Here we go again into the world of mysterious creatures aka cryptids.
To tell the truth, most of these creatures were new to me.
And I thought I knew quite a bit about this stuff.
Are these tales of mysterious creatures just scary stories, or real paranormal phenomena?
One thing I found out is, you can find paranormal activity like this in the most normal sounding places....

Unless you live in Georgia around the Altamaha River, you may have never heard of Altamaha-ha.
But sightings of this big aquatic cryptid go all the way back to the 1700s.
The Tama Indian tribe in the area has legends of a giant snake like creature living that date back before the English settlers.
A group of timbermen rafting logs in the 1920s claimed to have seen it.
In 1935, three hunters also said they saw the creature.
In the 1940s a group of Boy Scouts reported that they saw the creature.
In 1959, two Reidsville State Prison officials said they saw it as well.
And a retired farmer from the area said the creature almost overturned a boat he was on back in the 1970s.
The really cool thing about this cryptid is that some cryptozoologists think it might be a sea creature that comes inland to spawn.
Kinda like the way Godzilla homes in on Tokyo.
Before you totally discount this legend, check out the reports of a 55 foot long snake being found in China (I know, it's probably an internet hoax).
http://news.peacefmonline.com/foreign/200911/31420.php
Or for a more realistic view, take a look at Ngureco's Hub about real giant snakes. 

In Churubusco, Indiana there is the legend of a creature called the Beast of Busco that terrorized the town back in 1949.
The creature's name was Oscar (...wait...what?)
And he/she/it was a fifteen foot long snapping turtle!
They have a name for a creature like that in Japan too, it's called Gamera!
Of course Japan's turtle is way cooler, it can fly and shoot fire....and he's like close to 300 feet tall.
Anyway....Oscar just snuck up on chickens at first.
(Can you really see a fifteen foot long snapping turtle sneaking up on human prey?)
But then the hell-turtle began to develop a taste for larger prey like livestock.
One day, a local farmer (ever notice how local farmers always see these things?) saw a fifteen foot snapping turtle basking on a rock near a river.
The farmer called the local police (okay, I gotta give him props for that) and when the cops got there, said turtle was still there!
(Usually the cryptids get up and run off when the local authorities get there)
Instead of emptying their service revolvers into him and their shotguns, and ramming it with a police car (like I would have), they came up with a plan to drag Oscar from the water with chains pulled by 4 Clydesdale horses.
Uh-huh.
Evidently Oscar stood still for this, but when the horses tried to pull him out, the turtle snapped the chains and retreated into the depths. never to be seen again.

Now what's funny is that there is a whole separate mythos about Oscar that involves him playing Moby Dick to local farmer Gale Harris' Captain Ahab.
Allegedly, Farmer Harris tried to capture Oscar in various traps over the years and finally gave up, leaving Harris in a near a state of ruin.

No, this cryptid has nothing to do with weed.
Well, the people seeing it may have...but still....
Grassman is also known as the Ohio Grassman and the Kenmore Grassman.
The alleged first sighting of this creature was in Gallia County, Ohio in 1869.
Since then, the Grassman has gotten around quite a bit with sightings around Kenmore Ohio, Akron, and all the way into Eastern Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
The appearance is supposedly Bigfoot like, seven to nine feet tall, black, brown or reddish hair, big hands and feet.
Although some people say he/it looks like a vagrant.
A seven to nine foot tall vagrant?
One thing that separates Grassman from Bigfoot are the reports that it may hunt deer in packs (up to five have been seen at a time) and live in caves or make simple lean-tos (or even domes) in the woods.
Seeing one nine foot tall creature is bad enough...but five at once?

A really creepy little cryptid, the Dover Demon was first sighted in the town of Dover, Massachusetts on April 21, 1977.
Some teenagers driving down Farm Street at 10:00 at night caught the creature in the cars headlights and Bill Bartlett the driver first thought it was a dog or cat.
But on closer inspection (they stopped?) the creature was anything but a house pet.
It had a large, watermelon-shaped head, no nose, ears or mouth, and illuminated orange eyes, like glass marbles.
It's arms and legs were long and thin and it had long slender fingers that it used to grasp the pavement.
Normally a throw away sighting right?
But an hour later, another teen walking home, ran across what appeared to be the same creature.
Then the next night, two more teens saw it.
The teens all gave descriptions of what they saw, and the only really difference in appearance was that the creature seen on the second night was said to have green glowing eyes instead of orange.
Of course everyone has their idea of what the creature was....
an alien or mutant hybrid that was created by us (experimental lab type deal) and escaped...
a being from another dimension...
a Grey...
a poltergeist-type being (note all the kids were teens)...
a Mannegishi (a race of trickster people in Cree Indian folklore)...
and it's also possible that it was just a group of high school classmates playing a joke on everyone.
But Bill Bartlett still stands by his story today and one of the other witnesses went on to became a police chief.
If it was a hoax, it looks like by now someone would have cracked doesn't it?