this is just a reminder that this is a side blog re-using an old temporary URL.
If you followed me because of something i posted in the past, you want to be following my main @ayellowbirds
Region: Iroquois Confederacy (presently New York, USA)
Habitat: Caves, Forest, Mounains, Sky
Character: Malicious
An enormous head without a body, larger than the tallest human from its chin to crown, the flying head is a fearsome monster that appears in numerous tales.
In the 18th century, the Seneca leader Cornplanter (Gaiänt'wakê) told that flying heads were covered with thick hair that could repel arrows, and had a dark and angry-looking face set with deep wrinkles and a furrowed brow. Akin to a bird, they had enormous black wings and a pair of fearsome talons used to rend flesh. The flying heads hid in mountainside caves by day, but came out after dark or during storms, and the sound of their flight induced terror and sickness in those who heard it.
Even managing to hide from its claws would not assure safety, and Gaiänt'wakê notes that these monsters would especially target the homes of widows and orphans, slamming their wings against the walls and crying out in an unknown language before leaving—only for the following days to see fatal illness soon take the lives of those inside.
Another source specifically notes that the flying head’s wings extend from its cheeks, and that it was in fact four times the height of an adult man, with a great mouth full of sharp teeth. Although it preferred humans as prey above all else, it could easily eat any other living creature.
An instance of survival through a flying head’s own greedy hunger is described in several versions of the story: a lone woman roasting acorns in the fire at night was spotted by one of these horrors. Either ignoring the creature deliberately or else not noticing it, depending on the teller, she reached into the fire to take some of the cooked nuts and eat them. In versions of the tale where she is aware of the flying head, she sometimes instead mimes eating stones she has been heating for the express purpose of tricking the monster. The flying head, thinking it has found a special treat, reaches in and snatches up a mouthful of burning coal and stones. The last that is heard of it are agonized screams of pain as its mouth burns, fading into the night.
Another tale names a particular flying head, Dagwanoenyent (meaning “whirlwind” or “cyclone”). Dagwanoenyent was somehow kin to a group of twelve famed human brothers, and was noted specifically to have large eyes, and long hair that dragged on the surface of the great rock he roosted upon until it swept it to a polished smoothness. The brothers advise their youngest sibling to be sure to speak first to Dagwanoenyent, for if the flying head speaks first, the result is death. Knocked back by the impacts of arrows the boy makes grow to the size of logs, Dagwanoenyent’s retreat created a swath of destruction much like his namesake by felling trees. Forced into the brothers’ home, he is beaten until he calms down and agrees to share his knowledge and power.
Beyond his fearsome flight and terrible strength, Dagwanoenyent has powers of healing, being able to revive a dead member of the family by blowing upon him. He appears to be more reasonable and less voracious than other monsters of this kind, and is mentioned to have dined on chunks of hickory bark. He seems to possess incomparable knowledge, including several means of resurrecting the dead.
Source:
“The Flying Head.” Native Languages of the Americas. Web. 19 May 2015.<http://www.native-languages.org/senecastory4.htm>.
Curtin, Eremiah. “THE TWELVE BROTHERS AND THEIR UNCLE, DAGWANOEnYENT.” Seneca Indian Myths. John Bruno Hare, 8 July 2004. Web. 19 May 2015. <http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/iro/sim/sim84.htm>.
Leeming, David Adams and Jake Page. “The Iroquois Flying Head.” Myths, Legends, and Folktales of America: An Anthology. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 77-78. Print.
Bear in mind that this is kind of light on the trigger warnings and analysis. I’d like to do lengthier reviews for each of these in the future, but you can see why that would be a big undertaking. I’m leaving off some things that I read, but don’t actually recommend.
Region: Pennsylvania, USA
Habitat: Forest, Wetlands
Character: Malicious
Variations on the Will-o’-the-Wisp are well-documented by folklorists, and countless luminous entities are glossed under the same identity. But local traditions always have their own twist on things, and what one scholar calls two different names for the same class of monsters may be very different in the minds of the people who first told the story. We have seen the Jack-a-Lantern of the southeast, noted for its ability to vocalize, and now we turn north for another of this type.
Pennsylvania “Dutch” lore of ultimately German origin calls this kind of entity a drach, or “dragon”, and recounts that it may be found in marshlands, bogs, and damp woods, sharing the broader association with bodies of water. More so than in the Jack-o’-lantern accounts, there are supposedly many tales of narrow escapes from the drach, which follows timid-natured people for uncertain but likely nefarious purposes.
The drach varies widely in size, appearing as a fireball merely the size of a candle’s flame, to a blazing orb the size of a human head. So too does its activity vary, sometimes moving about in the air, and sometimes simply hovering in place and appearing to “send off scintillations”. In general, it flees those who approach and follows those who retreat, and is identified as an omen or “token” of death that lures one to catastrophe.
The popular skeptical notion that this is merely the result of swamp gases igniting is disputed by those who tell of the drach, who doubt that such a thing as burning gasses could move in the manner of these dragons,
The identification of this entity with the Jack-o’-lantern was not unfamiliar to tale-tellers, and J.G. Owens quoted an unnamed old man of central PA who recalled having heard of a wicked man named “Jack-o’-Lanthorn” who was barred from both Hell and Heaven upon his death on account of it being feared his malign influence would make the souls of the sinful unmanageable, and was thus cursed to wander the world with only the light of the drach as his guide.
Source:
Hoffman, W. J. “Folk-Lore of the Pennsylvania Germans. II.” The Journal of American Folklore 2.4 (1889): 35. JSTOR. American Folklore Society. Web. 11 May 2015.
Owens, J.G. “Folk-Lore from Buffalo Valley, Central Pennsylvania.” The Journal of American Folklore 4.13 (1891): 115-28. JSTOR. American Folklore Society. Web. 12 May 2015. .
Region: Louisiana and other southern states, USA
Habitat: Forest, Riverine, Wetlands
Character: Malicious
One source recounts tales of the will-o’-the-wisp or ignis fatuus among the African-American communities of Louisiana. An older man who had been born with a caul on his head—and was thus by his own testimony gifted with the ability to see ghosts and the power of prophecy—told of how the “jack-a-lantern” was feared among the Creole community.
On dark nights, the jack-a-lantern compels a potential victim to follow it towards the water or to thickets of thorny bushes. Once the floating light has its prey in the water and drowning, or being torn apart by thorns, it begins to exclaim, “Aïe, aïe, mo gagnin toi!”: “Ah, ah, I have you now!”
A more direct account from Virginia resident Catherine Jones (recorded by V. Hale) passes on the note that her grandmother called these “Jack-ma-lanterns”, and explains that in her grandmother’s time, the danger of these entities was much more pronounced because of the lack of lamps or flashlights—a light in the distance would be assumed to be the light of a cabin or house.
In discussing broader black folklore of the southern US, L. Pendleton recounts that the “Jack-o’-lantern” is found in or near wetlands, and that it is strongly advised that those who see one should turn away from it and flee for the safety of home. It is described as “a wicked spirit or demon ‘hot from hell.’”, and the curious are warned not to investigate one, with the example given of a man on horseback who was attacked by the jack-o’-lantern in a fiery rage, both rider and mount being immolated.
Jones tells that Jack-ma-lanterns were employed by malicious witches to lead people astray and make them wander in circles or off through the deep woods, relating that her own grandfather had been a victim of such trickery, but knew a solution: to turn out all his pockets, draw a circle in his path and make the sign of the cross on the ground, and say the following prayer to dispel the influence of the misleading lights:
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Speret (sic), drive these witches away with their evil jack-ma-lanterns.
Sources:
Fortier, Alcée. “Customs and Superstitions in Louisiana.” The Journal of American Folklore 1.2 (1888): 136-40. JSTOR. American Folklore Society. Web. 11 May 2015.
Hale, Virginia. “The Jack-Ma-Lanterns.” The Silver Bullet, and Other American Witch Stories. Ed. Hubert J. Davis. Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David, 1975. 48. Print.
Pendleton, Louis. “Notes on Negro Folk-Lore and Witchcraft in the South.” The Journal of American Folklore 3.10 (1890): 201-207. JSTOR. American Folklore Society. Web. 12 May 2015.
Region: Lumberjacks
Habitat: Forests
Character: Animalistic
The lore of the American lumberjacks does not keep to any one state or province, nor indeed to any one country. It is thus hard to place creatures originating in lumber camp tales as being from any particular locale—especially as, via the popularity of the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan, it is hard to disentangle the stories that actually originated in the camps from those that were created elsewhere by storytellers inspired by the character and notions of lumberjack lore. One such storyteller may be Glen Rounds, whose publication of a collection of stories about Paul is most likely wholly original. This does not, however, discount it from inclusion here.
Rounds tells of Paul’s encounter with a very peculiar pest, that to an ordinary-sized person might be a dire threat. The nature of the lumber camps was such that close-quartered bunkhouses were the norm, and these would attract bedbugs, said to have even been trained to act as loyal pets that could serve their masters by stealing blankets from others. Among these insects were some left behind at one of the camps Paul had worked at early in his life: returning thirty or so years later, it was discovered that the lack of lumberjacks to bite led to a struggle to adapt on the part of the bedbugs, with the strongest and biggest thriving until they were large enough to hunt rodents and birds, then gophers and rabbits.
To deal with the cold winters and lack of lumberjack body heat, they developed thick coats of reddish-brown fur that grew long on the back and was worn down short on the belly, and eventually wound up being large and fierce enough that they somehow interbred with another predator: the bobcats of the woodlands. The resulting hybrids bore the extra legs of insects, and developed the oddly lupine habits of pack-hunting and howling at the moon.
The indigenous peoples living near the camps told Paul that the “bedcats” could easily beat even larger, more mature bobcats in a fight, and attacks upon the loggers working under Paul prove that they lack the normal reluctance of wild cats to enter logging camps. Prior to the return of the lumberjacks, the indigenous people had found that the bedcats provided excellent pelts, but the arrival of the loggers sparked some primal bedbug instinct to return to the bunks. There, Paul found that the wildcat-sized creatures proved as much of a pest to him as regular bedbugs were to regular-sized lumberjacks, albeit far noisier with a chorus of hisses and snarls.
Rounds wraps up the tale by noting that the bobcat-sized bedcats have long since been eliminated through trapping and bounties established by Paul. At least, he hadn’t heard of any getting that big, since then.
Source:
Rounds, Glen. “The Bedcats.” Ol’ Paul, the Mighty Logger: Being a True Account of the Seemingly Incredible Exploits and Inventions of the Great Paul Bunyan. New York: Holiday House, 1936. 42-51. Print.
Region: Vermont, USA
Habitat: Urban
Character: Malicious
The account of an old woman who claimed to have witnessed the disinterment and disposal of the undead in question marks one of the earliest cases of something explicitly identified by Ameriican fokllorists as a tale of a kind of vampire: a man living in Woodstock, VT, contracted tuberculosis—then known as “consumption”—and died of same. Six months later, his brother fell ill with the same disease.
The surviving and healthy family members resolved to exhume the deceased and examine his remains: they found that his heart remained in a pristine, un-decayed condition in spite of the time passed and the condition of the rest of the body. It is evident that the sickness of the surviving brother was blamed upon the deceased one, sustaining himself in undeath by feeding upon his kin.
The old woman who had witnessed these events explained that it was a very common belief in her childhood some seventy-five years prior (thus, the early 1810s) that those who died of consumption could attack their surviving siblings or parents and cause tuberculosis. If the heart of the deceased was found to be decayed and contain no liquid blood, it would then be presumed that there was some other (perhaps more natural) cause of the consumption.
The solution, presumably final as it concludes the tale, was to re-bury the body except for the heart, which was taken to the central square of the town, known as the Green. There, the heart was placed in an iron pot over a fire, and allowed to burn until only ashes remained. The witness described this as the standard method of dealing with this kind of threat.
Source:
Curtin, Jeremiah. “European Folk-Lore in the United States.” The Journal of American Folklore 2.4 (1889): 56-59. JSTOR. American Folklore Society. Web. 12 May 2015. .
Perchance thou hast decided to embark upon the most noble endeavor of devising a coat of arms for a person of worth, but thou art stymied by the lack of appropriate symbolism to convey just how profoundly such a person is not heterosexual or cisgender.
Worry not! This humble demigirl hath endeavored to compile here an exhaustive reference listing the great many plants, animals, and objects suitable as heraldic devices, for all thine fanciful creations of arms. Here shall be described under the tag of #Herald’s Guide to Queer Symbolism an exhaustive account of the lesbian, gay, asexual, aromantic, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, intersex, and otherwise non-heterosexual and non-binary character such things as may be suitable for this purpose. Thus follows the first account, focused upon two instances of flowers as symbols:
In using as a heraldic device the flower known popularly as a carnation, one must take great care not to use its common name, as this word is in fact used in heraldry to describe the tincture (color) of skin tones common to European peoples. Thus, for the purposes of heraldry, it is appropriate to blazon this flower as dianthus, in reference to its genus name which includes other visually similar flowers.
A heraldic device of one or more dianthus flower(s) vert may be used to symbolize romantic or sexual desire of men for other men, as the green carnation has been rendered symbolic of masculine homosexuality through an association with the writer Oscar Wilde.
The proper name for the flowering plant most commonly known as violets or pansies, viola has appeared on occasion in historic heraldry. According to a writer cited in Hilderic Friend’s Flowers and flower-lore, Vol. 2, the violet is not a typical heraldic flower and was regarded as too humble a plant, but “…it has been ingeniously given as a device to an amiable and witty lady of a timid and reserved character, surrounded with the motto ‘Il faut me chercher' (I must be sought after).” while the pansy was regarded as bold and symbolic of reflective thought, owing to its derivation from the French pensée.
For the women-loving woman, the viola is a most suitable heraldic device. JoAnne Myers notes in her Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements that the flower was said to have been worn by the poet Sappho, and that it was used in Basil Rathbone’s 1927 adaptation of Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive as a motif to suggest the love of a woman for another.
Overall, the viola is a suitable device for the arms of a woman who is much consumed by romantic or sexual affection for other women. If blazoned as violet or violette, it is suggestive of a more passive desire, and if blazoned as pansy or pensée, a more bold and outgoing love is represented.
Region: Oklahoma
Habitat: Urban, Forest
Character: Malicious
Thomas Yeahpau (identified as Kiowa-Comanche-Apache) relates one version of this shapeshifter, taught to him directly by his grandfather, whom he says “would tell of his experience with a shapeshifter which every tribe has stories of: the deer lady.”
According to this version, set in the 1920s, the Deer Lady initially appears—in the midst of a gathering of women dancers around a bonfire at a major social event—as the most exceptionally beautiful woman the storyteller has ever seen. She grabs the attention of the male audience, but does not return it, at best giving a friendly smile and then ignoring them. The men ask around, but no-one admits to knowing who this woman is. As the music builds and the men sing to encourage the dancers, the storyteller is “almost hypnotized”, until one of his friends yells and points out that the mystery dancer has hairy, hoofed legs. A man darts forward, seizing her dress and exposing the woman as having not only the feet of a deer, but the entire hind end.
The Deer Lady reacts to this unwelcome exposure by seizing the man, tearing off his head, and throwing it into the fire. As the other dancers and the audience panic, she rips off her clothes and begins to attack them, tearing off more heads to consume the eyes and tongue (only male victims are explicitly mentioned), then pulling out their heart to eat that as well. Those fleeing find that the wreck of a car is blocking the only exit, the thoroughly-packed parking lot rendered impenetrable and the Deer Lady given plenty of time to consume her kills.
The Deer Lady is repelled by a group of elders who appear abruptly, chanting “ in an unknown language and throwing medicine on her”, which causes her to scream in her own unfamiliar tongue, and flee by jumping over the old men. Alternating between quadrupedal and bipedal, she briefly screams to the sky before bounding from one car to the next to escape over the parking lot and into the woods.
By the end of the tale, the old men and the the dead bodies have both vanished, and Yeahpau’s grandfather realizes his good fortune to have survived, as Deer Ladies elsewhere are said to have wiped out entire camps. A lack of proper prayer and reverence is cited as having allowed her presence.
Yeahpau’s version of the Deer Lady is counted among “bad spirits”, and labels her as a “shapeshifter” although it is noted that she always takes on the same form, bringing into question what her true form may be.
Source:
Yeahpau, Thomas. "Deer Lady.” Tribal College Journal 12.1 (2000): S10. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Apr. 2015.
I’ve always had an interest in cataloging monsters. One of my most prized acquisitions—from nearly half a decade before I actually had the chance to sit down and act as a GM myself—was a copy of the Monster Manual for 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a massive hardcover book that still has a prized place upon my shelf. It’s one of the things I adore about what bogleech does.
But I tended to notice something about most of those collections: the places they focused upon. Largely European, occasionally east Asian, now and then Middle Eastern—and plenty of original ideas inspired by those, or masquerading under the names of existing creatures from those sources. If an African (and not “Greek and Roman sources claim this was in Africa but no actual African sources mention it” like so many monsters), American, or that oh-so-rare Australian critter was mentioned, it was usually as a curiosity, more likely to be mentioned in the context of cryptids.
Well, I’m a California-born New York-raised US citizen. I don’t have much in the way of access to African or Australian sources…
…but I’m a professional librarian with a background in cultural anthropology, so you can sure as heck bet that I’ve got access to sources of information on American monsters. Some years back, I started looking more seriously into this subject, and found quite a lot. Some of the monsters I looked into got more and more attention as time went on. I remember a time when nobody around here but super-nerds who watched too much of the Sci-Fi channel knew what a chupacabra was, but now it’s pretty much an icon of cryptids alongside Bigfoot. But there’s still a lot more out there to talk about.
Thus, this project: Critters, Creeps, & Cryptids. AKA, “a North American Bestiary”.
The purpose of the project is to collect notes and references on the subject of monsters, ghosts, bogeymen, strange creatures, cryptids, and even the more bizarre of the “tall tale” heroines and heroes. I will make no attempt to distinguish between “folklore” and “fakelore” in this endeavor, though I will cite my sources (in MLA format) as thoroughly as possible. I will very likely make more than one entry on the same creature as I dig up new sources, perhaps using different names for what is clearly the same kind of being depending upon how a source names it.
Ultimately, the goal is to work towards something that can be compiled as a book, but that’s a long way off, and I like the idea of being able to share this content with other people.
Starting next week, I’m going to try to do a minimum of one post a week to this blog, on this subject. I’m trying to build up a buffer of posts so that I can continue to post even when there are other distractions, but we’ll see how things work out.