Points Places Bizarro Beasts
Posted by: Loren Coleman on January 30th, 2007
Stream of consciousness cryptozoology? Connect the dots romantic zoology? Twilight language hominology? Have you ever chosen a date, pondered, wondered, and seen where it took you? Let’s begin with January 30th, for example, and see where we go today.
Let me examine first this curious little book entitled Bigfoot: Tales of Unexplained Creatures. It was published in 1978. Were you around in 1978? Do you recall the booklet’s investigator, a guy named Dennis Pilchis?
Pilchis’ little organization existed in Rome, Ohio, and was called Page Research Library. His group privately published this thin strange book, Bigfoot: Tales of Unexplained Creatures, as well as Night Siege.
A couple very weird reports are noted for January 30, 1959, in Pilchis’ 1978 booklet. One is about a trucker driving that night on U.S. Route 52 near New Richmond, Ohio. He told authorities he saw a bizarre gray “ugly” creature with tentacles crossing the road ahead of his truck. Two hours later, just across the state border in Covington, Kentucky, a woman reported seeing a bent over strange grayish creature with a lopsided chest, “ugly” tentacles, and rolls of fat running horizontally over a bald head.
The New Richmond report is not too far from Loveland, Ohio, where the bipedal humanoid Lizardman or “Loveland Frog” was seen by two police officers on March 3, 1972. Also, near here on May 25, 1955, Robert Hunnicutt was driving in Branch Hill, Ohio, at 3:30 AM when he saw three 3.5 foot tall hunchbacked gray entities standing by the roadside. The creatures had forehead folds, slit mouths, and lopsided chests. Hunnicutt reported an odor like alfalfa and almonds.
Intriguingly, Point Pleasant, Clermont County, just off of U.S. Route 52, about five miles east of New Richmond, Ohio, is the birthplace of Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the USA, (April 27, 1822).
Humm, Point Pleasant, Ohio and Point Pleasant, West Virginia (Mothman country).
Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania, is in Bucks County, a very strange place (actually loved by Ivan T. Sanderson for its ringing rocks). M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 film Signs, starring Mel Gibson and Lizardmen (top of the blog), was filmed and set in Bucks County. Shyamalan’s weird movie, Lady in the Water (about a nymph – a Merbeing?- and a werewolf-like Scrunt – seen above), was shot in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. With the exception of the Pine Barrens footage, all of The Last Broadcast (about the Jersey Devil) was taped in Bucks County. Also, a short scene from Stephen King’s The Stand is based in Bucks County.
Another Point Pleasant, this one in New Jersey, served as the fictionalized setting of the short-lived 2005 television show, Point Pleasant. The program only aired eight episodes and was about a mysterious teen that washed up on the local beach. This powerful individual turned out to be Christina, the child of Satan and a human female.
With a flip in the location’s name, you find the Passamaquoddy Pleasant Point Reservation, at Pleasant Point, Maine, has some native rituals and tales of Big Birds. Animal X’s Australian film crew visited my home, taped their interviews, and then went up to Pleasant Point, Maine, to film the Thunderbird dances there for the Animal X episode on winged weirdies and Mothman.
This leaves me wondering, what curious things may have happened around Pleasant Point, a small country town in southern Canterbury, New Zealand?
A year after the sightings in Ohio and Kentucky, on January 30, 1960, reporter Betty Allen found Bigfoot tracks around a shovel loader on a logging road at Bluff Creek, California.
BTW, on another January 30th, this one in 1995, at 8:00 PM, in Olympia, Washington, a young female said she saw several Lizardmen with bright red eyes standing outside her bedroom window. Her father went to investigate but discovered nothing and saw nothing.
Whatever happened to Dennis Pilchis?
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Some of these stories, like the one about the Loveland Frog are quite a blast from the past. I went through a bit of a stage when I was younger of seeking out these stories, the bizarre of the bizarre. These are beasts straight out of the Goblin Universe. Hard to fit these into any kind of possible real biological entity but good exercises in speculation.
From most of the eyewitness testimony I’ve had the privilege to get my hands on; the “Loveland Lizard” as well as the “Lizardman” of SC seem to be a reptile with the ancestry of the Deinonychus or Velociraptor.
I’ve spent at least five years researching the “Lizardman” ever since I saw an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries.” Like some birds these cryptids migrate.
But what separates these accounts from the rest–are the reported aggression toward people. Some of these cryptids seem to feel the need to stay hidden at any cost.
Awesome. Thanks Loren! I actually live in Maysville, Kentucky, which is about two-thirds of the distance between Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Cincinnati, Ohio, and is also on the Ohio River. For those geographically impaired, New Richmond, Loveland, and Covington are all pretty much suburbs of Cincinnati. To have it all neatly tied together through strange coincidence, from Cincy to Point Pleasant, WV, is phenomenal.
We have a bridge here that crosses the river here that is the sister bridge of the Silver Bridge. It’s in a similar style (minus the extra support rails) and was built around the same time (three years after). Our bridge is called the Simon Kenton Bridge, named after the pioneer.
Coincidentally, Mothman and Bigfoot have both been spotted in our area.