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Monsters: Legend, Fact, and Horror
What is a monster? I would say, a large creature that is nonhuman and frightening. Some would add “legendary,” but I’m including real creatures as well. Young people grow up reading about mythical fire-breathing dragons that the hero must slay, in order to obtain the treasure and/or rescue the damsel in distress. Thus Saint George, to save the king’s daughter from being sacrificed, slays a villainous dragon, and Wagner’s Siegfried slays the dragon Fafnir, gets the curse-stricken Rheingold, and wakens the sleeping fire-ringed Brunnhilde.
But boys usually go on to discover the dinosaurs, real creatures that once, eons ago, stalked the earth. I at one time devoured books about these vanished creatures, imagined giant Tyrannosaurs confronting horned Triceratops, or sea-roaming Ichthyosaurs, or Brontosaurs easing their scaly tonnage in Jurassic marshes. These hulking, toothed, scaly creatures had once really lived! Scary, fascinating.
Yes, monsters are fascinating. Medieval maps often marked the edge of seemingly limitless seas with the words, “Here monsters be.” In the Old English epic poem Beowolf, the fell monster Grendel comes forth at night to devour humans, until the young hero Beowolf kills him. And in our own time the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland is said to be seen at intervals, his long neck emerging from the waters, though his actual existence, rumored since ancient times, is hotly debated. Science demands hard evidence, but something else in us hopes that the thing, maddeningly evasive, may secretly exist. Life would be so much more interesting, if it did.
But monsters can be frightening. Long ago on the radio I heard the story of a semi-human marauder who was terrorizing the inhabitants of some region in the far North. This creature murdered people and then tore their teeth out of their mouth. Flying in a helicopter, the deputies out to kill him tracked him running for hours over the tundra below, keeping pace with a wild herd of some kind of animal. Yes, they finally landed and did away with him, but the idea of such a creature of superhuman endurance, mutilating the bodies of his victims, haunted me for years. The dinosaurs were entertaining clowns by comparison.
I myself once killed a monster. It happened long ago when, a refugee from Academia, I was living in a shabby little room on West 14th Street and eating peyote buttons (then not illegal) to induce fascinating Technicolor visions. In the depths of night I was bedazzled by towering Babylons, exotic turbanned males, white clouds that I could turn green, and I myself responsible, by sacrificing my seed to the sun (a bare lightbulb overhead), for the fertility of the entire world. During these grandiose adventures I had just one unpleasant experience. Eyes shut, I saw, dimly taking shape, a form half-human and half-animal, the so-called Missing Link, frightening in its bestial appearance. Aware that this monster was going to terrify me, I simply opened my eyes and made him disappear. Then, without him, the phantasmagoria continued. So I too, without shedding blood, have slain a monster.
Have I ever seen a real-life monster? If one includes large, dangerous creatures, yes: the sharks I have viewed through thick glass partitions in the huge display tanks of the Aquarium at Coney Island. Seeing them there swimming underwater, their big, supple bodies darting and twisting at will, one appreciates that they are streamlined, agile killers, their inward-curved teeth designed so that, once they have their prey in their jaws, the victim’s struggles to escape only drive the teeth deeper into their flesh. The Aquarium sharks are no threat, but I have heard stories of surfers’ agonized screams, as they are borne off by a shark. And I can well imagine how the dangling legs of humans in the sea — perhaps survivors of a shipwreck — could tempt a hungry shark in the wild.
Circus elephants are tamed monsters at best, their wild instincts curbed, so as to render them safe objects for our entertainment, a spectacle both magnificent and sad. As for the lions and tigers pacing in the cages of old-time zoos, they were — and maybe still somewhere are — fit subjects for our pity and indignation. No wonder the Animal Rights crowd exist. To deprive anyone, animals included, of their freedom is, in my mind, despicable. I’ll make exceptions for genuine scientific study, and for zoos and aquariums designed to re-create the creatures’ habitat in the wild, but otherwise I want them free. Yes, exceptions too for the occasional killer bear or other creature, but these are exceptions indeed. Most wild creatures know to keep shy of humans; the odds are terribly against them. We too are killers, often needlessly.
My slain monster was a fantasy, albeit it a scary one. Do such monsters really exist? Indigenous peoples of the region have long told stories of the reclusive Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, an aggressive apelike creature taller than a human said to inhabit the snows of the Himalayas. Western explorers have at times reported seeing huge footprints in the snow, and even, at a distance, hulking upright forms, quite muscular, all but the face covered with hair. Critics have dismissed such tales as hoaxes, or genuine reports mistaking bears for a Yeti, but a hiker’s photographs taken in 1986 have been analyzed and proven genuine.
In 2011 the Russian government organized a conference of experts in Western Siberia that claimed to have “indisputable proof” that the Yeti existed, but critics disputed them and suggested that the conference was really a publicity stunt designed to bring tourists to an impoverished region. Then in 2013 an Oxford geneticist urged all Yeti believers to send him samples of Yeti hair, teeth, or tissue for DNA testing. Of the 36 samples received and tested, most turned out to be from cows, horses, bears, and other animals. But two samples proved to be a perfect match with the jawbone of a Pleistocene polar bear that lived between 40,000 and 120,000 years ago. Then two other scientists tested the same data and said it was from a rare Himalayan subspecies of the brown bear.
So it goes. The Yeti exists or does not exist, is genuine or a hoax, is genuine but simply a familiar brown bear. Believers and nonbelievers fight it out again and again, proving that the creature, real or imagined, truly fascinates us and probably always will.
Paralleling the Yeti and the controversy it provokes is Big Foot, or Sasquatch, an upright, apelike creature of the folklore of the native peoples of North America. Those who claim to have seen him describe him as six to nine feet tall, covered with dark hair, and leaving footprints 24 inches long. Sometimes he is shy and reclusive, living deep in the wilderness, while other accounts make him a menacing creature to be avoided at all costs. Especially common in the Pacific Northwest, sightings are reported from all over North America. As with the Yeti, controversy ages right up to today. There have been numerous hoaxes, and scientists have avoided debated the creature’s existence, lest they give credence to the believers’ claims. The native peoples remain believers, and publicity-seeking laymen will continue to make dramatic claims lacking solid proof. For me, Big Foot’s existence seems more dubious than the Yeti’s, but our fascination with the subject persists.
That some observers may confuse the Yeti or Big Foot with a bear is understandable. I have never met a grizzly face to face, thank God, but I have seen their stuffed carcasses in museums and have read dramatic accounts of encounters. Unlike the Eastern black bear, the grizzly of the West, still found in isolated places, is a formidable 800-pound monster looming up to eight feet high (and yes, they do rear up), with claws that are six feet long. If you meet him face to face, the worst thing you can do is run, since that tells him you are prey and triggers his predator instinct to pursue and kill. It is recommended that you avoid eye contact and slowly withdraw, making soft, unthreatening sounds, so as to avoid any appearance of attack, but also any hint of fear. And if he comes too close, use your bear spray. Okay, good luck. Because, if you run, he can run faster. If escape is impossible, get up in a tree, and if he shakes it, hang on for dear life. The worst possible encounter: a mama grizzly with cubs. Because she’ll do anything, or threaten it, to protect her young.
Grizzlies usually avoid humans, but I recall a tragic story of an attack in Glacier National Park in 1967. Several young people working there one summer were sleeping outside in their sleeping bags, when an aggressive bear appeared. They quickly got up in a tree, and yelled to one girl still on the ground to join them. But the bear had got hold of her bag’s zipper, and she could not get out. “He’s tearing my arm off!” she screamed. While her friends watched in horror, the bear dragged her a certain distance, then screams ceased; she was dead. The bear dragged her mangled body a bit farther off, then left. The incident was reported in the media nationwide; like most people, I was horrified. A party of Park Rangers with rifles went out in search of the bear, killed several. In the claws of one of them were bits of human flesh. This was a rogue bear, atypical. But recently similar attacks have been reported. So even today, monsters do exist, and they kill.
The very thought of surfers dragged off by sharks, or the girl attacked by a rogue grizzly, inspires in me a special kind of horror, unique. The victims in their last moments realize that they are being killed by
this brainless beast, this primal force, this thing, and scream in agony. Some would say that the animal is simply following its instincts, and that such attacks don’t merit the moral judgments that attacks of humans on humans deserve. True, but this is a rational argument, and the horror I’m describing has little to do with reason. It’s the brainless power of the shark or the bear, this blind brute force unleashed, that inspires the horror.
I’ll add just one more note. Years ago I heard on the radio — I don’t recall which station — a report of a Big Foot sighting in some small town in the West. A man and a woman having an extramarital affair were so shaken by seeing Big Foot that they reported it to the local sheriff. Usually skeptical of such reports, the sheriff was inclined to take this one seriously. The couple, being involved in an adulterous affair, had good reason not to report their sighting, but report it they did. They must have seen something alarming, concluded the sheriff. That is all I know of the sighting, but it shows how these reports persist, regardless of science’s skepticism. The couple, I’m sure, saw something. But what?
© 2020 Clifford Browder
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