Author Denver Michaels

On March 26, 1962, the Ocala Star-Banner ran an article about a Pensacola sea monster that attacked five teenage boys. The piece was titled “4 Teenage Skindivers Still Missing After Raft is Abandoned.” The text of the story is as follows: Four teenaged skindivers remained missing today after abandoning their tide-swept rubber raft in the Gulf of Mexico Saturday. A fifth youth swam two miles to shore about dark Saturday. The four were Bradford Rice, 14, Warren Felley, 16, Eric Ruyle, 16, and Larry Stuart Bill, 17. The fifth youth was Brian McCleary, 16 found sleeping on a beach near Fort McRae early Sunday. McCleary said he and the other four were skindiving in the gulf when the tide began carrying them to sea. Swells broke over their raft. He said they tried to move to a buoy but missed. Then, he said, they abandoned the raft to swim ashore. The raft washed ashore on Gulf Beach. Face masks, shoes, and fins were inside. McCleary said he, Bill and Ruyle developed cra

During the height of the French and Indian War, a fort was built in the frontier town of Winchester, Virginia to protect the local citizenry from attack. Named Fort Loudoun, after the Governor General of Virginia and Commander-in-Chief John Campbell, the fourth Earl of Loudoun, construction began in 1756. The fort was designed by the commander of the Virginia Regiment, Colonel George Washington, who supervised its construction. During the excavation of the fort’s foundation, Washington’s men dug up a couple of large skeletons. According to Washington, they were seven feet long. Today, the property is owned by the French and Indian War Foundation and is listed in the National Registry of Historic Places. If you guessed that the George Washington giant skeletons are not housed in the museum on the property, then you are correct. What happened to them? My guess is that they were lost—possibly never even stored. A war was going on, and Washington and his men were not out to prove to the w

The Lowcountry of South Carolina is a great destination. The food and the beaches are amazing. Cities such as Beaufort and Charleston are full of history, stunning architecture, and antebellum homes with manicured lawns that embody the deep South. Large oak trees draped with Spanish moss form canopies along narrow streets and side roads. And of course, there is Bigfoot. Visits to Lowcountry I spent a week in the Lowcountry in the summer of 2020 and again in January 2022. But I was a good hour’s drive from Hilton Head; thirty minutes away from Beaufort; and around forty-five minutes from Charleston. I stayed at a campground “in the middle of nowhere.” The nearest town was Yemassee—a small community whose roads leading in were riddled with potholes the size of kitchen sinks. The point of this post is not potholes, Spanish moss, or antebellum homes—Bigfoot is the star here. As I usually do when I arrive in a new place, I began thinking of the elusive beast. I checked the Bigfoot Field Re

In the spring of 2022, I spent three weeks in Massachusetts. I stayed a stone's throw from Cape Cod, which led me to think about what might be lurking in the waters off the coast. This brought to mind the legends of the Gloucester Harbor Sea Serpent. Though Gloucester Harbor is a good bit north of Cape Cod, I still got lost in thoughts of its sea serpent during my trips to the cape. The Gloucester Harbor sea serpent is the classic, quintessential sea monster . It frequented Gloucester Harbor, Massachusetts from the 1600s to the 1960s. Perhaps it still swings by from time to time. Old Accounts Renowned traveler John Josselyn mentioned the Gloucester Harbor sea serpent in his writings. Locals told Josselyn of a large serpent they spotted laying on a rock—this became the first documented sea serpent sighting in North America. The fearsome creature lay coiled and resembled a cable. Those who saw the serpent considered firing at it with muskets; they did not however, fearing their own

In her book To the American Indian, Lucy Thompson (1856–1932), a member of the Yurok tribe whose Yurok name was Che-na-wah Weitch-ah-wah, recorded many of the tales of her people. One of the most interesting stories in the book is that of the Wa-gas. According to Thompson, the Wa-gas were an ancient race of white people that lived in North America many thousands of years ago. However, these folks were much different than Europeans who colonized the Americas in recent times. The following excerpt comes from Thompson’s book in a section titled “ Traditions of the Ancient White People” :

Jain belief states the universe is eternal and so is time; there is no beginning or end. The Jains believe in a cosmic time wheel that never stops rotating.  There are two half rotations—an ascending time cycle and a descending cycle. Within the half cycles, there are further divisions of time. The ascending cycle ushers in prosperity and happiness and increasing time scales. The opposite is true for the descending time cycle. Sorrow, misery, and immorality are hallmarks of this cycle of time. As the wheel descends, the time cycles decrease in their duration. People and animals were much larger in the first four divisions of the descending cycle and the last four divisions of the ascending cycle. As sorrow and misery increased, living things became smaller; their lifespans also markedly decreased. Jain giants correspond to the Cosmic Wheel of time. During the time of utmost happiness and prosperity—a time which lasts for an inconceivable duration—people live three palyopamas. One Pal

In his book The Old Frontier, James Cowan recounted the legends of ancient New Zealand and told the tale of Kiharoa, the giant warrior chief of the Ngāti-Raukawa and Ngāti-Whakatere tribes. According to Cowan, there was a curious landmark near the village of Whenuahou known as the “ Giant's Grave . ” The grave was 12–14 feet long and 4 feet wide. Enquiring about the the grave, Cowan learned the legend behind it from two warriors from the Ngāti-Maniapoto tribe. He wrote: There certainly seems to have been a veritable giant, a man of enormous stature and length of reach with the hand-weapons of those days, six generations ago. This Kiharoa, or “The Long Gasping Breath,” was a chief of the Ngati-Raukawa and Ngati-Whakatere tribes, who in those times owned the Tokanui hills and the surrounding fruitful slopes. Kirahoa was said to have stood at twice the height of an average-sized man. He wielded an enormous taiaha—a traditional Māori close-quarters staff. His weapon was named “The Fi

Ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft Rowe (1793–1864) said this about the Allegewi, an ancient and mysterious tribe with a power center in the Ohio River Valley:  “The oldest tribe of the United States of which there is a distinct tradition were the Alleghans…This tribe at an antique period had the seat of their power in the Ohio Valley and its confluent streams which were the sites of their numerous towns and villages…From the traditions of the Lenapes, given to the Moravian missionaries, while the lamp of their traditionary history still threw out its flickering but enlivening flames, the Alleghans had been a strong and mighty people, capable of great exertions and doing wonders.” A Dim Tradition There is a dim tradition of an ancient tribe that lived in high-walled villages in the Ohio Valley. These were the Alleghans, better known as the Allegewi. John Heckewelder (1743–1823) was a Moravian missionary. He recounted many of the traditions of the Lenni Lenape (also known as the Delaware) in

The Paw Paw Tunnel in Oldtown, Maryland goes back to the days of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, better known as the C&O Canal. The C&O Canal operated from 1831 until 1924 along the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., to Cumberland, Maryland. The canal was primarily used to transport coal from the Allegheny Mountains. Building the 184-mile canal was a huge undertaking at the time; the lands to the west were remote and mountainous. A section of the canal, in Allegany County, Maryland, just across the river from present-day Paw Paw, West Virginia had to be bored through a mountain in order to bypass the Paw Paw bends, a 6-mile section of the Potomac with several horseshoe bends. Work on the tunnel began in 1836 and was completed in 1850. However, the tunnel was initially estimated to be complete in 1838. The work was slow-going and hazardous; using only hand tools and dynamite, works were only able to tunnel about 12 feet per day. Cave-ins were commonplace, as were injuries and

Giants and dwarves. An ancient odd couple. From fantasy novels to 1800s newspaper stories, the two go hand in hand. My fascination with stories of ancient giants introduced me to supposed tribes of little people in ancient America. Specifically, John Haywood’s Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee opened my eyes to the enigma. His book covers in depth both enormous and diminutive skeletal finds in Middle Tennessee. But what really stuck out to me in my years of research into the ancient giants that walked the earth are reports from North America of burial mounds that contained the remains of both giants and dwarves. Over the years I have read a number of accounts of mound excavations that yielded these strange discoveries. "Graves of Dwarves Found" A Massachusetts newspaper, the North Adams Transcript , ran a piece titled “Graves of Dwarves Found” on October 24, 1899: " Workmen terracing King hill, an old landmark of northwestern Missouri, which is to be convert

Large turtle tales are among my favorite types of cryptid encounters . Perhaps that is why I spent over a week on the outskirts of Roswell, New Mexico in 2022. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of the fabled large turtles the "size of a Volkswagen." (I did not.) Maybe the best turtle tale is the story of Oscar, the Beast of Busco. This enormous turtle, with a shell as big as "the top of a car" caused a ruckus in an Indiana town in 1949. In 1883, the Scientific American published a blurb about a large turtle—large is an understatement!—spotted at sea. I reprinted the entire text below: A Large Turtle "Captain Augustus G. Hall and the crew of the schooner Annie L. Hall vouch for the following: On March 30, while on the Grand Bank, in latitude 40° 10’, longitude 33°, they discovered an immense live trunk turtle, which was at first thought to be a Reptiles and Amphibians 535 vessel bottom up. The schooner passed within twenty-five feet of the monster, and those on bo

In my book Modern-Day Mammoths , I cover David Thompson's story of the possible discovery of mammoth tracks in 1811. David Thompson (1770–1857) was born in England and came to North America as a fourteen-year-old boy. Thompson arrived in Manitoba as an indentured servant for Hudson’s Bay Company. He went on to become a fur trader and a renowned cartographer. Thompson mapped nearly 2 million square miles of North America. He earned the title of “greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced.” During his travels through the Rocky Mountains, Thompson encountered tracks most likely from a mammoth. He wrote: "January 7, 1811, Continuing our journey in the afternoon we came on the track of a large animal, the snow about six inches deep on the ice; I measured it; four large toes each of four inches in length; to each a short claw; the ball of the foot sunk three inches lower than the toes, the hinder part of the foot did not mark well, the length fourteen inches, by

There is a manmade lake in Argentina's Salta Province that has a history of sightings of a lake monster dubbed Cabralito. Interestingly, Salta Province is renowned for strange phenomena and even paranormal activity . The following is an excerpt from my book Water Monsters South of the Border: Unique video footage of a strange creature was captured on Christmas Day, 2011 in Argentina’s Salta Province. The video was obtained by a fisherman in a manmade lake called Cabra Corral while he was filming lake scenery. When local news media outlets learned of the video, they quickly dubbed to animal “Cabralito,” a reference to the lake and also to the “Patagonian Plesiosaur,” also known as Nahuelito, a reference to Nahuel Huapi, the lake where it resides. Sebastian Papetti is the fisherman who obtained the video. He claimed that something strange in the water caught his eye as he was filming. What caught his attention was a creature—a creature that had a large wake following it, and was rept