A cryptid being a creature or being whose existence has not been proven, but nevertheless crops up in mythology and folktales. My favourite is Bigfoot, he just looks so cuddly, like a cereal mascot or something.
Others are creepy as fuck. For my money, the Japanese cornered the market on this, the hitotsume-kozō is a one-eyed child ghost. If I saw it in reality I would shit myself. From Inuit mythology, there’s the Qalupalik, a sea-dwelling humanoid that abducts children that stray too close to the shore.
Dang! Wikipedia’s description made me remember an old Japanese cartoon I’ve watched on youtube. At one point (about 4:50), one of the characters in this eerie old Fleischer-like cartoon turns into a creepy one-eyed, one-legged boy. I thought it was some artist’s fever-dream, but now I see that they were depicting a legendary creature.
I hate to be a finagler, but are demons and ghosts and supernatural entities “cryptids.” I thought the term was limited to things that might occur in nature, and simply be elusive. Bigfoot is just a large, stinky, macropedal anthropoid, and even Chupacabra might just be a quick, hungry animal with lots of sharp teeth, nnnh, nnnh.
For instance, the “Hidebehind” is not a natural animal, because it has the supernatural power always to be behind you, no matter which way you’re facing. He’s on my list of pretty darn creepy folkloric critters.
Giant man-eating plants – Audrey II! – are really creepy!
Man-eating swarms of army ants are creepy. The reality is pretty bad, but the fantasy versions are a whole lot worse.
Giant spiders… Oh, gosh, it’s just going eight; time for me to go! (Whew!)
I’ve always found Aboriginal Australian creatures particularly creepy, like the Yara-ma-yha-who and the Bunyip. In particular the modus operandi of the Yara-ma-yha-who gives me the jibblies.
I guess if the real animals in your country are already terrifying and deadly, the make believe ones have to really pull out all the stops in the creepy factor.
Choosing to stick with putatively flesh-and-blood creatures, as opposed to the supernatural realm (though the dividing-line can sometimes be blurred): a cryptid which has always thrillingly creeped me out, is east Africa’s Nandi Bear – the beast has numerous local names, the most prominent being chemosit. Its heyday would seem to have been around a hundred-plus years ago, in the earlier times of settlement by Europeans in that part of the world. Whatever the creature might have been, it seemed elusive, secretive, and a frequent and savage killer – its speciality being, eating the brains of its victims (animal or – frequently – human): smashing the skull or tearing off the top of the head, to accomplish this.
There were a great variety of physical descriptions of this animal, apparently somewhat split along racial lines. Africans tended to describe it as a huge and ferocious ape – something of a “yeti / Bigfoot” touch. Europeans who believed or suspected that they had encountered it, were apt rather to liken it to a huge hyena, a large baboon, or (wait for it) a bear. The great uncertainty as to what manner of creature it might be, intensified the general mystery and spookiness. A theory which I’m particularly fond of, suggested as the Nandi Bear’s identity, a small relict population of the prehistoric mammal Chalicotherium: reckoned to have lived in the period between about five, and fifteen, million years ago – an ungulate, but with clawed feet, looking something like “a hyena the size of a horse”. Being a herbivore does not necessarily equate to being peaceable and no danger to humans: witness, for example, the hippo and the African buffalo.
It appears to be agreed, even among ardent cryptozoological believers, that the Nandi Bear seems to have faded away, for good: apparently no reports of it for a good many decades, from the parts of Africa where it was said to obtain.
One of my cousins babysits a little boy; she’s always putting his picture on Facebook. She doesn’t have a very good camera, and rarely uses a flash…that, combined with something about the color of his eyes, makes them almost always photograph as black. (The whites are visible though.)
My addition to this list: stick figure “aliens”. It’s clearly some clever camera work, but that doesn’t make the footage any less unsettling.
When I was a kid and was sick with a fever I always had a recurring dream about stick figure people and although I don’t remember much about it I do remember it was always disturbing to me.
