Calling all Weaverville Library Monster Lovers

Hello all,
I finally have all your wonderful monster pictures and stories uploaded!
I hope you can join me on Saturday afternoon, January 17th, at Weaverville Library.
I have two chapters of my Bogeyman 101 book that I would like to share with you. I am looking for editors who won't be afraid to tell me if the stories are too short, too long, or boring (I hope not).
Ask Lauren at the desk for more details.
Hope to see you there!
Karen Miller

The Lightning Monster

Evil monster with elephant nose

Mountain Mouse

Mega Muncher

Evil soccer Player

MOnster Number Four-The Puffies

Monster Number Three-The Evil Dancer

Monster Number Two-The Massacre

New Monsters-Monster Number One-The Electrifier

New Book Reccomendations for Fall-Winter 2008

These are all terrific reads!
Elementary School
The Retired Kid John Agee Allie Finkel’s Rules for Girls- Meg Cabot
Baby Dragon- Amy Erlich Old Bear -Kevin Henkes
Waggit’s Tale-Peter Howe Toy Dance Party Emily Jenkins
Gully’s Travels –Tor Seidler Nurk-Vernon

Early Chapter books

Magic Schoolhouse Series-Joanna Cole
Kids of Polk House School Series-Patrica Reilly Giff
Any title by Arnold Lobel
Magic Treehouse Series-Mary Pope Osburne
Junie B Jones- Barbara Park
Ricky Ricotta Series Dave Pilkey
Captain Underpants Series-Dave Pilkey
A to Z Mysteries- Ron Roy and John Gurney
Time Warp Trio Series-Jon Scieszka and lane Smith
Kids of Polk House School Series-Patrica Reilly Giff

Middle Grade
Masterpiece-Elise Broach
Hit the Road –Manny Burch
Hate that Cat-Creech
My One Hundred Adventures-Polly Horvath
Highway Cats-Janet Taylor Lisle
ANY BOOK BY-Eva Ibbotson
The Countess Below Stairs-Eva Ibbotson


Young Adult

The Hunger Game-Suzanne Collins The Graveyard Book-Neil Gaiman
Sunshine-Robin Mckinley Impossible-Nancy Werlin

It is really friendly but accidentally things on fire. It used to eat leaves, but it burned them. Now it eats rocks.

The Lumpman of Pennywinkle Pond

You know when this monster is mad because sparks in her eyes.

When he moves along, water and everything else clears out of the way.

A scamef- a very nice creature that lives tn the desert. It's a vegetarian. It has 2 long arms and hands and water in its humps. It can't swim.

My monster ran into a tree and his head flipped upside down!!

The monster Gallery from Carolina Mountains Lit Fest in September

what do you think of this creature?

Desert worm

The most feared animal of the Gobi desert is the legendary allghoi khorkhoi which is also known as the Mongolian death worm. The name is descriptive: it means "intestine worm", because it is supposed to resemble a four-feet-long animated piece of intestine. It surfaces after rain and sprays anyone who gets too close with an acid-like substance that kills instantly. It also radiates a killer electrical charge. The existence of the worm is unproven, despite four research teams having tried to find it since 1990. Many scientists believe it is a snake: the venom-spitting death adder or king cobra are the most likely candidates. One problem is that Mongolians believe that mentioning the worm is unlucky, so reliable first-hand accounts are hard to come by.

If you love Nessie, you'll be happy to know...

Sweden's Loch Ness monster possibly caught on camera

Aug 29, 2008

STOCKHOLM (AFP) — Sweden's own version of the Loch Ness monster, the Storsjoe or Great Lake monster, has been caught on film by surveillance videos, an association that installed the cameras said Friday.

The legend of the Swedish beast has swirled for nearly four centuries, with some 200 sightings reported in the lake in central Sweden.

"On Thursday at 12:21 pm, we filmed the movements of a live being. And it was not a pike, nor a perch, we're sure of that," Gunnar Nilsson, the head of a shopkeepers' association in Svenstavik, told AFP.

The association, together with the Jaemtland province and local municipality of Berg, installed six surveillance cameras in the lake in June, including two underwater devices.

The project, which has so far cost some 400,000 kronor (43,000 euros, 62,500 dollars), is aimed at resolving the mystery of the Swedish Nessie.

The first sighting dates back to 1635 and the most recent to July 2007, with most speaking of a long, serpent-like beast with humps, a small cat or dog-like head, and ears or fins pressed against the neck.

The association employs one person full-time to review the recorded video footage each day.

In the images filmed Thursday and posted on a website dedicated to the Storsjoe monster (www.storsjoodjuret.nu), a long serpent-like being is seen swimming in the murky waters.

"A highly-advanced system on one of the cameras detected heat produced by the cells," indicating that it was a live being, Nilsson said.

"It's very exciting and quite spectacular," he said.

He readily admitted however that the project was also "aimed at improving business around the lake."

"The monster has helped us," he added.

Some 20 more cameras are due to be installed soon, including one at a depth of 30 metres (100 feet) to catch any movements under the winter ice

Great Visit to North Buncombe Elementary School

I haven't posted anything recently because I have been busy working on a new book (about the bogeyman) and preparing for my visit to North Buncombe. Last Friday was the date of my visit and it was terrific! I spoke with 700 students! They were wonderfully attentive and fun to be with.
I DO have something new to share with you. One of the most interesting extinct animals I have learned about is the Thylacine tiger from New Zealand. It was thought to be extinct. Actually, it still is. But look at what the scientists have done with a bit of its DNA. It's surprising.



Extinct tiger gene 'resurrected'
5:00AM Wednesday May 21, 2008
By Greg Ansley


The world thought it had seen the last of the Tasmanian tiger in 1936 when Benjamin, the sole surviving member of Australia's lost packs of big marsupial carnivores, died in Hobart Zoo.

But a team of Australian and American scientists have brought at least a trace of the extinct animals back to life in a world-beating experiment that activated thylacine genes from museum specimens in the embryo of a mouse.

Tiger DNA introduced into the embryo resumed biological activity - the first time genes from an extinct species have triggered a response in another living organism.

In time, and with a great deal more work, researchers believe the breakthrough could ultimately enable the resurrection of not only the tiger but also of other extinct species.

In the meantime, they said their work could help scientists unlock and understand many of the secrets still surrounding dinosaurs and other animals lost to the world, and further the development of biomedicines.

The publication of the team's work yesterday in the international science journal PLoS ONE followed earlier, disappointing attempts to resurrect the tiger using DNA from museums.


Plans announced in 1999 were dropped three years later after scientists at Sydney's Australian Museum could not find thylacine DNA of sufficient quality, although one of the key researchers, Professor Mike Archer, later said it was still hoped that the project could be renewed using new techniques.

Archer, now Dean of Science at the University of New South Wales, told ABC radio that the reactivation of the thylacine DNA in a mouse embryo was a significant step forward, and that he believed extinct species could be brought back to life.

"I'm personally convinced this is going to happen," he said.

"We are working on a number of projects like this.

"I've got another group working on another extinct Australian animal and we think this is highly probable,"he said.

Researchers who achieved the new tiger DNA breakthrough are far more cautious, and said yesterday that there was no way the technique could be used to bring back an entire thylacine, or any other extinct creature.

Dr Andrew Pask, R.D. Wright Fellow at the University of Melbourne's zoology department, who led the research, said the work in Melbourne and at the University of Texas had established proof of principle that could help discover the unique qualities that defined a species.

Previously researchers could only examine the gene sequences from extinct species - but now they would be able to examine the functioning genes of a vast range of lost creatures, from dinosaurs to mammoths and Neanderthals.

And the future could bring incredible new advances, with rapid advancement in gene sequencing likely to produce the entire thylacine genome within a few years.

To bring an extinct species back to life would require a vastly more complex and difficult programme matching tens of thousands of genes to their correct positions in chromosomal packages.

Professor Marilyn Renfree, Federation Fellow and Laureate Professor at Melbourne University's zoology department, said the pace of scientific discovery was advancing at such a pace that it was conceivable that extinct animals could one day be brought back to life.

She said that the DNA used in the project had been taken from 100-year-old specimens from Melbourne's Museum Victoria, and had been inserted into the mouse embryo with a "reporter" gene, which produced a blue colour indicating the thylacine DNA was functioning biologically.

The tiger gene used in the experiment has a similar function in developing cartilage and bone as its counterpart has in the mouse.

"We were very, very excited when we saw it working," Renfree said.

As well as allowing researchers new access to previously lost genetic biodiversity, Renfree said the team's discovery was critical in a time when extinction rates - especially of mammals - were increasing at an alarming pace.

Jeremy from Prairie School-one of the best schools in Illinois!

Jeremy Ahn to me



that's pretty cool. and no. i don't need any more. Just as long as you visit Prairie School again!!!

A good question: Jeremy A asks how long it takes to write a book

Hi Jeremy, it probably ends up to be about a year before I finish a book's first draft. I try to write 3 hours a day. Sometimes that 3 hours includes research, though.
Right now I have finished all my research for the bogeyman book, and I am letting it "marinate" in my brain until the structure of the book comes to me. I don't want to say too much about it because then I will use up the creative juice I want to save for composing the book.
That was a good question. Do you want to know more?

Another case of extinction? NOT!

It's usually the tiny creatures that get discovered or are found not to be extinct after all. But, six hours ago, look what I found on the National Geographic website.
Read and wonder!


National Geographic News: NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/NEWS




"Extinct" Pygmy Elephants Found Living on Borneo
John Roach
for National Geographic News
April 23, 2008

A gift exchange between Asian rulers several centuries ago may have inadvertently saved a population of elephants from extinction, according to a new study.

Today a small population of unusually placid and genetically distinct elephants lives in the northeast corner of Borneo, a Southeast Asian island shared by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei (see map).

Scientists have long wondered why the elephants' range is so restricted and why they are less aggressive than other wild elephants in Asia.

The new research suggests the elephants may have descended from a population of elephants that originally lived on the island of Java in what is now Indonesia (see Indonesia map).

The finding is based on an analysis of archaeological and historical records. It supports a long-held local belief that the elephants arrived there from the island of Sulu, which is now part of the Philippines.

The sultan of Java is thought to have sent the Javan elephants as a gift to the sultan of Sulu. For unknown reasons, descendants of the elephants were subsequently shipped to Borneo and abandoned.

Back on Java, the original population went extinct by the end of the 18th century, after the arrival of Europeans in Southeast Asia.

The gift to the sultan of Sulu may therefore have inadvertently kept the lineage alive.

"There's a lot of literature on these exchanges between the different courts," said Michael Stuewe, an elephant biologist for WWF, an international conservation organization.

"These elephants may be the oldest example of a wild [mammal] population that is saved without intention to do so by royalty and through a captive detour," Stuewe said.

DNA and Archaeology

Stuewe was not an author of the new study, but he was part of the research team that showed the Bornean elephants to be a genetically distinct population of Asian elephants.

He began studying them in 1999 as part of a project to determine how to protect wildlife from the rapid conversion of Southeast Asian forest habitat into palm oil plantations.

He noticed then that the elephants were unusual—shorter and rounder than other Asian elephants and with longer tails.

"They were like little cartoon figures of an elephant," he said.

(See photos of pygmy elephants and the threats facing them.)

His colleagues at Columbia University in New York conducted DNA analysis in 2003 and found the Bornean population to be genetically distinct.

The team concluded the elephants were likely isolated on the island when the last land bridges connecting Borneo to the mainland disappeared some 18,000 years ago.

WWF's Junaidi Payne was a co-author of the genetics study and the new paper.

He and co-authors Earl of Cranbrook and Charles M.U. Leh were unable to find archaeological or historical evidence confirming the existence of so-called pygmy elephants on Borneo beyond a few centuries.

They concluded that the most plausible explanation is the Bornean elephant population "consists of remnant survivors of the extinct Javan population."

The study, the authors add, raises the importance of the Bornean population and suggests other large mammals could be saved from extinction by removal from threatened habitat to safer locations.

(Related: Borneo Elephants: From Pest to Priority [September 4, 2003])

The research was published last week in the Sarawak Museum Journal.

Palm Oil Threat

Simon Hedges is the Asian elephant coordinator for the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

He said the new study makes a "plausible case" that the Bornean population is descended from the Javan elephants but that more research is needed before firm conclusions can be drawn.

If the authors of the new study are correct, he added, the remnant Javan population on Borneo will be important for genetic reasons, since it would contain material thought lost from the gene pool.

However, the population will likely be given less of a conservation priority, since it is outside its original wild range.

"[Such] factors are generally seen as downgrading the importance of such populations versus the truly wild animals," he said.

WWF's Stuewe noted that if the finding is confirmed, it will mark another instance in which royalty had inadvertently saved a mammal from extinction.

A similar fate met the alpine ibex, a mountain goat whose remaining population was protected by an Italian king in the 1850s, captive-bred by the Swiss, and reintroduced throughout the Alps in the 1900s.

European royalty imported Przewalski horses from Mongolia in the early 20th century for their stables. The wild horses went extinct in the 1960s. European captives were reintroduced to Mongolia in 1992.

"The ability of these large charismatic mammals to recover from what seem to be extreme [population] bottlenecks apparently is there," Stuewe said.

"There is a chance for these guys if you take care of them."

Palm Oil Threat

Today, Stuewe added, the elephants face new challenges from the rapidly developing palm oil industry in northeastern Borneo, where the remnant population is located.

Driven by surging demand from the biofuels industry, Stuewe said the forest is being converted to palm oil plantations at increasing rates.

"And unfortunately," he said, "oil palm plantations are to elephants what a candy store is to little kids—they just love them."

The love, however, is not shared by plantation managers who view the elephants as a nuisance and kill them. Biologists estimate about a thousand elephants remain on Borneo.

The only hope for these elephants now is protection of the lowland forest as nature reserves or sustainably managed logging concessions, Stuewe said.

Hedges, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, noted the palm oil expansion threatens a host of species on Borneo.

"One ultimately hopes that some of the expansions of the oil palm industry are going to be controlled and done in an appropriate way so that the whole suite of species at risk isn't wiped out," he said.

© National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.

It isn't extinct after all! It's in Vietnam!

Researchers find rare giant turtle in Vietnam
Discovery carries great scientific and cultural significance
AP
Swinhoe's soft-shell turtle was previously thought to be extinct in the wild before this one was discovered in northern Vietnam.
View related photos

Related stories



CLEVELAND - Researchers from the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo have discovered a rare giant turtle in northern Vietnam — a find that carries great scientific and cultural significance. Swinhoe's soft-shell turtle was previously thought to be extinct in the wild. Three other turtles of the species are in captivity, said experts from the Zoo's Asian turtle program.

The discovery represents hope for the species, said Doug Hendrie, the Vietnam-based coordinator of the zoo program.

Turtle expert Peter Pritchard, president of the Chelonian Research Institute, confirmed the find based on a photo Hendrie showed him.
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"It looked like pretty solid evidence. The animal has a pretty distinctive head," Pritchard said.

There have been rumors for years of a mythical creature living deep in the waters of a northern Vietnam lake. Some in a village west of Hanoi claimed to be blessed by catching a glimpse of its concave shell as it crested above the surface of their lake.

A national legend tells of a giant golden turtle that bestowed upon the Vietnamese people a magic sword and victory over Chinese invaders in the 16th century. Whether that sacred turtle has materialized in the 21st century will be a matter of cultural debate among the Vietnamese.

"This is one of those mythical species that people always talked about but no one ever saw," said Geoff Hall, zoo general curator.


Pritchard said an amateur photographed a Swinhoe's soft-shell turtle in southern China about six months ago that he believes was legitimate.

"It's on the very brink of extinction, so every one counts," Pritchard said.

The Cleveland Metroparks Zoo began its effort to preserve and protect Asian turtles in 2003 amid reports of increased killings for food or to make traditional medicine from their bones. Development and pollution also led to loss of nesting habitats along rivers, zoo officials said.

The zoo has put more than $275,000 into Asian turtle conservation efforts since 2000 and has supported Hendrie since 2003, officials said.

His team and scientists from Education for Nature-Vietnam had searched lakes and wetlands along the Red River for three years before hearing about the creature living outside Hanoi.

The turtle remains in the lake and researchers have notified the Vietnamese government of its existence, Hendrie said.

Thank you for signing monsters and water beast for me I really like the hoop snakes story .I cant wait to read all of the wonderful stories you wrote .Thanks
Teresa

Dear Teresa,
You are helping to motivate me! I cannot wait to finish the bogyman book and send it off to the editor. I have been working slowly in my research, but will speed it up so you all have something NEW to read!
Keep reminding me to get to work on the book!
Sincerely,
Karen Miller

ow!I can`t believe you taped up my picture.My teacher thought it also looked good.All my friends just laughed at it.The teeth I do wish I left white.They do look weird.

Again thak you for coming to talk to us.The thing I love the most about every year of school is the authors that come,especially you!

Before I forget,Erin White,a great friend,and I wrote a story called Lullaby Land last year.We have made a recorded play of it!This year I wrote the 2nd book Lullaby Land:They`re Back.We also recorded tahat one!Reply me back if you would like a copy of these stories.

I cheak my mail 5 times at lest every week so if you do reply, you will most likely get a reply as well!
Liz

Dear Liz, I would like to scan the picture and post it to the blog. It is one of my favorite monsters!
And please, send the story. I will be happy to listen or read it!
Karen

To Liz in Kingsport

Dear Liz,
I can tell you have a great imagination and a deft artist's hand. I taped your picture of a monster right above my PC so I can look at it when I write.
That's interesting that you thought about all the work it took to wrote a book. It did take a long time, but I enjoyed learning about the monsters. There are so many that I couldn't fit into this book! One of them is a creature that supposedly lives in Central Africa.(I'll give you a hint...it resembles a creature from the time of the dinosaurs.)
Karen Miller

To Chloe from Kingswport

Hi Chloe,
Have you ever thought about becoming a writer? I chuckled when I read that you thought I was like a big scoop of cookie dough. I cannot think of anything better than to be compared to that yummy thing.

I would be so happy to read any one of your stories. Just send them to my gmail,
karenhokansonmiller@gmail.com.
Karen Miller

To Jessica from Kingsport

Dear Jessica,
What a nice note you wrote! I am so happy you enjoyed my visit. I think I had as much fun as all of you (maybe more.) :)
I have been hard at work on my new book about bogeymen. It is so interesting to find out that kids, all over the world, are worried about them. One of my favorites is a "waterhorse!"
Karen Miller

More school visits

I ill be working with the wonderful students from Arthur Morgan School on April 9 and speaking with teachers-to-be at Montreat Collge on April 14th.
I'll tell you how it went after the visits.
Karen Miller

Swamp Monster?

The following is a looong article, but well done. It is a "skeptic's" view. A "skeptic" is someone who wants something to be proved, beyond a doubt, before he believes it. I think it is important to weigh all the facts before making up one's mind. So, if you have the time, this is a worthy article to read.
Investigative Files

Tracking the Swamp Monsters

Do mysterious and presumably endangered manlike creatures inhabit swamplands of the southern United States? If not, how do we explain the sightings and even track impressions of creatures that thus far have eluded mainstream science? Do they represent additional evidence of the legendary Bigfoot or something else entirely? What would an investigation reveal?
Joe Nickel
Monster Mania

The outside world learned about Louisiana's Honey Island Swamp Monster in 1974 when two hunters emerged from a remote area of backwater sloughs with plaster casts of "unusual tracks." The men claimed they discovered the footprints near a wild boar that lay with its throat gashed. They also stated that over a decade earlier, in 1963, they had seen similar tracks after encountering an awesome creature. They described it as standing seven feet tall, being covered with grayish hair, and having large amber-colored eyes. However, the monster had promptly run away and an afternoon rainstorm had obliterated its tracks, the men said.
The hunters were Harlan E. Ford and his friend Billy Mills, both of whom worked as air-traffic controllers. Ford told his story on an episode of the 1970s television series In Search of . . . . According to his granddaughter, Dana Holyfield (1999a, 11):
When the documentary was first televised, it was monster mania around here. People called from everywhere. . . . The legend of the Honey Island Swamp Monster escalated across Southern Louisiana and quickly made its way out of state after the documentary aired nationwide.
Harlan Ford continued to search for the monster until his death in 1980. Dana recalls how he once took a goat into the swamp to use as bait, hoping to lure the creature to a tree blind where Ford waited-uneventfully, as it happened-with gun and camera. He did supposedly find several, different-sized tracks on one hunting trip. He also claimed to have seen the monster on one other occasion, during a fishing trip with Mills and some of their friends from work. One of the men reportedly then went searching for the creature with a rifle and fired two shots at it before returning to tell his story to the others around the campfire (Holyfield 1999a, 10-15).

Figure 1. Louisiana's pristine Honey Island Swamp is the alleged habitat of a manlike monster.
Searching for Evidence

Intrigued by the monster reports, which I pursued on a trip to New Orleans (speaking to local skeptics at the planetarium in Kenner), I determined to visit the alleged creature's habitat. The Honey Island Swamp (figure 1) comprises nearly 70,000 acres between the East Pearl and West Pearl rivers. I signed on with Honey Island Swamp Tours, which is operated out of Slidell, Louisiana, by wetlands ecologist Paul Wagner and his wife, Sue. Their "small, personalized nature tours" live up to their billing as explorations of "the deeper, harder-to-reach small bayous and sloughs" of "one of the wildest and most pristine river swamps in America" ("Dr. Wagner's" n.d.).
The Wagners are ambivalent about the supposed swamp monster's existence. They have seen alligators, deer, otters, bobcats, and numerous other species but not a trace of the legendary creature (Wagner 2000). The same is true of the Wagners' Cajun guide, Captain Robbie Charbonnet. Beginning at age eight, he has had forty-five years' experience, eighteen as a guide, in the Honey Island Swamp. He told me he had "never seen or heard" something he could not identify, certainly nothing that could be attributed to a monster (Charbonnet 2000).
Suiting action to words throughout our tour, Charbonnet repeatedly identified species after species in the remote swampland as he skillfully threaded his boat through the cypresses and tupelos hung with Spanish moss. Although the cool weather had pushed ,gators to the depths, he heralded turtles, great blue herons, and other wildlife. From only a glimpse of its silhouetted form he spotted a barred owl, then carefully maneuvered for a closer view. He called attention to the singing of robins, who were gathering there for the winter, and pointed to signs of other creatures, including freshly cut branches produced by beavers and, in the mud, tracks left by a wild boar. But there was not a trace of the swamp monster. (The closest I came was passing an idle boat at Indian Village Landing emblazoned "Swamp Monster Tours.")
Another who is skeptical of monster claims is naturalist John V. Dennis. In his comprehensive book The Great Cypress Swamps (1988), he writes: "Honey Island has achieved fame of sorts because of the real or imagined presence of a creature that fits the description of the Big Foot of movie renown. Known as the Thing, the creature is sometimes seen by fishermen." However, he says, "For my part, let me say that in my many years of visiting swamps, many of them as wild or wilder than Honey Island, I have never obtained a glimpse of anything vaguely resembling Big Foot, nor have I ever seen suspicious-looking footprints." He concludes, "Honey Island, in my experience, does not live up to its reputation as a scary place."
In contrast to the lack of monster experiences from swamp experts are the encounters reported by Harlan Ford and Billy Mills. Those alleged eyewitnesses are, in investigators' parlance, "re-peaters"-people who claim unusual experiences on multiple occasions. (Take Bigfoot hunter Roger Patterson for example. Before shooting his controversial film sequence of a hairy man-beast in 1967, Patterson was a longtime Bigfoot buff who had "discovered" the alleged creature's tracks on several occasions [Bord and Bord 1982, 80].) Ford's and Mills's multiple sightings and discoveries seem suspiciously lucky, and suspicions are increased by other evidence, including the tracks.

Figure 2. This plaster cast preserves an alleged Honey Island Swamp Monster track.
From Dana Holyfield I obtained a plaster copy of one of the several track casts made by her grandfather (figure 2). It is clearly not the track of a stereotypical Bigfoot (or sasquatch) whose footprints are "roughly human in design," according to anthropologist and pro-Bigfoot theorist Grover Krantz (1992, 17). Instead, Ford's monster tracks are webbed-toe imprints that appear to be "a cross between a primate and a large alligator" (Holyfield 1999a, 9). The track is also surprisingly small: only about nine and three-fourths inches long compared to Bigfoot tracks which average about fourteen to sixteen inches (Coleman and Clark 1999, 14), with tracks of twenty inches and more reported (Coleman and Huyghe 1999).1
Monsterlands

Clearly, the Honey Island Swamp Monster is not a Bigfoot, a fact that robs Ford's and Mills's story of any credibility it might have had from that association. Monster popularizers instead equate the Honey Island reports with other "North American 'Creatures of the Black Lagoon' cases," purported evidence of cryptozoological entities dubbed "freshwater Merbeings" (Coleman and Huyghe 1999, 39, 62). These are supposedly linked by tracks with three toes, although Ford's casts actually exhibit four (again see figure 2). In short, the alleged monster is unique, rare even among creatures whose existence is unproven and unlikely.
Footprints and other specific details aside, the Honey Island Swamp Monster seems part of a genre of mythic swamp-dwelling "beastmen" or "manimals." They include the smelly Skunk Ape and the hybrid Gatorman of the Florida Everglades and other southern swamps; the Scape Ore Swamp Lizardman of South Carolina; Momo, the Missouri Monster; and, among others, the Fouke Monster, which peeked in the window of a home in Fouke, Arkansas, one night in 1971 and set off a rash of monster sightings (Blackman 1998, 23-25, 30-33, 166-168; Bord and Bord 1982, 104-105; Coleman and Clark 1999, 224-226; Coleman and Huyghe 1999, 39, 56).
Considering this genre, we must ask: Why swamps and why monsters? Swamps represent remote, unexplored regions, which have traditionally been the domain of legendary creatures. As the noted Smithsonian Institution biologist John Napier (1973, 23) sagely observed, monsters "hail from uncharted territory: inaccessible mountains, impenetrable forests, remote Pacific islands, the depths of loch or ocean. . . . The essential element of the monster myth is remoteness."
Echoing Napier in discussing one reported Honey Island Swamp encounter, John V. Dennis (1988) states: "In many cases, sightings such as this one are inspired by traditions that go back as far as Indian days. If a region is wild and inaccessible and has a history of encounters with strange forms of life, chances are that similar encounters will occur again-or at least be reported." And while the major purported domain of Bigfoot is the Pacific northwest, Krantz (1992, 199) observes: "Many of the more persistent eastern reports come from low-lying and/or swampy lands of the lower Mississippi and other major river basins."
But why does belief in monsters persist? According to one source, monsters appear in every culture and are "born out of the unknown and nurtured by the unexplained" (Guenette and Guenette 1975). Many alleged paranormal entities appear to stem either from mankind's hopes or fears-thus are envisioned angels and demons-and some entities may evoke a range of responses. Monsters, for example, may intrigue us with their unknown aspect as well as provoke terror. We may be especially interested in man-beasts, given what psychologist Robert A. Baker (1995) observes is our strong tendency to endow things with human characteristics. Hence, angels are basically our better selves with wings; extraterrestrials are humanoids from futuristic worlds; and Bigfoot and his ilk seem linked to our evolutionary past.
Monsters may play various roles in our lives. My Cajun guide, Robbie Charbonnet, offered some interesting ideas about the Honey Island Swamp Monster and similar entities. He thought that frightening stories might have been concocted on occasion to keep outsiders away-perhaps to protect prime hunting areas or even help safeguard moonshine stills. He also theorized that such tales might have served in a sort of bogeyman fashion to frighten children from wandering into remote, dangerous areas. (Indeed he mentioned how when he was a youngster in the 1950s an uncle would tell him about a frightening figure-a sort of horror-movie type with one leg, a mutilated face, etc.-that would "get" him if he strayed into the swampy wilderness.)
Like any such bogeyman, the Honey Island Swamp Monster is also good for gratuitous campfire chills. "A group of men were sitting around the campfire along the edge of the Pearl River," begins one narrative, "telling stories about that thing in the swamp . . ." (Holyfield 1999b). A song, "The Honey Island Swamp Monster" (written by Perry Ford, n.d.), is in a similar vein: "Late at night by a dim fire light, / You people best beware. / He's standing in the shadows, / Lurking around out there. . . ." The monster has even been referred to specifically as "The boogie man" and "that booger" (Holyfield 1992a, 14). "Booger" is a dialect form of bogey, and deliberately scary stories are sometimes known as "'booger' tales" (Cassidy 1985).
Suitable subjects for booger tales are numerous Louisiana swamp and bayou terrors, many of them the products of Cajun folklore. One is the Letiche, a ghoulish creature that was supposedly an abandoned, illegitimate child who was reared by alligators, and now has scaly skin, webbed hands and feet, and luminous green eyes. Then there is Jack O'Lantern, a malevolent spirit who lures humans into dangerous swampland with his mesmerizing lantern, as well as the Loup Garou (a werewolf) and the zombies (not the relatively harmless "Voodoo Zombies" but the horrific "Flesh Eaters") (Blackman 1998, 171-209).
By extension, swamp creatures are also ideal subjects for horror fiction. The Fouke monster sightings, for example, inspired the horror movie The Legend of Boggy Creek. That 1972 thriller became a box-office hit, spawning a sequel and many imitations. About the same time (1972) there emerged a popular comic book series titled Swamp Thing, featuring a metamorphosing man-monster from a Louisiana swamp. Interestingly, these popularized monsters predated the 1974 claims of Ford and Mills. (Recall that their alleged earlier encounter of 1963 had not been reported.)
The Track Makers

While swamp monsters and other man-beasts are not proven to exist, hoaxers certainly are. Take, for example, Bigfoot tracks reported by berry pickers near Mount St. Helens, Washington, in 1930. Nearly half a century later, a retired logger came forward to pose with a set of "bigfeet" that he had carved and that a friend had worn to produce the fake monster tracks (Dennett 1982). Among many similar hoaxes were at least seven perpetrated in the early 1970s by one Ray Pickens of Chehalis, Washington. He carved primitive seven-by-eighteen-inch feet and attached them to hiking boots. Pickens (1975) said he was motivated "not to fool the scientists, but to fool the monster-hunters" who he felt regarded people like him as "hicks." Other motivation, according to monster hunter Peter Byrne (1975), stems from the "extraordinary psychology of people wanting to get their names in the paper, people wanting a little publicity, wanting to be noticed."
Were Harlan Ford's and Billy Mills's monster claims similarly motivated? Dana Holyfield (1999a, 5-6) says of her grandfather: "Harlan wasn't a man to make up something like that. He was down to earth and honest and told it the way it was and didn't care if people believed him or not." But even a basically honest person, who would not do something overtly dastardly or criminal, might engage in something that he considered relatively harmless and that would add zest to life. I believe the evidence strongly indicates that Ford and Mills did just that. To sum up, there are the men's suspiciously repeated sighting reports and alleged track discoveries, together with the incongruent mixing of a Bigfoot-type creature with most un-Bigfootlike feet, plus the fact that the proffered evidence is not only of a type that could easily be faked but often has been. In addition, the men's claims exist in a context of swamp-manimal mythology that has numerous antecedent elements in folklore and fiction. Taken together, the evidence suggests a common hoax.
Certainly, in the wake of the monster mania Ford helped inspire, much hoaxing resulted. States Holyfield (1999a, 11): "Then there were the monster impersonators who made fake bigfoot shoes and tromped through the swamp. This went on for years. Harlan didn't worry about the jokers because he knew the difference." Be that as it may, swamp-monster hoaxes-and apparent hoaxes-continue.
A few months before I arrived in Louisiana, two loggers, Earl Whitstine and Carl Dubois, reported sighting a hairy man-beast in a cypress swamp called Boggy Bayou in the central part of the state. Giant four-toed tracks and hair samples were discovered at the site, and soon others came forward to say they too had seen a similar creature. However, there were grounds for suspicion: twenty-five years earlier (i.e., not long after the 1974 Honey Island Swamp Monster reports), Whitstine's father and some friends had sawed giant foot shapes from plywood and produced fake monster tracks in the woods of a nearby parish.
On September 13, 2000, laboratory tests of the hair from the Boggy Bayou creature revealed that it was not Gigantopithecus blacki (a scientific name for sasquatch proposed by Krantz [1992, 193]), but much closer to Booger louisiani (my term for the legendary swamp bogeyman). It proved actually to be from Equus caballus (a horse), whereupon the local sheriff's department promptly ended its investigation (Blanchard 2000; Burdeau 2000).
Reportedly, Harlan Ford believed the swamp monsters "were probably on the verge of extinction" (Holyfield 1999a, 10). Certainly he did much to further their cause. It seems likely that-as long as there are suitably remote habitats and other essentials (such as campfires around which to tell tales, and good ol' boys looking for their fifteen-minutes of fame)-the legendary creatures will continue to proliferate.
Acknowledgments

In addition to those mentioned in the text, I am grateful to several people for their assistance: From Louisiana, William Sierichs Jr., James F. Cherry M.D., and Kenner Planetarium Director Michael Sandras; and from the Center for Inquiry, Director of Libraries Tim Binga, Skeptical Inquirer Managing Editor Ben Radford, and-for conceiving of and arranging the multi-state "southern tour" lecture series that took me to Louisiana-CSICOP Executive Director Barry Karr. Thanks again also to Ranjit Sandhu for manuscript assistance.
Note

Although Harlan Ford obtained tracks of various sizes, a photo of his mounted casts (Holyfield 1999a, 10) makes it possible to compare them with his open hand which touches the display and thus gives an approximate scale. This shows all are relatively small. The one I obtained from Holyfield is consistent with the larger ones.
References

Baker, Robert A. 1995. Afterword to Nickell 1995, 275-285.
Blackman, W. Haden. 1998. The Field Guide to North American Monsters. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Blanchard, Kevin. 2000. Bigfoot sighting in La.? Baton Rouge, La., The Advocate, August 29.
Bord, Janet, and Colin Bord. 1982. The Bigfoot Casebook. Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books.
Burdeau, Cain. 2000. Many in central La. fear Bigfoot. Baton Rouge, La., The Advocate, September 15.
Byrne, Peter. 1975. Quoted in Guenette and Guenette 1975, 81.
Cassidy, Frederick G., ed. 1985. Dictionary of American Regional English. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1: 333-334.
Charbonnet, Robbie. 2000. Interview by Joe Nickell, December 4.
Coleman, Loren, and Jerome Clark. 1999. Cryptozoology A to Z. New York: Fireside (Simon & Schuster).
Coleman, Loren, and Patrick Huyghe. 1999. The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide. New York: Avon, 14-19.
Dennett, Michael. 1982. Bigfoot jokester reveals punchline-finally. Skeptical Inquirer 7.1 (Fall): 8-9.
Dennis, John V. 1988. The Great Cypress Swamps. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 27, 108-109.
"Dr. Wagner's Honey Island Swamp Tours, Inc." N.d. Advertising flier, Slidell, La.
Ford, Perry. N.d. "The Honey Island Swamp Monster." Song text in Holyfield 1999b, 13.
Guenette, Robert, and Frances Guenette. 1975. The Mysterious Monsters. Los Angeles, Calif.: Sun Classic Pictures.
Holyfield, Dana. 1999a. Encounters with the Honey Island Swamp Monster. Pearl River, La.: Honey Island Swamp Books.
--. 1999b. More Swamp Cookin' with the River People. Pearl River, La.: Honey Island Swamp Books.
Krantz, Grover. 1992. Big Footprints: A Scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch. Boulder, Colorado: Johnson Books.
Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
Pickens, Ray. 1975. Quoted in Guenette and Guenette 1975, 80.
Wagner, Sue. 2000. Interview by Joe Nickell, December 4. l
About the Author

Joe Nickell is CSICOP's Senior Research Fellow and author of numerous investigative books.
Related Information

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A frog the size of a bowling ball?

Honest! Plus, it had heavy armor and teeth! No, don't look for it by your pond. It lived during the time of the dinosaurs. The scientists who discovered its existence named it Devil Toad, or Beelzebufo.
Here's a link from BBC News with an drawing of what the scientists think it looked like.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/08/sci_nat_enl_1203364630/html/1.stm

Another "formerly" extinct creature found

Lizards alive! Another little giant rediscovered

Naturalists in Tenerife were delighted to reveal the existence of yet another branch of the growing family of Canary giant lizards, this time on the island of La Palma.

In the same week that saw the much publicized discovery of a new species of giant rat in tropical rain forests in the Far East, came news of a humbler, but no less exciting kind for these islands. It concerned the sighting – and capture, on film, at least – of a giant lizard in La Palma which, like its cousins in La Gomera, El Hierro and Tenerife, had been thought to be long extinct until relatively recent rediscovery. The chance find of Gallotia auaritae to give it its Latin name, was in fact made on July 13, but was only made public last week. On that day Luis Enrique Mínguez, out hiking in the mountains of the island’s north-east happened upon an extraordinarily large lizard basking by the side of the track at some 12 metres distance. He had the presence of mind to take several photos of the reptile which, he said, showed no concern and eventually ambled off into the undergrowth. Observations based on a careful study of the photographs, a visit to the location and comparisons with giant lizards elsewhere in the archipelago have led biologists to estimate the lizard to be a male of about four or five years, measuring between 300 and 312 millimetres in length, head to tail, and weighing around 170 grammes. A lengthy search of the area in October by giant lizard experts proved unsuccessful, but neither the time of year nor the weather were on their side. It is now planned to organize an intensive programme to track down examples of the lizard which could eventually result in the establishment of a recovery centre like those in La Gomera and El Hierro.