I suppose at one point or another most people have been confronted with a dangerous animal. In the UK it will have probably been an aggressive dog or perhaps a bull. In other countries people have to contend with large, dangerous wild animals.
The release of adrenaline or the ‘fight or flight’ response gets the body ready to take action to preserve itself. However the fear felt by some witnesses who have encountered unknown animals seems to be of a totally different kind. Well, you might say, fear would be quite a reasonable reaction when confronted with a monster but this fear seems quite unlike the ‘flight or fight’ response.
In 1954 Georgina Carberry, an Irish librarian was fishing with three friends on Lough Fadda, Connermara. They had a weird encounter with something on the Lough that changed their lives. Veteran monster hunter the late F W Holiday later interviewed Miss Carberry. She described seeing a serpentine animal that undulated vertically, throwing its body into loops. It had shark-like jaws and a forked tail. She said the whole body was ‘wormy’ and ‘creepy’ with movement all over it. When the serpentine monster began to swim towards their boat the three ladies made for the shore. Running to their car they drove away as quickly as possible. Miss Carberry had a horrible feeling of pursuit, as if the thing had slithered out of the water and was crawling after the car. She did not dare to return to the Lough for seven years, and even then only in daylight and never alone.
The Loch Ness monster has also elicited such responses. George Spicer, who had the famous land sighting of the beast in 1933 called it an abomination and wanted the Loch to be dynamited.
Mr Richard Jenkyns and his wife, who saw the monster in September 1974, described it as resembling a huge stomach with a writhing length of gut attached. He said the thing was obscene and that it left a persisting feeling of obscenity.
Whilst investigating the monster of Loch Morar I was told by a local woman of two young men from Yorkshire who had been out on a boat fishing a couple of years ago. One lad was operating the tiller whilst the other kept watch. The one on watch shouted out that there was a tree trunk in the water. Both of them saw the ‘tree trunk’ move against the wind and draw alongside the boat. It then arched up and dived beneath them. The dead tree was in fact a massive, elongate animal. They went straight back to shore, packed up and left the area completely.
In the Gambia I have hunted a much feared swamp dwelling dragon known as the Ninki-Nanka. Some people who have seen it have supposedly gone mad with fear. Some people even refuse to speak of it. There is a tradition that the creature can strike you dead with the merest glance, or that if you see one you will die.
This recoiling of the mind is not restricted to serpentine, water based monsters. Man beasts can also have this effect on witnesses. Australian cryptozoologist Tony Healy has told me of some of the cases involving the yowie, an ape like hairy giant of the outback.
One case involved two men who saw an ape like creature peering at them through their car window in the Blue Mountains. One man was paralysed with fear and the other fainted. The latter man moved away from the area and never returned. One man told Tony that a yowie could ‘terrorize you from the other side of a mountain’.
Another case involved two 17 year old youths in a campsite at Cotter Dam outside of Canberra. They were confronted by a tall hairy creature that seemed to be able to move with amazing speed. The thing cut off each escape route they tried. In desperation one lad ‘phoned his mother from the campsite payphone begging his mother to drive out and rescue them. She found both young men sobbing like babies. The youths both felt, like Georgina Carberry, that the monster was pursuing the car on the their way back to the city.
Dean Harrison, a powerfully muscled body builder and yowie researcher is not the type of bloke to scare easily, but he admits that when he encountered a yowie a ‘hugely terrifying sensation’ overtook his whole body.
Another man, an experienced hunter was reduced to a ‘ball of jelly’ by the sight of a ten foot, hair covered ape like creature near Ewen Maddcock Dam Queensland. He hats to even think about what he saw and now will not enter the bush without a powerful firearm.
A few years ago the CFZ investigated sightings of a shadowy, hulking humanoid form seen around Bolem Lake near Newcastle. A witness called Naomi and her teenaged son saw a tall, dark, humanoid form about three hundred feet away from them. Though it was standing stock-still they got the feeling that it was ‘rushing at them’ in an aggressive manner. They got back into their car and drove away.
The Big Grey Man of the Cairngorms in Scotland is supposed to have such a terrifying effect that people have blindly run off cliffs in their attempts to get away from it.
I personally know a man who has seen the weird Owlman of Cornwall, the UK’s answer to West Virginia’s Mothman. He was so badly frightened by it that he had reoccurring nightmares for years. Even now he intensely dislikes talking about the sighting and gets very scared. This is not what you would expect if all he saw was an oversized bird.
What is this lurking fear, this nameless dread? It sounds more like the icy, heart stopping, paralysing effects of a deep phobia than of an everyday ‘natural’ fear. It is thought that tigers can freeze prey by stunning them momentarily with an infrasound component of their roar. At 18hz (cycles per second) it is just below human hearing. Is it possible that our cryptids are emitting such a sound? Possibly, but there is another more sinister explanation for this lurking fear and I shall return to this in a future post.
Last summer someone emailed me a copy of the photograph on the left. I took a cursory look at it. It's a dead cat, I thought. I showed it to Richard Freeman who agreed, and then promptly forgot about it. 
Now, this picture hit the headlines a couple of weeks ago, and somehow we overlooked it. However it turned up in our inbox this morning with someone claiming that it is the image of a "fairy". The picture, by the way, was allegedly taken at La Pampa in Argentina in early January. 
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