The Batman Of Cave Creek

In these days of Homeland Security alerts and school shootings, reports of what I sometimes like to call “Fortean Critters” – like the Bunnyman mentioned yesterday – are being treated much differently than they were 50 years ago. Fear drives today’s reports, that’s for sure.

For example, take the bizarre events from Valentine’s Day, 2007, coming out of Arizona. Three schools in the north Phoenix suburb of Cave Creek were on lockdown for about 45 minutes on the morning of February 14, 2007, after a student at Desert Arroyo Middle School reported seeing what seemed like a person dressed as Batman run across campus, jump a fence and disappear into the desert. (No jokes about Batman looking for his Bat Cave near Cave Creek have been heard yet from the media, thank goodness.)

The student described the “Batman” as 6 feet 3 inches tall and possibly male. It being a male and having a mask on seem to be assumptions. How a student knew that the height was exactly 6′ 3″ was not explained.

A police search of the area turned up no one. Nothing was shared in the media about other evidence, such as footprints, being found or not found.

Without diminishing the reality of our era’s evil, nevertheless, the rush first to lockdowns and police action is real. Such reactions seem to reflect how the darkside appears to construct how these reports are being processed today.

Is the Valentine’s Day 2007 event related to the above pictured winged weirdie, the subject of a 2006 Texas encounter? For more on this incident, see near the end of this blog.

How was an even earlier sighting of a Batman handled, also from the nearby state of Texas? Simply put, it was discussed more with wonder than a threat.

There exists in the Fortean literature a rather famous case, filed under the name “Houston Batman.” You may have heard about it before: a huge winged man-thing was seen in a pecan tree near the center of Houston, Texas, on July 18, 1953. The incident occurred while Mrs. Hilda Walker was standing outside her home at 2:30 in the morning. (Please note the “23” time.)

Walker was talking with a teenage girl at the time when they both spotted an odd “figure” flying toward them. As it came closer, these two eyewitnesses were able to see that the figure was actually appeared to be a man with bat wings growing out of his back. The creature landed in Mrs. Walker’s pecan tree, during which time the witnesses were able to get a better look at their otherworldly visitor.

Mrs. Walker subsequently described him as “…a man with wings like a bat,” dressed “in grey or black tight-fitting clothes.”

The figure was about six and a half feet tall (about the same height as the Cave Creek Batman, please note). The Houston Batman of 1953 remained perched for about half a minute. A halo or “aura” seemed to radiate about him. The glow faded, reported the witnesses, and the Houston Batman gradually appeared to vanish into thin air.

BTW, despite the poor mythmaking on the part of the motion picture The Mothman Prophecies (2002), which said that the Houston Batman served as a warning for the famous Galveston Hurricane, this is pure cryptofiction time-traveling. The famed hurricanes in Galveston occurred in 1900 and 1915, long before the Houston Batman was seen in 1953.

Do not let open the floodgates, at all, on the Springheel Jack tales. That’s a whole other can of worms, er, or bats in the belfry.

However, we should at least consider these January 2006 drawings (one above, two below) from a sighting that occurred 4.4 miles north of Dickens, Texas, at Turkey Crossing.

Loren Coleman 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.

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