita Villanueva who lived in Manila in the early 1950s and had some bizarre experiences; but if she did, my bet is that she was either epileptic or schizophrenic, and everything else about the story (including the bites on the back of the neck) were later additions to add a nice frisson to the tale.  The fact that the story is still making the rounds, sixty years later, doesn't tell you anything about its truth or falsity.

As Gary Taubes put it, speculations and assumptions do not become the truth simply because they are endlessly repeated.  And anecdotes, however much they are embellished, and however often they end up in "non-fiction" anthologies, remain tall tales without much in the way of real value to skeptics.  In science, we need more than just a good story to convince us.