Author Denver Michaels

Numbers 13:33 says: "And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight."  When the Spanish explorers landed on the shores of the New World, they hoped to find immeasurable riches and vast amounts of gold. What they didn’t expect, however, was to meet real-life “Sons of Anak.” Hernando de Soto (circa 1500–1542) is best known for being the first European to cross the Mississippi River. In fact, de Soto died of a fever in a village on the banks of the Mississippi. While marching through present-day Alabama, de Soto and his men met a true “Son of Anak."  According to the account of the Spanish chronicler Garcilasso de la Vega, de Soto tarried in the town of Talisse for a week and a half during which time a powerful chief, Tuscaloosa, sent an ambassador to meet with him. The ambassador was Tuscaloosa’s own son—about 18 years of age—who much taller than any of the Spaniards or I

The Ogden Standard-Examiner ran the following piece on October 4, 1935 telling of "wild men" roaming the forests of British Columbia: Reports Tell of Canadian Monster Men Settlers Fifty Miles From Vancouver Describe Hairy Giants VANCOUVER, B. C., -- (UP) -Sasquatch men, remnants of a lost race of "wild men" who inhabited the rock regions of British Columbia centuries ago, are reported roaming the province again. After an absence of several months from the district of Harrison Mills, 50 miles east of Vancouver, the long: weird, wolf-like howls of the "wild men" are being heard again and two of the hairy monsters were reported seen in the Morris Valley on the Harrison River. Residents in the district tell of seeing the two giants leaping and bounding out of the forest and striding across the duck-feeding ground, wallowing now and again in the bog and mire and long, waving swamp grasses. REPORTED AGILE The strange men, it was reported, after emerging from the

While trekking through the Amazonian rainforest Theodore Roosevelt learned of a supposed man-eating catfish lurking in the rivers. In his book Through the Brazilian Wilderness , Roosevelt wrote that several Amerindians in his party had caught a catfish over three and a half feet long. When they cleaned the fish, its stomach contents contained a monkey. Roosevelt and the other Americans in the group were shocked that something as large as a monkey could fall prey to a fish. The locals told him that fish much bigger dwell in the lower Madeira; these fish occasionally snatched unsuspecting humans. The following passage can be found in his book: " We Americans were astounded at the idea of a catfish making prey of a monkey; but our Brazilian friends told us that in the lower Madeira and the part of the Amazon near its mouth there is a still more gigantic catfish which in similar fashion occasionally makes prey of man. This is a grayish-white fish over nine feet long, with the usual di

In 1896, a strange carcass washed ashore near St. Augustine, Florida . Two boys discovered the St. Augustine Monster and reported their find to Dr. DeWitt Webb, a local physician and founder of the St. Augustine Historical Society and Institute of Science. Webb examined the carcass on December 1 and in his estimation, it weighed at least five tons. He believed a giant octopus had washed ashore. The mysterious carcass became an area attraction and garnered the attention of news outlets. The New York Herald ran the following piece on January 3, 1897: Its head was nearly destroyed, and only the stumps of two arms were visible ... The body, as it lies somewhat imbedded in the sand, is 18 feet long and about 7 feet wide, while it rises 3 1⁄2 feet above the sand ... The weight of the body and head would have been at least four or five tons. If the eight arms held the proportions usually seen in smaller species of the octopus, they would have been at least 75 to 100 feet in length and about

A reader contacted me several years ago. He had just finished my book  Water Monsters South of the Border .   The book inspired him to share a story with me about "El Mohan"—a creature of Columbian folklore.  His story reminded me a lot of those great campfire tales and ghost stories so often recounted among friends. I thought I would share it with you, but first, here is a little background on El Mohan: Although his description does vary from place to place, he is usually a huge creature, covered in hair with long, claw-like nails. He sometimes has red eyes and gold teeth and is fond of mischief. Fisherman say el mohán  capsizes boats and steals bait and hooks. Washerwomen claim he bewitches girls with music and tricks. He is also said to guard ancient treasures in his underground palace and his appearance heralds the arrival of floods, earthquakes and plagues. Click Here for full article from Columbia.co This is the El Mohan story sent by the reader: I m

Throughout the American Southwest there are dozens of tales of lost mines and caches of hidden treasure. For hundreds of years, the tales have infected many with gold fever. The stories have lured countless treasure hunters to their doom, while financial ruining an endless line of investors. Modern-day treasure seekers are still combing the mountains and desert landscape of the Southwest hoping to hit it big. There are rumors of a lost mine in El Paso, tucked away in the Franklin Mountains. Known as the Lost Padre Mine, this story has lured many into the Franklins searching for a cache hidden by monks in the 1600s. According to the story, priests from the mission of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (our lady of Guadalupe), across the Rio Grande in Juárez, worked a mine in the Franklin Mountains. The industrious monks extracted both gold and silver ore from the mine and they smelted the raw material into bars. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 forced the Franciscans to flee the area, but before they

I first learned of the East Bay Walls by watching an episode of America Unearthed on History Channel. The episode is titled “Marco Polo Discovers America” just in case you would like to watch it. At any rate, the show introduced me to a series of mysterious walls, called  the East Bay Walls, and alternately called the California Mystery Walls and Berkeley Mystery Walls. These stacked stone walls stretch from San Jose in the southern Bay Area fifty miles north to Berkeley. At first glance the East Bay Walls do not look all that mysterious. Back on the East Coast, where I’m from, there are tons of stone walls. In my home state of Virginia, especially in the piedmont’s horse country, mortarless stacked stone walls—built in the same fashion as those in California—run for miles on end. There are tons of similar walls in the Northeast, too. Farms and wooded areas in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York have stone walls running in various directions almost as far as the eye can see. In t

The Scientific American ran a fascinating article on May 12, 1883, titled "A Prehistoric Cemetery." It discussed the " bones of a giant race": Two miles from Mandan, on the bluffs near the junction of the Hart and Missouri rivers, says the local newspaper, the Pioneer, is an old Cemetery of fully 100 acres in extent piled with bones of a giant race. This vast city of the dead lies just east of the Fort Lincoln road. The ground has the appearance of having been filled with trenches piled full of dead bodies, both man and beast, and covered with several feet of earth. In many places mounds from 8 to 10 feet high, and some of them 100 feet or more in length, have been thrown up and are filled with bones, broken pottery, vases of various bright colored flint, and agates. The pottery is of a dark material, beautifully decorated, delicate in finish, and light as wood showing the work of a people skilled in the arts and possessed of a high state of civilization. This has

"Pieces of eight" from a sunken treasure fleet still wash ashore along Florida's Treasure Coast especially in the areas close to Sebastian Inlet. The coins come from the legendary 1715 Treasure Fleet—a sunken Spanish treasure flotilla. For some background, a piece of eight is a Spanish silver coin that served as the first international currency due to its uniformity. The piece of eight, or Spanish dollar , was legal tender in the United States until 1857. In 1792, the United States based its dollar on the standards that the Spanish piece of eight had set. In colonial America, when coins were in short supply, people would cut Spanish dollars into eight pieces, like pieces of a pie, to make change and to have smaller denominations of currency. Many countries even counter stamped pieces of eight and used them as their official currency. Kip Wagner Ohio-born Kip Wagner (1906–1972), a construction contractor, moved to Florida in the late-1940s after signing a contract to build