A non-believer's guide to loving cryptids and ghosts
"Finding Bigfoot: Further Evidence" and the necessity of belief in the impossible
When my wife and I had just started dating, we would occasionally go and visit her brother in New York. They had, at some point, become obsessed with the Animal Planet TV show, Finding Bigfoot: Further Evidence, and in between our trips to various bars and restaurants, we’d binge the show.
Finding Bigfoot, if you’ve never seen it, features three members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) and a skeptical field biologist, who search for proof of living Sasquatches in a process they call “Squatchin’.”
Squatchin’ involves going to towns or forests with recent Sasquatch sightings, re-creating the alleged event (usually using the Sasquatch-sized BFRO member James “Bobo” Fay as the Bigfoot stand-in), and then camping overnight in the woods to track the elusive hominid down. The tracking techniques include midnight hikes in which a branch cracking (inevitably a deer) is mistaken for a squatch, “knocking,” which is smacking a big stick against a tree, as Sasquatches are known to do when communicating over long distances, and bellowing into the void in an attempt to imitate a Squatch call.
There have been 9 seasons and 100 episodes of this show. To the layman, they have not yet proven the existence of Sasquatch, but the three BFRO members are true believers. They’ll say things like, “Looking around this area, we can see that there is no sign of a Squatch. But we know that Squatches are excellent at covering their tracks, so a Squatch has definitely been here.”
Ranae, the resident skeptic and field biologist, openly disbelieves in the phenomenon, but clearly loves being in the outdoors, and cannot believe her luck at stumbling into this gravy train that pays her to travel around the world and say things like, “I would need to see further evidence to say this was a real Bigfoot encounter.”
Magical thinking
I would argue that belief in cryptids like Bigfoot is a stronger, purer form of belief than a belief in God. God, after all, is squidgy, ineffable — everyone’s definition of him or her or it or they is different, and it’s impossible to prove something’s nonexistence. So there will always be spaces in between demonstrable fact in which one can cram God, no matter how hard atheists try to kill the concept.
Cryptids, on the other hand, are explicitly defined, and are objectively fake. We live in a world where every single person has a tiny camera in their pocket, and yet, no one seems to manage to snap a picture of a Squatch in spite of thousands of sightings. When a photo is taken, it is inevitably shown to be a hoax.
This means that belief in Bigfoot is a leap of faith that even the most zealous True Believer in God will never have to make. You still can’t disprove Bigfoots and other cryptids, at least not to 100% — but you could take it beyond a reasonable doubt.
In spite of all of that, millions of Americans believe in Bigfoot — 13% of adults. There’s a Sasquatch Music Festival. There’s a National Sasquatch Awareness Day. In Skamania County, Washington, it’s a felony to kill a Bigfoot.
The normal rationalist viewpoint is that this is just proof of widespread stupidity. I think it’s something better.
Ghost tours for the nonbeliever
In 2011, after 25 years of living in Cincinnati, I went on a ghost tour of the downtown Over-The-Rhine neighborhood as part of a kooky Halloween activity. I went in expecting it to be stupid (because ghosts aren’t real!) but I finished it absolutely delighted with the city I grew up in. It was a feeling of wonder I’d never felt for Cincinnati before.
Cincinnati’s Over-The-Rhine neighborhood, during my childhood, was one of the worst ghettos in the U.S. For a few years, it had the highest number of murders per square mile of any neighborhood in the country. It was a place we were told not to go.
But Over-The-Rhine is also one of the largest historic districts in the country. It got its name because the neighborhood used to be separated from the downtown area of the city by the Miami and Erie Canal, and because of the amount of German immigrants in the city, that stretch of the canal became known as “the Rhine.” The Canal is gone now, but the neighborhood’s name stuck.
At the time I went on my tour, Over-The-Rhine had started to gentrify — after race riots in 2001 (revolving, predictably, around the police shooting of a young unarmed black man), the city focused on the massive neoliberal development of the area, and now it has turned a once predominantly-black neighborhood into a bougie hipster neighborhood.
The ghost tour took us to many of the still-abandoned buildings — former beer halls, and also the city’s gorgeous and eerie beer tunnels, deep underground brick bunkers that were designed to keep beer cool during the swampy midwestern summer heat.
The ghost tour took us into these abandoned places to tell us of the ghosts that haunted them, and I quickly realized that, while I still considered the “ghost” part of this to be bullshit, I was getting a clearer glimpse into the history of this era than anything more formal and “legit.”
Because ghost stories are about the people who lived in these neighborhoods. They’re about their tragedies, their loves, their beliefs, their culture, and their lives. Other historical tours focus on important events: battles, speeches, catastrophes — things that we do not experience frequently in our everyday lives.
After that, I went on ghost tours in New Orleans, London, and the Jersey Shore. And in each of them, I felt that through this fiction, I was getting closer to the truth of life in these times than I’d ever been before.
Hot damn, it’s the Loveland Frog!
At the end of my street growing up was a woods. If you followed the creek down the hill through the trees, you would come to a giant drainage tunnel, which the braver kids could walk through to get to Lake Isabella in the town of Loveland.
Lake Isabella, and the nearby Branch Hill bridge over the Little Miami River, I would later learn, was the site of Ohio’s own cryptid: the Loveland Frog.
As cryptids go, the Loveland Frog is perhaps a bit tame, but it’s fitting for the area. The story is that one night, a Loveland Police Officer saw something scurry in front of his car. He stopped to see what it was, and saw a 6-foot-tall frog stand on its legs and point a wand at him. It shot sparks at the officer, who then emptied his clip into the creature.
Other sightings followed through the years, including as recently as 2016, when two kids playing Pokemon Go! near Lake Isabella saw two enormous glowing eyes staring at them from the water. As it emerged, it became clear — this was the Loveland Frog.
Now let’s set aside a couple of facts. First: a different police officer went back to the site of the first Frog sighting and found someone’s large, escaped pet iguana absolutely riddled with bullets.
Second: the Pokemon Go! frog sighting later was found to be the work of pranksters from the nearby all-boys Moeller Catholic High School, which is typical of a high school that sucks as hard as Moeller does.
What’s more interesting is that this goofy wand-toting amphibian has added an enormous amount of personality to an area that, when I was a kid, felt like it had precisely zero personality. Josh Steele, the older brother of one of my closest friends, even wrote a bluegrass musical for the Cincinnati Fringe Festival titled “Hot Damn, It’s the Loveland Frog!”
At some point, the truth of the legend matters a lot less than the way the legend bends local minds and culture. Why shouldn’t sleepy suburban Cincinnati get its own weird cryptid? Why shouldn’t New Jersey get its own devil? And what’s the worst case scenario if a bunch of goofballs go out into the woods and knock sticks against trees to summon the legendary Sasquatch?
More importantly: shouldn’t we try and find more of these cryptids? While researching the Jersey Devil for my book, I asked Jersey Pine Barren-native
for stories, and what she came back with wasn't just tidbits on the Leeds Devil (as it's locally called), but on myths like the Yimyammer, an enormous monster which shook the trees when it walked (and which may have been specific to just her family), or Fiddlin' Sammy Gibberson, a local fiddle player who once bet the devil a fiddle of gold that he could beat him in a fiddlin' contest and won. This story predates the Charlie Daniels song, by the way. I guess the musician didn’t think he could sell as many records with “The Devil Went Down to Jersey.”This led me to other Jersey legends like the White Stag of Shamong, a good luck omen which wards people away from catastrophe, and which seems to have roots in both European and local Lenape myths. It led me to Big Red Eye, which is the name of the state’s own local Sasquatch, it led me to the Cape May Sea Serpent, and it led me to Ong’s Hat, the Pine Barren ghost town that is allegedly a portal to another dimension. (I am lucky, in this respect, that New Jersey has an entire publication dedicated to these legends called “Weird NJ.”)
All these stories have broken me down. I have set aside the part of my brain that values rational thought above all else, and I have made space for another, closely related section of my brain that loves ghosts, monsters, and legends, and knows that these fictions are a better window into the past than the facts will ever be.