Legend of the Guyascutus, aka The Sidehill Gouger

The folklore of the United States was greatly enriched during the late 19th and early 20th century thanks to tall tales. Lumberjacks, hunters, ranchers, and other men who made their living out in the wild would frequently return home or to camp with incredible stories of fantastic animals they encountered.

These “fearsome critters” as they came to be known were a great source of entertainment among frontiersmen as a means of passing time, as well as a good way of captivating naïve audiences unfamiliar with the terrain. What made these beasts so fascinating were the bizarre features many of them possessed. The gumberoo, for example, resembled a hairless bear with a rubbery hide that bullets simply bounced off, but it would explode if it came into contact with fire. Jackalopes looked like common rabbits except for the huge antlers that grew from their heads. Cactus cats were large felines covered with large spines that they would use to pierce cacti and drink the juice, which they would subsequently become intoxicated on. Of all these strange creatures, though, none is more enigmatic than the Guyascutus.

Said to have inhabited forests of the Midwest, particularly along the Mississippi River and in the Ozark Mountains, the guyascutus is a very difficult monster to identify since its description varies between those who claimed to have seen it. Some compared it to a massive alligator with a thick plated shell on its back and a row of sharp dorsal spines. Others said it resembled a deer with rabbit ears and sharp fangs. It was either a vicious man-eater or a peaceful herbivore based on who you asked. Further adding to the confusion were the varying names given to the beast depending on the region. It was known by monikers such as the Sidehill Gouger, Guyanoosa, Sidewinder, Rickaboo Racker, and Hunkus-Lunkus.

Whatever the appearance or name, one feature remained constant in all accounts of the guyascutus; they had telescoping legs that could extend or contract as needed for navigation. This served them well when they had to navigate sloping hills and mountainsides, usually by making the legs on one side of their bodies shorter than the other in order to conform to the proper angle. In this state, however, they were restricted to moving only in one direction; trying to turn around with legs of mismatched size would cause them to lose balance and tumble down the mountainside. If a guyascutus was in danger of falling, it could always secure itself by using its prehensile tail to wrap around a sturdy stone and maintain balance – assuming, again based on inconsistent accounts, that it actually had a tail.

The legend of the guyascutus was profitable for several unscrupulous people. During the 1860s and extending up to the turn of the century, crooked carnival barkers who ran traveling shows would set up shop in Midwestern towns advertising that they had captured a guyascutus. The curious citizens, hoping to see the mysterious beast, bought tickets to see it unveiled. The barker would hype up the creature before the crowd, emphasizing its ferocity, its unbridled bloodlust. Then he would be interrupted by a badly injured man who rushed into the tent, screaming that the guyascutus had broken loose. The crowd, in a panic, fled to avoid being maimed by the monster. Once they were gone, the barker and his accomplice to pocket the money, pull up the show and leave town.

Guyascutus stories remained mostly regional lore, though the tales did eventually spread to New England. Residents of Vermont and New Hampshire reported seeing creatures similar to those around the Ozarks, which they dubbed the wampahoofus. Farmers attempted to breed these creatures with their livestock in order to help them adapt better to mountain pastures. These experiments frequently ended in failure, though, as the resulting cows and sheep did possess shorter legs on one side of their bodies, but lacked the ability to adjust the size, making it impossible for them to travel on flat terrain or turn around while on the hills.

It’s been suggested that the guyascutus was inspired by legendary creatures of European folklore, the haggis of Scotland (not related to the meal) and the dahu of France, both of which are said to have legs of varying length to help them travel better on uneven mountains. Whatever creature of the North American wilderness inspired it is a mystery considering how many varying descriptions of it exist. While it did feature in some prominent tall tales, including an encounter with the legendary Paul Bunyan, the guyascutus, along with its strange brethren of lumberjack lore, is all but unknown today. At a time where fictional works are constantly rehashing the same tired clichés and relying on the same overused monsters, it’s disheartening to see the fantastic creatures of the past, rich with originality and brimming with potential for reinterpretation, being forgotten. The fearsome critters are an endangered species on the verge of extinction, and sadly, their revival doesn’t seem likely.

In another source, the description is given that Sidehill gougers are North American folkloric creatures adapted to living on hillsides by having legs on one side of their body shorter than the legs on the opposite side. This peculiarity allows them to walk on steep hillsides, although only in one direction; when lured or chased into the plain, they are trapped in an endless circular path.

In this description Sidehill gougers are herbivorous mammals who dwell in hillside burrows, and are occasionally depicted as laying eggs. Since the gouger is footed for hillsides, it cannot stand up on level ground. If by accident a gouger falls from a hill, it can easily be captured or starve to death. When a clockwise gouger meets a counter-clockwise gouger, they have to fight to the death since they can only go in one direction.

Gougers are said to have migrated to the west from New England, a feat accomplished by a pair of gougers who clung to each other in a fashion comparable to “a pair of drunks going home from town” with their longer legs on the outer sides.

Frank C. Whitmore and Nicholas Hotton, in their joint tongue-in-cheek response to an article “Fantastic Animals” (Smithsonian Magazine, 1972), expounded the taxonomy of sidehill gougers (Membriinequales declivitous), noting in particular “the sidehill dodger, which inhabits the Driftless Area of Wisconsin; the dextrosinistral limb ratio approaches unity although the metapodials on the downhill side are noticeably stouter.”

Source Credit(s): Posted by Jim Bevan for manic-expression.com, manic-expression.com/apps/blog/show/19429117-manic-expression-s-monster-extravaganza-guyascutus, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidehill_gouger , Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts, Written by Henry H. Tryon, Public Domain License

The pages presented with this post are one of the earliest written accounts describing fabulous beasts of lumberjack lore, together called “fearsome critters.” These creatures are the New World counterparts to the monsters of classic mythology.

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Loch Morar monster Morag sightings uncovered

Early accounts of the Loch Ness Monster’s lesser-known cousin have been uncovered by researchers.

Morag is a mysterious creature said to inhabit the depths of Loch Morar, in the Lochaber area of the Highlands.

Alexander Carmichael, a prolific gatherer of folklore at the turn of the last century, gathered stories about her from people living near the loch.

His scripts have been uncovered by the Carmichael Watson project at the University of Edinburgh library.

The writings, thought to date from 1902, paint a conflicting view of Morag.

On the one hand, she is presented as a mermaid-like character with flowing hair, while another description paints her as a grim reaper whose sighting was viewed as a death omen.

Dr Donald Stewart, a senior researcher on the project, discovered the texts while leafing through a “mad mixture” of folklore collected by Carmichael over 50 years.

“We were so pleased when we found them, it was just totally unexpected,” he said.

In the first text, Carmichael states: “Morag is always seen before a death and before a drowning.”

A second text reads: “There is a creature in Loch Morar and she is called Morag. She is never seen save when one of the hereditary people of the place dies.

“The last time she was seen was when Aeneas Macdonnell died in 1898.

“The Morag is peculiar to Loch Morar. She is seen in broad daylight and by many persons, including church persons.

“She appears in a black heap or ball slowing and deliberately rising in the water and moving along like a boat water-logged.

“The Morag is much disliked and is called by many uncomplimentary terms.”

A final description, penned by Carmichael at a later date, retains Morag’s association with death but sees her take on more human characteristics.

‘Great distress’

He wrote: “Like the other water deities, she is half-human, half-fish. The lower portions of her body is in the form of a grilse and the upper in the form of a small woman of highly developed breasts with long flowing yellow hair falling down her snow white back and breast.

“She is represented as being fair, beautiful and very timid and never seen save when one of the Morar family dies or when the clan falls in battle.

“Then she is seen rushing about with great speed and is heard wailing in great distress, bemoaning and weeping the loss of the House of Morar laid desolate.

“The Morag has often brought out of their houses at night the people living along the shores of the lake and in the neighbourhood of her haunts, causing much anxiety to the men and much sore weeping to the women.”

Carmichael, who became a figurehead for the celtic artistic movement, originally wrote the texts in Gaelic.

He is thought to have spent only a couple of days in the area of Morar and did not claim to see Morag for himself. His main source of information about the monster appears to be a local named Ewan MacDougall.

The first text was unearthed by Dr Stewart in 2011 and he later happened upon the other two.

Speaking about the findings for the first time, he said: “Clearly, there’s something going on in Loch Morar, whatever it is.

“People make sense of it in different ways, depending on who sees it, what they’re feeling at the time and how the story comes down from tradition afterwards.

“I think the texts are pretty exciting. They give us a window back to how people saw this monster well over 100 years ago. They’re the first reported sightings that we have.

“It shows that there were other monsters vying for popularity and Nessie happened to win out in the end. But there were a lot more of them out there.”

More recent sightings have depicted Morag - whose home is only about 70 miles from Loch Ness - as a humped serpent-like creature similar to the more famous Nessie.

The first recorded sighting of Morag was in 1887, while in 1948 nine people in a boat claimed to have seen a 20ft-long creature in the loch.

In 1969, two men claimed to have accidentally hit the creature in their boat. Morag is said to have disappeared after one of the men hit it with an oar while his companion opened fire with a rifle.

Loch Morar is the deepest freshwater body in the British Isles, with a maximum depth of 310m (1,017ft).

Source Credit(s): BBC © 2013 bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-21574832 

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Writing on the wall: Pictographs, tribal tales add to lore of Sasquatch

Not far from the Tule River in Central California is a rock shelter used by tribal villagers long before the Sierra foothills began filling up with white settlers and gold miners.

The shelter is known as Painted Rock by tourists and archeologists for its colorful array of centuries-old pictographs depicting the animal spectrum from the small (lizard, centipede, caterpillar and frog) and the high-flying (condor, eagle) to the bigger beasts (coyote, beaver, bear and man). And man, of course.

Almost all of the painted images are instantly recognizable as creatures that would have inhabited the Sierras 500 to 1,000 years ago, when the pictographs are believed to have been created.

Three of the animals, though, can only be described in today’s lexicon as an adult male, adult female and child Sasquatch.

The big male, according to Yokuts tribal lore, is Hairy Man, standing on two legs, its arms spread wide, with long hair and, writes Forest Service archeologist Kathy Moskowitz Strain, “large, haunting eyes.” Next to it, with the same hairy, two-legged aspect, are what appear to be the adult female, the “mother,” and her child.

None of the animals shown on Painted Rock are proportionally larger than one would expect; they’re all either life-sized or smaller, as if in the distance.

The painting of Hairy Man is 8 1/2 feet tall.


The “Hairy Man” Pictographs from California. The child is on the left, the female to it’s right, and the male dominates the right side of the panel.

By the time the first white man saw the Painted Rock pictographs in the 1870s, earlier European settlers of the American west were already well aware of Native Americans’ historical belief in the animal the Central California tribes called Hairy Man.

Many Native Americans, from the Cree people in Manitoba to the Cowichans in British Columbia to the tribes of central and northern California, have through the centuries taken a wide berth to avoid encountering a race or tribe of large, two-legged hairy beasts.

The account of a Methodist missionary found that the Salteaux Indians of Lake Winnipeg “living in dread” of what the missionary himself described as “these imaginary monsters.”

Anthropologists’ response to this has been mixed. Some believe the animals were a creation of tribal folklore meant to keep children in line and convince them not to stray too far from the villages.

But early white traders, settlers and miners often talked about the fervent belief held by the locals in what the whites invariably referred to as “mythical” creatures — which were described much the way Sasquatch is now described.

A 1790 publication related a Hudson’s Bay Company trader’s story about the North Saskatchewan River Indians’ belief in a giant, two-legged beast called the wendingo or windingo. The Indians, noted the trapper, “frequently persuade themselves that they see his track in the moss or snow.”

Two decades later a fur trader named David Thompson found a large footprint, described in historical journals as having been 14 inches long and eight inches wide, near what is now Jasper, Alberta. The print is often referred to as the first Sasquatch footprint found by a white man, though Thompson himself was said to have believed it to be the track of a large grizzly bear.

British Columbia periodicals in the late 1800s and early 1900s carried short news items referencing “the wild man of Vancouver Island” being seen by prospectors and others. And the region’s Kwakiutl Indians related tales of the “Woods Giant” which was routinely described the same way — much larger and hairier than humans, walking on two legs, with deep-set eyes under a thick, protruding forehead.

Which, again, is the same description applied to many Sasquatch sightings today.

While modern-day curiosity about Sasquatch was stoked by the 1967 film taken by Yakima County residents Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, an even more dramatic incident near Mount St. Helens predated that one by nearly a half-century.

In her book, “Myths and Mysteries of Washington,” prolific Northwest historical author Lynn E. Bragg wrote about Cascade and coastal tribal tales of a “band of renegades who looked like giant apes and lived like wild animals in secluded caves high in the Cascade Mountains.”

Tribal belief in the giant beasts — referred to by different tribes and dialects as Seeahtic (or Selahtic), St’iyahama, Stiyaha, Kwi-kwihai and Skoocoom — were related by missionaries as early as 1840. But it wasn’t until July 1924 that the non-tribal world sat up and took notice.

That year, a group of miners prospecting in the Mount St. Helens and Lewis River area reported that their pine-log cabin had withstood a night-long attack by a group of what they described to forest rangers and reporters as “mountain devils” and “hairy apes.”

The miners’ account was that the assault on the cabin came at night, several hours after one of the miners had fired several rifle shots at a seven-foot-tall, hairy animal. According to their story, which was related in numerous newspapers, several of the creatures attacked the cabin, pelting it with large rocks, shrieking loudly, battering at the front door and climbing onto the cabin, the latter prompting the miners to fire several shots through the roof.

The miners left the next day, so anxious to put distance between them and the creatures that one of them, Kelso resident Fred Beck, said they left behind some $200 worth of “supplies, powder and drilling equipment.”

Their revelations made the newspapers, and numerous reporters and curiosity-seekers returned to the site and found numerous large, bare footprints around the cabin — but no “apemen.”

The tale told by Beck and the others is considered evidence of Sasquatch by some while being dismissed by others as a hoax or a bad case of cabin fever.

According to the latter version, the “attackers” were a group of local youths pelting the cabin with pumice stones from the top of the canyon either intentionally or by accident, perhaps not knowing there was a miner’s cabin at the bottom.

Beck, though, later said he and the other miners were able to see the creatures through the gaps in the log walls. “Only three of the creatures (were seen) together at one time,” Beck recalled in a dictated statement to his son four decades later, though “it sounded like there were many more.”

Beck’s description of the shrieking, wall-banging experience bears an eerie resemblance to one that occurred Aug. 14, 2004, at remote Snelgrove Lake in the Canadian province of Ontario.

A group of people were staying at a lakeside cabin, including documentary filmmaker Doug Hajicek, who has produced more than 200 films for such entities as PBS, Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, Outdoor Life Network and ESPN.

For two hours in the early evening, Hajicek said, someone or something threw small rocks toward the group, though not in a threatening way.

“Fifty or sixty rocks, lobbed,” Hajicek said. “You could shine a flashlight in the woods but all you’d see is trees. I didn’t have the courage to stand up and walk into the woods.”

Later that night, Hajicek woke up hungry, went to the cabin kitchen and flicked on a light “that illuminated my head in the window. The back side of the cabin was attacked — screams, banging on the walls, things hitting the cabin and the entire cabin started shaking and rock, and (rocks) started hitting the ceiling and the walls.

“It was like being in a bad B movie.”

Neither Hajicek nor any of the others in the cabin dared go outside until long after the “attack” had abated. But Hajicek returned on the same date the following year with several other people including two research professors, one from Idaho State University and the other from the University of Minnesota. At 3 a.m., Hajicek said, “something huge hit the side of the cabin, so loud the cabin just resonated.”

Shocked and scared, none of the people in the cabin ventured outside.

So, just as the year before, nobody saw whatever it was that was out there.

Source Credit(s): © Scott Sandsberry for Yakima June 19, 2012 bigfootencounters.com/articles/tribal-tales.htm Top Photos: © Kathy Strain/Stanislaus National Forest

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Lusca: Tentacled Sea Monster from the Caribbean - was it Octopus giganteus?

The Bahamian island, Andros, has an array of what the natives call blue holes, formed during the prehistoric Ice Ages. Researchers discovered that they are an immense network of underwater caves, linking Andros’ lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. Divers of these blue holes have described their experiences in many ways ranging from beautiful and fascinating to eerie and haunting. The eerie feeling you get while diving the blue holes might be from the presence of Lusca, the mythical beast of Bahamian legend. Lusca is half-shark, half-octopus. She lurks deep among the waters of the blue holes and inland caverns that are found throughout the Bahama island chain.

Local legend holds that the tidal currents of the inland blue holes are none other than the breath of Lusca. As she breathes in, water pours in strongly enough in some caverns to form a whirlpool, and when she exhales, cold, clear water boils to the surface.



It has been suggested by cryptozoologists that the lusca is actually a gigantic octopus, far larger than the known giant octopuses of the genus Enteroctopus which includes the giant Pacific octopus which can be found in the coastal North Pacific, usually at a depth of around 65 m (215 ft) and has a recorded arm span of up to 4.3 m (14 ft).

One of the first fairly well-documented sightings of an unknown giant octopus occurred around on the evening of November 30 of 1896. Two bicycling boys discovered an enormous light pink mass that had washed up on the beach at St. Augustine, Florida.

When the young men first saw the carcass, it had sunk into the sand because of its immense weight. The next day, Dr. DeWitt Webb, founder of the St. Augustine Historical Society and Institute of Science, arrived on the scene. The skin was of an extremely light pink color with a silvery tint to it. They concluded it weighed roughly five tons and the visible portions were twenty-three feet in length, four feet high, and eighteen feet across the widest part of the back. Webb decided that it was not a whale but instead some kind of octopus.



Over the course of the next few days, Webb and the rest of the party returned and photographed the creature. Also, two drawings based on the snapshots were made by A. Hyatt Verrill, son of Dr. Verrill.

Published in the Pennsylvania Grit, 1897.

For decades, the photographs taken were lost and these drawings were all that existed pictorially of the event. Then, in 1993, some of Dr. Webb’s original photos were discovered / recognized! The photographer Dr. Webb had used, Mr. Van Lockwood, had compiled an album of photos he had taken from 1885 to 1899. Upon Lockwood’s death, he had bequeathed the album containing the photos to the St. Augustine Historical Society and Institute of Science. Somehow decades later this album was discovered / recognized while in the possession of Mrs. Marjorie Blakoner, of California. Here they are:

Panoramic view of the crowd of some 50 persons, who had come by foot, bicycle, horse, or car, to see the “Florida monster”.

Two horses and a harness, on the left side; to the center is the carcass, a domed mass, with a cable around it’s middle and a post on it’s left. On the right are 3 other men, of which the first one is Dr. Webb.

One assistant reportedly found fragments of arms while digging in the sand nearby. He was unfortunately alone at the time so his statement is uncorroborated. Evidently, it was attacked while still in the sea and had been dismembered before the carcass washed to shore. Soon afterwards, a storm dragged it out to sea where it again washed ashore two miles to the south of its original position.

It was then that Webb sent several letters describing the carcass to scientists. Professor Verrill of Yale read one of them. Verrill, a zoologist, was recognized for his work on cephalopods, especially giant squid. In a note in the American Journal of Science, published January 1897, he concluded the animal was a giant squid, not an octopus, but much larger that the Newfoundland specimens he had examined. Webb then forwarded more photographs and information to Verrill, who changed his theory to an octopus. He wrote more notes to the American Journal of Science describing the new giant octopus. He concluded the specimen’s tentacles to be approximately seventy-five to one hundred feet long by eighteen inches at the base. He then designated the new creature Octopus giganteous verrill, after himself.

It would be into the second week of January that the work on the specimen would continue. The carcass had been washed out to see again resulting in further losses of body parts and mutilation of the carcass. He reported to both Verrill and Professor William Healy Dall, curator of mollusks at the National Museum in Washington DC, now called the Smithsonian, by letter. In spite of this, neither Verrill nor Dall made any effort to investigate the carcass for themselves nor were they willing to provide the time and money to properly preserve the animal.

Using teams of horses and the efforts of local citizens and companies, Webb was able to move the carcass further up the beach. This protected the remains from being permanently washed out to sea where they would have been lost forever. He then prepared specimens for Verrill and Dall. They were both taken from the mantle of the creature and preserved in formaldehyde. This would turn out to be the only hard evidence to future scientists to study. Webb was, however, interested in preserving the whole carcass and preservatives were forwarded.

Verrill received Webb’s preserved specimen on February 23 and wrote letters of reaction that were published in Science on March 5, 1897, and in the Herald on the seventh. He described the samples visually and concluded they could not be octopus tissue because they resembled the blubber found in some crustaceans, despite the fact that little oil was found in them. Professor Frederic Augustus Lucas, of the National Museum, also examined the specimens and stated “the substance looks like blubber, and smells like blubber, and it is blubber, nothing more nor less.”

Verrill finally concluded, after further examination of the tissues, that the bag-like section of the carcass was most likely the upper head and nose of a sperm whale. In the issues of the American Journal of Science and the American Naturalist for April, he does not try to make the objections and problems with his sperm whale theory less obvious. He pointed out that other zoologists that examined the carcass still believe it is an unknown cephalopod related to the octopus.

No work was done on the specimen until 1957 when Dr. Forrest Glenn Wood became interested and involved Dr. Joseph F. Gennaro Jr. Dr. Wood was a specialist in biology for the Naval Undersea Research and Development Laboratory of San Diego (California), and was reviewing the archives of the Marineland Research Laboratory (Florida) in support of its research on octopi.

This lead to a long research effort uncovering all of the published accounts of the event, many of which made mention of specimens being sent to the Smithsonian. Wood was unsuccessful in getting the Smithsonian to cooperate, so the more influential Gennaro made a trip to the Smithsonian to collect the specimen and wrote:

There by the sink was a glass container about the size of a milk can. Inside it was a murky mixture of cheesecloth, formalin (and I think some alcohol), and half a dozen large white masses of tough fibrous material, each about as large as a good sized roast. We lifted them up with the cheesecloth, then took them out with forceps.

He noted that the material corresponded to Webb’s description. He was allowed to remove what he wanted with a dissecting knife with replaceable blades. The two pieces he removed were wrapped in cheesecloth, placed in a jar, and transported by himself to his laboratory.

Initial examination proved disappointing. There were no features such as suckers, identifiable skin structures, or muscular masses. He then viewed them through a microscope along with control specimen samples of known octopus and squid. He was disappointed to find no cellular fine structure. He expected highly differentiated cells of a mammal if it was from a whale or structures typical of a squid or octopus. Then he viewed his control samples. They also revealed little if any cellular structure. Differences of connective tissues were more striking. Octopus tissue was different from squid tissue and neither could be mistaken for mammalian tissue.

Using polarized light, Gennaro decide to compare connective tissues. His findings were as follows:

Now differences between the contemporary squid and octopus samples became very clear. In the octopus, broad bands of fibers passed along the plane of tissue and were separated by equally broad bands arranged in a perpendicular direction. In the squid there were narrower, but also relatively broad, bundles arranged in planes of the section, separated by thin partitions of perpendicular fibers….

It seemed I had found the means to identify the mystery sample after all. I could distinguish between octopus and squid, and between them and mammals, which display a lacy network of connective tissue fibers….

After seventy-five years, the moment of truth was at hand. Viewing section after section of the St. Augustine sample, we decided at once and beyond any doubt, that the sample was not whale blubber. Further, the connective tissue pattern was that of broad bands in the plane of the section with equally broad bands arranged perpendicularly, a structure similar to, if not identical with, that in my octopus sample….

The evidence appears unmistakable that the St. Augustine sea monster was in fact an octopus, but the implications are fantastic.

To Be Continued on Cryptid Chronicles!
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Source Credit(s): suite101.com/article/lusca-st-augustine-and-bahamian-cryptid-a364121, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusca, staynehoff.net/giant_octopus.htm

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