The Paranoid Style Podcast
The Paranoid Style Podcast
California Cryptids
This week The Paranoid Style Podcast is venturing out into the wild unknown… but staying close to home cause this episode is all about California Cryptids! From the frosty depths of Lake Tahoe to the dark and shady Lumberwoods. From Fresno to Hyampom. It’s Devils and Bear Hogs and Tessies. Oh, My! These creatures of legends are out here having fun, in the warm California sun!
If you have any topic suggestions for the show or any tales to share, please email us at theparanoidstylepod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram @theparanoidstylepod or on twitter @style_paranoid.
Opening theme music provided by Tony Molina. You can hear more of his music at https://tonymolina650.bandcamp.com/
ARK: Hey, Sister!
CCK: … …
ARK: Hey, Listeners. This is The Paranoid Style Podcast, two sisters picking up the slime covered rocks of the universe and taking a peek at what dirty secrets lie underneath. My name is Amanda. I have had the experience of being completely panic stricken while in the woods.
CCK: … …
ARK: This week will be examining just some of the creepy, crawly, and possibly killer mythical creatures that may or may not make their homes in some of the more remote areas of the map. And since there is a whole wide world of mysterious creatures to discuss, we’re gonna stick close to home this time and focus specifically on our home state. Christine, tell me what you know about California Cryptids.
CCK: California cryptids… we’re undeniable. Fine, fresh, fierce. We got it on lock. West Coast represent. Now put your claws up. Oh-Oh-O Oh, all right. Well, first, let’s take a moment to talk about the words cryptozoology and cryptids. Cryptozoology is the pseudoscientific study of legendary creatures or animals that some believe existed or may still exist and have just not yet been proven or discovered. The term was probably coined in the 1940’s by a Scottish zoologist named Ivan T. Sanderson and is made up of Crypto, meaning hidden or secret and Zoology, the study of animals.
ARK: So, of course the word cryptids refers to the legendary animals or creatures themselves and means hidden animals. Now, it might be easy to write off some of these hidden animals as just myths, misunderstandings, or in some cases as gaffs meant to deceive, but there are new species of animals still being discovered.
CCK: There have been very recent discoveries of the bones of a crocodile species that dates to the Cretaceous period. The freshwater crocodile was believed to be over eight feet long and probably would’ve have gotten even longer if it had lived. It was named Confractosuchus (kon-frak-toh-suh-kus) sauroktonos (so-ruck-tonos), meaning “the broken dinosaur killer,” because of the juvenile dinosaur remains that were found in its stomach.
ARK: Holy crap! A dinosaur eating crocodile?! Where did that used to live?
ARK/CCK: Australia.
CCK: Exactly. And in what is now modern-day Iberia, scientists unearthed what is so far the most complete specimen of a herbivorous titanosaur, meaning big-ass vegetarian, ever found. The sauropod, which is your classic brontosaurus-shaped dinosaur, was from the Upper Cretaceous period and estimated to be 17.5 meters or over 57 feet long, they have named it
ARK: Long, Tall Sally.
CCK: I wish. No, they called it Abditosaurus kuehnei meaning the Forgotten Lizard and Kuehnei in honor of the German paleontologist Professor Walter Georg Kuhne that discovered the first remains back in 1954, but was unable to finish his excavation due to lack of funding and all work stopped. There were a couple of fits and starts in between, but the excavation of new bones and preservation of the initial findings did not begin until 2014, and Long Tall Sally was officially described to the world just this month.
ARK: Ok, so two giant creatures that once roamed the earth, literal monsters, and we had no idea they even existed until recently. It’s just a shame we didn’t discover them still roaming the earth… well, maybe not the dinosaur-eating murder log, but you know what I mean.
CCK: I do and there are still new species of insects and bacteria that are being discovered all the time.
ARK: Meh.
CCK: Ok, maybe they’re not flashy, headliners, but just remember that the Komodo dragon was not officially named until 1912…
ARK: And then they stole him from his land and made him into a hired gun for the CIA.
CCK: You can hear more about that on our MK Ultra episode… the megamouth shark was not discovered until 1976, the beaked whale in 1991.
ARK: Man cannot even begin to imagine the strange and terrifying creatures that live in the ocean or as I like to call it “River of Certain Death”.
CCK: River? Never mind… on land, it wasn’t until 1981 that the giant gecko was discovered. The bonobos, one of human’s closest living DNA relatives, wasn’t named until 1929. While these discoveries are much more rare then the discovery of new bugs, they are notable for their size. These relatively large animals managed to stay hidden from most of humanity for very long periods of time before finally being rooted out.
ARK: Absence of proof is not proof of absence. However, in the vast majority of the cases we’ll speak of today, the absence of proof is abundant. The nature of cryptids, at least so far, is that in many cases the only thing we have to go on is anecdotes. While there is the occasional footprint, tuft of mystery hair or fur, or video footage of a dubious nature, mostly the only reason we still talk about some of these cryptids today is because at one point in time, someone told a really good story and/or they told it very convincingly. Without further ado, we now present the Top[AK1] Ten California Cryptids… In the number ten spot…
CCK: First up, we have the Lone Pine Mountain Devil. This cryptid is described as a large, multi-winged creature, covered in fur, with knife-like talons and multiple rows of razor-sharp teeth, that may be venomous. The Lone Pine Mountain Devil inhabits mountainous, wilderness regions, possibly as far south as Northern Mexico, but its name comes from the area of its best-known and most notorious documentation of a sighting. Lone Pine, California is located between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Inyo Mountains. Beginning in the 1920’s, Lone Pine became a very popular film location, especially for Western films, and in its history, it would be used in over 400 movies and 100 television episodes.
ARK: Including, one of our favorites, 1990’s Tremors, starring America’s Sweetheart…
CCK: The Lone Pine Mountain Devil.
ARK: No, Kevin Bacon, but I bet I can link the LPMD with KB in six degrees or less. (Let’s see. The Lone Pine Mountain Devil and Ida Lupone…)
CCK: Here’s an even closer link than Kevin Bacon, some people believe that the Lone Pine Mountain Devil may be a West Coast relative of the New Jersey Devil.
ARK: I can see the family resemblance. They are both hairy monsters with huge bat-like wings. They both stalk pine forests, and they have the same last name! But, I would say that the descriptions of the Lone Pine Mountain Devil is actually more reminiscent of pterosaurs, rather than the more camel or kangaroo like face the Jersey Devil is usually described as having. I can’t speak to the Jersey Devil’s method of hunting and killing prey, but I don’t recall this special little calling card that the LPMD is credited with.
CCK: (Why Californians gotta be so extra?) The LPMD is said to have an infinity for the soft cartilage areas located on the face and torso. But, not one to be too greedy, that leaves a whole lot of extra tender meat for other animals in the area. The earliest settlers and forty-niners that came to rush the gold fields of California in 1848 told of finding animal carcasses with their faces gone and gaping wounds in their chest. But, it wasn’t just animal carcasses they were finding there were also tales told of discovering other settlers, gold prospectors, and entire families murdered with their faces eaten off their skulls.
ARK: And it was one of these caravans of settlers, made up of families of men, women, and children, heading west in 1878, where we get our most enduring legend of the Lone Pine Mountain Devil. The caravan of settlers were headed to a mission a little over 110 miles north of San Diego. For some reason the name of this mission is never named in any of these accounts, but based on the geographic description, a theory is that it would have been the Mission San Gabriel Archangel. Weeks after the scheduled arrival time of the caravan, one lone settler arrived, a priest called Father Justus Martinez. Father Martinez arrived disheveled, dehydrated and without any supplies but the clothes on his back and a journal. According to the priest’s journal, he had taken a vow of silences after witnessing an attack on the settlers by what he called “beasts damned by the good lord”.
CCK: His account of the attack as recorded in his journal talks of a celebration in honor of Saint Roderick that turned into a “riotous orgy”. The man of the cloth excused himself from the revelries and it was from the safety of his tent on the outskirts of the convoy that he witnessed what happened next to the settlers. Apparently, in a bid to keep the party going, the settlers began chopping down trees to feed the bonfires, when suddenly they were swarmed by a group of “winged demons” descending from the treetops. An entry from his journal read:
FATHER MARTINEZ: “My God. My God. They are all gone. The winged demons have risen! What sin have they committed against each other and thy sacred earth. May the forgiving Lord not abandon their souls, which were taken from them into the depths of hell! And through the earthly fires of man, a sole tree remained on the mountain’s peak. And the Devils that spared me, returned to the refuge of the Lone Pine on the Mountain.”
CCK: According to this legend, the grizzly, rotting corpses of the 37 settlers that went missing that fateful night were eventually found months later by some copper miners in the area. As California’s population continued to grow into the early 1900’s, sightings of the Lone Pine Mountain Devil decreased; however, there were a fairly recent uptick in sightings between 2003 and 2010. At this time there is still no photographic evidence of the Lone Pine Mountain Devil.
ARK: Unless… The Paranoid Style Podcast dedicates itself to watching all of those 400+ movies that were filmed in Lone Pine, California, to see if there were any accidental cameos made by LPMD!
CCK: I would rather let the LPMD eat my precious, soft cartilage than sit through 400 Westerns. I am willing to rewatch Tremors though!
ARK: Our next cryptid is a fearsome critter… Christine, you better do that thing you do here.
CCK: And now it’s time for Clarification Corner with CCK. Fearsome critters are an integral part of the North American folklore, storytelling tradition, especially among logging camps at the turn of the century. Lumberjacks, in order to pass time, would tell tall tales of odd and mysterious animals that lived in the wilderness that surrounded the logging camps. These tales were sometimes used to try and explain strange occurrences or noises that they encountered in the woods and sometimes it was used more as a hazing ritual for the newcomers to the camp. In 1910, William Thomas Cox, Minnesota’s first State Forester and Commissioner of Conservation published his field guide called “Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts”. The work of metafiction includes illustrations by Coert du Bois and Latin classifications by George Bishop Sudworth, the Chief Dendrologist of the of U.S. Forest Service at the time. Over a century since it’s original publication and Fearsome Creatures is still considered one of the primary sources on the legendary creatures of the United States and Canada. And this has been clarification corner with CCK.
ARK: The Cactus Cat is a bobcat-like animal most frequently sighted in the American Southwest, specifically the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and of course, California. The cactus cat is described as being not much larger than your typical house cat, but is covered with hair like thorns, sharp, protruding bones on its front legs, and clusters of barbs that form little horns behind the cat’s ears. Some say the cat has an armored, branched tail, while other accounts have the creature with a long tail with a spiked ball on the end of it. But all accounts agree on one fact about the Cactus Cat. It gets its name from its insatiable love of fermented cactus sap.
CCK: The Cactus Cat was said to prowl the desert at night, using it’s sharp, front leg protrusions to slice open cacti and let the sap run out, but it would not drink the fresh sap. Instead, it preferred to drink of the sap that had been spilled a night or two earlier and allowed to ferment and thicken. After drinking up every last drop of the fermented cactus juice, the cat would throw itself down in the sand and roll around before leaping up and spending the rest of the night yowling into the darkness. On rare occasions the Cactus Cat would become too intoxicated and enter campsites, attacking the campers and leaving them with large welts from the whacks of its barbed tail. But, for the most part, the Cactus Cat preferred its solitude, often sleeping the days away inside hollowed out Saguaro cacti.
ARK: Same, Cactus Cat. Same. Next up, we’re heading to the beautiful California Central Valley, to Fresno, California, home of the first modern landfill in the United States, which is a now a National Historic Landmark and a Superfund site. But, its also home to the very bizarre Fresno Nightcrawlers.
CCK: The Fresno Nightcrawler, also sometimes known as the Fresno alien, has been spotted on multiple occasions, in Fresno and in Yosemite National Park, just about 60 miles north of Fresno. And unlike the majority of creatures on our list, this one has been captured on video… maybe. The first known sighting of the Fresno nightcrawler was captured on CCTV from a surveillance camera that a man named Jose had pointing at his front lawn.
ARK: The story goes that in November 2007, homeowner, Jose, was awoken in the middle of the night by his dogs barking. He went to go look at the security footage on his monitor when he spotted a thin, white humanoid, probably just about 5 feet tall and most of that height was the creature’s legs. They seem to have webbing connected from each knee to the torso, small, stilt like feet. The creature moves oddly, as if its knees bend backwards and it has no discernable arms. And the description that is often used for what these creatures resemble is a pair of white pajama pants walking around on their own. About 1 minute later, a second creature crosses Jose’s yard in front of the camera. Jose didn’t have a way to transfer the footage, so Jose grabbed his video camera and recorded the footage off the monitor. The result is footage that is highly pixelated, compressed and just generally of low quality. But Jose sent the video to his local TV station owned by Univision, the US’s largest Spanish language TV network.
CCK: Despite the low-quality of the footage, it was still enough to get the network interested, and they called in Victor Camacho, a paranormal investigator and host of the radio show, Los Desvelados (The Sleepless Ones), which would discuss a wide range of ooky-spooky topics from UFOs to ghosts to alternate dimensions. Camacho reviewed the footage, but also insisted on speaking with Jose before coming to any sort of conclusion about what was on that video. Jose agreed to speak with Camacho but refused to have his face on camera during the interview. Camacho would later present this video and his findings from visiting Jose and being able to study the yard that is shown in the video to a conference of the Mutual UFO Network or MUFON. No one could agree on what it was they were seeing in the video.
ARK: Jose’s footage would later be used on a episode of the History Channel show “Fact or Faked” and would again be found inconclusive as to whether the footage was in fact faked or fact. But, it would not be the last time that we would hear of the Fresno Nightcrawlers. As Jose’s video made its way onto various television shows and networks, more reports of sightings of these creatures were being shared, even from as far away as Poland. And in 2011, they were once again allegedly captured on video. This time on a trail cam that had been set-up inside Yosemite’s National Park. It once again shows two of these leggy creatures walking down a path, but this time, the second creature is significantly smaller than the other, perhaps a baby nightcrawler?
?CCK: (baby voice) A night-night crawler?
?ARK: Hang on… there’s an incoming call… we’ve just been banned from Fresno for life.
?CCK: Woo-hoo! Moving on… Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…
ARK: Haha! I have never thought it was safe to go in the water!
CCK: We’ll, now there’s another reason for you to never go back in the water, cause our next California cryptid is really making a splash. Out first water-based cryptic of the bunch is Tahoe Tessie. Lake Tahoe is North America’s largest alpine lake, meaning a lake that is at a high altitude, usually 10,000 feet or more above sea level. It is also the second deepest in lake in the country, just right after Crater Lake in Oregon. Lake Tahoe is located in both California and Nevada and you know else technically lives in both California and Nevada as a result?
ARK: Gilligan’s Island actress, Dawn Wells.
CCK: What is wrong with you? … Tahoe Tessie! Tahoe Tessie is usually described as being a very large, serpentine creature, with smooth dark skin, like a seal. The reports of Tessie’s size varies from the size of a bus to a sturgeon of unusual size.
ARK: So, potentially a sturgeon the size of a bus. There are about half a dozen sightings of Tessie every year, but apparently, if you want to hedge your bets on a sighting, the time to go is in June in an even year. In 1897, a San Franciscan by the name of I.C. Coggin wrote a firsthand account of his sighting for the San Francisco Examiner. While hidden in a tree about 60 feet from the ground, he watched as a giant serpent creature made his way through the underbrush of the surrounding woods back out to the lake. From Coggin's own account:
COGGIN: Soon the monster appeared, slowly making his way in the direction where I was hidden in the tree-top, and passed on to the lake within fifty feet of where I was, and as his snakeship got by, and I partly recovered from my fright, I began to look him over and to estimate his immense size. After his head had passed my tree about seventy feet, he halted and reared his head in the air fifty feet or more, and I was thankful that the large pine hid me from his sight, and I dared to breathe again as he lowered his head to the ground and moved on. His monstrous head was about fourteen feet wide, and the large eyes seemed to be about eight inches in diameter, and shining jet black, and seemed to project more than half this size from the head. The neck was about ten feet, and the body in the largest portion must have been twenty feet in diameter. I had a chance to measure his length, for when he halted his tail reached a fallen tree, and I afterward measured the distance from the tree, where I was hidden to the fallen tree and it measured 510 feet, and as seventy or eighty feet had passed me, it made his length about 600 feet. The skin was black on the back, turning to a reddish yellow on the side and belly, and must have been very hard and tough, as small trees two and three inches in diameter were crushed and broken without any effect on his tough hide. Even bowlders of 500 or 600 pounds weight lying on the surface of the ground were pushed out of the way. His snakeship slowly made his way to the lake, glided in and swam toward the foot."
ARK: In the 1950's, two off-duty police officers reported seeing a large, black hump rise above the waterline and keep speed next to a boat going over 60 MPH. In the 80's, a couple of fishermen claimed to have seen a 15-foot-long serpent pass under the water near their boat. It goes on and on, and there used to be a hotline to call with reports of any Tessie sightings, alas, I believe it has since been disconnected.
CCK: Some of the explanations for Tessie have included that it is a Plesiosaur or an ichthyosaur (ick-thee-a-saur), both Mesozoic era marine reptiles. Although, traditionally thought to have been extinct for several million years, fossils of the ichthyosaur have been found in nearby Nevada. The sturgeon theory is not without merit. Sturgeons are primitive bottom-feeders that can grow up to 12 feet long and can weight up to 1500 pounds. But one theory that is usually agreed upon is that Tessie makes her home in an underwater tunnel beneath Cave Rock, on the south side of the lake. For the indigenous people of the Lake Tahoe area, the Washo people, the lake is considered the spritiual center of the world. And the Washo people also believed that something lived underneath Cave Rock, legendary creatures known as Water Babies. Water Babies were believed to inhabit all bodies of water. They were very powerful and their cries could be an omen of death; however, they were also capable of bringing blessings or renewing the Washo healer's powers.
ARK: There is a rumor, although, I think it is highly untrue, that in the 1970's famed oceanographer, Jacque Cousteau, led a deep-dive expedition in Lake Tahoe, upon his return to dry land, Cousteau was asked what he found to which he would only reply, "The world is not ready for what is down there.". Like I said, I don't believe this story is true, although if it is, there's a good chance that what the world is not ready for is a whole bunch of dead bodies. There are rumors that the mob used Lake Tahoe as a common dumping ground for their spring cleaning, and that the cold waters have preserved those bodies rather well. It is also thought that in the 1800's the bodies of Chinese railroad workers were also disposed in the lake. Experts estimate that there may be as many as 200 preserved bodies at the bottom of the lake.
CCK: It’s time bring the mood back up with another fearsome critter! The sweet, cuddly, fun-to-say Hyampom Hog Bear! The Hyampom Hog Bear is a small brown bear, with curly fur and a pointy snout. The hog bears’ territory ranges from the Columbia River, which flows from the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada, all the way south through Washington and Oregon, but they also make their home near the Klamath River which runs through the Klamath Mountains in the Northwestern part of California.
ARK: And there is a very good reason why they make their home here in the golden state, the area of the Klamath River is particularly adapted to raising hogs. There are several oak trees which bear crops of sweet and nutritious acorns.
CCK: And they Hyampom Hog Bear loves acorns?
ARK: Well, while the Hyampom Hog Bear does supplement its diet with acorns, they are not its favorite food… or else it would have been called the Hyampom Acorn Bear.
CCK: Oh, dear…
ARK: No, not deer, pigs… The Hyampom Hog Bear has an insatiable appetite for the other white meat! As the hogs are allowed to roam to forage for acorns, the hog bear lies in wait until his prey is in his sight. Now, any rancher has to expect some loss from time to time of his herd, but the hog bear is especially destructive about it. The hog bear only takes one bite out of the back of each of his victims, leaving the poor animal squealing in agony. There are a couple of theories about this method of hunting. It is thought that the hog bear’s saliva was particularly rife with bacteria. The bacteria in the bears mouth would infect the wound and taint the taste of the remaining pig flesh, which means the hob bear knows that only the first bite is going to be delicious and each subsequent bite will taste more and more rotten. From “Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods”:
CCK: “Although the swineherds and hog ranchers of Hyampom usually encourage an all-pork diet, the hog bear’s habit of not paying for the pigs it consumes was universally condemned by the American Ham Association. What they could not agree on, though, was what to do about the situation. Keeping the pigs penned up would be prohibitively expensive, as would multiplying the number of swineherds on guard. Injecting the pigs with foul-tasting castor oil (the “billdad gambit”) would have ruined them for the market. One enterprising rancher, Marcus Wasselbaum by name, dressed his pigs in cheap human clothes, with wigs and a touch of mascara, to deceive the bears, which worked temporarily. Eventually a hog bear caught on, and one day swineherds came across a whole drift of bleeding pigs in prom dresses and tracksuits, each with a missing chunk of back flesh; their wigs slipped askew; their mascara running. Ursodental experts determined that all the bite marks came from the same set of jaws. Psychiatrists agreed that no one who witnessed the scene should be allowed to own knives or operate heavy machinery.”
ARK: As far as I know there have not been any reported sightings of the Hyampom Hog Bear, but there was a tale of Mr. Eugene S. Bruce of the Forest Services. Mr. Bruce while hiking along the Klamath River came across a hog bear cub and caught him with this bare, ahem, hands. The bear eventually went to live in the Washington Zoo. While this is certainly a true story, the bear that Mr. Bruce caught was most likely not one of the Hyampom variety. And that brings us to the end of our examination of the California Cryptids…
CCK: Wait a minute! What about the king of cryptids? The big footed man on campus? The legend?
ARK: You mean the Squonk? They don’t live in California… ok, ok. You got me. I’ve totally left El Numero Uno of the legendary monsters off the list. Skunk Ape aka Sasquatch aka Ape Man aka Hairy Bill aka Man Monkey aka Woods Booger aka Bigfoot.
CCK: The town of Willow Creek, California has a Bigfoot themed festival every year called Bigfoot Days and a Bigfoot museum. It’s known as Bigfoot Capital of the World!
ARK: Whose side are you on? It was very important to me that we do an entire episode devoted to the big man, himself. To allocate Big Foot to a single location seemed like a disservice for a cryptid of the world.
CCK: You ran out of time?
ARK: I ran out of time… Think of it this way, this episode is for the smaller, independent cryptids that are more likely to be overlooked.
CCK: The Mid-West Flatwoods Monster really keeps you up at night. And the Jersey Devil with the way they hiss, it gives me a terrible fright. I wish they all could be California cryptids…