American Folklore & Cryptids

"Kate," an invisible entity said to torment the Bell family of Adams, Tennessee from 1817 to 1821 — knocking, slapping young Betsy, speaking and singing aloud; legend holds it poisoned patriarch John Bell.

A giant hair-covered biped said to roam Pacific Northwest forests, named after huge footprints found at Bluff Creek, California in 1958 and made world-famous by the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film.

An internet legend seeded by Texas reporter Brian Bethel's 1996 mailing-list account: children who knock on doors or car windows at night asking for help, their eyes solid black, insisting "let us in."

America's best-known ritual legend: chant "Bloody Mary" three times before a dark bathroom mirror and a bleeding face appears. Folklorists have documented the rite among schoolchildren since the 1970s.

Two documented 1970 incidents in Fairfax County, Virginia — a man in a rabbit suit threatening people with a hatchet — fermented into a gory urban legend centered on "Bunny Man Bridge," a railway underpass in Clifton.

A vampire-beast legend born in Puerto Rico in 1995 — the name means "goat-sucker." Livestock were found drained of blood; the legend spread to Mexico and the U.S., its image shifting from a spined biped to a hairless canid.

In April 1977, three teenagers in Dover, Massachusetts independently reported a hairless, spindly creature with an oversized head and glowing orange eyes within 25 hours; investigator Loren Coleman coined its name.

On the night of September 12, 1952, boys in Flatwoods, West Virginia chased a falling light up a hill and, with adults, met a ten-foot figure with a spade-shaped cowl that glided toward them hissing — a national news sensation.

An urban legend of Prince George's County, Maryland: a half-man, half-goat armed with an axe stalks lovers' lanes and pets. A 1971 report of a beheaded dog put the Goatman in the Washington Post.

The classic American ghost from Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820): a Hessian trooper decapitated by a cannonball, who rides nightly in search of his head and hurls a pumpkin at those who flee.

On the night of August 21, 1955, the Sutton farmhouse at Kelly, Kentucky reported hours under "siege" by meter-tall silvery beings with huge ears and glowing eyes that shrugged off gunfire; eleven people fled to the police station.

A colonial New Jersey legend: Mother Leeds' thirteenth child, born in 1735, turned into a horse-headed, bat-winged fiend and flew up the chimney; a January 1909 sighting wave panicked the Delaware Valley.

A woman in white who drowned her own children and now wanders riverbanks at night crying "Ay, mis hijos!" — a legend of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest used to warn children away from water after dark.

A frog-faced biped of Loveland, Ohio: a businessman reported three in 1955, and two police officers saw one in 1972 — though one officer later said it was just a large iguana.

A dog-headed biped of northern Michigan's forests with blue or amber eyes. Radio DJ Steve Cook's 1987 April Fools' song "The Legend" unexpectedly drew waves of callers reporting real encounters.

A winged humanoid with glowing red eyes reported around Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966-67; after the Silver Bridge collapse of December 1967 it became tied to omens of disaster.

A giant lake serpent of Okanagan Lake, British Columbia, showing dark humps above the surface. It descends from N'ha-a-itk, the sacred lake spirit of the Syilx people; the name "Ogopogo" dates to 1926.

Created by Canadian artist Trevor Henderson in 2018: a forty-foot emaciated giant whose head is a pole bearing two rusted sirens, luring prey with mimicked voices and garbled emergency broadcasts.

A faceless, impossibly tall figure in a black suit created by Eric Knudsen (as "Victor Surge") in a June 2009 Something Awful photoshop thread — the internet era's most influential crowd-built monster.

Born in a May 2019 anonymous 4chan post: those who "noclip out of reality" fall into some 600 million square miles of empty yellow rooms — damp carpet, mono-yellow walls, buzzing fluorescent light.