America Has Some of the Craziest Cryptids

These are America’s little-known “fearsome critters,” which came principally from lumberjack lore. Consider the Funeral Mountain terrashot, a walking casket that blows up when it stumbles into a searing desert. Or the tripodero, which has telescoping legs for seeing over bushes and a mouth that fires dried clay at its victims. Or the hidebehind, a lumberjack-hunter that you can’t see because—conveniently enough for the myth—when you look its way it ducks behind a tree. Also, it hates alcohol, so the only way to make sure it doesn’t eat you is to be drunk all the time. Ah, America.

Perhaps the most fascinating monsters of American lore, though, are the ones that serve to explain the phenomena we encountered as we headed west. That’s no different than any other folklore, really. In the absence of solid science, we humans will come up with any spectacular theory that will do—usually to serve as some sort of moral lesson or strategy for avoiding bodily harm.

But what’s remarkable about these fearsome critters is how they go about making sense of our world in the most nonsensical ways imaginable. They’re silly. They’re irreverent. And they’re probably standing right behind you.

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