#it even had an meteor crash site nearby that caused a few who lived near there to become aliens when the spell happened

[sniffanimal]

i miss my wolfwater universe. i found my notebook i kept at my register and wrote stuff in when i was working retail like 6 years ago. it was a cute little town where all my furry ocs lived lol but i also had this idea that it existed in a sort of portal world where the town was all humans until it got trapped under a spell and everyone there exists as animal people instead now, and Reilley was a paranormal investigator who came to town to study it and got turned into a dog when she got there. I was gonna do little vignettes and comics and stuff set in it. it could be fun to bring it back

[mythicallore]

Creature Feature: Flatwoods Monster

Some cases within the world of cryptozoology, UFOlogy, and the paranormal have managed to become almost legendary in their fields. These are the rockstar cases that seem to have defied all attempts to dispute or debunk them, refusing to die and managing to live on and even transcend mere eyewitness reports to become legendary. One such case that is as well known and persistent as it is mysterious is that of a very strange creature that appeared one evening in a small U.S. town amid stories of a UFO landing, and would go on to catapult itself into the annals of great cases of the paranormal.

The setting for this very bizarre tale is the small rural town of Flatwoods in Braxton County, West Virginia. It is a quiet town pretty much in the middle of nowhere, where everyone knows each other and not much typically happens, but on September 12, 1952, all that would change, and the peace would be disrupted by a world changing event for them. On this evening, at around 7:15 PM, brothers Edward and Fred May were outside playing a friendly game of football when they were surprised to see what looked like a pulsating, blazing ball of fire go streaking across the sky to come down and seemingly crash in some hilly woods at a nearby farm owned by a G. Bailey Fisher.

Not quite believing what they had just witnessed, the excited boys ran to the house of a neighbor named Kathleen May, to whom they breathlessly told of what they had seen. May gathered up a flashlight and called together a group of people composed of local children Neil Nunley and Ronnie Shaver, as well as 17-year-old West Virginia National Guardsman Eugene Lemon, to go investigate the area where the strange ball of fire had gone down, along with Lemon’s dog. As they followed the beam of the flashlight out into the night past the dancing, flickering trees they still had no idea what they were dealing with or what to expect out there, and there was a sense of apprehension and even fear as they stumbled along up a hill on the farm. Little did they know that things were about to get very bizarre indeed.

When they reached the top of the wooded hill they could see through the trees what seemed to be a pulsating red light, and they were overcome by a sudden, nauseating metallic stench that they would later describe as a “pungent mist.” In the meantime, the dog snarled and barked before retreating with its tail between its legs, leaving them stabbing about in the darkness with the flashlight beam, searching for whatever it was that had chased the animal away. As they peered through the darkness trying to make out just what the light ahead was and what lie out there in the gloom, they could see glinting in the light of the flashlight what looked like the shining eyes of some nocturnal animal, but it soon became apparent that this was no animal any of them had ever seen before.

The mysterious eyes seemed to be set within a massive humanoid figure standing around 10 feet tall, with a round, fiery red face with glowing yellow eyes set within it, framed in some sort of hood or cowl shaped like “the ace of spades” embedded with flickering lights, and possessing small clawed hands, and a dark green, possibly black cylindrical body with what appeared to be folds upon it like some sort of draped fabric or molded metal, the whole of which was wreathed in some mist or fog. None of them got much of a chance to examine it for too long, because after a few moments whatever the entity was emitted “something between a hiss and a high-pitched squeal,” and then glided right towards them with a “thumping, throbbing noise” to send the terrified witnesses running for their lives down the hill, dropping the flashlight in the process to send them into near total darkness. Upon returning home they would all experience severe nausea, swelling of the throat, and even convulsions, compared with the symptoms of mustard gas by the doctor who examined them.

The next day, local law enforcement checked out the site of the purported incident, but were unable to find any corroborating evidence for anything the group said they had seen. There was no trace of any pulsing light, no sign of the creature or its odiferous stench, and nothing at all to suggest anything out of the ordinary. That was the official consensus, but of course word got out and it was not long at all before the media was stoking the fires of UFO rumors by claiming that signs of a landing, such as “skid marks” and an “odd, gummy deposit,” as well as strange pieces of a plastic like material, had been found at the scene by a reporter named A. Lee Stewart, Jr., and it was also discovered that numerous people in the area had also seen an object streak across the sky on the night in question. The case took off as a real UFO landing, and the media went with it, splashing it all over newspapers as various UFO enthusiasts and paranormal investigators descended on the area as well, including esteemed Fortean writers Gray Barker, Ivan T. Sanderson, and John Keel arriving to investigate.

Various strange accounts began to come out of the woodwork at the time, such as one woman who claimed to have seen the same monster that had been described just a few weeks before, and another witness who said that her house had reverberated and been shaken by some mysterious force on the night in question. Another report came from a couple who claimed that just hours after the original sighting they had been driving down the highway when they had noticed a horrible metallic smell and been assaulted with what felt like an electrical charge, before witnessing an otherworldly reptilian creature float across the road in front of them.

There were other odd accounts as well. Mrs. May would claim that the day after the incident she had been approached at her home by two mysterious men who said they were reporters and had asked to be shown the site, after which they would emerge from the trees with strange oily stains on their clothes. In later years even more strange accounts would surface, such as a commander of the West Virginia National Guard named Captain Dale Leavitt, who in the 1990s would say that he had examined the area with 50 Air Force personnel after the “crash” and find an oily substance and a mysterious “6m circle of depressed grass.”

There would also turn out to have been numerous other sightings of UFOs on the night of September 12 across several states. Indeed, in an account compiled by investigator Frank Feschino, Jr. in 2004, there would be hundreds of reports of unidentified flying objects and landings reported on from the same night as the incident. Adding to all of this were the odd physical symptoms reported by the witnesses and their doctors, as well as the subsequent strange death of the dog who had been with them, which allegedly began vomiting uncontrollably and dropped dead for no clear reason. All things told, the weird incident sparked UFOmania in the small rural town, and many were convinced that what had been seen was an actual alien spacecraft landing and its unearthly occupant. Indeed, Ivan T. Sanderson was sure that this was the case, and that the numerous other UFO reports from the same time frame implied perhaps a whole fleet of the objects passing the area.

In the years after the Flatwoods encounter the original witnesses would stick by their story, insisting on what they had seen, and it became one of the most famous alien encounters in the annals of the paranormal. So what was it they saw out there? What was that light, the noxious odor, and indeed that looming, glowing eyed beast? What connection did this have to the lights that so many people saw shooting across the sky on that same exact evening? Just what is going on with the case of the Flatwoods Monster? That depends a lot on who you ask.

A very persuasive skeptical argument is that the whole mysterious event is the result of a unique convergence of a mixture of misidentification and coincidence. In this theory the light, or lights as the case is often described, was perhaps a meteor, which was mistakenly thought to have crashed behind that wooded hill by the witnesses. There were indeed many people who reported the light seen as not a UFO, but as a meteor, so perhaps the witnesses saw this celestial event and jumped to a different conclusion. They then warily went up that dark hill in a state of fear, the atmosphere made more ominous by a blanket of fog that was covering the area at the time. In this state of dread, they saw one of the three aircraft warning hazard beacons in the area visible from that hill, and considering the meteor they had seen mistook it for a UFO.

But what about the horrible monster they saw, you ask? The skeptical take on it is that this was no monster at all, but rather a large barn owl perched atop a high branch. In the murky darkness, with fear pervading the air and low visibility and that sinister light visible through the trees, the witnesses misidentified the owl and its perch as being part of a single entity. The owl, just as startled as the witnesses, had then flown off past them into the night, letting out one of the bird’s distinctive shrill cries in the process. In their panic and surprise, the witnesses had mistaken it for an alien entity flying towards them, sending them running. Many of the features of a barn owl match up with the description of the creature, and looking at artistic representations comparing the monster and an owl it is easy to see the similarities, especially considering that they had only seen it fleetingly for a few moments in dim lighting before fleeing in terror.

This all seems to make sense so far, but then we are left to ask just what about the other evidence found, such as the oily residue and the strange track marks? Some have pointed out that these tracks could have been caused by a tractor that was in the area at around the time of the sighting, the oil perhaps leaking from it, or even from the truck of a local man who had gone driving through hoping to see the creature. The foul odor had been suggested as being exuded by a type of grass native to the area with a distinctive smell. And the negative physical symptoms are claimed by skeptics to have been simply caused by deep fear and over exertion. Skeptic Joe Nickell wrote a whole deconstruction of the case for the Skeptical Enquirer, which you can read here, and it is so convincing that even many paranormal researchers and UFOlogists have conceded that this is probably what actually happened.

Joe Nickell’s sketch comparing a barn owl and the alleged “monster”

It certainly seems to be open and shut when looking at all of the clues and evidence that this may have just been one big misunderstanding seen through the lens of anxiety and fear, later sensationalized by the media and embellished with countless books and articles in the lore of the paranormal. Yet there are many who think that the case is far from solved, pointing out that there are still aspects that don’t fit in neatly with the skeptical theory, such as the pulsing quality of the “meteor” and the fact that a whole group of people saw the creature and maintained that it was no owl.

Whatever the answer may be, whether this was some alien entity or the product of misidentification and overactive imaginations, the tale of the Flatwoods Monster still gets plenty of play in paranormal circles, and is still talked about and debated to this day. It has become such a legendary case that the town of Flatwoods has a museum dedicated to the creature and an annual weekend festival to commemorate it called “Flatwoods Days,” which features live music, and food and craft vendors. There is even a sign on the road leading into town that reads “Welcome to Flatwoods / Home of the Green Monster,” so it seems that whatever the Flatwoods Monster was or wherever it went, it has been ingrained in the town’s culture and in the world of Forteana, and in a sense is here to stay.

[neverendingparable]

✂

✂ - for my muse to rescue yours from danger

Itwas the middle of the night and Jonathan couldn’t sleep.

Thestars were exceptionally bright and two of the moons had already gone intowaning crescents, signalingthe first half of the night was coming to an end.

Somewherein the dark near him, he made out snoring from Ryan. His older brother neverhad troublewith passing out like a rock even on the clearest of nights, but that was because he never bothered with thefiner things in life.

Stargazing,mountain climbing, cave exploring and forest scouting - things that made Jonathan’sheart soar were only kiddy hobbies for him.

Ryanonly cared about two things, asserting his dominance and being entertained onother people’s expenses. Why Almos and Alex still let their oldest son hangaround when he well could’ve gotten a place on his own by now, Jonathan neverunderstood.

Wheneverhe asked, Alex made an absentminded speech about family and how nice it is tolive together, as she packed her bags for another trip halfway across thegalaxies.

Jonathanwas used to it by now, both her repeated absences due to her job’s demands andRyan leeching off the family. He just made sure to stay far away from him whenhis parents werent around and it was just the two of them.

Usually,taking walks in the woods, climbing to his tree hammocks and spending anafternoon reading books in the pleasant shade….

He sighed. 

As nice as it could be, he did feel lonely sometimes. Maelle barely paid much attention to him either nowadays and he often found himself craving for a bit of friendly company. Someone who was excited about stars and trees as he was. 

Resting his chin in his hand, Jonathan gazed out into the night sky. His eyes traced constellations he taught himself from books, the faint outlines of nearby planets, a few shooting stars streaking across the sky here and there-

He frowned. 

It was mid-meteor season but he’s never seen a shooting star do that. It wasn’t uncommon for celestial anomalies to be caught every once in a while on Lichtell, but they never lurched violently in their path. 

Or rattled from side to side. 

Or trailed smoke behind them. 

Jonathan sat up, wide awake. Something was coming towards them, hurling closer by the second. 

Unlike meteor strikes, it wasn’t followed by faint heat waves or bright light that hurt your eyes - in fact, it barely gave any light at all anymore, save for the flames engulfing the object. 

It streaked over the Von Sales’ property, crashing just beyond the trees of the forest outside their house. 

Jonathan unlocked the window, disabled the security barrier and jumped down onto the damp warm ground of the moss below, not wasting a second.

In his bed, Ryan simply snorted and turned over, pulling the blankets further above his head as his younger brother sneaked out, into the forests. 

Even in the dark, the trees were familiar. The forest was like his second home to him and this proved handy as he jumped over surfaced roots and rock boulders to follow the smell of burning. 

It didn’t smell like a meteor either - the scent it gave off was metallic, sour almost. Unfamiliar to someone who had witnessed quite a few celestial rock showers every few sun cycles in the backyard. 

Finding the crash site wasn’t hard, because it had set some nearby moss beds ablaze. It lead Jon through the darkness easily, until he ducked underneath some branches and stepped out into the burning mess of the landsite. 

It was…..underwhelming and breathtaking simultaneously.

The object was only a tad bigger than Jonathan himself, shaped oddly and charred black. Steam erupted from various places at once, but by the time he had arrived, it already fizzled out to only a few smoke twirls here and there. 

What really caught his eyes were the eccentricity of this thing. Sure, it could just have been a malfunctioning satellite. These things happen too, it’s not uncommon for investigating devices to lose their power or their path and end up crashing back to Lichtell. 

But the writing on the hull was odd. Jonathan didn’t recognize it, but it seemed familiar. Almost like he had seen these strange curvy symbols in one of his books - or perhaps in the notes his parents took from their intergalatic travels. 

He dared to step closer, taking note not to put his feet on any timbers. His heart was pounding in his throat and he found it difficult to swallow - but none of this managed to stifle the excitement of his new discovery. 

It was only when the banging began, that he realized things weren’t as okay as they seemed. Something was fussing around on the inside, making a panicked ruckus against the charred metal. 

Jonathan scrambled forward before what his actions caught up to him. The wreck was still hot to the touch, too hot to pry open with his bare hands, so he grabbed the nearest stick he could find and prodded at the dents, hoping to find a mechanism that would open it for him. 

When the being - who or whatever it was - inside noticed his presence, they began shouting in a strange language. Even in his panic, Jon could understand that they’re trying to communicate with him, asking for help. 

The insides must be hotter than out here, he thought, eyeing the door with increasing dread. What if they dont last long?

The stick proved useless, as it eventually broke after a couple times more hard prodding. He’d have to use his hands. It’ll hurt like hell and perhaps he could get alien poisoning that’ll cause him to grow mutated limbs or eyes. 

But in his ‘heroic’ young mind, Jonathan concluded it was better than letting this unwordly newcomer die. 

So, clenching his teeth together, he grabbed onto the metal handle of the door and pulled. 

It seared his skin in shots of hot pain, just like that one time he had touched a burning meteor shortly after it fell, but instead of leaping back like before, he steeled himself and  pulled harder. 

His nerves were screaming at him, yet the door refused to budge. It must’ve melted in the heat, deformed enough to prevent its smooth operating. 

Fortunately for him, the trapped being inside realized what he was doing and began kicking against the metal as he pulled. Harder and harder, until with a loud pop!, and another curl of black smoke, the door swung open.

Jonathan fell backwards into the moss and curled around his blistered hands, trying hard not to cry out in pain. The skin was red and puffy, he could feel his pulse throb. 

In a few hours, he couldnt imagine how the injuries must look like. 

“?” 

A voice brought him back to reality. He glanced up….well, glanced down to see the person who had scrambled out of the wrecked ship. 

They were tiny, in comparison to him, but their limbs and facial features seemed to be in the correct position, no double mouths or green slimey skin as he had often seen in pictures of his parents travels. 

“?” They said again, in their odd harsh language. Realizing Jonathan couldn’t understand them with the way he sat silently staring with his mouth hanging open, they glanced around and then pointed to the sky, the ship and then him. 

“Er,” Jonathan reluctantly got up, turning his attention away from his hands. “You- yes, you fell from the sky,” 

The being tensed as he stood now towering over them. Their eyes darted from him to his hands and Jonathan sheepishly hid them behind his back.

“It’s nothing- oh…look at you! You’re hurt too!”

Blood trickled down their forehead and one of their arms looked bent all funny, but they seemed more concerned with immediate danger, eyeing Jonathan and the woods like they were contemplating running away.

Jonathan paused. Were they scared of him? That idea was unheard of, he never hurt anyone with anything other than his occaisonal clumsiness!

He tried a smile, but it came a bit forced. “I’m not going to hurt you, I promise.”

He took several steps towards the direction of his house, then glanced at them. 

“If you run out there, you’ll get lost, surely. Or worse, attacked by hunters or wildlife. You have to come with me.”

They seemed to catch on what he wanted, but hesitated. Their glance returned to the ruined ship. By now the fire and smoke died out and the damage was easier to spot. With its crooked door, dented hull, there was little chance it was going to fly ever again. 

The being pursed their lips- or what Jonathan thought was their lips it could be that they only looked similar yet used their body pieces for completely different purposes than he did - and reluctantly stepped closer to Jon. 

Keeping a reasonable distance from him, they followed as he lead them carefully out of the woods and back to the Von Sales property.