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Top Ten Real-Life Monsters
By Brad Steiger
FATE :: January 2007
In September 2006, inspired by the 2001 poll of movie monsters conducted by the Media Psychology Lab at California State in Los Angeles, I surveyed a number of cryptozoologists, paranormalists, psychical researchers, Forteans, and ufologists and received their nominations for the Top Ten List of Real-Life Monsters.
Number Ten: Dover Demon
William Bartlett stands by his story that the being that he and two other teenagers sighted in April 21 to 23, 1977, in Dover, Massachusetts, was real. The “thing” that has become known as the Dover Demon was seen by Bartlett as it crept along a low stone wall on the side of the road. It stood about four feet tall and carried its hairless, rough-textured body on two spindly legs. Its arms were also thin and peach-colored. The creature’s huge, watermelon-shaped head was disproportionate in size to its relatively small torso, and it bore two large, glowing, red-orange eyes.
Bartlett, who has made his career as a painter, recently told the Boston Globe that he definitely saw something weird that night. “I didn’t make it up,” he said. “It’s a thing that’s been following me for years. Not the creature—the story.”
Bartlett had his glimpse of the Demon atop the broken stone wall along Farm Street around 10:30 p.m. About two hours later, 15-year-old John Baxter was walking home from his girlfriend’s house when he claimed to have gotten within 15 feet of the monster along a creek in a heavily wooded area along Miller Hill Road. At midnight the next night, another 15-year-old, Abby Brabham, was driving home with her boyfriend when she saw what appeared to be the same weird creature sitting upright on Springdale Avenue.
Loren Coleman, who began an investigation within days of the sightings in 1977, believes Bartlett and considers the case credible. Coleman was able to interview all four teens within a week of the reported sightings and is convinced that they had not concocted a hoax. Coleman, who also coined the name “Dover Demon,” has commented that the same area in which the strange being was sighted has a tradition of unexplained activity dating from the 1700s: An apparition of Satan on horseback, tales of buried treasure, and then the Dover Demon. “It’s almost as if there are certain areas that ‘collect’ sightings, almost in a magnetic way,’’ the investigator told Mark Sullivan of the Boston Globe.
No sightings of the Dover Demon have been reported since those strange nights in April 1977. Coleman observed that the Dover creature does not match the descriptions of the chupacabras or of Roswell aliens, or of the bat-eared goblins said to have attacked a family in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1955. “It’s extremely unique” says Coleman. “It has no real connections to any other inexplicable phenomena.’’
Number Nine: Flatwoods Monster
Kathleen May described the alien being that she and seven other Flatwoods, West Virginia, residents saw on September 12, 1952, as looking more frightening than the Frankenstein monster. A group of excited boys, including her sons, Eddie, 13, and Fred, 12, had been at a nearby playground when they sighted a flying saucer emitting an exhaust that looked like red balls of fire. According to the boys, the UFO had landed on a hilltop in back of the May house.
Gene Lemon, a husky 17-year-old, found a flashlight and said that he was going to investigate. At the urging of her son, Mrs. May agreed to accompany him, and the other boys fell in behind them. About halfway up the hill, Lemon directed the beam of his flashlight on what he believed to be the green, glowing eyes of an animal. Instead, the beam spotlighted an immense, humanlike figure with blood-red face and greenish eyes that blinked out from under a pointed hood. Behind the monster was a “glowing ball of fire as big as a house” that grew dimmer and brighter at intervals. The 17-year-old’s courage left him in a long scream of terror, and the intrepid band of flying-saucer-hunters fled in panic from the sight that Lemon’s flashlight had illuminated.
Later, Mrs. May described the monster as having “terrible claws.” Some of the boys, however, had not noticed any arms at all, and some said that when it had moved toward them, it had not really walked on legs, but “just moved.” Most of the witnesses agreed that the being had worn dark clothing, probably dark green. Estimates of the monster’s height ranged from seven to ten feet, but everyone agreed about one characteristic of the alien—it had emitted a sickening odor, “like sulphur,” Mrs. May said, yet unlike anything she had ever encountered.
Lee Steward, Jr., of the Braxton Democrat arrived on the scene only moments ahead of Sheriff Robert Carr, but the reporter found most of the witnesses too frightened to speak coherently.....
Read the rest of this article in the January 2007 issue of FATE
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