NEIL ARNOLD: Zooform Classics 1 - The Monkey Man of Elgin

Thank goodness Jon Downes created the ‘zooform phenomena’ category back in the early 1990s, otherwise so many seemingly supernatural and inaccurately stated ‘cryptids’ would have been lost to us all. Clearly some ‘creatures’ seen throughout the world are not cryptids – they are not mystery animals, or creatures newly discovered, or even beasts ever likely to be discovered; e.g. Mothman, Jersey Devil, Goatman; because, put simply, they are something from beyond the realms of science and flesh and blood nature.


Due to their lack of solidity, even though many witnesses see such forms, these manifestations, clearly of a complex yet misunderstood unnature, are lumped in with the paranormal, an altogether loose category. Some zooform creatures are a sum of many parts, such as hoax, media influence, mass hysteria, or misinterpretation of a known animal, dramatised for greater effect.


In 2005 a bizarre creature, at first said to resemble a four-foot-tall monkey, was observed in the city of Elgin, Illinois, situated 40 miles northwest of Chicago. With a population of over ninety-thousand, it would seem absurd to suggest that an unknown primate could be on the loose, in what is Illinois eighth largest city. Experts at the time commented also that it would be impossible for a large monkey to inhabit the woods despite police combing the far west suburbs in search of a beast first sighted by fifteen-year-old Titiana Williams, who saw the creature lurking near her home one Sunday evening. Miss Williams stated that the animal resembled a monkey that was sitting on the slide. She told her mother about the sighting and several reports emerged in the space of a week.


The spate of sightings featured on NBC5 with reporter Lisa Tutman interviewing a Lt Cecil Smith from the Elgin Police Department. Tutman asked Smith of the possibility that the creature may have simply been a short hairy guy, to which Smith answered that although anything was possible, it seemed as if a chimpanzee may have been the culprit.


Despite the rather ordinary possibility that a monkey may have escaped a private collection, so was born the very brief legend of the Elgin Monkey Man, a pretty non-existent zooform creature that centred upon the Amanda Circle and Fleetwood Drive areas of Elgin. With police scouring the area into the early hours, experts from Brookeville Zoo stated that the descriptions given of the “brown and black” monkey, matched the identity of a chimpanzee.

Of course, no monkey was flushed from the bushes, and the Elgin Monkey Man faded into folklore. Its zooform status was elevated, however, when several news sources claimed that Elgin had its own Abominable Snowman. The mystery had slightly more lasting power than the five-foot-long boa constrictor which was found in 2003 at Churchhill Woods Forest Preserve in Glen Ellyn, and the capture on two occasions of a pacu (piranha relative) in the Fox River.

NICK REDFERN: Haunted Canals & Hairy Creatures

As readers of this blog may be aware, I have a deep interest in so-called British Bigfoot reports. And the hairy critter that fascinates me most of all is that which was seen late one night in January 1879 on the Shropshire Union Canal - and which involved a man being attacked by a large ape-like animal with bright, shining eyes.

Of course, as I point out in my book on the subject, Man-Monkey: In Search of the British Bigfoot, the incident was not an isolated one, and other sightings of the creature have since been made in the same vicinity. Well, now none other than British Waterways have picked up on the story and have a new posting at their website that reveals background data on the 1879 affair, as well as much more on countless other haunted canals of Britain.Here's the link to the complete article.

GUEST BLOGGER RICHARD HOLLAND: A Wide World of Man-Monkeys

The CFZ blogging family would like to introduce you to a new guest blogger: Richard Holland, editor of Paranormal Magazine, and all round good bloke. He intends to be a regular visitor tho these pages, and I am sure that you will all agree with me that this will be jolly good news for all of us..

Of the many hobbies I inflict on my ever-dwindling bank balance is my enthusiasm for bound volumes of wonderful Victorian/Edwardian magazines like The Strand, Pearson’s and Pall Mall, stuffed full as they are of Golden Age illustration, crime and spook stories and contemporary commentary.

One of my favourites is Wide World, which first started publishing in the 1890s. Wide World was packed with adventure stories from the exploration (and exploitation) days of the British Empire, as sterling chaps with enormous moustaches forged their way through jungle, desert and mountainous wastes encountering indigenous peoples and, yes, monsters on their way.

I’ve republished several edited highlights from my Wide World collection in the ‘Unearthed’ section of Paranormal Magazine, many of a cryptozoological nature (or supernature). Two of these were devoted to what the editorial chaps of the early 1900s liked to refer to as ‘Man-Monkeys’. ‘The Hunt for the Man-Monkey’ retold an expedition to Borneo, which included the celebrated Rajah Brooke, to capture a Mai-as, described as an ‘extraordinary animal emphatically distinct from any other variety of the ape family [and] gifted with a really high degree of intelligence’.

Needless to say, rather than capture this splendid hominid, they end up shooting one (the accompanying illustration of the savage-looking beast was a Rider Haggard-style treat). ‘The dead body of the monkey having been skinned and the flesh removed,’ we are informed, ‘the skeleton was brought back to England, where it remains in the possession of the owner of the yacht who had organized this expedition.’ Frustratingly, neither the name of the owner or his yacht is vouschafed to us, however: does the skeleton still exist, mislabeled maybe in some private collection?

The other story referred to the Mudevar tribe, also known as Tiger People, who inhabited the jungles of the Cardamom Hills near the Southern India Malabar Coast. These hairy, dwarfish, ape-like people were entirely new to me. Like the Mai-as of Borneo, they are described as living in ‘nests’ high up in the trees. They used boluses to kill their game, which would include humans if they were lucky enough to get one. For this reason alone, we are informed by the translator of a hill-tribe chieftain’s yarn, they were cheerfully slaughtered by other tribespeople. I believe their former stamping ground has been largely cultivated now, all that jungle tamed. They must be long extinct, or, if they were human, absorbed into the more general Malabar gene pool.

I would be pleased to learn how well-known the Tiger People are in cryptozoological circles. Does anyone have any more information on them? And what of the Wild Man of Borneo’s missing skeleton? The Wide World does feature stories that are patently untrue or exaggerated, although I suspect the editors at the time may have been unaware of this. But the tales of the Man-Monkeys do have the ring of authenticity to me. So, over to the experts at the CFZ!

Richard Holland, Editor of Paranormal Magazineand Uncanny UK.