Cryptological

Artist’s interpretation of a “Wild Haggis”

Wild haggis (Plural: Haggi) is a fictional creature said to be native to the Scottish Highlands. It is comically claimed to be the source of haggis, a traditional Scottish dish that is in fact made from the innards of sheep (including heart, lungs, and liver).

A Tiger Quoll, a possible explanation for Waitoreke sightings.

The Waitoreke (or Waitoreki, Waitorete) is an otter/beaver-like cryptid said to live in New Zealand. It is usually described as a small otter-like animal that lives in the South Island of New Zealand. There are many theories on the Waitoreke's true identity, such as it being an otter, beaver or pinniped.The Waitoreke is usually described as a small otter-like creature sometimes as big as a cat. It is described as having brownish fur and short legs.

The sightings usually place the creature near or in the water on the South Island of New Zealand. Its fur is described as being short like that of an otter.

Very little physical evidence proving the existence of the Waitoreke exists. Julius von Haast is reported to have obtained a Waitoreke pelt in 1868. The fur was brown, with white spots, and the toes lacked webbing. This is inconclusive evidence; the pelt seems to have resembled a quoll's.

River otters can be found in the wilds all over Japan. They are under a meter in total length, and well-loved for their shy, playful nature and cute faces.

As with most wild animals in Japan, kawauso develop magical powers upon reaching old age. They are particularly skilled at shape-changing and accurately copying sounds. They love alcohol, and are usually only seen in human areas when trying to acquire sake. They are playful yokai, well known for tricks and mischief, but very rarely dangerous.

Kawauso are fond of playing pranks on humans, especially by mimicking sounds and words. They enjoy calling out human names or random words at strangers walking in the street and watching their confused reactions. They are fond of magically snuffing out lanterns in the night and leaving travelers stranded in the dark. Others transform into beautiful young women and try to seduce young men, and then run away laughing.

Occasionally kawauso do commit more violent deeds. In a few instances near castles in Ishikawa, a kawauso dressed up as beautiful young woman was found luring men to the water’s edge in order to catch and eat them, discarding the half-eaten bodies into the moat.

The jatai is a kimono sash which becomes animated and slithers around like a giant snake during the night.

Pixiu (also called Tianlu or Bixie) is one of the five auspicious animals of traditional Chinese culture (the other four are the dragon, phoenix, turtle and kylin). The Chinese people call it “fortune beast.” This lion-looking beast has the head of dragon, the body of a horse and the legs of a kylin and is able to fly. The Pixiu is both ferocious and powerful so it works as a security guard of Heaven, resisting demons and ghosts. Just like the dragon and the kylin, the Pixiu brings happiness good luck for people and has an exorcising function. What is different from the kylin is that the Pixiu is a ferocious animal and has strong will in protecting its master. That is the very reason why many Chinese people wear jade Pixius.

The Pixiu has 26 figures and 49 incarnations. As Chinese mythology says, the Pixiu is the Dragon King’s ninth son. Gold, silver, jewels and all other treasures are the Pixiu’s staple food. That gives the Pixiu a noble temperament which helped it win the love of the Jade Emperor and the Dragon King. One day, maybe because it had eaten too much, it relieves its bowels in the Jade Emperor’s palace. The angry Emperor beat it and removed its anus. When news spread among the Chinese people, they regarded the Pixiu as an auspicious animal that can help in making fortunes.

Cardiff Giant is a 10-foot (3.0 m) tall purported "petrified man" uncovered on October 16, 1869, by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. "Stub" Newell in Cardiff, New York. However, it was realized that it was just a hoax created by New York tobacconist named George Hull. Hull, an atheist, decided to create the giant after an argument with a fundamentalist minister named Mr. Turk about a passage in Genesis that stated that there were giants who once lived on Earth. The idea of a petrified man did not originate with Hull, however. In 1858 the newspaper Alta California had published a bogus letter claiming that a prospector had been petrified when he drank a liquid within a geode. Some other newspapers also had published stories of supposedly petrified people.

The Gippsland Big Cat is a cryptid from Australia. Although feral cats are present in Victoria as in the rest of Australia and there have been hundreds of reported sightings, no proof of the existence of big cats has even been established.

Dr John Henry, a researcher from Deakin University, studied the reported sightings from the 1970s and concluded that it was "beyond reasonable doubt" that large cats were roaming the Grampians region. In June 2005 Kurt Engel, a deer hunter from Noble Park, shot what he claimed was a large cat in rugged terrain near the town of Sale. Engel photographed the dead cat, before cutting off its tail and dumping the body in a river. DNA testing results determined that the beast was a feral cat.

The tale of the Gippsland big cat is closely related to similar tales of exotic carnivorous felines that have been reported for many decades in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, and commonly known as the Blue Mountains cat.

Mermaids are known as ningyo in Japanese, but they are very different from the mermaids of Western tradition. Ningyo more closely resemble fish than humans, with a varying level of human-like features, ranging from just an ugly, deformed fish-like face, to an entire human torso with long, bony fingers and sharp claws. They can range in size from the size of a human child to the size of a large seal. Unlike the mermaids of the Atlantic and Mediterranean legends, ningyo from the Pacific and the Sea of Japan are hideous to behold, resembling more of an otherworldly nightmare than a seductive siren.

Mermaids resembling the breeds known throughout the West – with an attractive human torso and a piscine lower body – are not unheard of in the Japanese islands. Particularly since the end of the Edo period and the opening of Japan to the West, more and more Western-style Atlantic mermaids have been seen in Japanese waters. However, the most common Japanese mermaid is more beast than beauty.

Ōkubi appear as enormous, severed heads, which fly through the sky. In most accounts they are female in appearance. Quite commonly they have blackened teeth.

Ōkubi are little threat to humans. Their most common activity is to fly about harassing people: grinning at them, blowing away their umbrellas, or otherwise scaring them. According to some accounts, if an ōkubi breaths on any body part, that part will become inflamed. However, stories about serious injuries or deaths are rare to nonexistent.

The Leshy or Lesovik is a male woodland spirit in Slavic mythology who protects wild animals and forests. There are also leshachikha/leszachka (wives of the leshak) and leshonky (children of the leszy). He is roughly analogous to the Woodwose of Western Europe and the Basajaun of the Basque Country.

A leshy usually appears as a tall man, but he is able to change his size from that of a blade of grass to a very tall tree. He has hair and a beard made from grass and vines, and is sometimes depicted with a tail, hooves, and horns. He has pale white skin that contrasts with his bright green eyes. A leshy has a close bond with the gray wolf, and is often seen in the company of bears as well. He is the forest lord and carries a club to express that he is the master of the wood. He has blue blood, which makes his cheeks the color blue. Legend describes him as having a red scarf and his left shoe on his right foot. He also has no shadow.

Leshy protects the animals and birds in the forest and tells them when to migrate. He can shapeshift into many different forms. As a human, he looks like a peasant with glowing eyes, and his shoes are on backwards.

A person who befriends a leshy can learn the secrets of magic. Farmers and shepherds would make pacts with the leshy to protect their crops and sheep. The leshy has many tricks, including leading peasants astray, making them sick, or tickling them to death. They are also known to hide the axes of woodcutters. A person gets lost in the woods when a leshy crosses their path. To find the way out, you have to turn your clothes inside out and wear shoes on opposite feet.

Leshies are terribly mischievous beings: they have horrible cries, and can imitate voices of people familiar to wanderers and lure them back to their caves, where the leshies will tickle them to death; they also remove signs from their posts. Leshies aren't evil, although they enjoy misguiding humans and kidnapping young women, they are also known to keep grazing cattle from wandering too far into the forests and getting lost. Sometimes cow herders will make pacts with a leshy by handing him their crosses from around their necks and sharing communion with him after Christian church gatherings; these pacts are said to give the cowherds special powers.

Sometimes more than one leshy inhabits a forest, and then they will fight for their territory, knocking down trees and scaring animals.

Indrid Cold, commonly known as The Grinning Man, is a purported humanoid entity. His name comes from his tendency to smile at those who encounter him.

The Grinning Man is reported to be human-like in appearance, though is commonly associated with UFO activity and is sometimes believed to be an alien. It is also believed possible that he is connected with the Men In Black. In his first sighting, he was described as being over six feet tall and wearing a reflective, green suit with a black belt. He had a dark complexion and small, beady eyes set far apart. He was described as not having any nose, ears, or hair. In his second known encounter, his suit was said to be blue instead of green, but still retained its reflective property.

According to reports made by Woodrow Derenberger, Indrid Cold came from a planet named Lanulo in the Genemedes galaxy, and that there were two other "grinning men" by the names of Demo Hassan and Karl Ardo.

Indrid Cold was first seen on October 16, 1966 when two boys, Martin "Mouse" Munov and James "Jimmy" Yanchitis, in New Jersey were walking on Fourth Street, when they saw a surreal figure standing near a fence. As they walked closer, the figure was a tall bald man wearing a metal green suit who was staring right at them with a huge grin. The idiosyncratic man chased them until they got away from him. UFO sightings were also reported around the area.

On November 2, 1966 in Parkersburg, West Virginia (around the same area and time as the Mothman came about), Woodrow Derenberger was driving his way home on Interstate 77 until he heard a crash. Then, an unidentifiable vehicle appeared to land in front of his truck. He described it as a "an old fashioned kerosene lamp chimney, flaring at both ends, narrowing down to a small neck and then enlarging in a great bulge in the center." The Grinning Man came out of the vehicle with a dark tan, and walked up to Derenberger and telepathically said his name was "Indrid Cold" and he meant no harm. Cold said he just wanted to know more about the human race and he would visit Derenberger again. After the encounter, Derenberger stated that Cold revealed he was from the planet Lanulo in the galaxy of Genemedes.

During the same period in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, the Lilly family had been reporting that poltergeist activity in their home, such as diamond shaped lights. The Lilly's daughter, Linda, was sleeping one night, and awoke to see a man standing over her.

Kasha are a type of bake-neko, or monster cat. They are large, bipedal felines as large as or larger than a human. They are often accompanied by hellish flames or lightning. They like to appear during rainy or stormy weather, and most often during the night. Their name sometimes causes confusion with other yokai; while their name means “fire cart,” they do not use vehicles of any kind.

Kasha, being bake-neko, often live among humans, disguised as ordinary house cats or strays. However, they reveal their true forms during funeral services, when they leap down from rooftops to snatch corpses out of their coffins. Kasha are occasionally employed as messengers or servants of hell, in which case they are tasked with collecting the corpses of wicked humans spiriting them off to hell for punishment. Other times, they steal corpses for their own uses — either to animate as puppets or to eat.

It is nearly impossible to retrieve a person’s remains after they have been snatched by a kasha. This makes passing on to the next life difficult. The best defense is to be prepared; temples in areas where kasha are said to prowl have devised unique ways of defending against these monster cats. In Yamagata, clever priests have taken to holding two funeral ceremonies for the deceased. The first ceremony is a fake — the casket is filled only with rocks, so if a kasha comes for the body it will end up with nothing. The real ceremony takes place afterwards, when the risk of a kasha encounter is lessened. In Ehime, a head shaving razor may be placed on top of the coffin as against kasha. In Miyazaki, priests chant, “baku ni wa kuwasen” and “kasha ni wa kuwasen” (“don’t be eaten by a baku, don’t be eaten by a kasha”) twice times in front of the funeral procession in order to keeps evil spirits away. In Okayama, the priests play a myōhachi — a type of cymbal used in religious ceremonies — in order to keep the kasha away.