LanTOK November 2023 Cryptids

All right, hello everybody and welcome to Land Talk. Today we are talking about a very exciting subject, cryptids. I'm Nathan, joined by many other people today. Hi, I'm Marissa. I'm Bob. I'm Paris. I'm Amanda. I'm Ari. All right, let's get into it. Has everybody came prepared with a favorite cryptid or an exciting story? Oh well, you have to pick one, but I have a sticky note full of them. I brought pictures that only people in the room can see. They are good pictures. They are good pictures. I actually recently learned about the Rougarou through cartoons. Yeah, I know a little bit about that one too. I only know about the Lougarou, which was the French version of werewolf, but Rougarou is a completely different thing. Is it? Well, it comes from the original French story of the werewolves, because the werewolves as a story came out of France. Right, yeah. And a lot of the Louisiana French colonialists came with that story and it developed as a separate thing, but it was influenced by a lot of the French colonial concepts of the werewolves. So, with some research, I did find that there are obviously studies on how werewolves came about, etc., but they said that one of them is a tale they would tell the children, and if they broke their lens or missed it, they would turn into the Rougarou, and then they would have to be like that for 101 days. Days? Not years? That sounds terrible. I was going to say, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm like, I want to do that. Somebody likes, what, rainbows? I can handle it. I'm going to hide myself off to the swamp and go on vacation. He also is a popular costume for Mardi Gras, but not the Mardi Gras you would see in New Orleans, but the deep rural Mardi Gras, where their costumes are a little creepier, a little pointy-hattier, in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable, but it's where you'll find a lot of the Zydeco music. You would consider it like deep south here, but deep Louisiana-cation. A whole different level of deep. A lot of horseback riding, a lot of other random things happening, but he's a very popular guy. I have a question for everybody, because this came up in a conversation I was having with a friend. How do you define a cryptid? Because I think sometimes people have their own individual definitions, just because of how monsters have kind of an ambiguous definition for some people. Sometimes people say something is a cryptid, and you're like, no, I would have considered that a cryptid. So I'm just curious, how do you define a cryptid? I feel like a big part of it is the story and the legend. Otherwise, just having a haunted house, just having a one-off thing, I feel like a cryptid kind of has its own persona, and steps up to that next level of just being not just a spooky thing, but people talk about me, and they know my name. I usually draw the line that it can't just be a myth, it's got to be a myth that people claim they've seen, that people are wondering about somewhere. This isn't like, oh yeah, there used to be myths about dragons, this is, I saw a dragon. Like the dragon in Blue Whale. All the cryptids do usually have their place of origin in their name, too, which lends more to that truth. Because more often than not, they're individual entities, rather than a collection of this type of creature. Right, the species, yeah. I was going to say that, I know Nathan and I talked about this a little bit, that the term cryptid I think is uniquely American. It is. You would say that maybe Nessie could be a cryptid over in the Loch Ness, but I would say for the most part, It's just the definition, but nobody else uses the term cryptid for Nessie. It's very American. But there are things that I feel like toe the line, like the Grimm. Is he a cryptid? He's also a ghost. He could be a little of both, depending on where, because there's many different Grimms, there may be just black dog tails. Sorry! I'm going to settle in with it, too. Depending on where the location is from, I think makes it either a ghost or a cryptid. Right. Would you say it's fair that there's a cultural, what's the difference between the folklore of it and the legend? Like there's that tie into its place, but there's a folklore, cultural tie. A seed that it develops from. Yeah, and the potential to see it today. Yeah, it's still somewhere out there. That's why she's a cryptid, because people are still like, no, no, they're out there in the town, in the forest. Same thing with Vigier the Devil, or Mothman, or a bunch of other urban legend style, a friend of a friend of a parent of a cousin of a was out late at night and maybe drunk, but that's not the point, and they saw this thing. For me, that's one of the big things. It's not just that, oh, there's this legend about this thing, but nobody really believes it. No, people are like, I saw this thing. Or they know somebody who saw this thing. We have a skunk ape. I think that that's definitely not a bear, and it's unlikely to be a human. There's a video on YouTube called, I think I saw a skunk ape, please help. It's a person with a video camera, 10 years old it said, crouching in the Florida swampy brush with all the trees everywhere, the scrub, and videoing this thing from the back, this big, looks kind of like a gorilla, but it's in the process of ripping apart a tree. At first you're like, is that a bear? It looks like a gorilla, but kind of lankier. Then you're like, oh, that's just a person in a suit. Then you watch it for two minutes rip a large piece of wood, a tree apart, and tossing it. The camera changed, and just running. As I was on YouTube this morning looking at that, other skunk ape foot videos pop up, and those are more of the old Patterson footage, where it's like, now we see that's a person walking, with the classic big foot walk, but this other one, I don't know. I wish he had made mention about how it smelled while they were sitting there. That's a big part. You're supposed to smell them before you see them out in the Florida swamps. Maybe they're the essence of Florida, just by concentrating to one stink. I don't know, if you read Devolution, it's kind of spread to the various Sasquatch mythology. I think that's the same as the Yeti. I would think not. Maybe up close, probably. Assuming your nose still functions in that kind of weather. I feel like all the cold, he probably doesn't sweat as much. He's probably got that special oil that keeps him warm. How recently were you that close to a polar bear? Okay, sure thing. Has anybody had any experiences with cryptids? I guess I would, because we never knew whether they were small monkeys, mutant squirrels, or what, but about 20 years ago, 23 years ago, we formed a ghost hunting trip around the perimeter of Florida, which took us up to Shell Mound, where we heard that there were some pretty cool pirate ghost stories. We wanted to check out Shell Mound is essentially just a wild area with a small sign that says, this is a park, there's a giant banyan tree, and nothing else. We decided to head over there just after sunset, just to see how creepy it could be and see what we could see. When we pulled into the very end of this dead end park, we were the only lights on, and so we said, let's turn the car off and see what it looks like. The second we turned the car off, we could hear all over the car, all over the roof, the hood, the windows. We immediately turned the lights on and our car was covered. We still disagree about whether they were hairless or not, but they were very dark in color, they were about whatever this size is. About the size of a chihuahua. They may have had tails, and they scattered. We booked it out of there. We were followed by an orb, but that's a different story. They only show up when things go awry. Your first reaction wasn't to get out and try and poke one with a stick? No, they were covering the car. At first I thought squirrels, and it's not a nail sound, you'd think squirrel, but they were weighty, and when they ran, they ran up into the trees, into the grass, and just were gone. We were there to see ghost pirates, possibly a ghost parrot, a ghost monkey situation, because of the speed of that too, of them descending and then disappearing. The Kentucky Goblins? The Kentucky Goblins are very paranormal too. There's stuff there that they're not just a creature. I would have been torn between getting out and poking one with a stick. And the self-preservation instinct of, maybe we shouldn't get out of the car. Nah, we're going to get out of the car. The Kentucky Goblins, they actually have a couple different names, and oddly enough I think one of them is the Little Green Men story, even though they're described as these little white things. For those listening, if you know Sableye from Pokemon, it looks like them, but white, and white actually. Big ears, big eyes. This whole house, everyone in this house saw these creatures. It wasn't like a one person, it was a whole home of people saw these creatures. At different times? At different times, came out with shotguns, shot at their own house, trying to get the creatures off of their house at multiple different times. They would always flee back to the woods. I think it happened maybe two or three times with them. No one really believed them. There's always someone like, oh it must have been a mass hallucination. When was this? 2010, this is recent. There is a really good, I think it's last time I watched it, it was on Amazon, but it's like a mini series of a documentary crew investigating this, it's called Hellier, and it's really, really good if you're interested in that. Spoiler is like everything, they never actually really find them. See I would have invited them in and just be like, what are you? Whatever happened to Paris? Strong desire to see all of these creepy creatures that show up in the middle of the night when there's no lights. I am a firm believer that if you start with the aggression, you're definitely going to get aggression back. Wait for them to make the first move, then you are justified in beating them. There's another thing too, I think if more research goes into this, this might pan out to a lot of different cryptids, but the Kentucky Goblins are unique too because there are a bunch of cave systems in that area that are famous for being very extensive and connected and not fully explored. It is awesome. There's a creature living underground that is alien to have landed there a long time ago. If you look at an overlay of the cave systems in the United States and then people who just disappeared without a trace, they do line up pretty neatly. The hot spots are hot spots on both of them. This could be because people go spelunking and they should not have because they're dumb. This could also be because we've got killer cave things. No one knows. I have to make sure not to cross cryptids and conspiracies because I'd be like hollow earth mole people. That's actually a really good point though. Is there a line that says this is definitely a conspiracy and this is a cryptid? Does it come back to just one single creature? The conspiracy is more of a this is something that some usually organization, often the government is trying to hide from us that everyone should know. The moon is hollow and it's a satellite. They're trying to hide it. If they're trying to hide it, they're clearly failing. Mothman had premonitions associated with him. That's what they say. He was considered a bad omen though, wasn't he? You would just see the red eyes and the dark figure and be like it's an owl. He's a real, real, real big owl and apparently he's also associated with that bridge collapsing. He showed up a lot around the couple of months before this major bridge collapse. Some people say there's talk that he was trying to warn people and that he had a hard time communicating because he's a mothman. There's other people that it's somehow his fault because he showed up and then these bridges collapsed. Let's just say American infrastructure. A bridge could collapse at any time. We don't need a mothman. I hope he warns me before I get on that bridge is what I say. He also likes to stare at people as they're in their cars late at night doing things and stuff. There's many stories that he's also just your average Joe creeper. He's got those red eyes in the dark. He likes to watch what's going on and maybe he sees a bridge in the future collapsing and he lets people know. What are you going to do? He's got no mouth. He sees all these tragedies and it's all just trapped inside of him. Mothman just screaming internally. He does have a really great statue in Pleasantville. So much so that if you don't know that people leave them offerings of beans and money. They have to go clear a moth every day because they're like, stop leaving beans at mothman! He has a picture of a big silver mothman statue about 10-15 feet tall. He's got very pretty tattered wings in that statue. He's got some butterfly wings and a very muscular superhero body. He's ripped. He's a lot more man than moth. He's got the ambiguous unshapely shape of mothman mothman that kind of looks like the batman symbol. Yes. That's how they chose in their town to represent their hero. The mothman with his offerings of beans and money. It is a lot of beans. There's a live feed of the statue 24-7. Just in case something happens. My friends went there and texted us when they were like, we're by the mothman statue. So everyone opened up the live feed and they waved at us through the live feed. Oh, that's really fun. That's not a part of the story that I know. I'm not sure. I'm sure there's something with some sort of meme that came out. I couldn't tell you why. I just know that it's a thing that people have been doing. The people who run the mothman. I don't want to see mothman. He is an omen of destruction. They're like, please stop. Because we have to pick up the beans. We don't need the beans. There are unopened cans of beans. Hopefully that's the way that most people bring them in. Pocket full of beans. I would appreciate dry beans a lot more than there would be wet beans. Does anybody have their own personal canon about cryptid that they enjoy? I don't think it's the average Bigfoot. My cousin tormented me with a chupacabra when I was a kid. I retaliated by leaving scarab beetles in his bed. He'd watch the mummy. I was like, you can stop at any time now. That one was very much not in alignment with the actual chupacabra mythos. He woke up just to wig me out. Chupacabra is one of the scarier ones too. He's definitely just a baddie. Or just an animal. There are two different chupacabras though. We have the Puerto Rican chupacabra. I heard something recently. I didn't do a lot of digging to be fair. I heard that in the 80's there was a big wave of Texan chupacabra fighting. It was happening at the time of border panic happening. Apparently a drug lord at one of the borders was doing healing goats and draining blood. They confirmed this in several case studies. A lot of the chupacabra mythos got repopularized at the same time that this was happening. It was a ritualistic thing happening. I was just hung up on the what are you doing? I was just listening to something about this. I don't think most people there was a cult that took this to a different level in Mexico. There's always a cult somewhere. You make a flesh golem and feast different things. Sacrifice isn't a part of it. You've moved on from that now. Sacrifice is a big part of it because you need to make your flesh golem. When you start with the goal being a flesh golem you have already exceeded the bounds of sanity here. That's interesting. You could probably do a giant research thing of this. Unrest in the normal world and how that correlates to the stories that you start to hear around those times because people are scared. They're looking for answers. I've never heard of that. It's something that you say to kids in Venezuela. I have heard about it in Colombia and Mexico. If someone is behaving bad or really wants to go to the forest or anything. You shouldn't go there. Cucuy? It's like the boogeyman. There's a similar correlation between horror movies and the current social panic. Right now we've got a whole lot of parents being afraid that their children aren't who they believe them to be. I could do a dissertation on this but we've kind of gotten off topic. These are the black eyed kids. These are scary. They're black eyed children. They'll come up and they have completely black eyes. A la Coraline. They'll knock on your car door and try to get into your car. What they do is bad news. If you see a black eyed kid, run them over. No white, no nothing. It's like the ghost stories of the ghost hitchhikers. I think they're popping in out of other dimensions too. Like the hat man. There are actual cryptid shadow people like the dark watchers. Those go all the way back into Native American mythology. It's not just shadows. These are literally, since the beginning of time here in North America, creepy shadow people over in the west. They can stay over there. I whispered that. I said they don't do anything. They're human figured, creepy big shadow people. You'd be like, shadows are on Noah. A walking shadow. Again, I miss creepypasta. Which one was the scariest? I want to hear Nathan's headcanons for Bigfoot. Bigfoot, he's the most popular cryptid probably, I would say, especially in North America. He is spotted all over. He has many different iterations. We have our skunk apes, and then there's wendigos and there's all sorts of stuff. Wendigos are not as helpful. They get mistaken. He gets seen all over. I'd like to believe that we are seeing the same Bigfoot or group of Bigfoots all over North America and that they are interdimensional hitchhikers who are either visiting or trapped in between our world. They're slipping in between dimensions. That's how they end up at different parts of the world all the time and how he is such a prolific cryptid. He's all over the place. It goes in with, he's just a nice guy. Bigfoot's probably one of the more friendly cryptids you can think of, too. He's just a tourist. He's just sightseeing. He's popping in. He's popping out. He's just a guy from Quantum Leap. He hasn't had on makeup and set design in a while. He's just lost out there, slipping in and out. He never knows where his next jump will take him. Do you remember what formed the basis for this theory? That's pretty intriguing. That's something that I had never even considered. It goes into the UFO theories of UFOs visiting us and different UFO sightings and the graves and stuff. There's all sorts. You can go all left and right about them. One of the things is that they are interdimensional travelers visiting Earth and that Bigfoot might have been in the Star Wars cosmic universe where there's lots of different aliens. Bigfoot is just the hobo of the aliens. He hitched a ride back in the 40s or 50s when they came because they were doing nuclear tests. They're like, oh, let's check this out now. Earth's ready. He hitchhiked his way on some gray ship or some reptilian ship or something and then he fell off or missed his ride and now he's just been chilling here. He's just a dude in a van. It's just a fun way to bring aliens and Bigfoot together and also make Bigfoot more fun. And aliens less scary. I don't know why people are always so terrified about the concept of aliens. It's the fear of the unknown. It's mostly that because their desires and wants are going to be completely alien to ours, we think, and they may not consider our moral issues theirs. Ending us is probably not a concern to them. Or they might even see us as sentient enough beings to deal with or be dangerous. Maybe they don't care about us. That's almost kind of just as scary, too. It's kind of that Cthulhu-esque feeling of what do they want? Or Cthulhu being like, when Cthulhu shows up, he's in charge. Humans have been in charge on Earth since we existed and the idea that aliens are coming in and they're going to be one step above us I think that's just inherently people, whether they think about it or not, are just like that's probably built in. We're the number one species. I can't take that man seriously anymore. Cthulhu with all the That man. That man I met on the street. All I'm dating is the Cthulhu. Tentacles and love Cthulhu. He has gotten a lot more adorable. Is there a Krypton in there we haven't really talked about? You need to talk about Nathan's favorite. I love, and I have been looking stuff up. I want to know about this guy. About the frog man. Where is he from again? What's his name? The Loveland Frogman. The Loveland Frogman. With a good butt. You can't see it, but we have a picture and it is the top half is frog, big frog head, and then there is a very pert bottom on him. He does not skip the squats and he is running and jumping and there is the police officer who saw him. He's just trying to escape. So it started in 1955 when somebody who admittedly was drinking and driving in Ohio claimed to see a frog man crossing a bridge or an area and hopping over a fence into a creek or some sort of body of water. Then that became legend and became like a folklore and people talk about it. Then in 1972 he was spotted by a police officer and his partner who called it in and they saw what looked to be, at first they thought it was some sort of creature, but then it got up on its hind legs, crawled up a fence and hopped back into the water as they were pulling up with their headlights. They put in a report, that's how it became official, there was an official police report saying this and saying they don't know what it is and what it looked like and it appeared to have a frog head and stuff. Later, in that same month, which was March, he hit the frog man. A separate police officer claims to have hit a frog man and then he claims, they don't have this and there's no pictures, but he threw it in his trunk and called it in and somebody else came and claimed it was an iguana without a tail. That was how they wrote it off. That's how they say. I've been looking this up and in March 1972 it did not get above 60 degrees in Ohio. Iguanas aren't going to survive, they're not going to live very long. It was mostly in the 40s and 30s during that time. Also the fact that it happened twice 20 years apart in both iguanas, yes. I posit that it is much more likely that there might be a frog man wandering around out there and frogs and toads have been known to adapt to cold weather. I want to see this corpse. Well he got rid of it probably because he wanted it to end. I think it's more likely he was made to get rid of it or it was gotten rid of for him because the men in black don't like those things around and that's the thing, they show up. Also just normal police offices don't like to do a bunch of extra work like that. If it's not for, like there wasn't a murder, there wasn't an actual crime, this would just become a whole bunch of headache for them possibly. Or have the town think that they've lost their marbles. Right, yeah, you're supposed to be a person of authority. Although if you hold up a frog man corpse, I'll believe you. If it's that big, I don't think you'd be able to hold it. So that's the story and they claim that it's an iguana but I've looked up the numbers and it was cold and I don't know, it doesn't seem likely. And then the 20 years apart thing, how many iguanas are escaping? This doesn't seem very likely in Ohio. Okay, do you have something to say, Iz? There are a lot of major reptiles. There are. Yeah, but the temperature. Do Ohio have any warm waterways? They do well in water as long as it is. Your water doesn't get cold. There's some waterways they can live in. This brings into the next thing I wanted to bring up and talk about is that how do we feel about debunking? It's a big part of the cryptid world is people who are trying to make their evidence to believe it and people are trying to disbelieve and people are trying to just do the truth and it's a whole thing about debunking. I've listened to this podcast called Death by Monsters. I don't know if anyone's heard of it before but their very first episode is called Glamping for Bigfoot. Everything about that sentence offends me. What it was is there's this guy in his truck and he was hunting from his truck, which is super illegal. He was hunting bears. Also super illegal. He saw what he thought was a Bigfoot and a child. Not a child, but a Bigfoot child. A juvenile Bigfoot. He shot it from his car. Pretty sure he got it. In order not to be caught glamp hunting or whatever you want to call it, he drove away and came back and his body was gone. He even went and grabbed other people to come and help him grab his body and it was not there. It was just a bear. He was like, no, no, I'm absolutely sure I shot this Bigfoot in my truck while driving on the highway. With his rifle. I think... Just while you gather it, I was going to say it can be really frustrating to have a thing debunked and be told, no, this isn't real, but if you do get those out of the way, you can spend more time on the ones that they haven't been able to find evidence for debunking and go with that. Also, I haven't seen any of these officially debunked in any way that I'd like to. I personally am a pretty cynic skeptic. Unfortunately, the burden of proof is on the person trying to prove it exists. You can't prove a negative, you can only prove that it is real. A lot of the time, the so-called evidence being put in front of me has so many other more likely explanations in front of it. Because, wow, would I love it if someone could prove in a way that I would agree with that this is likely or that it is true. So much of the time, I'm like, okay, you're ignoring huge swaths of facts over here so that your pet theory can work. I'll let you have your fun, but no. What if there's always going to be a flaw in somebody's information to assist with keeping that information from being concrete? That's part of the whole thing. People do really love their pet theories and stuff, and it's a whole part of the whole cryptid community of people who like that. But I think it's important to have a little bit of a skeptic spine, because you don't want to just be crazy. You want to keep it up just to separate tourists from their money, or because you're having a good time, or whatever the case may be, fine, great. Please stop using it to excuse assault and murder. It could have been an actual talk out crime. The number of people who've shot other people's dogs because they thought it was a wolf. First of all, you don't know what a wolf looks like. That's just real obvious. Second of all, that's also super illegal. Stop it. If it was just everyone's having fun with this and it doesn't actually matter what the outcome is, I'm not going to believe it without a mountain of evidence supporting it, but I'm not going to have a problem with someone else believing it. Whether that's what the person talking to me is saying or not, this is being used to ignore other things or to explain other things that becomes a problem. I want to circle back to the question, which was scariest? How scary is cryptid, and why? I've done a lot of talking, I'm sorry. If anyone else wants to start with it. I'm going to go with the when to go. Man eater, also cold weather, which is always a no-go for me. With all due respect, I watch a lady on TikTok, she's got a masters or a doctorate in mythology. The cannibalism part of the when to go is a problematic take that was added by Europeans to dehumanize the indigenous folks. There is definitely, we're not even supposed to say the name apparently, there is a when to go creature, but they do not talk about it in any way, shape, or form. The cannibalism part was added on by the Europeans later on. Some of the folks that are still technically indigenous are the skin walkers. That I don't know much about. I guess just scary in the sense of you don't know who you're talking to. Depending on which mythology, which tribal mythology you're talking, will depend on how nasty they are, because it can be anywhere from somebody who just uses magic in ways they don't approve of, all the way up to they will skin you and eat you and then use your pelt to go take your place and then go skin and eat somebody. It can get really gnarly. One of them is the liver eater. There's a bunch of various ones, because Native American mythology is not a unified thing. Seeing them and potentially videotaping things that could be skin walkers, they still sometimes fall under the cryptid. I hate calling things that are obviously in people's religion lore and stuff like that cryptids, but I feel like in this case it's one of those things where I saw that. The creature looks a little off, like it's a dog, but doesn't... Not ear is different. Not ear fun, in a let's just not sort of way. Oh yeah, I can see that. The not ear, yeah. Describe what you're seeing. Imagine if somebody had heard of a deer and tried to recreate it in their mind, but they weren't 100% certain what the eyes were supposed to look like. For those who don't know, this is an Appalachian folklore, and it's literally just called not deer. It's a deer-esque shape. It's exactly a good way to describe it. It's somebody who'd never seen one trying to imagine itself into being. It looks vaguely like a deer from back, if you're far enough away from it, you think it's a deer. You get closer and look at it, and you're like, that's not right. Sometimes it's because they have weird eyes, sometimes it's because their head's back. Some way they have the wrong amount of legs, or it's just wrong. It's like looking at something out of the side of your eye kind of a feeling. I don't know what it is, but that's not a deer. Are those stories of them interacting, or are they scary? They sound scary. I don't know. There is some mythos that changes, depending on where in Appalachia you are. The consensus that I know is, you see it, no, you don't. You don't. The appropriate way to address if you ever encounter a not deer, do not acknowledge it. There was a lot of times, do you guys remember that weird zombie deer virus that was happening, where deers would be walking around with their necks completely broken and still alive? There's video of that one. A lot of those were also filmed and thought to be not deer before they realized that there was an actual biological thing happening. That's a really cool topic, too, because this is something that I find attractive about the Bigfoot and Sasquatch. The concept of where do cryptids fall in the conversation of the missing link, or just evolutionary offshoots, or unknown species, or strange parasites that have just happened to this animal and made it into something grotesque. That's a thing, too, though. Parasites won't absolutely completely change how a creature works. There's some animal that actually uses the parasite to its advantage for making lights or something. Not the one that doesn't bode well for the snail. They do have evolved together because of it. I think some of the bioluminescent creatures may have had a parasite at some point in time, way back in time that just changed their genetics. I love the stuff like jackalope syndrome, where there are actually rabbits with horn-like protrusions. They are very thick bunnies. Some of them are fine, and they'll live longish, relatively healthy lives. A lot of them don't eat well, or whatever. People see them and are like, it's a jackalope. No one's wrong. There is, especially in the Amazon, a parasitic fungi for every type of bug species. That one drives the ant to go further into the nest so it can die and explode and infect everyone else with that fungal parasite. As the ants notice it, they will all carry that ant as far as possible away to try to protect the nest. That's right up there with if you spray an ant with the death pheromone, they'll just take themselves off to the cemetery and hang out there until it wears off. I'm not dead yet. Speaking of other Appalachian things, stuff will come up on TikTok because I like a lot of the Appalachian folklore and music and stuff like that. One of them is, I don't know if there's an actual name for it, but it's called hay. It's something in the woods that takes on the voice of someone you know calling out hay. While this girl was making a recording in her grandma's property, not anywhere near the house, she was getting a recording ready to film because she was going to go film creepy stuff that she could find. Her husband's voice you could hear in the video was clear across the country. He didn't come with her or whatever. When you hear it, you're not supposed to respond to it or try to talk to it or anything like that. She stopped because she was like, did I really just hear that? It said, hey, two more times. It's like how sometimes you get EEPs or whatever of random noises. This was clearly like, hey. Hey. You can hear the inflection. That's so scary. Appalachia has a lot of... There's a lot of cryptids and stuff too that are the nastier ones that have evolved or the stories have evolved to draw people away from other things or to pull them away or to separate people. If you were a predator hunting human, you definitely want them separated. What happens if they look like... Does that count? The more attention you give it, the more it... It locks on to you. Pay attention once you start conceding that there's something. The first step is paying attention. It's got your attention. Hey, if we keep prodding here, maybe they'll actually do things. They labeled it as a ghost or a demon or a monster or a spirit or what. Basically, the notion is you hear a hay out in the woods, don't respond. You follow the ghost light. Don't follow anything into the dark woods. Bring a flashlight. Stop following the list. Do you have a cryptid? That's what I told you, that cryptids is something really American. There's not even a translation for the word cryptid to Spanish. There is no. For example, Venezuelan folklore. We have ghosts and demons and everything, but we don't really have cryptids. Chupacabras is not Venezuelan. The only cryptid that I could think of is not even Venezuelan. It's Argentinian. It's not really an original name. They are this kind of... I don't know how to say it in English. They are these creatures that are in the Alps in Argentina and they take care of nature. It's not really friendly, the word, because they don't interact with humans. They are just there to take care of nature and they are different types for every different... Biome? The name is Peque, which is literally the short version of saying pequeña. They are supposed to be these really small creatures human-like creatures that just exist with the whole purpose of taking care of nature and the only reason why they don't interact with humans is because we don't take care of nature anymore, so they don't want to be with us. They are kind of like the fae or fairies. Pukwudgies. They are literally little people. They are not powerful or anything, they are little people taking care of nature. They're hobbits, it's fine. I'm used to cryptids. Growing up, we never really talked about it, besides sasquatch. The only reason I know that is because kids start calling each other sasquatch and things like that. I think he was also in the Goofy movies. I think the first time I asked you guys about Laugh Man before, you told me, Laugh Man, when we were going to the collection, I was like, oh, okay. I'm still new to things, I don't know. I know they're made up of mythical kind of things. Some people believe they're myths, others don't. Would you consider a changeling or something like that? You can, I think changelings are definitely more across the pond, if you will. I'm sure that there are fae here, but I feel like all the fae lore and things like that is really European-centric when it comes to changelings. Particularly Irish. And unfortunately, they believe that the myth of the changeling is probably largely associated with children of oxygen. Yeah, or any sort of disability of some sort. Wired Folk came and replaced my perfect child with this broken mess of a human being. Or imposter human being. Yeah, other mean words that could be used. Especially some of the, depending on which mythos you're reading, some of the mythos are to get your proper child back, your changeling child, possibly, unto death. I've also heard of leaving by the age of two. Take them back to the forest. You're just at home and your mom's like, no, you have to come. We're going to the forest. Stay there. It'll be fine. They say it's usually I did a minor in folklore. And the time when very, I'm going to say the word traditional, but tracing of children with autism that we often associate with autism comes out usually around the age of three or four. In Irish mythos, this is about the same time when they would start christening their children. And that was when they would get a name. That's the same age when people were saying I can't give this child a name. It's not my child. I've been living for three years without a name. Instant mortality was such. Can you bring me baby number one? And two, potentially. I'm sure they had nicknames for the baby. The pomp and ceremony of the naming was a big part of it. But I had to have called them something. It's a very different experience. We didn't have children. We just had small people that were old enough to work. I think the younger babies were probably not loved and doted on quite as much. They might have just been set to the side. I think also sometimes depending on how often people have babies too if they were having potentially twins or triplets or just one every year attempted you've got to be like think one, think two, think three. Cat in the hat, come on. I can understand being maybe a mom and knowing most of the children I've birthed are not going to make it and whatever I've got to do to protect them. It was a number game back then. You had 12 kids. Hope will let me get four of them. It's interesting to consider what is a cryptid and what's not considered a cryptid because it's all culturally tied to something but you get messy because folklore is cultural. That's what I think is so interesting about cryptids too. We have to wrap up a little bit now but just our conversation here how it went to so many different places because the idea of cryptids is very much tied in with our civilization and our ideas of things and the folklore we make up and the things that we choose to create often says a lot about the people who are living in that time or living in that area and stuff. I think really interesting is seeing where it comes from. You can see sometimes they're in a straight line or a slightly curvy line from this idea to oh no we have a funny little monster that comes out sometimes. Thank you all for coming. Thank you all for your awesome stories and thoughts. It was a very, very fun episode. I think we're going to call a wrap on the cryptids.