Forest Cryptids

The towering ape-man of the Pacific Northwest, glimpsed in fog and legend for centuries.

A winged humanoid with blazing red eyes, haunting Point Pleasant before disaster struck.

A Navajo witch who wears the skins of animals and walks between worlds.

A gaunt, insatiable spirit of the frozen north that was once human.

The blood-draining predator that left livestock drained across Latin America.

Officially extinct since 1936, the Tasmanian tiger is the subject of more credible survival sightings than almost any other lost species.

A bat-winged, hoofed terror born from a colonial curse in the Pine Barrens.

A massive wolf-like predator terrorized rural France for three years, killing over 100 people before it was finally brought down.

An upright canine terror first reported in 1887, stalking Michigan's north woods ever since.

Deep in the Congo Basin, local tribes describe a living dinosaur with total consistency across generations.

Florida's foul-smelling answer to Bigfoot, lurking in the Everglades heat.

Louisiana's Cajun werewolf stalks the bayou, cursing the sinful and haunting those who break Lent.

The Philippines' most feared shapeshifter hides as your neighbor by day and hunts as a beast by night.

The original Romanian undead predates Dracula by centuries and is still feared enough that corpses are occasionally exhumed and staked in rural villages.

A ghostly black dog with blazing red eyes has haunted the roads and churchyards of East Anglia for over a thousand years.

The hairy hominid of Boggy Creek, Arkansas, that inspired one of horror's first docudramas.

A fat, stumpy snake that supposedly jumps, speaks, and has a taste for alcohol.

A watermelon-headed creature spotted three times in two nights, then never again.

A short, bipedal ape covered in golden-brown fur walks the jungles of Sumatra, and credible scientists have spent decades trying to prove it exists.

A large black cat prowls the foggy moors of Cornwall, shredding livestock and vanishing into the granite landscape.

A divine chimera of dragon and deer that only appears to herald greatness or disaster.

A vampire that tears its own torso free and flies through the night on bat-like wings, trailing its entrails below.

A 400-year-old spider that takes the form of a beautiful woman to lure men to their death.

A small, troll-like trickster from Wampanoag legend that lures victims off cliffs.

A six-legged panther-witch from Cherokee legend that screams through Appalachian hollows.

Australia's own Bigfoot has been reported for centuries, from Aboriginal Dreamtime stories to modern highway encounters.

A half-bird, half-reptile terror from Maryland with a taste for livestock and legend.

China's Bigfoot roams the thick forests of Hubei Province, backed by thousands of reported sightings.

A shaggy, upright canine prowling a rural Wisconsin road since the 1980s.

A towering, ace-of-spades-headed figure that appeared after a UFO streaked overhead.

A half-man, half-goat said to roam the back roads of Maryland with an axe.

A fanged, winged rabbit with antlers sounds like a joke until you see the taxidermy specimens in Bavarian hunting lodges.

The people of Flores Island describe small, hairy cave-dwellers who stole food and children, and the story gained credibility when Homo floresiensis fossils were found.

Zambian fishermen describe a flying reptile with leathery wings and teeth that capsizes their boats.

A legless or two-legged dragon slithers through Scandinavian and Germanic legends as a creature of both terror and strange wisdom.

A 12-foot flightless bird, officially extinct for 600 years, with enough backcountry sighting reports to keep the search alive.

A blood-stained, three-toed giant that terrorized a small Missouri town in the summer of 1972.

A spiny, fire-born beast from the Wisconsin woods with a taste for white bulldogs.

A horned, shaggy beast whose eerie howl echoes through the Ozark hills at night.

Islanders in Papua New Guinea describe a glowing, long-tailed flying creature that matches no known bird or bat.

A towering horse-headed giant that leads travelers in circles through the Philippine wilderness.

A purple-skinned, bat-winged ape seen near Mount St. Helens after the eruption.

Something large, dark, and feline stalks the misty moorlands of Devon, leaving torn livestock and fleeting glimpses behind.

In Central America, a glowing-eyed dog follows you home at night, but its color decides your fate.

In the Congo, locals describe a spider with a leg span wider than a grown man is tall.

A massive dark green hound the size of a bull roams the Scottish Highlands, and hearing its third bark means death.

A scaly, goat-like creature that charged a crowd of onlookers at a Texas lake in 1969.

A woolly, horned quadruped lurking in the hills of West Virginia since the 1990s.

A foul-smelling ape-man stalking the misty slopes of Mount Hiba in rural Japan.

Deep in the Amazon, locals say a snake longer than a river is wide guards the waterways.

A bipedal reptilian predator stomping through the Australian outback, leaving three-toed tracks in places nothing large should be.

A stinking, one-eyed ground sloth still roaming the Amazon, if the locals are right.

A towering owl-humanoid haunting the woods around a Cornish church.

A flame-haired forest guardian with backward feet, who drives hunters insane by making them walk in circles.

A headless, pale giant spotted lumbering through a West Virginia town in 1964.

A giant bat with a 10-foot wingspan, screaming through the jungles of Java.

Entire sections of Brazilian forest have collapsed into tunnels dug by something impossibly large.

A Bigfoot-like creature with a distinctive blonde mane has been spotted near mining towns in northern Ontario since the 1900s.

A shapeshifting flying serpent from Chilean forests that drains the blood of livestock from the air.

In the forests of Ghana, something with iron teeth and bat wings sits in the treetops, legs dangling like bait.

A blood-drinking creature from the Philippines that walks backward and hides in the shadows of its owner.

A Finnish forest spirit that spreads disease and madness to anyone who catches a glimpse of her moving through the trees.

A bipedal ape spotted by both Vietnamese villagers and American soldiers during the war.

Brazilian hunters know this forest spirit punishes anyone who takes more than they need.

A striped, cat-sized predator prowling the Australian bush, matching nothing in the known fossil record since the Pleistocene.

Kenyan tribes fear a nocturnal beast that kills for one thing only: the brain.

A gray, brindled cat the size of a donkey has been mauling people in Tanzania since the 1900s.

In Togo, a vampire disguised as a glowing firefly slips through locked doors to feed on the sleeping.

A tiny red tree creature that swallows you whole, then spits you out slightly shorter.

Across East Africa, multiple credible witnesses have reported small, rust-colored ape-men walking upright.

A small, armored creature with a glowing gemstone embedded in its head, spotted in the Andes at twilight.

Deep in Vietnam's jungles, soldiers and scientists have reported a powerfully built ape that walks like a man.

A hairy, rock-throwing giant reported in New Zealand's Coromandel Range long before the Bigfoot craze.

In the forests of Honduras, a backward-footed ape-man kidnaps anyone who makes eye contact.

In a remote Kenyan river valley, locals describe an armored, club-tailed reptile that has no business still existing.

An enormous, tapir-like beast reported by a colonial officer in the unexplored highlands of Papua New Guinea.

In the Australian outback, a malevolent spirit stalks those who practice sorcery and kills them in their sleep.