All places
The full catalogue of approved places. Sort by rating, recency or discussion, and narrow it down by category.
377 places
Lake Iliamna and Its Monsters
Alaska's largest lake, where bush pilots have reported dark bodies over thirty feet long moving below the surface since the 1940s. The Dena'ina knew of them long before and warned against going onto the water alone. Unlike most lake monsters this one has a plausible explanation — belugas or giant sturgeon coming up from the sea — but no specimen has ever been landed.
Cadboro Bay and Caddy
The bay off Victoria that gave its name to the sea serpent Cadborosaurus — "Caddy". Accounts run from the 1930s: a long neck with a horse's head, a humped body, and a speed witnesses call impossible for a seal. In 1937 a carcass about three metres long was taken from a sperm whale's stomach at a whaling station, photographed, and then lost. The photograph is still argued over.
Harrison Lake, Where 'Sasquatch' Came From
The valley of this British Columbia lake gave the word itself: in the 1920s the schoolteacher J. W. Burns collected accounts of forest giants from the Sts'ailes people and rendered their local name as "Sasquatch". In 1957 the council of Harrison Hot Springs seriously voted on funding an expedition to catch one. Sightings are still logged here.
Whitehall, the Official Home of Bigfoot
In August 1976 several teenagers and two police officers independently described a figure over seven feet tall near this town on the Vermont line: covered in hair, red-eyed, and making a cry one officer called "a woman screaming mixed with a pig". The town council later passed an ordinance forbidding harm to Bigfoot within the town limits — legally pointless, and a fair measure of how seriously it is taken here.
Louisiana, Missouri: the Summer of Momo
In the summer of 1972 this town on the Mississippi went through a genuine panic: children said they saw a black hairy figure over six feet tall at the edge of the woods holding a dead dog, and the stench was such that one of their mothers smelled it from indoors. Enough reports came in within a week that the sheriff organised search parties, and the papers named the thing Momo, for Missouri Monster.
Loveland and the Frogman
A small town in Ohio on the Little Miami River, and a creature that twice made it into a police report. It began in May 1955, when a driver on the road along the river said he had seen three upright, wrinkled figures under a bridge, one of them holding a rod that threw sparks. It would have stayed a piece of roadside talk but for March 1972, when Officer Ray Shockey braked on East Kemper Road for something about four feet tall with the face of a frog or a lizard. Two weeks later Officer Mark Matthews shot at the same kind of animal on the same stretch. The answer came from Matthews himself, and satisfied nobody. For decades afterwards he told interviewers plainly that what he had shot was a large iguana missing its tail, most likely escaped from somebody's house, and that he wanted no part of the legend. It carried on without him: in 2016 a Pokémon GO player walking by the river reported the frogman again.
Honey Island Swamp and Its Monster
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.
Lake Worth and the Goatman
In the summer of 1969 several groups by the lake outside Fort Worth said, in one night, that a white hairy creature covered in scales jumped from a bluff onto their cars and threw a car tyre some fifty feet. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram put it on the front page and hundreds arrived at the lake with guns. Some of the reports were later traced to a student prank. Not all of them were.
Okanagan Lake and Ogopogo
A lake in British Columbia where the creature was known long before Europeans: the Syilx called it N'ha-a-itk and carried a small animal as an offering when crossing the water. Settlers began reporting a long dark humped body in the 1870s. The name Ogopogo comes from an English music-hall song of the 1920s and stuck so firmly that it displaced the original.
Lake Champlain and Champ
The lake between Vermont, New York and Quebec, where a creature called Champ has appeared in accounts since the nineteenth century and, by tradition, since Iroquois times. The best-known evidence is Sandra Mansi's 1977 photograph — a dark curved neck above the water — which experts could neither confirm nor call a fake. Both states have formally forbidden harming Champ, a rare case of a cryptid making it into law.
The Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil
A million and a half acres of pine on sand, where a three-hundred-year-old legend of Mother Leeds's thirteenth child persists. In 1735, the story goes, she said in temper that the child could be the devil — and the newborn turned into a winged thing with hooves and a horse's head, went up the chimney, and has been here since. In January 1909 it was reported across the state for a solid week; schools closed, and tracks were found in the snow on rooftops.
Bray Road and the Wisconsin Werewolf
On a country road outside Elkhorn, drivers have reported the same thing since the late 1980s: a large creature covered in fur, standing or running on two legs, with a dog-like muzzle. A local paper gathered the accounts in 1991 and the Beast of Bray Road went national. What sets it apart from the usual Bigfoot story is the face — witnesses insist on a wolf's, not an ape's, and hold to it under ridicule.
Bluff Creek, Where the Patterson Film Was Shot
On 20 October 1967 Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin shot fifty-nine seconds of film here, showing a large hairy figure walking across a gravel bar and glancing back over its shoulder. That frame is the most recognised image of Bigfoot ever made, and the argument over it has not settled in half a century: some analyse the gait as impossible for a person, others look for the seams of a suit. The place itself is an ordinary creek in the remote forests of northern California, and people still come with cameras.
Fouke and the Boggy Creek Monster
A creek in the pine hills of south-western Arkansas, and the animal the town of Fouke has been talking about since the 1840s: seven feet or so, upright, covered in reddish-brown hair, and a smell witnesses reach for the word "animal" to describe. It is credited with killing chickens, dogs and livestock, and with never once harming a person. What carried it out of the county was 1971, when a family living outside town said a hairy arm came through a screen window at night. Two years later came a cheap film, The Legend of Boggy Creek, shot on location with local people in front of the camera, which took far more at the box office than it cost — and a local rumour became an industry. Fouke has lived on it since: the Monster Mart on the highway, signs through the town. The creek itself is marked by a small plaque on the bridge, easy to drive straight past.
Flatwoods and the Braxton County Monster
On 12 September 1952 three boys watched something bright come down on the hill behind the Fisher farm. Going up with one boy's mother and a few neighbours, the group made out a figure some ten feet tall in a torchbeam: a dark pleated body like a skirt, and a red face shaped like the ace of spades, lit from within. It smelled, they said, of metal and burning, and half the party was vomiting by morning. The Air Force put it down to a meteor and an owl. The locals never did.
Point Pleasant, Home of the Mothman
Between November 1966 and December 1967, people in this town at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha reported a winged figure some two metres tall with glowing red eyes — dozens of sightings. The first came from two couples driving past a disused explosives plant at night: the thing, they said, kept pace with their car at a hundred miles an hour. The reports stopped on 15 December 1967, when the Silver Bridge collapsed and forty-six people died — a coincidence that tied the Mothman to premonition for good. A steel statue of it stands downtown.
Metro-2
A secret metro line that officially does not exist — Moscow's most durable urban legend. As the story goes, "D-6" links the Kremlin with bunkers, the ministry building on Smolenskaya and Stalin's Near Dacha, and an entrance sits in the basements of Moscow State University's main building, which is said to have as many floors below ground as above. Diggers have published maps for decades that do not agree with one another; the defence ministry has never confirmed anything and never clearly denied it either. The legend runs on that silence: the less that is said, the more detailed the map becomes.
The House on the Embankment
The grey housing block facing the Kremlin, built in 1931 for the Soviet elite. During the Great Terror people were taken from it at night: of roughly five hundred flats, more than a third were touched by the purges, and some changed occupants several times over. The legends follow from that — staircases with no numbers on the doors, rooms nobody moved into for years, footsteps along the corridors of empty floors. Residents said they heard furniture being moved in the flat next door at night, when nobody lived there. It is still considered the bleakest residential building in Moscow, and it is the case where the ghost story grew straight out of the documented history.
Ostankino and the Crone with the Staff
Ostankino was built on the ground of an old cemetery, and Moscow's most persistent legend attaches to that fact. In the sixteenth century, when the boyar Sotin set out to plough a field here, a hunched old woman with a staff appeared and told him not to disturb those lying in the earth — or misfortune would find whoever did. She has been "seen" before every disaster in the area since; staff at the television centre recalled her in the days before the tower fire of 2000. People mention her matter-of-factly, the way they mention an omen, and almost nobody can say where they first heard it.
The Site of the Sukharev Tower
The tower stood here from 1695 until it was demolished in 1934, but the legend outlived the building. It housed the School of Mathematics and Navigation, run by Jacob Bruce — Peter the Great's companion, astronomer and engineer, whom rumour turned into a sorcerer. He was said to keep an observatory at the top, to conduct experiments at night, and to have walled a "black book" into the masonry, one that granted power over everything. The book was looked for during the demolition and never found. Bruce's ghost is said to appear on Sukharevskaya Square since, waiting for the tower to be rebuilt.
The Bad Apartment on Bolshaya Sadovaya
Apartment 50 at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya — the "bad apartment" of The Master and Margarita, where Woland's retinue takes up residence. Bulgakov lived here in the early 1920s, and the stairwell had its reputation before the novel: residents said people went missing from that flat. After the book was published the entrance stood covered in quotations and drawings for decades — the walls were painted over, the writing came back. There is a museum there now, but the habit of leaving a note for Woland has not gone anywhere, and locals describe the black cat in the courtyard in a tone that is not entirely joking.
Golosov Ravine
A ravine in Kolomenskoye that Moscow tells stories about as a place where time comes loose. In the best-known version, a detachment of Tatar horsemen vanished into it during Devlet Giray's raid of 1571 — and in 1621 riders in antique armour appeared at the tsar's gates. Questioned, they insisted they had gone down into the ravine to escape pursuit, hidden in a greenish fog on its floor, and stepped out of it a few minutes later. Fifty years had passed. Two enormous boulders lie at the bottom, the Goose and the Maiden Stone; people still come to make wishes on them, and the fog really does linger there longer than on the slopes.
Kuldhara
A village in the Thar Desert near Jaisalmer that its inhabitants abandoned in a single night around 1825 and never returned to. The story goes that the state minister demanded the village headman's daughter, and rather than hand her over the whole community of eighty-four villages walked out in the dark — quietly enough that none of their neighbours noticed them going. On leaving, the brahmins cursed the place: anyone who tried to settle there would not survive the night. The houses have stood empty for almost two centuries since, in the middle of otherwise inhabited land. The stone walls, staircases and doorways are intact — not ruined, simply left, as though the owners had stepped out and never come back.
Sedlec Ossuary
A chapel below Kutná Hora in Czechia decorated with the bones of some 40,000 people. In 1870 a woodcarver arranged them into a chandelier, coats of arms and garlands — the chandelier is said to use every bone in the human body.