Its muscles were tight, solid outlines resembling the finely chiseled marble on a statue from a museum. One of the upper leg muscles trembled like a horse after a hard race. Its sexual anatomy was matted with tangles, uncircumcised and strangely hefty for a human. There was long, thick disheveled patches of dark brown hair protruding from its body in various odd places, mostly on its upper torso. Its head was covered with the same untamed mess that hung like a lion’s mane over its shoulders and down its back.
It just stood there staring at me through the windshield. Its eyes were like red fiber-optic lights, with no white around the pupils, and they seemed to have the same iridescent glow that an animal has when caught in the beam of headlights. There were large clouds of warm air coming rapidly from its mouth as it momentarily rested from running through the field. Its nostrils were large and flared and seemed out of contour for a human.
Between the thick exhales of breath I could see some color around its mouth, chin, and neck that went down to his chest. It too was red, but this glistened in the light’s gleam as something wet would. The large snowflakes fell around its hair, melting when it touched the red liquid that stained its skin. He appeared to have recently bled liberally from a wound somewhere in the face area.
My mind was racing with questions and possibilities as to what or whom it was that stood there. Was I the victim of a practical joker? Was it a man who had been in an accident or been attacked and needed help? An escaped convict? Nothing made sense, really, as I took in more of his ragged features. His ribs were revealed with each heave of his breath as if he was malnourished. Patches of hair hung in clumps on the torso. A few scattered leaves clung to his unruly mane.
His arms were as muscular as his thighs and were abnormally long and slender, and his hands ended in spindly fingers with long, ragged nails. They too were covered with what appeared to be blood and dirt.
In frightful silence I studied the figure and saw that the blood and dirt was spread sporadically over its abdomen and on its chest. My eyes went back up to the face. Its breath had slowed and more of its features were revealed. Its mouth showed boxy, outsized teeth in what appeared to be a hideous grin, mixed with saliva and blood and stained pink. Its lips opened wider in warning and revealed two large canines that were thick and longer than the other teeth.
Then it licked its bottom teeth with its tongue, running it across his bottom lip. It still maintained an unblinking stare, with eyes that seemed to pulse inside its sunken cheekbones, as if pondering what action to take next. It was in that one tense moment of direct connection when I truly realized the strong difference between beast and man. I was the unwary traveler who had interrupted his beastly movements and we were now at a standstill awaiting its decision of whether to pass over my intrusion and go onward or engage in an attack.
It closed its mouth, snorted a hefty gust of air, then just as quickly as it had jumped onto the road a few moments before, jumped away to the other side with an uncanny grace, barely touching the ditch and running through the opposite field. I sat there in my car for a few minutes more, looking back and forth at the tracks it had left in the snow, and from both sides of the road. The rest of my travels that evening where rushed, and a bit too fast for the road conditions I will admit.
When it was time to leave the next day to return to Evansville I opted to drive during the daylight hours and to stay on the main roads. Back at work that next week several of my co-workers in the break room were discussing a series of cattle mutilations and farm animal killings going on in various surrounding counties. Some of the cattle were reportedly left alive, others ripped apart, and some just had certain organs removed.
These incidents ranged from the farmlands of Southern Indiana and down through Western Kentucky. There were several guesses as to what was attacking the animals and they ranged from coyotes, wolves and one even suggested that ‘aliens’ did it. I never spoke up as to what I had seen and silently kept the knowledge of that strange nighttime visitor to myself for fear of ridicule. Inside, I knew that the extraordinary creature I had observed that holiday eve could possibly be the culprit to all the carnage the farmers were experiencing.”
I offered to render a sketch of the creature she saw and pressed her for everything she could remember concerning the details of its appearance.
“It had patchy hair, mainly in patches on the shoulders and back,” she further recollected, “and it had a full tangled head of hair spreading around its neck and patches on its upper chest also; no tail and no hair in the genital area. It was thin and lean. You could tell it had a big boned structure but the flesh was thin on its body like it was unhealthy.
Sketch of the ‘Sturgis Vampire’ as rendered by the author under direction of witness.
The genital area looked like it had a rash or was being scratched on a regular basis as it was a pinkish color and it had large, hanging testicles with a thick uncircumcised appendage hanging loosely. When it did turn to run into the opposite field the buttocks were muscular as well, even though it was rather thin in stature.
I would estimate its height to be somewhere between six-foot-two and six-foot-five, and around 145-150 pounds in weight; maybe it had some sort of disease or malnutrition disorder. There were ribs showing, like it was starved. Also the area around the hips was slightly sunken in showing the pelvic bone structure.”
The beast’s face was sunken and shallow, she stated. It had a wide nose, like a person of African descent, a large lip area around the mouth, “and the canines were a bit shorter than the Beast of LBL’s (see Werewolves and Dogmen). I didn’t notice any lower canines sticking up, and the face was gaunt, sunken in, the flesh sticking to the bone structure, the eyes were red but I’m sure that was from the headlights shining in its face.
It did have blood around its mouth, on its teeth, and running down it’s chin and chest, and on its hands and lower arms. The eyes shown fiery red, with no whites around the pupils, just solid red, glowing in the light like a captured animal in the dark. Wild, very long brown hair fell from its head in thick tangles along it’s white skin, down it’s back, over its shoulder.
It appeared to be a man, and it was naked, it’s flesh as milky as the snow around its bare feet that were raised up on the toes, as if preparing to pounce, it’s back hunched over slightly. It’s muscles were tight, solid outlines resembling finely chiseled Italian marble, no doubt they would have been hard to the touch, as well as cold. One of the upper leg muscles trembled like a horse’s does after a hard race. It stood staring at me, through the windshield, I could see the exhales of breath, large clouds of warm air, coming from its mouth in fast rhythms as it rested from running through the fields.
The hair on the neck and shoulders was in patches, like hunks taken out all over, there were sprigs of long hair hanging from the elbows and along the backbone from the neck down to the butt crack. Its hair was dark brown; and I don’t know if you can add this but it had what appeared to be leaves stuck in it at places; it was a tangled mess, very unruly, and the straggles that hung long by the face were twisted with blood I assume at the ends.”
Inhumanoid witness Daniel Carter tells of a strange series of events he experienced on two separate occasions in the jungles of Palawan, Philippine Islands:
“I was vacationing in the Philippines islands in the summer of 1994. A couple of days before I was to leave a group of local friends took me out to do a little camping in the jungle (Palawan to be exact) when we came across very odd tracks. These prints were about two feet across and it looked as though the creature walked on two feet. The locals joked that it was the ‘Mamatay Tao’ or “human stalker.”
In the summer of 2001 Carter again visited the area with friends to hike and search for the Mamatay Tao. After a two-hour hike, the group had decided to take a rest when they started to hear strange grunting noises coming from the brush.
“At first, we thought it is was a wild boar,” He writes, “but these sounds became high pitched alm
ost like a long soft scream.” The sounds continued for five to seven minutes when suddenly, with an abrupt rustling of leaves, the beast appeared. “It was about five to six feet tall and very slim. It had the same shape and appearance of some kind of ape, but this was not a mammal. It had dark reddish/brownish skin that appeared very bumpy. Its eyes were small and black, very close together. The jaw and mouth was what caught my eye. The mouth stuck out and the teeth were very visible.
It stood there very about 20 seconds then dashed away with amazing speed. According to the locals, the creature I described was spotted before in the same area. What I saw that night was very real and was not an animal that I have seen before.”
On July 4th 1995 a group of campers at Moonshine Park in Siletz, Oregon observed a weird looking humanoid with three claws on each hand floating in the river near some rocks. The thing had huge eyes, they said, a bullet-shaped head and a body covered in short hair.
Catmen
Although much rarer than ‘Dogmen’ (see Werewolves and Dogmen), sightings of creatures described as half-human, half-cat have occurred sporadically as well. And why not? ‘Catman’ fits in rather nicely with our menagerie of semi-human monstrosities which parade nonchalantly through the human experience and challenge our most unshakeable scientific paradigms. Nearly everyone, of course, is familiar with the Egyptian Sphinx, a huge lion with the head of a man. Cats and cat-like deities were worshiped in ancient Egypt as creatures of the underworld, and this stigma has, to a lesser degree, remained with the felids throughout the ages.
In the middle ages they were thought to be the familiar of choice for most witches, thus vessels of satanic demons sent to aid the sorcerer’s intended maledictions against humankind. The ancient Greeks believed in terrible beasts they called ‘Manticores;’ lion-like monstrosities with human faces and scorpion’s tails believed to live in Ethiopia.
Pliny (VIII, 30) writes that, according to Ctesias, a Greek physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon, among the Ethiopians, “...there is an animal found, which he calls the ‘Mantichora;’ it has a triple row of teeth, which fit into each other like those of a comb, the face and ears of a man, and azure eyes, is the color of blood, has the body of a lion, and a tail ending in a sting, like that of a scorpion. Its voice resembles the union of the sound of the flute and the trumpet; it is of excessive swiftness, and is particularly fond of human flesh.”
Over in Australia we have the ‘Kinie Ger,’ a fearsome beast with the head and body of a large, predatory cat and human limbs said to kill and devour all in its path. Later it was written that these beasts also possessed deadly poisonous quills, or darts, in their tails which they launched at intended victims, who would then be entirely consumed; bones, flesh, clothing and all. The ancient Persians believed in the ‘Mardkhora,’ fearsome man-eating beasts with the heads of men, the bodies of lions covered with quills, and the tails of scorpions. These demonic entities were believed to relish the taste of human blood above all else.
It is interesting to note however that, even though their namesake has suffered a bad rap for thousands of years, the Catmen seem to have very little animosity toward the humans who observe them today. They seem content to merely wreak havoc on the animal population of a given area, with only the occasional report surfacing which mentions aggressive behavior toward the witness, and then disappear completely and without trace back into the zooform universe from which such creatures spring.
One night in July, 1964, two campers huddled in fear inside their tent on Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, California. For seven long, terrifying hours they listened to the strange noises coming from two bizarre inhumanoids as they “chittered” back and forth very close to their camp. They dared not look outside, or even make a sound because they knew what the beasts were. They had seen the frightening creatures only a short time before during their stay in the area, and later described them as half-human, half-cat entities which were tailless and stood five feet in height. Their heads were quite close to their bodies, according to the witnesses, which were very muscular below the shoulders. They estimated that the creatures weighed approximately 200 pounds each.
A massive bipedal Catman was also encountered in rural Lorain, Ohio on November 9th, 1968. A Mr. and Mrs. Cataldo were awakened at 5:45 a.m. by a loud ‘thump’ on the roof of their home. The sound was soon followed by more sounds, this time coming from near their window. When the couple looked up at the window they were horrified to see a huge face looking down at them. The creature stood with its hands, or paws, resting on the windowsill. Mr. Cataldo then sprang from the bed and made for his gun but by the time he had recovered it, the thing was gone from the window.
Cataldo then looked out just in time to see the creature dashing, on two legs, around the east side of the house. It weaved from side to side as it ran, he claimed, “like an ape.” It swiftly crossed two streets then disappeared into the woods. The Cataldos stated that the creature stood around six feet tall and was a dark grayish-brown, with the front side being lighter in color. It most resembled, to them, “a large lion of around 600 pounds.” Palm prints found on the windowsill reportedly looked human-like except the prints were reversed and ran in a straight line.
One night in 1969 a motorist driving along an isolated road in Niles, Michigan spotted a strange creature near the road and slowed down to observe it more clearly. To his surprise the cat-like beast then rushed to the car and attacked it, punching the windows with large, clawed fists and shattering them in four places as the driver sped away. It had emitted an awful squealing sound, the witness later said.
Another incident of alleged Catman aggression came from southern Illinois in 1970. While driving through the Shawnee National Forest one night a motorist experienced engine trouble and pulled to a stop beside the road. As he got out to check under the hood he was “jumped” by a large, cat-like inhumanoid. The lights of a passing vehicle frightened the beast away, however, and the witness was able to drive to Cairo where he reportedly received medical attention. I find no mention of the exact type of treatment rendered to the witness, but one might assume that it was relatively minor.
Hairy, “ape-like” inhumanoids weren’t the only creatures being seen during the Pennsylvania monster scare of 1973 and ‘74. One ‘monster’ sighted in Latrobe, PA. in September 1973, was described as looking more like a cross between a human being and a cat than anything else. Just as in the Loraine, Ohio case, the witness claimed that the thing’s hands were turned backwards.
That same year a logging crew working in British Columbia also had several encounters with a similarly-described entity. It started when they began hearing strange “hooting sounds” coming from the woods around them. The sounds were unnerving, unlike anything with which they were familiar. They also found unusual “cat-like” footprints in the fresh mud. Shortly thereafter the foreman, a man named Woods, was walking through an area known as Cedar Swamp when the hooting sound came from so close by that he ran terrified back to the safety of his Caterpillar. From then on, Woods carried a pistol when he was onsite.
He finally got to see the creature one day not long afterwards as he was driving the Caterpillar. He had heard a noise from behind him and, turning to look, he saw a tawny-colored creature that he at first took to be a mountain lion as it leapt down from the trees. He was stunned when it landed on its back legs, stretched out as if it had just awoken from a nice nap, then jumped across a skid and into a tree on the opposite side. It had all happened so quickly, he later said, but he was sure that what he saw resembled some kind of bizarre cross between a cat and an ape.
The late Rene Dahinden; famous monster hunter, spent ten days investigating the site and reportedly found an unusual ‘bed’ that was likely used by the creature and three different types of teeth marks on nearby trees.
In Maryland, a wonderfully strange state, multiple witnesses; mostly young couples; were frightened away from a lover’s lane near the Wicomico Rover in November of 1980, by ‘the Catman.’ They
invariably described a black, hairy beast with glowing yellow eyes and long claws that seemed to enjoy peering in the windows of parked cars and scaring the wits out of the amorously inclined. It also had the ability to walk on all four legs, like a cat, and on only two, like a human.
Another fantastic man-like felid appeared in Kansas in 1998. Ray Jones, wood-carver and inhumanoid eyewitness, had retired to a farm on the outskirts of a central Kansas City to raise his garden, tend to his animals and render his sculptures in peace, according to author Brad Steiger. But peace is the last thing he got when he became the victim of an inhumanoid attack. Jones writes:
“One night in June of 1998, when I was working late in the outbuilding I had converted into my wood-carving studio, I thought I heard Elsi and Esther, my two Guernsey cows, making those kinds of spooked sounds that cattle make when something strange is troubling them. Buster, my old Airedale, sat up and growled -and then the geese down by the pond cut loose, squawking and trumpeting like all billy-hell. There are no watchdogs as good as geese, ‘cause they are so danged territorial.”
Deciding to investigate, Jones put down his tools and stepped outside. There was a full moon overhead and visibility was excellent. Then he heard the chickens raising hell in the henhouse and figured that some stray animal, a dog or cat, was after them. He grabbed a stick and walked to the doorway of the henhouse, waving it about and shouting threats to intimidate any stray four-legged beast that might be inside molesting his poultry. He failed miserably, as it turned out. The beast that awaited him inside the henhouse was not intimidated at all.
“Although it was almost completely dark in the henhouse,” Jones later stated, “I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck when I saw something dark stand up and growl back at me. I’m about five-eleven, and it was as tall as I am. Then it charged me, knocking me flat, placing its paws on my chest and looking down at me. I nearly had a heart attack when I found myself staring into the open jaws and pointed fangs of a black panther. I could feel and smell its fetid breath on my face as he sat on my chest, sizing me up for a meal.”
The Inhumanoids Page 45
