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The Blue Mountains and the Yowie

added29 August 20261790

The range west of Sydney, where Aboriginal peoples described a large hairy creature long before colonisation and settlers began writing about it from the 1790s. The Yowie is described in almost the same terms as the North American Sasquatch. The mountains really do smoke blue — that is eucalyptus oil vapour scattering the light, not a legend.

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On the map

A legend about a whole area — the pin is approximate

-33.60000, 150.35000

Blackheath Open in maps

Getting there

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DebunkedWhite

Carlos at the Sydney Opera House

In 1988 Carlos arrived in Australia — the channel of a two-thousand-year-old spirit, worked by José Alvarez, with press releases, forged clippings and stories of people fainting in New York auditoriums. The press took all of it on trust, no newsroom rang the American telephone numbers supplied, and the tour ended with a full house at the Sydney Opera House. It was a production by James Randi, designed as an experiment on journalism: Alvarez was his student, the spirit an invention, the documents forgeries, and the whole itinerary planned in advance. That same evening 60 Minutes showed how it had been done.

85 km away

Anomalous zoneBlack

Lake George

A lake near Canberra that periodically disappears entirely and returns years later — the mechanism is not fully explained and is not simply drought. It has a grim reputation: people drown here regularly in shallow water, and by local accounts Aboriginal people considered the place bad and did not camp on its shore. The road alongside is known for the number of crashes on a flat straight stretch.

194 km away

FolkloreYellow

Hanging Rock

A volcanic formation in Victoria, known from Joan Lindsay's novel and Peter Weir's film about schoolgirls vanishing on a picnic. The book is written so that many readers still believe the story is true — there was no disappearance. The rock, however, produces exactly the impression described: narrow passages between boulders, an abrupt silence, and the distortion of time sense that many visitors mention.

666 km away

More: Cryptid

CryptidYellow

The Kyshtym dwarf, Alyoshenka

In May 1996 Tamara Prosvirina, a resident of the village of Kaolinovy near Kyshtym in the Urals, brought home a creature about twenty-five centimetres long with an elongated skull and large eyes. She called it Alyoshenka, fed it, and told neighbours a son had come to live with her. She was taken to a psychiatric hospital; the body was filmed and photographed in the meantime, and that autumn it vanished without trace. What makes the case unusual is the sheer volume of material: video, photographs, dozens of interviews. Later genetic work points to human remains — most likely a premature infant with severe developmental defects.

CryptidYellow

The Goatman of Maryland

CryptidYellow

The Melon Heads

Creatures with disproportionately large heads living in the woods — a legend told in three American states at once, Ohio, Michigan and Connecticut, each with its own backstory. The Ohio version is the most widespread: supposedly children from a closed institution for hydrocephalus patients who escaped after a fire. No such institution and no such fire appear in the records. What is interesting is the rest: three unconnected regions invented almost the same image, and in all three it explains the same thing — that there is someone in the woods who was once hidden there.