by Dom Joly
Scary Monsters and Super Creeps
Also by Dom Joly
The Dark Tourist
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © 2012 by Dom Joly
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Dom Joly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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All pictures provided courtesy of the author
A CIP catalogue copy for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-85720-764-7
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85720-766-1
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd,
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‘Scary monsters, super creeps, keep me running, running scared’
David Bowie
For Toast (12 November 1924–2 July 2011):
‘The joys of parents are secret; and so are their griefs and fears’
Francis Bacon
Contents
Foreword
Ogopogo
Hibagon
Mokèlé-mbèmbé
Bigfoot
Yeti
Nessie
Epilogue
Foreword
Before we start . . . A little admission. This book is not really about monsters at all. Don’t get me wrong – I did set off on various adventures around the world to places where ‘monsters’ were reputed to roam, in the vain hope that I might bump into one. It’s just that both you and I know that this was very unlikely to happen – and, even if it did, I was probably the worst person in the world for it to happen to.
In the UK I’m famous for being a practical joker and an accomplished liar. In my first show, Trigger Happy TV, I used loads of furry costumes – including a Yeti outfit, in which I scared skiers on a Swiss ski-slope. So if I suddenly announced, in a much-hyped press conference broadcast live around the world, that I had found a ‘monster’, and then showed footage of said encounter, I might face some incredulity.
Done right I could probably still get away with it, though. Experience has shown that there is little our rapacious news outlets like more than a ‘monster’ story. Such scoops give them the excuse to endlessly replay blurry, shaky footage (does nobody own a tripod?) and get weird hairy men into the studio to talk about new discoveries of wild weird hairy men.
The former kind of hairy men often profess to be cryptozoologists. This is a posh scientific name for people who are interested in ‘monsters’. A lot of cryptozoologists decide to write books on the subject. Most of these books are incredibly dull. This is because these guys are writing about something that serious scientists don’t really take very seriously. So, to show how serious they are, cryptozoologists tend to write long, boring, pseudoscientific books in which they try desperately to prove to a disbelieving world that they are not nutters but actually distinguished men of science.
This is not a book like that. This is a book documenting my year spent travelling the world looking for ‘monsters’ and getting into all sorts of trouble with the ‘super creeps’.
Why do you keep putting the word ‘monsters’ in quotation marks?
Thank you for asking. It’s because I think it would be unfair to describe the creatures I’ve been after as ‘monsters’. The dictionary definition of the word is: ‘An imaginary creature that is typically large, ugly and frightening.’
This sounds more like some of my least-favourite British towns than it does anything I was going in search of.
Before I set off on my adventures I wasn’t convinced that they were all imaginary. Most were definitely supposed to be quite large. ‘Ugly’ is a subjective term anyway and certainly not one I’m prepared to throw at an eight-foot missing link. And these creatures are frightening only because we don’t know anything about them.
So far they have defeated science and managed to keep hidden(ish) from our modern world. Besides one kind of Yeti none of them are supposed to attack humans. As I set out, it seemed to me that they just want to be left alone to do whatever it is they like to do . . . If they exist at all. Confused? Welcome to my world.
Well, we didn’t start this – you called the book Scary Monsters and Super Creeps!
Yes . . . I know. I couldn’t resist. I’m a huge David Bowie fan and it was just perfect for the title. It sounded cool and I went with it – sorry. But from now on I won’t put the word ‘monsters’ in quotation marks. It would start getting really annoying, wouldn’t it?
Why monsters?
I love to travel – it’s my obsession – but I always need a purpose. For my last book, The Dark Tourist, I went on holiday to the sort of places that most people wouldn’t: Chernobyl, North Korea, ski slopes in Iran, etc. For this book I needed something new.
Some people travel the world birdwatching. (Costa Rica, for example, is a place where such nerds go to holiday – it’s full of twitcher couples all off to find some specific bird.) Big-game fishermen sail the Seven Seas trying to catch some special fish. I just decided to do the same: to try to find out as much as I could about the Big Six monsters of cryptozoology.
The ‘Big Six’?
OK – I don’t know why it had to be six. I guess that I was just thinking along the lines of the Big Six when you go on safari.
Some were obvious: Bigfoot and the Yeti were a given; the Loch Ness Monster was another obvious contender, though I was initially loath to choose it as this would hardly be the most exciting of foreign trips.
This left me with three others. I found some stuff about the Mokèlé-mbèmbé in the Congo. This sounded like a proper adventure and, since the big lure of my Yeti-expedition research was reading Tintin in Tibet, I thought that the theme could be continued with a Tintin in the Congo-type adventure (minus the hideous racism and the murdering of hundreds of animals).
Further googling – sorry, research – revealed a story about a monster that lives in the hills around Hiroshima. It’s called the Hibagon and one theory is that it’s a man who was irradiated in the Hiroshima explosion. This at first seemed the most tenuous of stories but I’ve always wanted to visit Japan and it’s a country with an enormous monster culture – after all, it’s the home of Godzilla.
This left me with a spare. I’m married to a Canadian, love Canada and have always wanted to write something about my semi-adopted country, so I chucked Ogopogo into the mix. Thus are adventures decided.
I think my initial interest in monsters came from a book I was given for my birthday as a kid. It was called Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World and was a companion piece to the 1980 series on UK telly. I loved this book. I read it from cover to cover, over and over again, and longed to go and find out more about the weird Yeti footprints found in the Himalayas and to find the spot where the infamous Super 8 footage of Bigfoot was filmed.
At about the same time a man came to my prep school and gave us a lecture about the Loch Ness Monster. I was transfixed. He showed us footage and photographs of ‘Nessie’. Once day, I vowed, I’d go and look for her.
So that’s how this book got going. I set off on all my trips with an open mind. I’d reall
y love to think that there was a Bigfoot or a Yeti or even a Big Cat of Cirencester out there. My local newspaper in the Cotswolds loves to run a ‘Big Cat Spotted’ story every slow news day (there is quite a fat Siamese that sits in the window of a house on Blackjack Street but I don’t think that’s the one causing the commotion). Once, I . . .
Get on with it!
Oh great: first you ask questions and now you’re actually heckling my Foreword . . .
I hate forewords.
Actually, so do I. I groan when I see a big, long foreword before a book. It’s just padding. If a book is any good then it doesn’t need a foreword. They are usually random, wistful musings from an author desperate for anything to delay him having to face that terrifying moment of actually starting to write the book. If anybody really does have any questions, then ask me on Twitter . . .
So stop writing and get on with it.
Alright. Here it is. I hope you enjoy the adventures.
Dom Joly, Cotswolds, 2012
Ogopogo
‘What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.’
Werner Herzog
I woke up in my bed in my house in the Cotswolds. It should have just been another normal day – but it wasn’t. Today was my first day of being a monster-hunter. I woke up the kids and kissed them goodbye in a slightly formal manner, like some Victorian explorer off to deepest, darkest Africa for three years.
‘Where are you going, Daddy?’ one of them asked sleepily.
‘I’m going monster-hunting,’ I replied casually.
‘What kind of monster?’ they asked, slightly more awake.
‘It’s a lake monster in Canada . . . Sort of like a dinosaur-type thing . . .’ I didn’t sound very clear on the matter.
‘Is it dangerous?’ asked Jackson, my seven-year-old son.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ I replied in a manner intended to convey that danger was not really something that bothered me.
‘Then it’s not a monster.’ He seemed very sure of himself on this fact.
‘Well . . . Yes, actually, it is . . . But anyway . . . Bye . . .’ I wandered downstairs feeling slightly deflated and made myself a very strong coffee from the Nespresso machine that has turned my wife Stacey and me into caffeine junkies. We have terrible cold-turkey days when we run out of the little coffee capsules and hang around looking out of the window, waiting for the man. (The Nespresso man, who’ll deliver our next box of coffee crack.) I sipped my perfectly frothed macchiato and started to worry a little. For someone who was off monster-hunting I felt distinctly spoilt and unprepared. Should I have gone to Millets? What did a monster-hunter need? A knife would have been good but I was flying to Canada so it wouldn’t be allowed on the plane. What about a long stick? They probably wouldn’t let that on board either. What did a monster-hunter wear? I quite fancied having some sort of uniform – something a touch Indiana-Jones-ish – but I’d just packed my usual Carhartt gear, the uniform of the overgrown London media wanker who refuses to grow old gracefully. Someone on Twitter once said that they thought men like me dress in the same manner as we did at our sexual peak. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a sexual peak but I knew what she was saying.
It was exciting: this was the first of six trips around the world in pursuit of six legendary creatures. I had decided to go to British Columbia first. It was probably the most civilized of all my destinations and I still wasn’t entirely sure what the form was for monster-hunting. I was looking at this trip as a bit of a trainer mission before I hit the more difficult ones.
My destination was the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia – a popular summer-vacation destination for West Coast Canadians. Lake Okanagan, an eighty-mile-long glacial lake that runs the length of the whole valley, is supposedly the home of Ogopogo: a monster that has been chronicled and talked about for more than 200 years. Ogopogo is pretty big news in Canada – every bit as famous as Nessie.
I said goodbye to Stacey in the manner of a hunter-gatherer off to collect meat for the family: I hit her over the head with a large club and had my way with her. Actually no, I didn’t. I kissed her and told her I’d be back in two weeks . . .
At Heathrow I readied myself to face the worst part of any journey: airport security. Obviously I don’t want to be blown out of the sky but you can’t help but look at the ‘security specialists’ screening you in international airports and immediately think, Failed traffic wardens.
I’d tried to think ahead and had bought a couple of see-thru washbags so that I didn’t have to put all my liquids into the see-thru bags that are always too tight and that BAA now try to sell you for £1 a go. I shouldn’t have bothered. A fourteen-year-old boy with acne and an ill-fitting uniform demanded that I take all the liquids out of my see-thru washbag and put them all into one of their see-thru bags. How this might prevent terrorism was beyond both him and me.
‘We are just here to help you stay safe . . .’ is the repetitive mantra of airport security staff. They’re not, however, there to explain anything. I’d be concerned leaving a sandwich assembly in their hands yet this is the first line of defence against global terrorism. God help us all.
Once I was through the X-ray machine a twelve-year-old Indian woman told me that I could put the liquids back in my own see-thru bag. Again, there was no explanation.
I was then free to set about my preferred, slightly OCD departure routine. First I went to buy Vanity Fair. As usual, I couldn’t find it. As usual, I eventually checked the Women’s Lifestyle section and, sure enough, there it was. It’s not a women’s lifestyle magazine! It’s a fabulously aspirational monthly fix of American snobbery, travel and good journalism. I gave up complaining about this kind of misrepresentation long ago, though. The people manning checkout counters are the younger, idiot brothers of the ‘security specialists’.
I now headed for the ludicrously overpriced seafood bar to have my usual prawn cocktail and half-bottle of house champagne. This has become a ritual. If a meal could be my last on earth then I want it to be good and hang the eye-watering cost.
I was slightly tipsy as I boarded the plane to Vancouver. It wasn’t very full so I ignored my assigned seat number and grabbed one in the front row with loads of legroom. This is always a tense time, waiting for the doors to close and the certainty that the row’s yours. Now, at the very last minute, a bald man bustled on board and plonked himself down right next to me. I suspected that he was doing the same as me, and this wasn’t his assigned seat, but I was in a fairly weak negotiating position. My new neighbour started reading Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin while subtly trying to gain control of our mutual armrest. Unfortunately for him, he had little idea that he was taking on a hardened veteran of elbow wars. For a good twenty minutes or so we jockeyed for position while studiously ‘ignoring’ each other. I could feel his growing hatred of me and realized that this was my first of what I was sure would be many encounters with a super creep.
‘Excuse me – has there been some mistake? Have you paid for two seats?’ I lifted my elbow in mock-exasperation. This caught him totally off-guard. He wasn’t prepared for direct confrontation and backed off fast. His elbow disappeared down by his side and victory was mine. I spread my arm out triumphantly over the whole of the armrest.
He attempted to disguise the defeat by pulling out his laptop (a PC, not a Mac: total confirmation that he was a super creep). I checked out his screensaver. This was a photograph of a red Rolls-Royce parked on a street in Knightsbridge. I hate Rolls-Royces – I just don’t see the point of them. If this vehicle was his he was definitely a super creep. But if he’d just taken a photo of one and then used it as his screensaver he was a sad super creep.
I was flying economy. Not only that but on Air Canada – and their economy is very far from the best. I loathe airline seats. We can put men on the moon but can’t make a comfortable seat for international travel? Let’s get our priorities right. It’s phys
ically impossible to sleep in the weird halfback position that an airline seat forces you into. I’m convinced that they use them in Guantánamo for sleep-deprivation experiments.
I’d scrounged this flight off the Canadian Tourism Commission. Canada suffers from an image problem: people tend to think it’s incredibly boring. Bill Bryson once wrote that publishers went quite pale when he’d announced that he wanted to write something about the place. The Canadian Tourism Commission had high hopes that I was going to change all that . . .
I watched Super 8, a Spielberg homage recommended by Mark Kermode, my all-time favourite movie critic. It was good, but not great. (Curiously given the subject of this book, I’ve never really been that into monster movies. Jaws was good, but that’s about it.) The movie over, I was bored; so I started snooping on my neighbour’s emails. He was Danish and something to with paediatrics. I watched in fasciation as he spent more than an hour perfecting the dullest email I have ever read.
To all area coordinators:
A. Get idea of timelines so that inputs can be planned
B. Get an idea of how inputs should be provided
C. Get a timeline for when inputs should be provided
D. Get provision for extra input on timeline
I checked twice to see if he’d spotted that I was reading his email and was now taking the piss. Surely nobody could write an email that dull without seriously reassessing their life choices? At that moment I was so glad that I was a monster-hunter. My emails would never be like the dull Dane’s. They would be like this:
Dear Tony,
I need that underwater sonic device as soon as you can make it. Were my designs clear enough? Gotta go – I’m picking up some infrared-camera stuff and a really big net and want to get to Millets before it closes.
