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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on

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Speaker 1: iHeart Radio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George

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Speaker 1: nor with you, j W. Jason Oker back with us

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Speaker 1: and he is an Edgar winning award winning travel writer.

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Speaker 1: He's a horror novelist and a blogger. His previous nonfiction

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Speaker 1: books included Poland, The New England Grimpendium, The New York Grimpendium,

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Speaker 1: A Season with the Witch, and The New York Times

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Speaker 1: reviewed Cursed Objects. He's the creator of the blog and

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Speaker 1: podcast OTIS, which stands for Odd Things I've Seen. That's

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Speaker 1: his website as well, and his latest book as The

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Speaker 1: United States of Cryptids. J W. You spend busy. Thanks

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Speaker 1: for having me on, George. Good to have you back

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Speaker 1: to the program. What's what's new with you? Uh? These

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Speaker 1: days it's monsters in small towns. That's mostly what I

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Speaker 1: meant to right now. How did you get interested in that? So?

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Speaker 1: I've always liked cryptid from a child, probably the same

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Speaker 1: story as most people like cryptids. Where you pick up

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Speaker 1: a John Keel book or one of those kinds of

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Speaker 1: books and you see pictures of the Mothman or lockmass monster,

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Speaker 1: and then you're just like monsters for the rest of

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Speaker 1: your life, and they're a different kind of monster, right,

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Speaker 1: You grow up like seeing Dracula and Frankenstein and movies.

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Speaker 1: But these cryptids, you know, the books tell us there's

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Speaker 1: a possibility that exist, and it just kind of fires

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Speaker 1: your imagination as a child and sticks with you throughout

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Speaker 1: your life usually and when you hear cryptids. So we

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Speaker 1: we're talking about all kinds of monsters and strange creatures,

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Speaker 1: aren't we. Yeah, yeah, I think back in the day,

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Speaker 1: in the early days of cryptozoology, there was like very

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Speaker 1: much more constrained you know, bigfoot and lake monsters, But

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Speaker 1: these days encompasses folklore monsters and aliens and mythological creatures.

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Speaker 1: So it's a big kind of smortguspart these days. How

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Speaker 1: many do you think might be real? That's a good question. Um.

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Speaker 1: I always stick to anything in the water could be

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Speaker 1: real because who knows what's going on down there, and

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Speaker 1: that you know, every every single state has a lake monster,

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Speaker 1: and every ocean is packed with monsters, so there could

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Speaker 1: be a good bit. Plus, you know, anything in a forest,

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Speaker 1: so and you know the country's the country and world

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Speaker 1: is covered in those, so maybe a good bit. How

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Speaker 1: difficult or how easy was it for you to write

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Speaker 1: the United States of Cryptids? Oh? It was It was

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Speaker 1: easy because it was a blast. So the angle encryptid

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Speaker 1: on the United to cryptids, there's a lot of there's

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Speaker 1: a lot of crypto and cyclopedias out there, but the

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Speaker 1: angle we wanted to take on it was more, you know,

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Speaker 1: not debunking or not trying to prove we're not just

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Speaker 1: trying to list. We wanted to celebrate them. So we

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Speaker 1: really focused on making this almost a travel guide where

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Speaker 1: we would go to all the towns and all the

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Speaker 1: places that would celebrate these creatures, like festivals and statues

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Speaker 1: and seeming them and making them the mask out of

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Speaker 1: their town. And that turned it into like a really

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Speaker 1: really fun project. Some of these cryptids are pretty darn scary,

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Speaker 1: aren't they? Most of them? I think most of them are.

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Speaker 1: For some reason, we like monsters. I guess most animals

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Speaker 1: are also scary. If you think if we were so

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Speaker 1: used to like lions and elephants and you know, those

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Speaker 1: kinds of things, would really if you just came across

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Speaker 1: them for the first time in our lives, they would

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Speaker 1: probably be pretty scary. Are these creatures? Relegated to certain

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Speaker 1: regions of the country. Um, not totally. Most most of

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Speaker 1: I would say, are in the rural, rural areas because

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Speaker 1: obviously you need some some geography and some habitats of

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Speaker 1: the creatures. But there are also kind of a subspecies

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Speaker 1: or subgroup of urban cryptus as well. Let's talk about

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Speaker 1: the Jersey Devil. What have we were searched on that thing?

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Speaker 1: So the Jersey Devil is interesting because that one starts

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Speaker 1: not with a sighting per se. You know, a lot

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Speaker 1: of cryptids start with, you know, glowing eyes in the

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Speaker 1: dark on the back roads. For the Jersey Devil, it

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Speaker 1: starts with a myth um almost almost a folk tale

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Speaker 1: where mother Leeds is her name back in the colonial era,

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Speaker 1: had a thirteenth child that was cursed and became a

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Speaker 1: host winged, long faced creature that flew off in the

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Speaker 1: pine barrens of New Jersey, and these days is still

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Speaker 1: seen every once in a while. Most of these cryptids,

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Speaker 1: have they hurt anybody? That's a great question. So in

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Speaker 1: my experience, in my experience, in my research, I should

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Speaker 1: say ninety nine of cryptids have never heard a single person.

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Speaker 1: Like all the stories in the newspapers, and all the

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Speaker 1: stories in the books almost always just in with you know,

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Speaker 1: hunting parties chasing them down, and then the crypt is

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Speaker 1: just disappearing into the night. But there is the rare

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Speaker 1: occasion whereas, for instance, the folk Bigfoot, the folk monster

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Speaker 1: of Arkansas that won't attack the person according to the stories,

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Speaker 1: or the snally Gaster of western Maryland is supposed to

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Speaker 1: grab somebody and taking them up to the hill and

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Speaker 1: feasted on their guts. So there's one or two that

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Speaker 1: are that are definitely in the stories heard somebody, but

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Speaker 1: most of them they're just you know, trying not to

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Speaker 1: be bothered. JW. What would the definition of a cryptid be?

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Speaker 1: I would say acryptid is a creature that has some

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Speaker 1: evidence but is not acknowledged by mainstream science. We'll talk

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Speaker 1: in a moment about your other book, Cursed Objects, which

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Speaker 1: came out three years ago. That was a great book.

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Speaker 1: New York Times. She reviewed that one. They loved it,

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Speaker 1: didn't they? Yeah, yeah, and they did. It was that

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Speaker 1: was also a fun one. A little bit more dangerous

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Speaker 1: for me, but for a fun one. Now, how did

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Speaker 1: you begin to track some of these monsters all over

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Speaker 1: the country? So because of my my my history with

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Speaker 1: my website that you mentioned, I thinks I've seen dot com.

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Speaker 1: I've been constantly crossing the country looking for weird stuff, encryptids,

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Speaker 1: encryptid towns, always so on the category. So I had

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Speaker 1: some familiarity with the subject matter. And then it was

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Speaker 1: just a matter of digging into the newspapers. So a

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Speaker 1: lot of times, probably probably the first time in my

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Speaker 1: non fiction life, ninety percent of my research was just

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Speaker 1: in newspapers, because newspapers, you know, would track these sightings

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Speaker 1: day by day or week by week back in the

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Speaker 1: golden The golden era of cryptid is probably the fifties, sixties,

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Speaker 1: and seventies, and it's just giant records of them. And then,

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Speaker 1: of course, you know, once I knew about the creatures,

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Speaker 1: I just try to search around to see if there's

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Speaker 1: any commemoration of them, a plaque, festival, a statue, you know,

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Speaker 1: in a gift shop, a museum, and then I would

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Speaker 1: you go see those places. Let's talk about different regions

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Speaker 1: of the country and tell us what you think is

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Speaker 1: out that way. But let's start with the northeast. So

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Speaker 1: the Northeast is great because you know, it's it's it's

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Speaker 1: the oldest area of the country of the United States

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Speaker 1: at least, and probably my favorite thing in the in

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Speaker 1: the Northeast is going to be the Glocester Sea serpent.

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Speaker 1: So the Gloster Sea serpent is you know, a typical

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Speaker 1: sea monsters, just a long serpent in the water. But

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Speaker 1: it is the most documented cryptid of all time, I think,

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Speaker 1: at least in the United States. It was off the

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Speaker 1: coast of Cape Anne and Gloucester um for like two years.

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Speaker 1: Scientists studied it, the sailors attacked it, tourists came and

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Speaker 1: like camped out and watched it splash around, and we

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Speaker 1: have quite a long record of this creature. And today

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Speaker 1: if you go to Gloucester and you know, go past

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Speaker 1: the famous fishing fisher Fisherman statue, you'll see an eight

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Speaker 1: foot tall statue of you know, a sea monster right

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Speaker 1: there by the Historical Society. So it's kind of really

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Speaker 1: cool that not only they have the story, but they

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Speaker 1: also have this giant statue. Commemoradian. Is it like the

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Speaker 1: Locknessh Monster. It's not brought Astorian or Pleistorian. It's more

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Speaker 1: like a snake or a big eel. Yes, exactly interesting.

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Speaker 1: How about the southern area of the country. What do

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Speaker 1: we have there? Oh, the South is rife with cryptos

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Speaker 1: for some reason. So they have everything from skunk gapes,

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Speaker 1: which is Florida's version of Bigfoot, pretty similar but very smelly.

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Speaker 1: That's kind of their their calling card. Two things like

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Speaker 1: um they have trying to let a check my notes

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Speaker 1: before I before I lie about my regions. But as

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Speaker 1: the South of the Midwest, for the two areas, I

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Speaker 1: found probably the most creatures. So the South has especially

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Speaker 1: they have a wide variety. Right, So they have the

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Speaker 1: lizardman in Top Carolina, which is a mothman comes from

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Speaker 1: that region too, right, Yes, West Virginia is full of monsters,

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Speaker 1: a mothman, the flatwoods creature's another West Virginia of monster.

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Speaker 1: Virginia has wood Burgers, which is another kind of Bigfoot.

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Speaker 1: The town of Norfolk or city I should stay Norfics

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Speaker 1: the city in Virginia. They're known for their mermaids. They've

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Speaker 1: for some reason adopted the symbol of the mermaid and

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Speaker 1: they now have mermaids all over that that city. So

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Speaker 1: that's a monster. That's a monster wood and mine chasing

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Speaker 1: exactly exactly interesting. Now, what about the Midwest, So the

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Speaker 1: Midwest to me is probably the most has the most

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Speaker 1: creatures of the most variety of creatures, and I always

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Speaker 1: point at Wisconsin as having the best because the Wisconsin

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Speaker 1: has the Hodag, which is a panther sized creature with

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Speaker 1: spikes on its back and big tooths. It's a lumberjack moore,

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Speaker 1: and the town of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, celebrates this thing. It's

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Speaker 1: like their favorite favorite thing in the world. It's their mascot.

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Speaker 1: There's statues, there's merchandise. If you go to their dot

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Speaker 1: gov website where usually you'd go to like pay bills

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Speaker 1: or check out demographics and population, it's basically a Hodag

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Speaker 1: fan site. You know, they've got they've got fan clubs

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Speaker 1: you can sign up for and video games you can

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Speaker 1: play that are Hodag themed. The Hodags is my favorite

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Speaker 1: mount horror up there is obsessed with trolls. Um the

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Speaker 1: Beast of Bray Road. That's a werewolf creature which all

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Speaker 1: over in Elkhorn and also next door in Michigan. They

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Speaker 1: also have the dog Men, So there's a big werewolf

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Speaker 1: population up there in the Midwest, So a lot of stuff.

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Speaker 1: How about the West in addition to Bigfoot obviously, Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: the West is big Foot then for sure, all the

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Speaker 1: whole gorthwest to the point to the point that it

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Speaker 1: almost shoulders out everything everything else. But I was able

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Speaker 1: to find things like the Kodiak dinosaur, which is Alaska,

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Speaker 1: So so they have a as big as Alaska is.

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Speaker 1: It makes sense that they're major cryptid would be the

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Speaker 1: size of a giant water dinosaur. They have aliens right

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Speaker 1: Roswell's out there in the West. They're big, big on those.

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Speaker 1: That squatch is a favorite of mine, right, So that's

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Speaker 1: literally sasquatch like creature with wings. That's Washington State near

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Speaker 1: um Mount Saint Helens. They've got um some skinwalkers. We

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Speaker 1: know about those slide rock bolters, which is these giant

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Speaker 1: whale land whales that hook on the hook on the

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Speaker 1: mountains that slide down them. So they've got a few

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Speaker 1: besides of the big Foot. But still big Foot's the

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Speaker 1: king pretty much, not just of the West, but probably

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Speaker 1: the entire country. Honestly, in addition to your travels, JW,

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Speaker 1: did you come across witnesses who are just lost it

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Speaker 1: when they saw these creatures? So not not not firsthand,

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Speaker 1: And most of people I talked to were researchers, and experts,

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Speaker 1: but in all the newspaper accounts, they're just tons of

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Speaker 1: tons of witnesses and most of the evidence, probably ninety

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Speaker 1: percent of all evidence for cryptids is eyewitness accounts, and

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Speaker 1: generally the stories are, you know, people seeing something in

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Speaker 1: a night, going eyes and then just kind of having

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Speaker 1: their reality upturned right because they're seeing something that they

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Speaker 1: didn't believe previously. Now they see a giant hairy thing

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Speaker 1: or a giant scaly thing, or a multi legged thing

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Speaker 1: that doesn't quite fit in the animals they've ever seen,

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Speaker 1: and now they have to live with that for the

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Speaker 1: rest of their life. Did you get any thunderbird stories

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Speaker 1: or large animals? Yeah? Yeah, the thunderbirds. I did those

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Speaker 1: up in the Dakotas. Obviously, those are based on a

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Speaker 1: Native American lore, and there's quite a few kind of

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Speaker 1: ancient rock carvings of them up there that Dakotas. It's

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Speaker 1: a modern art as well. In Bismarck there's a great

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Speaker 1: statue of four giant thunderbirds that was sculpted by the

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Speaker 1: local First Nation's Technical College there. And then, of course,

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Speaker 1: the probably the most modern thunderbird story happened in the

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Speaker 1: seventies in Illinois, and I think it was an eight

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Speaker 1: year old child got attacked by two gigantic birds and

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Speaker 1: almost lifted off except his mom came out and beat

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Speaker 1: them off or something like that. Right, yeah, exactly, exactly.

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Speaker 1: What about the lizard man, Oh, he's a great one

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Speaker 1: because you know a lot of times a cryptic comes

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Speaker 1: along and then everybody sees it everywhere. That's a big foot, right,

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Speaker 1: He's been seen in all fifty states, but nobody has

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Speaker 1: a lizard man except for South Carolina. And basically this

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Speaker 1: story was pretty typical of most crypted first encounters, where

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Speaker 1: it's a teenager driving alone in the night and in

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Speaker 1: the dark. In this case, he hits the flat, he

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Speaker 1: goes have to change it, and this big, scaly, glowing

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Speaker 1: eye creature attacks his car. And then from then on

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Speaker 1: out people started seeing you know, scratched cars and attacks

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Speaker 1: in the local swamp and it became a legend. So

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Speaker 1: now you go to the museum in Skateboard and it's

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Speaker 1: you know, history and all their textiles and then the

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Speaker 1: whole section dedicated to a you know, six foot tall

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Speaker 1: scaly creature with giant claws. It seems like West Virginia,

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Speaker 1: Ohio and Wisconsin, Jason do the best job in somewhat

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Speaker 1: celebrating or promoting their monsters. I totally agree, totally agree

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Speaker 1: to the point that even so, a good example in

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Speaker 1: Ohio is the Peninsula python, which is literally just it's

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Speaker 1: an out of place species and oops is what they

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Speaker 1: call it. Where a giant python, which is a real creature.

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Speaker 1: We know that for science acknowledges that got looser or

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Speaker 1: somehow it lived in the town of Peninsula for like

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Speaker 1: an entire summer and now and this is back in

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Speaker 1: the seventies, so now every single year they have Peninsula

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Speaker 1: Python dates. So they decorate their houses pythons, just like

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Speaker 1: you know we would decorate with I don't know, streamers

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Speaker 1: during the Fourth of July or bottles of evergreens during Christmas.

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Speaker 1: And they have parade with like giant serpent floats and stuff.

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Speaker 1: So they the Midwest, again, especially those three states you mentioned,

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Speaker 1: are just the best at celebrating monsters. Is your book

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Speaker 1: The United States of Cryptids also like a travelogue? It

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Speaker 1: totally is. So besides having the stories of the creatures,

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Speaker 1: which all historical stories, there's my experiences going to the

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Speaker 1: town's experiencing the kind of the celebration these creatures. And

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Speaker 1: in the back we have a really good kind of index.

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Speaker 1: It tells you, you know, more than two dozen festivals

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Speaker 1: every year, with all the dates, all the addresses and

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Speaker 1: GPS coordinates. You need to find the statues, and to

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Speaker 1: find the museums, and to find the placards and the

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Speaker 1: historical signs. So you could probably you could take this

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Speaker 1: with you and read about the creatures and then kind

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Speaker 1: of use it as a wayfinder. Have you found that

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Speaker 1: some people actually plan their vacations looking for these creatures? Oh, totally,

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Speaker 1: either looking for the creatures or just celebrating them. Up

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Speaker 1: the Mothman Festival in West Virginia, that's a town of

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Speaker 1: four thousand people and it's a town you'd probably never

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Speaker 1: go to ordinarily, but every September when they throw the

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Speaker 1: Mothman Days or Mothmand Festival, it doubles in size the

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Speaker 1: population to like ten thousand, and people are just there

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Speaker 1: to like not even to find them Offmand, really just

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Speaker 1: a kind of party and dressed up as him and

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Speaker 1: like celebrate this kind of weird story in West Virginia's history.

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Speaker 1: But otherwise, yeah, there's definitely like you know, tours you

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Speaker 1: can go on, especially with the especially a big Foot.

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Speaker 1: There's a lot of like kind of go out of the

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Speaker 1: the wilderness in camp and try to find footprints. Was

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Speaker 1: it Mothman like prelude to a bridge collapsing or something? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it was. The first sighting the Mothman was in nineteen

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Speaker 1: sixty six in Point Pleasant, and almost one year later,

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Speaker 1: in December of sixty seven, the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing

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Speaker 1: forty six people. It was Qui this time. They were

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Speaker 1: all shopping. The bridge was heavy with cars and had

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Speaker 1: a flaw in one of its eye beams and collapsed

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Speaker 1: and everybody kind of all. Forty six people died in

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Speaker 1: the icy waters of the Ohio River. And about that

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Speaker 1: time the Mothman sightings kind of stopped it for a

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Speaker 1: year of constant sightings, it kind of tapered off. Some

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Speaker 1: people say it's because everybody had bigger problems on their

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Speaker 1: minds with the death of forty six people. Other people

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Speaker 1: say that it turns the Mothman kind of a harbinger,

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Speaker 1: that it was around kind of trying to warn of

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Speaker 1: an upcoming tragedy, which is I think how like the

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Speaker 1: Mothman propheties kind of kind of reads the movie end book,

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Speaker 1: would he be the only harbinger or other creatures are

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Speaker 1: the same. Yeah, that goes because most one reason why

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Speaker 1: I like the Mofan stories so much is it does

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Speaker 1: have that kind of ending to it, as tragic as

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Speaker 1: it is. But most cristic stories end with and it

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Speaker 1: was never seen again dot dot dot. So most of

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Speaker 1: the time they're not really harbaging anything. They're just showing up.

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Speaker 1: You know, a town goes into kind of hysteria for

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Speaker 1: a week or a month, or a season or a year,

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Speaker 1: and then sightings taper off until they move on to

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Speaker 1: something more boring than monsters in their midst. Well with

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Speaker 1: jw Oker also known as Jason his website Odd Things

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Speaker 1: I've Seen dot com linked up at Coast to coastam

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Speaker 1: dot com. This book the United States Encrypted is Where

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Speaker 1: do people get at jw anywhere you get books, all bookstores,

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Speaker 1: Amazon dot com, anywhere you buy your favorite books, you

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Speaker 1: can get it. What is the wampus cat from the South.

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Speaker 1: The wampus cat is a giant cat, kind of kind

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Speaker 1: of like a panther, cheat anything like that, But it

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Speaker 1: just happens. In most depictions of it, it it just happens

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Speaker 1: to have six legs instead of four. For some reason,

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Speaker 1: the big phenomenon around the wampus cat, and my experience

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Speaker 1: is that there are a lot of a lot of

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Speaker 1: high schools around the country that use it as a mascot.

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Speaker 1: So they have statues, they have murals, paints on the wall,

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Speaker 1: obviously it's on their jerseys, and for some reason a

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Speaker 1: six like giant cat became just known for you know,

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Speaker 1: rallying school spirit across the country. The Oklahoma octopus, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: that's a good one. So Oklahoma has a bunch of lakes.

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Speaker 1: I think they're all man made, but they're all freshwater

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Speaker 1: and science so far as we know, acknowledges no freshwater octopus.

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Speaker 1: There no sistike of the freshwater octopus. And yet despite that,

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Speaker 1: there have been stories surrounding I think three lakes in particular,

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Speaker 1: of you know, people getting dragged into water and ending

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Speaker 1: up a sucker like um sucker like indentations on their skin,

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Speaker 1: and just in general those lakes being very dangerous and

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Speaker 1: kind of having a lot more victims than lakes should

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Speaker 1: up there. So that's the Oklahoma octopus. It's just again,

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Speaker 1: lake monsters are cool because there's such a wide variety

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Speaker 1: of them. It's not just all kind of like lockmus

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Speaker 1: monster pleosaurs. It's it's octopuses, it's giant catfish, it's it's

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Speaker 1: giant worms, it's a it's a nice, nice little subset

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Speaker 1: of cryptids. In the Midwest, they have the piousaur bird

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Speaker 1: out there in Alton in Illinois. Native American legend has

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Speaker 1: it as a huge bird that one of their fighters

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Speaker 1: had the battle and it was an amazing story, the

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Speaker 1: pious our bird. Yeah, and today you can go up

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Speaker 1: there on the river there and there's a giant mural

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Speaker 1: of it on the side of this kind of limestone

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Speaker 1: cliff face. It's it'll been there, painted it fashion for

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Speaker 1: hundreds of years. They've repainted it, redone it over the years,

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Speaker 1: but it's always there and it's a really cool kind

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Speaker 1: of like thing to see. Listen to more Coast to

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Speaker 1: Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern and go

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Speaker 1: to Coast to Coast am dot com for more