MONSTERS In America: What’s Real, What’s Not, and What We Still Don’t Know

Are you ready to dive into the unknown? Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark, the true crime podcast from Ono Media with a hint of horror and mystery. Each week, I dive into a different case, breaking down the facts, and pondering the age-old question, "Why do people do what they do?" Now sometimes the answer isn't so clear, and that's why I'll also explore conspiracy theories, hauntings, and all things spooky. From the Green River killer to the Mothman incident, we will unravel all of the questions that keep us up at night. So don't miss out, subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform, new episodes drop every Wednesday. Into The Dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. Half-foot trackers, monster hunters, time travelers, and more. The handler one day told her this whole thing about how they've been terraforming on Mars, and they're building a colony, and they're recruiting specific people, a specific blood lines, and specific talents and skill sets to go onto the planet. On Richard Serrett's Strange Planet, we're redefining reality. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Every time, as a dark side. They claim to have seen a large winged creature, six to seven-foot tall gray and collar, and two large red eyes. While the world's famous big-foot may have been spotted traveling across I-80 earlier this week. Gray road in Elkhorn holds a decade-long history, as home to an otherworldly creature. After being sighted on three separate occasions on April 21st and the 22nd of 1977, the Dover Demon became well known in the world of crypto-noir. Most unexplained sightings start the same way. It's a flash of movement or sound you can't place, followed by the moment your brain rushes to interpret before you even realize what you're looking at. Nine times out of ten, there is an explanation, but every now and then there are other stories that don't clean up so easily, the ones with multiple witnesses and physical evidence, and details that refuse to line up with anything in this world that we completely understand. Hey guys, it's Andrew and welcome to every town, but today we're taking a closer look at what exactly cryptid encounters are. We'll look at the science, the misidentifications, and of course the handful of sightings that still don't make a lick of sense. This is Monsters in America, the truth, behind cryptid encounters. Something I find extremely interesting while at the same time semi-hard to believe even though it's true, is that your brain lies to you on a consistent basis. You just don't realize it. Most of the time when this happens your brain is doing a good thing and it's just trying to keep you alive, so when something unexpected flickers across your vision at night, especially something your mind tags as a possible threat, your perception doesn't behave like a camera that's capturing reality, it behaves more like a lawyer scrambling to build a case, grabbing whatever scraps of information it can find and then stitching them together into the most convincing story, not the most accurate one. Because for the brain coherence and truth isn't the goal, survival is, those two rarely line up as neatly as we like to think. We're imaginative creatures by design, there's this tendency we all have, peridolia where we see meaningful patterns and random noise. It's not a flaw, it's one of the oldest pieces of survival software we carry. Early humans who saw a face in the brush and assumed danger stuck around long enough to pass on their genes, the ones who shrugged it off as shadows, while many of them didn't get the chance to. Natural selection favored false alarms, hundreds of them, over being wrong just once. The misperception doesn't stop at what we see, it reaches into our memories too, and that's where things truly start to unravel. The brain doesn't record a perfect sequence of events, what it actually captures are fragments, a flicker of motion or sound, followed by that sudden rush of fear. Later when you try to make sense of that the mind stitches those fragments into a story, when it feels coherent even if the missing pieces were quietly filled in, that's the trouble, the brain fills in the blanks whether you want it to or not. Cognitive psychologists Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated this with what's now called the "misinformation effect." Interclassic car crash experiments simply changing one word in a question, asking how fast cars were going when they "smashed" versus when they "contacted each other." Caused people to remember very different speeds. It was all the same footage, but different memories, created by suggestion. Now imagine applying that kind of mental flexibility to something glimpsed for maybe three seconds in the dark while your heart is pounding out of your chest. Long line of research shows how easily humans miss information in their environment, even details that are unusual or important. Under acute stress, like the kind you feel when you think you're facing something dangerous, attention narrows, peripheral details completely vanish, and sometimes even central details disappear. The mind focuses on survival, not on accuracy. Things only get more distorted when other people enter the picture. When one witness talks about what they think they saw, their account can actually reshape another person's memory. The psychologist called this "memory conformity." And interestingly, a person who speaks first tends to resist influence the most. While the second person, the one hearing the description, shifts their memory the most dramatically. So when a group of friends sees something strange on a back road and spend the drive home comparing notes, they aren't sharpening the truth. They're blending it, reinforcing each other's assumptions, and pretty soon everyone is positive they all saw the exact same thing, even if their original perceptions were wildly different. But this is just how the machinery we all have operates on software written roughly 200,000 years ago. It prioritizes staying alive over being correct, and when that old system encounters incomplete data in a high stress moment, it generates errors, predictable errors that can look and off a lot like cryptid sightings. Sometimes the explanation isn't buried in neuroscience or memory distortion, but sometimes people do see exactly what they describe. It's just not what they think it is. Take bears, specifically a bear standing up on a time legs. Now, most people have never seen that in person, so it's really weird to witness, and bears stand upright more often than people realize. Their anatomy makes it easy for them to balance, and they'll do it to get a better view over tall brush, or to sniff the air, or simply to reach food, and sometimes they stand because they're injured. Back in 2016, a black bear in New Jersey became unexpectedly famous online, and locals called him "pedals". Because of the injuries to his front legs, one paw was missing entirely, and the other barely functional. He walked almost exclusively on his hind legs. And for years, he wandered through neighborhoods like that, captured on doorbell cameras and cell phones, his silhouette looking eerily like. Well, exactly what dozens of bigfoot witnesses have described, a large, dark, upright figure cutting through the tree line. The proportion seemed close, and the gait seems close too. At a distance, and bad lie with adrenaline doing its thing, your brain doesn't leap to injured bear. It leaps to something unknown. And the fairs aren't the only animals that wind up cast as cryptids. In Point Pleasant, West Virginia, during 1966 and '67, dozens of people swore they'd seen something impossible. The creature, the newspapers, eventually called the "Mothman". Six to seven-foot tall, gray and color, and two large red eyes. They set this creature flew over their car. and followed him back into town. That was the beginning of the Moth Man signings. The descriptions lined up in eerie ways, around seven feet tall and standing, eyes glowing red, wings stretching close to ten feet, and the ability to lift off and fly at alarming speeds. For that same year, something else happened in point pleasant that rarely gets mentioned. A snowy owl was shot in town, and local papers described it as a giant owl because its wingspan was nearly five feet across. Joe Nichol, an investigator with a committee for skeptical inquiry, reviewed the report's years later and pointed to owls as the most likely culprit as to what the Moth Man actually was. The strange cry people heard, that rounded face, the habit of perching near barns and abandoned structures. All of it lined up far more neatly with a barn owl than with a supernatural being. Another candidate appeared later as well, with a sand hill crane. It's a huge bird, almost as tall as a grown man with a wingspan that can hit seven feet and a patch of red coloring around the eyes. In daylight, they look elegant, harmless even, but at night, a bird that's size rising suddenly from a riverbank or a stretch of brush can look terrifying, especially to people who have never seen one before. Back in the 60s, sand hill cranes weren't native to West Virginia, which means locals wouldn't have had any immediate frame of reference for what they were actually looking at. Now I'm not trying to say big foot or Moth Man or whatever cryptid you want doesn't exist, and what I'm getting at is this. Wildlife does strange things. Animals wander out of their usual habitats. They get injured, stressed, or startled, and start behaving in ways that don't match the mental pictures we have of them, if we even have one at all. And when humans encounter those moments in the dark or in the fog or at a distance, our pattern-seeking brains reach for the closest match they can find, and sometimes that match happens to be a legend. All right, so quick question. 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Then it helps you set budget, singles, without having to micromanage everything yourself. If you want to feel more in control of your money, without turning it into a full-time job, this helps a lot. Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at RocketMoney.com/everytown. That's RocketMoney.com/everytown. RocketMoney.com/everytown. But then, of course, there are the cases that don't fold neatly under logic. The ones where multiple witnesses and people who don't know each other, they learn in the same place at the same time even, describe the exact same thing. The ones where investigators show up certain they'll find an explanation, they'll walk away without one because the details are just too specific, too consistent and too strange to simply brush off. And over Massachusetts, April 21st to the 22nd, 1977. On a Thursday night, 17-year-old Bill Bartlett was driving along Farm Street when his headlights caught something perched on a broken stone wall. Four feet tall, a smooth watermelon-shaped head, and glowing orange eyes. There was no visible nose or mouth. The moment lasted seconds, long enough for the thing to turn and scramble away, long enough to brand itself into the boy's memory. And Bartlett, he was a skilled artist. A fine arts painter, actually, whose work would eventually hang in galleries. And when he got home, he sat down and drew exactly what he saw. On the sketchy road, I, Bill Bartlett, swear on a stack of bibles that I saw this creature. A few hours later, on the other side of town, 15-year-old John Baxter was walking along Miller Hill Road when he spotted a figure up ahead. The first he thought it was a friend, but as he got closer, the shape wasn't right. The proportions were way off and the head too large. When his creature bolted into the woods and when Baxter got home, he drew his own sketch. Without ever speaking of Bartlett, his drawing matched bibles in all the ways that mattered. Then, the following night, 15-year-old Abby Brabo reported seeing the same creature on Springdale Avenue. And her description matched the others, except for one detail. Abby insisted the eyes were glowing green and not orange. And Bartlett had possibly noted orange because his headlights were reflecting off the creature's eyes. Abby was adamant. Investigators even tried nudging her to align her account with the earlier reports, but she refused to budge. The three witnesses, two nights, one creature, with descriptions that lined up too tightly to be dismissed as coincidence. After being cited on three separate occasions on April 21st and the 22nd of 1977, the Dover demon became well known in the world of cryptozoology, the study of creatures or animals whose existence is not scientifically proven. Cryptozoologist Lauren Coleman was the first investigator on the scene and the one who eventually coined the name Dover Demon. But he didn't work the case alone. Within days, he pulled together a small investigative team. Joseph Nyman, Ed Fog, and Walter Webb, all well-known researchers in the UFO and anomalous phenomena world. A web in particular wasn't just a hobbyist. He was the assistant director at the Hayden Planetarium at Boston Science Museum. And Coleman interviewed Bill Bartlett at length, documenting every detail he could pull from him. According to Bartlett, the creature walked on all fours with this strange, almost fragile way of moving. Its hands and feet ended in long, thin digits, and the eyes were huge, round, and glassy, reflecting light in a way that made them glow. In the head, Bartlett said it looked like a smooth, pale marble, roughly the same size as the rest of the body. Local reporting noted another detail that added to the eariness. The three sightings formed a straight line across roughly two miles of Dover. And so we have a description, we have witnesses, we have a mapped path of movement. What we don't have is a clean, reasonable explanation. And people have tried, and they still try. That skeptic suggested a baby moose, but moose calves don't wander alone, and Dover is an exactly moose country. Others floated the idea of a foal, but investigators found no tracks, no local farms were missing any horses. A mangy animal, well maybe, but it's impossible to know for sure. And it was also the question everyone eventually asked, "Well, could it all have been a prank?" In this case, that explanation doesn't land as neatly as skeptics would hope. And Bartlett and Baxter knew each other, only casually, the kind of "we go to the same school familiarity, but nothing more." Abby, well she didn't know either of them at all, so if it was a hoax, it would have required coordination among kids, who weren't friends, which is possible, but not really all that likely. And none of them in the following years admitted to that, or ever changed their stories either. So what we're left with is three independent witnesses, multiple encounters over 26 hours, descriptions that overlap, and ways that are hard to ignore. And then, well silence. The Dover demon was never seen again. So one of those teenagers run into back in 1977. The honest answer is, "We don't know." And then feel Old Illinois, around 9.30 pm on April 25th of 1973, Henry McDaniel heard a strange scratching at his front door. And he figured it was a neighborhood animal, maybe a dog nosing around his porch. When he opened the door, he didn't find anything familiar. He later described the creature as having three legs on it, a short body, two little short arms and two pink eyes as big as flashlights. McDaniel didn't wait to analyze it though. He grabbed his shotgun, fired four rounds at the thing and let out a loud hiss before bolted toward the nearby railroad tracks. According to McDaniel, the creature cleared roughly 15 feet and only three jumps, a physical feat that doesn't match any known wildlife in the region. When shares deputies arrived, they found footprints near the house and it looked dog-like but with six toe pads. Officers noted that McDaniel himself was calm, sober and coherent, not someone in distress or under the influence, so in other words, they didn't dismiss him as a man imagining things. And if this were one off-sighting chances are we'd never even know about it, except it wasn't. Two weeks later on May 6, McDaniel reported seeing the creature again around 3am, this time casually walking along the railroad trestle near his property. No gunshots this time and no panic, just quiet observation from a distance as he tried to understand what he was looking at. Later that same day, WWKI Radio News Director Rick Rainbow and three friends reported seeing an ape-like creature standing inside an abandoned building not far from McDaniel's home. Skeptics offered explanations because, of course, they did. One theory suggested the creature was an escaped kangaroo because it jumped so far, but McDaniel dismissed that immediately. He'd actually owned a kangaroo while serving in Australia and said the Enfield creature didn't move like one. It didn't look like one, and the prince didn't match. Another theory pointed toward an escape to primate, citing footprint comparisons and reports of so-called "American apes," though there was no evidence of any such animal loose in southern Illinois. The sightings stopped after that, but still, there were no clear answers. Interestingly, researchers at Western Illinois University later studied the incident as an example of social contagion. By their analysis, the number of actual firsthand sightings was small, but rumors, news reports, and community anxiety amplified the story until it felt like the entire town was under siege by something unknown. Whether you chalk it up to misidentification, an escaped exotic pad, or collective anxiety, while something strange happened in Enfield during the spring of 1973, and what that something was, remains anyone's guess. Around that same time, over in Waterford, Pennsylvania, another story was spreading. One locals called the "Sheep Squatch." Sometimes they called the "Sheep Man," sometimes the goat man. The names change, but the descriptions didn't. Since the early 1970s, people around Waterford have talked about a large, fur-covered humanoid with massive horns and hoved feet. And we're not just talking one or two stories, hundreds of people have claimed encounters over the years. The "Sheep Squatch" was said to stalk rural fields, tearing in the livestock and feeding on their remains. That part of the legend's stuff, because at the time, several farmers really were waking up to animals mutilated in ways they couldn't explain. One local teenager, Marilyn, lived on Baghdad Road during the 70s. She remembered seeing something sprint across a dirt road near the old sawmill, fast, upright, and unmistakably large. She tried to put it out of her mind, but years later, when she was 17, she had another encounter. And driving home at night, just before turning into her driveway, the same figure, or something like it, crossed the road and vanished into the tree line. Herb Kinney, a Waterford businessman, later said that a friend of his had a face-to-face encounter on the covered bridge along Nemiar Road, the one spanning the Booth Creek. He said when his friend was a tea, he was with a group of friends who had pulled their car onto the bridge when the creature attacked. They fought it off and sped away. Tires smoking, shaking and terrified. The roof of their car, according to them, was torn and twisted so badly it needed to be replaced. All four insisted the encounter was real, but when it came time to involve the police, embarrassment went out. No report was ever filed. By the mid-1970s, reports had spread everywhere. The covered bridge, Baghdad Road, the surrounding farmfields, then just as quickly as it arrived, the sheep squatch vanished from local talk, and sightings dried up by the end of the decade. So, what were people seeing? Why did so many unrelated witnesses across years and locations describe almost the same figure? I mean, was everyone just trying to get a little attention or was there really something out there? And if so, what was it? Now, before we close this out, I want to show you one more case. One that mirrors the others in unsettling ways. That's the beast of Bray Road. Bray Road in Elkhorn holds a decades-long history as home to an otherworldly creature. That's the name locals gave to a wolf-like creature reportedly seen around Elkhorn, Wisconsin. But these weren't vague campfire stories. These encounters were physical and they left marks. In the 1980s, multiple witnesses said the creature struck their cars hard enough to leave long, deep scratches down the doors and trunks. One woman said she ran over something on Bray Road and got out to check it out and was immediately chased back into her car by a massive wolf-like figure with red eyes. She slammed the door just as it raked claws across the metal and witnesses consistently described it as six to seven feet tall, humanoid and body but covered in hair, a shape somewhere between a wolf and a man. These sightings didn't all happen in the dark and some people reported seeing an unusual large wolf-like creature running on all fours through cornfields and broad daylight. One person even said it was chasing a deer. "I've seen some pretty big footprints that I would assume are bigger than a wolf but I don't know." And so, here's where things stopped lining up with the easy explanations. Others don't chase people or cars. Wolves don't suddenly stand upright and maintain bipedal speed. And no known animal in Wisconsin matches a seven-foot height paired with a forward-facing intelligence stare. And could some sightings have been misidentifications? Of course. And could a few have been pranks? Well, absolutely. But when unrelated witnesses, people who have never met keep describing the same creature in the same place across many years, simple explanations start to feel like they're stretching a little thin. So what are we really looking at when we step back and examine the full spectrum of all cryptid encounters? When we know memory isn't a perfect recorder, not a person's confidence and what they saw has very little to do with what actually occurred. And we know why life behaves unpredictably, especially when injured. We also know darkness, distance, and fear distort perception. We know collective hysteria is a real psychological phenomenon, stories spreading, mutating, feeding into each other until an entire community shares the same beliefs. We also know something else. A small number of cases, a very small number, the pieces don't lock into place. The explanations do not quite fit, which means they're still a sliver of mystery left. And maybe that's why these stories endure, because for all our science and all our understanding of the mind, all our attempts to explain the dark corners of the world and there are our moments, rare but real, when we simply don't have the answers yet. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Every Town, hope y'all enjoyed it. If you did, well dig a round because we have a bunch of other true crime stories that you have to hear to believe, I appreciate you very much, so thanks for tuning in, remember to come on back next week for another episode of Every Town. Every town filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. Because you never know, maybe your town will be next.