Cryptozoological Beasts

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March 24, 2016 by erniemarshall

 

The Honey Island Swamp Monster? One of many mythical beasts, Photo by Ernie Marshall

I took this photo, some years ago, at the New Orleans zoo. The zoo has its usual elephants and giraffes and such, but also a large section featuring animals native to Louisiana: alligators, otters, and the like. Since Louisiana is rich in legend and lore concerning strange, mysterious, and scary beasts, an exhibit of one of these legendary denizens of the swamps and bayous was included. This not-so-cuddly looking creature is known as the Honey Island Swamp Monster. It is rumored to roam the 70,000-acre Honey Island Swamp, located between the East and West Pearl Rivers, near Slidell, Louisiana (northeast of New Orleans).

I happened to spend a couple of days wandering about the Honey Island Swamp, not looking for the swamp monster, but following up on a “sighting” of an ivory-billed woodpecker. This bird is itself another “legendary” creature of sorts, thought to be extinct since the 1940s. But more about that later.

The Honey Island Swamp Monster is just one of many similar large, hirsute, bipedal man-beasts, including Bigfoot or Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest, The Yeti or Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas of Tibet, and the Yowie of Australia. All of these creatures go back to aboriginal lore and are still very much alive in contemporary legend, as evidenced by the series Finding Bigfoot on Animal Planet, and other popular books, TV shows, and films.

One unique detail about the Honey Island Swamp Monster, making it a swampland version of these man-beasts, is that its feet are supposedly webbed. Tracks left by the beast (but later proven to be faked) showed webbing between the toes. This gave rise to the notion that this monster arose from the mating between a gorilla (escaped from a traveling circus?) and a large alligator. Besides the biological impossibility of such a union giving rise to viable offspring, alligators do not have noticeably webbed feet. They primarily use their tails to propel themselves through the water.

These bogus boogiemen are just some of the multitude of fanciful fauna that populate remote areas of the planet, at least in our imaginations. “Crytozoology” is the term coined to cover such strange life forms. Zoology is the study of animals, and “crypto” is Greek for “hidden.”

At one end of the group are more or less supernatural beings such as zombies, werewolves, and vampires, and at the other, space aliens or extraterrestrials. In between: Bigfoot, La Chuapacabra (a beast that mutilates livestock), the Loch Ness Monster and other deep lake and sea monster types, mermaids and mermen, dragons of European and Chinese lore, and all the half-human, half-animal beings of ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology, including harpies, sirens, minotaurs, satyrs, and the sphinx, all jostling each other for room on the stage of the human imagination.

If I sound skeptical about all this, it must be because I am. Large bears, including grizzlies, animals that can walk upright for short distances, roam Bigfoot country. Bear tracks (the hind feet) can look quite human. Tracks in snow, sand, and mud tend to enlarge and change their shape with time and weather. The “sightings” in at least three famous cases, the “mothman” of Point Pleasant, West Virginia (1996), the “alien monster” of Flatwoods, West Virginia (1952), and the attack of “the little green men” at Kelly, Kentucky, (1955) turned out, upon investigation, to be large owls.

Playing the devil’s advocate, and before we indulge in ridicule, here are some points in sympathy with the belief in such beings.

An animal being bizarre, even to the point of monstrosity, is no argument against its existence. Consider, as just one example, the duck-billed platypus, a semi-aquatic mammal of Australia that has a duck’s bill, webbed feet, and lays eggs, looking something like the offspring of an otter and a duck. Who would have thunk.

Several animals, such as the gorilla and the giant squid, were thought until recent times, by reputable authorities, to be fictitious. It turns out they were just “hidden,”in dense jungle and deep oceans. To this day new species are being discovered.

Remnant populations of species long thought to be extinct do occasionally turn up. A coelacanth, for example, a primitive fish believed extinct for over 50 million years (a “living fossil” that has not changed in 400 million years), was caught in 1938 off the coast of South Africa.

But let’s get back to the Honey Island Swamp, draped in mist, Spanish moss, and monster lore. In exploring it I did not find any ivory-billed woodpeckers, but did not expect to. The last documented sighting of the bird was in 1939 by James Tanner, who then estimated that there were only about 25 of them left in the Singer Tract in Louisiana. Subsequently, the Singer Company logged out the tract to make sewing machine cabinets.

However, since then, supposed sightings of this magnificent bird have sporadically occurred in the southeastern US, its original range. My guess is that since it was likely extinct by then, but still sought after, the creature had entered the domain of “living legend.” This perhaps gives us an insight into why “sightings” of various legendary beasts persist. Is the world just more mysterious, marvelous, and ultimately wonderful (“full of wonder”) if these creatures are still somewhere at large, occasionally to be glimpsed among forest shadows?

This article was originally published in The Coastland Times.

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