An extremely random and little-known fact about me is that I am obsessed with Nessie (formally known as the Loch Ness monster, but that feels a bit too technical for my taste). My love began in high school, when my friends and I somehow found ourselves doing a group project in Spanish class on the topic of Nessie — I couldn’t tell you why Nessie was a viable theme for a Spanish project or how we came up with it to begin with, but here we are. We spent a weekend immersed in late-aughts internet search results: indiscernible footage of alleged sightings, various articles of questionable credibility, and random documentary clips that had made their way onto YouTube. Regardless of the quality of the research, though, I was hooked. And while I don’t necessarily spend a whole lot of my time deliberately seeking it out these days, I do still always experience a huge rush of excitement if Nessie, or cryptozoology in general, ever does come up. Keep collections to yourself or inspire other shoppers! Keep in mind that anyone can view public collections - they may also appear in recommendations and other places. Mothman goes under the microscope as Jeff Wamsley continues to dig for more clues to this complex mystery.ﾠ A required investigative resource for those who are searching for answers." - John A. Keel, Author, The Mothman Prophecies.

Cryptids for a Living - VICE What It’s Like to Hunt Cryptids for a Living - VICE

Ancient mythical animals are all around us in words and images. Following the transformations of such animals through literature and art across millennia has been my passion since the early ’80s. It was then, after years of writing and teaching, that I became intrigued by a winged and fishtailed lion figure on an antique oil lamp hanging in my study. That hybrid creature led me to the eagle-lion griffin and my first published book, The Book of Gryphons. I have followed a host of mythical beasts ever since. My most recent book, The Phoenix: An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast , was published in a 2021 Chinese translation.History and time shape the world around us, and the earth is ever changing, Gaia is in torment. We cannot wait until it is too late. We must unite to save it.” Since childhood, growing up in a family with spiritualist beliefs, I’ve been fascinated with mysterious phenomena. Once I became a little older, and my childhood love of zoos, museums, and dinosaurs became a broader love of science, I began to re-examine certain fantastic claims and beliefs with a skeptical lens. I became fascinated not only with the subject of certain beliefs, but the reason we as humans have these beliefs. The study of ghosts, monsters, or UFOs is really a study of the human condition and our belief systems. It’s the exploration of the human side that motivates the characters in my books and my continued interest in mysterious phenomena. There's something in the woods that wasn't there before, something that makes strange cries in the night, something with sharp teeth and claws. For believers and non-believers alike, this book is an interesting look at the legendary creatures that run, crawl and fly throughout the 50 states.”—James Madison University’s The Breeze

Cryptids (224 books) - Goodreads

Arguably one of the best-known cryptid books of all time, The Mothman Propheciesis the definitive account of one of America’s strangest cryptid legends. From 1966 to 1967, the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia was terrorized by sightings of a bizarre creature that appeared to be part-man part-moth. As journalist John A. Keel arrives to investigate, he begins to receive strange phone calls. Everything eventually comes to a head in December 1967, when tragedy strikes Point Pleasant, and Keel can’t help but wonder if it's all connected to the mysterious winged creature. I’ve seen many of these places personally. If you tell me there’s a hodag statue in Wisconsin, I want to see it with my own eyes, same as if you told me there was an actual hodag in Wisconsin. In South Dakota, I took selfies with the world’s largest chainsaw bigfoot sculpture. In Vermont, I hiked an icy mountaintop to find Wampahoofus Trail. In Ohio, I climbed an ancient mound shaped like an underwater panther. I have been to many cryptid museums and gift shops, and I have a shelf full of souvenirs to prove it. I sometimes joke that when I say I’m hunting cryptids, what I mean is that I’m driving to a town to drink a craft beer named after one. But I did also venture into their territories. After dark, I entered the old cement bunkers in the West Virginia forest that are the lair of the Mothman. I boated from New York to Vermont across Lake Champlain looking for sinuous humps in the water. I walked through an Arizona canyon that skinwalkers are known to haunt—but only after I drove to town to see if they had any craft beers named after them. Ts'ür'i and Aghay are protectors who use language revitalization to save the Earth from bad settlers and cyborg sasquatches in this fun YA comic book about colonialism. Cole Pauls is an artist from the Tahltan First Nation. He wrote this comic in English and Southern Tutchone to help keep the ancestral language alive. City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende The inspiration for the film The Dark Divide starring David Cross and Debra Messing, one of America’s most esteemed natural history writers takes to the hills in search of Bigfoot―and finds the wildness within ourselves. But the big reason that he’s the most popular cryptid is that we’re narcissists. Bigfoot looks like us. Have you seen Harry and the Hendersons?From Bigfoot to Mothman to the Loch Ness Monster, the world is full of legends about monsters that are living just out of sight. Whether or not you believe, it’s still a fascinating subject. Each book on this list grapples with the existence of cryptids in its own way, so dive in if you want to get into a worldwide mystery, centuries in the making. Here are 11 monstrously interesting books about creature and cryptid legends.

16 Hair-Raising Cryptid Books That Just Might Make You Believe

Here, of note, is an extensive treatment of the purported healing and anti-poison properties of unicorn horn, medieval medicine processing the… At another extreme of the cryptozoological spectrum is this “sharp analysis of the quest for unreal critters” ( The Wall Street Journal), which takes a highly skeptical look at the science—and pseudoscience—behind cryptids, the arguments both for and against their existence, and the people who continue to believe in them, despite evidence to the contrary. This is the book for those who enjoy reading about cryptids…but aren’t quite buying their existence. This work, created in the early 20th century by Odell Shepard, is one of the better works made through time to craft mythology (and cryptozoology of a fashion) together with more modern historical treatments of its subject matter. It is the unicorn (or alicorn) here which concerns the text- and related material ranging from the quite antiquated, to the medieval, and the then-modern as anthropology and adventure made its way further into the outlands of Africa, India, and Tibet. I love this universe because there’s such a wide variety of characters that are each convinced that their way is the right way. Sometimes you never quite know whose side someone will come down on. These animals are not disputed but “hidden.” It is an optimistic mission statement. It would be quixotic to seek gremlins that exist no further than storybooks. Bigfoot exists, along with Nessie and the Jersey Devil. Their formal discovery will happen tomorrow, or next week at the latest, and won’t you feel silly when they are?”The Loch Ness Monster. The Yeti. Bigfoot. These are just some of the iconic mythical creatures studied by the discipline of 'cryptozoology'.

books (picked by 9,000+ authors) The best cryptozoology books (picked by 9,000+ authors)

What’s the vibe in a cryptid town versus any random small town where you might stop at a gas station? Patricia Thang is an educator located in Los Angeles. Though a native Angeleno through and through, her heart also belongs to Tokyo, where much of her family is from. Besides books, she is an enthusiastic devourer of many things, including podcasts, television, and J-pop. She realizes there’s not enough time in the world to consume all of that content, but she’s trying anyway. Other endeavors to which she has dedicated herself include cuddling her dogs until they’re annoyed and taste-testing every vegan ice cream she can find. It’s a question as old as time itself: what is lurking out there in the woods? Is it just your average, run-of-the-mill lions, and tigers, and bears? Or something harder to explain? These questions form the basis for many legends surrounding cryptids and other strange creatures. At least, that’s the traditional definition of a cryptid. Since cryptozoology was established in its modern form in the fifties, the definition has widened to encompass even more fantastical creatures as more people grow interested in the topic. This includes extraterrestrial entities, creatures from folklore such as mermaids and gnomes, sentient non-humans like the Menehune of Hawaii, and even (possibly) robots. This expanding definition of cryptid isn’t just because cryptozoology fans are a welcoming lot. It’s because cryptid has become synonymous with monster, of any kind. Cryptid fans love monsters, and pop culture cryptozoology is basically Pok.mon: we want to collect all the monster stories, and we want the widest variety of them in our collection as possible. In Hunting Monsters, Palaeozoological researcher Professor Darren Naish explores the fascinating science behind these elusive monsters - a science known as 'cryptozoology'. Bizarre stories of ancient sea-monsters and resurgent…Bigfoot - the name used for any large, hairy biped reported in every state of the United States and every Canadian province - has long baffled casual tourists and experienced scientists. Now readers can examine the evidence for this elusive creature and take a journey into the realm of crytozoology, or hidden animals, with the number one author in the field of Bigfoot study, Loren Coleman. Readers will travel with Coleman during his forty-year study as he investigates, interviews and conducts fieldwork on these incredible beasts. From ancient Native traditions to today's Internet databases that record the sightings almost as… Flatwoods Monster of West Virginia, a robotic extraterrestrial that crash-landed in rural Appalachia There are a couple of things. There’s a weird relationship between science and belief in America. We go through periods of extreme belief in religion, then we’ll go through periods that are more secular, then we’re trying to do both at the same time. Other cultures are better at embracing the spiritual side, so monsters to them are kind of like, of course there’s monsters.