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A cypress swamp on the Pearl River in Louisiana, and the thing said to walk in it: over seven feet, grey matted hair, yellow eyes set too far apart, and a smell people compare to something dead. Its fame rests on one man — Harlan Ford, an air traffic controller who came out of the swamp in 1963 with a story and, later, with plaster casts of a four-toed print. The local explanation is more colourful than the creature: a circus train is supposed to have derailed by the river early in the century, and the chimpanzees that survived are supposed to have bred with alligators. They cannot. The two are different classes of animal and the sentence means nothing. What the swamp does have is water you could lose a wild boar in at two paces, and a smell of its own — enough to account for anybody else's.

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Lake Labynkyr and Its Devil

A lake in the Oymyakon district of Yakutia, one of the coldest inhabited places on earth. The local Even people have spoken of a devil since the nineteenth century: a dark creature with an enormous mouth that drags off reindeer and dogs. The lake behaves oddly in winter, keeping open water at fifty below. Sonar expeditions have recorded large objects near the bottom, and none has brought anything up.