So lets get started! So many out there, what to start with. Aahhhh, he is an oldie but a goodie, the Boogie Man. This guy really gets around. He has been called by many, many different names and in places all over the country, even the world. In Panama there is a legend of an entity called Tulivieja. She is so much a part of the culture that even today, children are given a mate (pronounced ma-tae), a charm made of red ribbon and coco bean dipped in gold to keep her away. Of course there are slight variations in the story, but for the most part the legend states that once way back in time, the spirits and the mortals could live together, see each other and recognize each other. One spirit incarnated itself in the form of a girl and a boy fell in love with her. They produced a child, but to hide what she was, she drowned the child. For this crime God turned her into the Tulivieja. Her form changed from a beautiful girl to large cat like creature with horse feet. Her face was full of holes and her hair was bristly. She was condemned to look for her drowned child forever. The Panamanians would tell their children to not stay out late or the Tulivieja might mistake them for her lost child or if you behaved badly she would steal you out of your bed.

In its simplest terms, the Boogie Man likes to find those individuals that are alone or unsuspecting and "Get you". To a child "Get you" is more than enough information, they don't even want to think about what all that means. To adults of course there are all kinds of atrocities that can race through your mind so it is just as frightening for one who believes. The fear of death or abuse is a powerful thing. The Boogie Man is rarely seen, and if he is, it is a fleeting glimpse. Just enough to put you on your toes.

Let go through a scenario. You are camping in a very rural area, a forest. In order to get to the restroom you have to walk a quarter of a mile down a trail. It is dusk and turning dark quickly. Now, if you are a person that doesn't like the dark, are a little timid, or maybe that night you are just a little on edge, whatever the reason, you are going to feel uncomfortable. There are shadows everywhere. In that moment and in those settings if you see movement or think you see movement, you are going to freak out a bit. I can personally attest to this uncomfortablness. I was once in my basement and the power went out. Little did I know it was the whole neighborhood, so I went down with a single candle to check it out. Now I am a pretty stable guy, logical, analytical, and definitely do not scare easy. It is spooky, however to see something that you know well enough, in a confined space (my workroom is not that big) seeing everything bouncing around, moving shifting your focus. Your depth perception changes and it looks like things are moving at you or moving around the room. It is a little unsettling. I was so fascinated by this that I went down in the basement later with all of the lights off at night to do it again and the same optical tricks happened. So back to our setting of the bathroom run at night in which you are officially freaked out. This creates several scenerios, one of which is you freeze. You just lock up, body and mind, in fear. Another is, you rationalize whatever it was away to create a saftey area in you mind. "It was just the wind." It could have been or could have been something else, but now you feel safer. The last one would be you go in the opposite direction and recognize or create a threat. "There is somebody in the trees!! Help!".

Have no illusions, there are times that a person really is there. Maybe it is just some friendly guy and leaves the person alone so that they will not get the wrong idea, or some creep spying on an unsuspecting person from behind a tree and got caught. If the supposed watcher never gets seen and leaves the area many people will belive the poor soul that got scared out of their skin, is just seeing things. To that person however, regardless whether it was real or imagined, it was very real, and hence the Boogie Man is born. Obviously this seems very generic, not to mention not at all supernatual, but there have been instances where people will see a reoccuring similarity. The man always wore a green coat, was seen, and then dissappeared in thin air. Later a person could not be found and information will reveal that the man in the green coat sounds a lot like an individual that died 10 years ago. Details like this will turn a missing person's tale into a Boogie Man story and it very well may be true.

Well this is not exactly local folklore, but a good monster none the less. It is cause for many tales and legends in Egypt. The mummies fall under the same rules that are discussed on the Ghost page of this site as to why they come back. By "come back" I mean that their souls reinhabit their bodies. Since the Egyptians were so good at preserving the bodies, when the soul returned, it actually had a functional body to return to. Hence they could walk around and affect everything in the physical world where obviously ghosts can not, at least not without some considerable effort. Granted, mummies are ugly as sin, but they can function.

There is much debate whether Bigfoot is real. Plaster molds were made of the footprints found proving that the prints existed, but no one knows whether it was set up as a prank or not. There is one compelling piece of footage that shows a dark furry manlike creature walking in the forest for a brief moment. This is another piece of "evidence" that has a considerable amout of controvery around it. Some experts say that the figure was over seven tall. Others say that it was only six feet tall and was a man in a hairy suit trying to fool people. Really there hasn't been much evidence to validate the exist of the creature. There has been enough to keep the legend alive though. About the time that it would fall by the wayside something will crop up. Some hunters have spent their lives looking for the creature to no avail.

In colder climates there are similiar tales of a prehistoric creature. These stories tell of a big white beast that lives on the tundra but walks upright like a man. Siberia or Tibet seems to be where most of the stories come from, but any place that has a cold rural environment, primarily in Asia, seems to be where most of the legends come from. The tales of the Abominable Snowman, or sometimes called a Yeti, are very old. There have been tales in Tibet dating back many, many centuries about this hairy creature. Oddly the tales of the Bigfoot rarley indicate violence, but the Yeti was known to be aggressive. Killing yaks, destroying traps, sometimes even attacking people. It was also wicked smart and would fool trappers or hunters. There have been stories told of the Yeti getting a hunter caught in its own trap.

This is definitely a different kind of monster. I can't really call it a creature or an animal as many of them originally were human. It is important to say that they do not have to be human, there are plenty of instances of animal zombies. Lets start with a good description so you will know what I am talking about. This is usually the same no matter how it came to happen, which I will get into later. Zombies are the animated dead. They usually are in various states of decay and will continue to decay. As you can imagine, the smell of a rotting body is not the most pleasant. Also because of the decay, not all of the parts work like they did when they were new, not to mention if there was any kind of injury sustained before death. This means that they are usually slow. You don't see too many zombie sprinters, or even ones that are very coordinated. One site that I visited did mention the zombies in the Michael Jackson "Thriller" video, but we all know that Michael is strange and it just in not surprising that he would find the six coordinated zombies in existance to have in his video. Maybe he paid to send them to zombie dance camp. Just kidding.

So now we know they walk, talk or moan if they have vocal chords that haven't rotted, and they stink. So what do they do? What kind of job skills does a zombie have? Well to start with, usually, they make more zombies. Isn't that cool, you get to literally make more friends. Since they are dead, they don't really care if they get shot. There flesh is already falling off the bone, getting shot at is not going to emotionally shatter them. As a matter of fact, it hardly even slows them down. This makes them great to send after people. They do gain some bonuses in this state. Their sense of smell in incredible, truly amazing. They can pick up the scent of a human from several miles away. The other added part that comes from the transformation or resurrection is an increase in muscles in the jaw. It has been thought that zombies have no pain and so they could bite harder, but it is more the case that the muscles have dramtically increased. The muscles in the jaw are the strongest on the body and if you triple the effectivness, well zombies have been known to bite through steel.

So how did this happen? How does one make or become a zombie? There have been primarily six different ways to make a zombie, in theory that is. This could get a little long, so I will make them brief and if you have any further questions, please email me.

1. Chemical Reaction - This is where the government would dump some strange chemical and it would get in the soil and "poison" the neighborhood. Another example would be a new drug or chemical being created and it had some nasty side effects. The movie "Resident Evil" is a great example of this.

2. Alien Intervention - Of the six, this is probably the most obscure, but I have run into the occasional story with this theory in it. The tale goes that aliens would be trying to take over the Earth and so use our own dead to fight against us as a psychological battle as well as getting an army for free. Far fetched, I know, but I want to include it.

3. Techno Reanimate - Science is glorious isn't it? There is always someone that thinks they can cheat. Take death away from someone and give them back life. Well, in a way. This stretches what many think of as zombies. This group has a tendency to not follow the rules and descriptions listed above. A good example would be the movie "Universal Soldier".

4. Divine Planning - Ah yes, the helping hand of a higher being. Of course most "good" beings would not want to have a human go through the state of being a zombie, but it can happen. The opposite side would then be the "bad" side, which usually ends up being a demon or something like them. There are instances where they would be more than happy to give you a second shot at life, but neglect to tell you that you technically are still dead, just animated. Zombies do make good shock troop which can help in a typical "bad guy" campaign. An example of this one would be in "Prophecy" with Christopher Walken.

5. Disease - Now we are getting into the more believable stories. A classic tale from centuries ago, that once bitten you were infected. When you died, which if the zombie that bit you didn't kill you right then, you would be dead anyway in say a week, you would come back as a zombie yourself. A new partner in crime that feels the same craving for flesh and is ready to paint the town red. Unlife doesn't get any better than this.

Yes! A great historical monster! Good ol' Nessie. Of of all of the monsters that I will write about, I consider the Loch Ness Monster to be the most fun. Maybe it is because of all of the creatures that I have talked about, this is the one that has the most sitings, and yet, no one has lock down proof, and NO ONE HAS CAUGHT HER. How wiley is she to avoid being caught for hundredS, more like thousands of years? The stubborness, the tenacity, she truly is a wonder. I am getting ahead of myself in the excitment here, let us talk about the legend and the theories for those who are not familiar with this particular creature.

The area where this creature resides is in a body of water called the Loch Ness. The Loch Ness is like a lake at the bottom of a valley that several rivers flow into. It is 23 miles long and about a mile wide and on the average 600 feet deep. It is located in Scotland. The monster supposedly lives in this large body of water. The interesting part about this monster is that they believe her to be a living dinosaur. The official name used by Britain at this time is Nessiteras Rhombopteryx.

Of the creatures of old, there are five big classics that come to mind. The first two I cover on other pages, vampires and the wolfman or werewolves. If you are interested in those, click on the button at the top of the page. The other three are Frankenstein, King Kong and Godzilla. Lets start with Frankenstein.

This really is an interesting story. Mary Shelly was in a competition to see who could write the better horror story with Bram Stoker(author of Dracula) I believe. After a nightmare while she was in Switzerland, she came up with the story for Frankenstein. For those that are not familiar with the story, Dr. Frankenstein is obsessed with the finite balance that is life. This is in a time when epidemics where typical and the mortality rate was high. This doctor wanted to give life back to people, and so tried to create life. Raiding the graves for body parts and sewing them together he creates a process that actually brings life to the body he constructed from scratch. It is at this point where Hollywood has changed the story countless times from the original story.

The original Mary Shelly story tells us that the creature, for it never really has a name, is very strong as not only was Dr. Frankenstein trying to create life, but make it better. Not only did it have incredible constitution it is also extremely intelligent. It learns English and French, and has the same emotions and problems that any of us would, but it also has no parents and is horribly disfigured. There is also the "small" detail that shortly after it was created, it broke out of the lab in confusion and ran away, it was pretty much a new born baby in a fully adult body. So not only is it pretty much created as a social outcast from the beginning, the good Doctor is not even around to help educate this poor guy on how the world works. This of course causes much resentment on the creatures part. This resentment leads to hatred and the battle between the Doctor's responsiblity to the creature unleashed on the world and the creatures fight for revenge makes for an intense tale. The moral implications of this whole storyline could be a whole page just by itself, but the one that always comes up when I think of this was in a review, "If you decide you want to be God, be careful what you create."

The big man himself. Screw the lion, this guy is really the ruler of the jungle. Almost everything is afraid of King Kong and if you aren't afraid, you at least respect him. Let me paint a picture for you. A full grown male Silverback Gorilla is only about 5'6", but he weighs in at 400 lbs. Even at this size, it is strong enough to throw a human around like they are nothing. The stories of King Kong depict him to be anywhere from 50 to 80 feet tall. This would make him tens of thousands of pounds heavy, maybe 40,000 lbs. That is like 20 Hummers folks. This is a creature that could play with a Hummer like it was a toy and then throw it a city block without trying. The picture shown is from the original 1933 production. Imagine if you pissed that thing off, and then let it lose in New York City. Yeah! Now we have a movie!

I find it interesting that most people think of these classic monsters with a little bit of fondness. In many instances I see poeple feel sorry for them, regardless whether they may be real or not. This is especially true for Frankenstein, if they know the original story, and King Kong. People relate the persecution and abuse that these monsters take to their own lives. Unlike Freddy or Jason, who are just warped men, the monster represent something outside of Man, and in a way, it is almost not their fault that they are the way they are. More so, part of us wants to see them succeed against man, even though in the movie or story they are taking the lives of men. Either way, these are now all monsters that we know and are familiar with, and they have survived enough to be remade again and again. Classics indeed, and I look forward to see them remade again in the future.

Well keep checking back! I will have something will a little more substance as soon as I can.