What Is a Cryptid? Why the Woods Keep Making Monsters
What is a cryptid, and how does a strange sighting become folklore?
From Mothman and Bigfoot to Dogman and the Fresno Nightcrawler, some legends started with footprints, some with frightened witnesses, some with bad footage and at least one with an April Fools’ joke. We went looking for where the stories actually began.
There’s something about the woods after dark that makes a strange noise harder to shrug off.
A branch snaps beyond the headlamp. Something moves between two trees and is gone before your eyes catch up. You hear an animal call you don’t recognise and, for a few seconds, your brain gets to fill in whatever you missed.
Most of the time it’s probably a deer, a bird or a branch landing at exactly the wrong moment. Every now and then somebody comes home with a story instead, and that’s the part we’re interested in.
Not another massive list of terrifying things supposedly hiding in American forests, but how one strange encounter becomes Mothman, Bigfoot or Dogman and somehow sticks around for decades.
Because when you start tracing them backwards, they all got there differently.
So what is a cryptid?
A cryptid is basically a creature people report or believe exists, but whose existence hasn’t been scientifically verified. Bigfoot is the obvious example. The Loch Ness Monster is another.
The word itself is surprisingly young. Canadian cryptozoologist John E. Wall introduced cryptid in 1983 as a less sensational term for the animals cryptozoologists thought might still be out there.
A lot of the stories now sitting under that label are much older, but the tidy category we put around them isn’t. It has also become pretty loose. Spend enough time online and almost anything hairy, winged, pale or unfortunate enough to appear in a blurry photograph eventually gets called a cryptid.
Once you start looking at where the individual stories came from, though, they’re rarely that tidy.
Mothman started with witnesses and one very uncertain headline
On November 15, 1966, Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette were driving near the old West Virginia Ordnance Works outside Point Pleasant when they reported seeing a large winged figure with bright red eyes.
They said it followed their car as they left. The next morning, the Point Pleasant Register ran a headline that’s honestly hard to improve on: “Couples See Man-Sized Bird...Creature...Something.”
More reports followed, along with explanations involving owls, sandhill cranes, hoaxes and simple misidentification. Journalist John Keel later pulled the sightings into the much stranger world of The Mothman Prophecies, helping what began as a local story travel far beyond West Virginia.
Then, in December 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed and 46 people died.
Mothman eventually became tied to the disaster as a warning, an omen or something darker. The bridge itself had a documented structural failure, so that supernatural connection belongs to the folklore that grew afterwards rather than the engineering record.
That doesn’t make what happened around Point Pleasant any less strange. Real people made reports, newspapers covered them and then a real disaster followed. Over time those things became tangled together so tightly that separating the town from the monster is now almost impossible.
Bigfoot had a history before Bigfoot had a name
Bigfoot is harder to trace because several different histories are sitting on top of each other.
Stories about large, wild or hairy humanlike beings existed among Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest long before giant footprints started turning up beside a California logging road. The Sts’ailes people of British Columbia, for example, have traditions around Sasq’ets with their own history and cultural meaning.
We wouldn’t treat those traditions as nothing more than early Bigfoot sightings. They existed in their own context long before the modern monster industry arrived, and pulling all of them into one neat Bigfoot timeline loses a lot of what made them their own.
The modern American Bigfoot story is much easier to watch taking shape.
In 1958, enormous footprints appeared around a road-building site at Bluff Creek in Northern California. Bulldozer operator Jerry Crew made a plaster cast, took it to a newspaper and ended up photographed holding it. The name Bigfoot took off from there.
Decades later, the family of contractor Ray Wallace said Wallace had made those tracks as a prank. By then, though, Bigfoot had books, expeditions, witness accounts, television appearances and the Patterson-Gimlin film behind him.
Explaining one set of footprints wasn’t going to put all of that back in the box.
Dogman might have the strangest origin of the lot
Michigan’s Dogman gets properly weird once you start pulling at the history.
In 1987, WTCM radio production director Steve Cook wanted something for April Fools’ Day. He liked folklore and monster stories, so he invented an upright, wolf-like creature for Northern Michigan and wrote a song called The Legend.
Cook has never hidden that part. The strange bit is what happened after the song aired.
Listeners started contacting the station with stories of their own. Some said relatives had seen something similar. Others claimed they had encountered it themselves.
The Dogman timeline now often gets pushed back to an alleged 1887 encounter in Wexford County, with sightings supposedly recurring in years ending in seven. The problem is that the strongest documentary trail starts with Cook’s 1987 song, where that older history was already part of the story he created.
Repeat something for long enough online and eventually it starts looking suspiciously like a source.
That doesn’t mean everyone who later reported something was inventing it. Cook himself has talked about people contacting him with experiences they genuinely believed had happened. Maybe they saw bears, dogs, strange movement in bad light or something they couldn’t identify. Maybe the Dogman story gave an old memory a shape and a name.
Either way, something invented for an April Fools’ radio spot ended up with a life well beyond the joke that started it.
Fresno Nightcrawler is what happens when folklore gets CCTV
The Fresno Nightcrawler comes from a completely different world.
It also looks considerably less threatening than most of the creatures here. Depending on the footage, it’s basically a pair of white trousers going for a walk without bothering to bring the person who owns them.
The story begins with grainy security footage recorded in Fresno, California, in 2007. A resident had installed CCTV after his dogs kept barking at night, and the recording appeared to show a pale, long-legged figure walking across the property.
Then the internet got hold of it.
There were television investigations, attempted recreations, later videos and plenty of theories about puppets and hoaxes. The original recording has apparently been lost, leaving the familiar clip as a copy of footage being played on a screen.
You’d think that would have been the end of it. Instead, the Nightcrawler became memes, artwork, videos and one of California’s stranger local cryptids.
Maybe that’s partly because it doesn’t seem particularly bothered about frightening anyone. There’s no prophecy, livestock massacre or approaching disaster attached to it. It just wanders through Fresno looking extremely odd, which is honestly enough.
Chupacabra changed as the story travelled
The original Chupacabra looked very different from the hairless dog-like creature most people picture now.
Reports surged in Puerto Rico in 1995 after unusual livestock deaths around Canóvanas. Early descriptions leaned towards something stranger: upright, large-eyed and sometimes described with spikes or quills running down its back.
As the story spread, the creature changed with it.
By the 2000s, reports from Mexico and the American Southwest increasingly involved hairless four-legged animals. Several supposed Chupacabra carcasses later turned out to be coyotes, dogs or other canids affected by mange or similar conditions.
Somewhere along the way, that version became the familiar one.
That might be the cleanest example in the whole article of what happens when folklore travels. Details get picked up, others disappear and eventually the creature people remember can look almost nothing like the one that started the story.
Not everything strange in the woods is a cryptid
The internet has made cryptid a very stretchy word.
Traditionally, we’re talking about an alleged physical creature that hasn’t been scientifically verified. Bigfoot fits easily enough. The Fresno Nightcrawler can fit too if you take the footage as a claim that some unknown creature actually crossed that yard.
Other things have completely different histories.
The Rake comes from internet horror and creepypasta rather than a long trail of people trying to document an unknown animal. SCP is collaborative fiction. Skinwalker traditions are different again, coming from Navajo culture long before the internet started using the word as shorthand for almost anything pale and unsettling beside a road at night.
Shoving all of those into one big monster category doesn’t really make them more interesting. It mostly wipes out what makes each one different in the first place.
Why do the woods keep producing monsters?
Probably because the woods leave a lot unfinished.
At night, you rarely get the whole picture. You hear half a sound. Something moves beyond the beam of your torch. Two eyes shine back without enough of the animal attached to work out what you’re looking at.
Distance gets weird. Size gets harder to judge. Animals you know perfectly well in daylight can look completely wrong when you only catch part of them.
Then somebody tells the story.
Another person has heard something similar. A newspaper gives it a headline. A radio host gives it a name. A bad piece of footage gives it legs.
The technology changes, but the basic process doesn’t seem all that different. Mothman travelled through newspapers. Bigfoot had plaster casts, photographs and television. Dogman had radio. The Fresno Nightcrawler had CCTV and the internet.
Now a strange clip can leave somebody’s backyard and reach millions of people before anyone has really worked out what was in it.
None of that proves the creature was real, but we don’t think it means every witness has to be lying either. Sometimes people genuinely see something they can’t explain.
What happens to the story after that is where things get interesting.
Sometimes the story ends up belonging to the place
This is probably why some cryptids survive long after the original evidence starts looking shaky.
You don’t need Mothman to be an undiscovered flying animal to see what the story became in Point Pleasant. People reported something, newspapers covered it, the story stuck and eventually the town built a museum, a statue and part of its local identity around the creature.
Bigfoot has done something similar across the Pacific Northwest. Dogman belongs to Northern Michigan despite the best-documented version of the legend starting with an April Fools’ radio song. The Nightcrawler belongs to Fresno after a few seconds of terrible security footage.
By that point, what was actually standing there is still an interesting question. It’s just no longer the only one.
The place has picked up the story too.
We’ve obviously got a soft spot for this stuff
If you’ve been around Wyld Peak for a while, Mothman and Bigfoot turning up here probably isn’t much of a surprise.
The stranger end of outdoor folklore has been finding its way into our designs for years, mostly because we like these stories for the same reason we like old tracks, abandoned places and weird bits of local history. Finding out where something started rarely ruins it. Usually it gives you something else to follow.
That’s pretty much how Mothman, Bigfoot and Dogman ended up on our Cryptid & Urban Legend T-Shirts, with some of the same weirdness eventually spilling over into the Cryptid Stickers & Urban Legend Decals.
If you’ve made it this far into a story involving Dogman and self-propelled trousers, we probably don’t need to explain the appeal much more than that.
Final take
A cryptid is supposed to be a creature nobody has proved exists, but the stories are much easier to follow.
Mothman starts with frightened witnesses and a West Virginia newspaper. Bigfoot runs through older traditions, California footprints and decades of media. Dogman somehow goes from an April Fools’ radio song to people claiming they saw one before the song even existed. The Nightcrawler gets a few seconds on CCTV and walks straight into internet folklore.
Then the stories keep moving. Details shift, new sightings turn up and explanations get added alongside whatever somebody remembers hearing years ago.
Somewhere in all of that, a strange encounter can become a monster people are still arguing about decades later.
Whether anything unusual was actually standing between those trees is a different question.
We’re happy leaving a little room for that one.
FAQ
What is a cryptid?
A cryptid is a creature people claim exists or report seeing, but whose existence hasn’t been scientifically verified. Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster are two of the best-known examples.
Who came up with the word cryptid?
Canadian cryptozoologist John E. Wall introduced the term in 1983 as a less sensational way to describe the creatures cryptozoologists were interested in.
Is Mothman a cryptid?
Yes. Mothman is commonly classed as a cryptid and modern American folk creature. The best-known reports began around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in November 1966.
Is Bigfoot the same as Sasquatch?
The names are commonly used for the same modern cryptid, but their histories aren’t identical.
“Bigfoot” became widely popular after the 1958 Bluff Creek footprint reports, while “Sasquatch” developed from a name connected to Sts’ailes tradition in British Columbia.
Did Michigan Dogman start as an April Fools’ joke?
The best-documented modern Dogman story begins with Steve Cook’s 1987 April Fools’ radio song The Legend.
The much stranger part came afterwards, when listeners began contacting him with alleged encounters of their own.
Where did the Fresno Nightcrawler come from?
Its modern legend traces back to grainy CCTV footage recorded in Fresno, California, in 2007.
The clip spread online and eventually developed its own fan culture, later videos and alleged sightings.
Is the Rake a cryptid?
We wouldn’t call it one in the traditional sense.
The Rake comes from internet horror and creepypasta rather than a documented history of people searching for an unknown animal.
Are cryptids real?
None of the famous creatures covered here has been scientifically verified as an unknown animal.
That doesn’t make the stories meaningless. People made reports, communities adopted them and some of these creatures have become inseparable from the places they’re tied to.
What actually started the story is often the more interesting question anyway.