If It's Rats He Wants...

We are small but we are many

We are many we are small

We were here before you rose 

We will be here when you fall

- Neil Gaiman, Coraline 

I can imagine that the two children of the Bredlow family chattered amongst themselves in excitement in the back of the car as they pulled up to cabin. It was a dazzling piece of coastal Americana - a small cabin nestled among the towering cliffs of the Oregon coast. Waves crashed and foamed below - ready to provide the background noise to the crackling of a wood fire. It was July of 1997, and the Bredlows were looking forward to spending two weeks in this cabin - relaxing and getting back to nature. However, the house they were now stood in front of was already occupied by something incomprehensible – and that something wouldn’t give up its property easily. A dream vacation was about to become a nightmare.

... It's Rats He Gets!

The Bredlow family was made up of four members. Margie Bredlow, a 47-year-old music teacher, had married Loyd Bredlow, another teacher, one year older than his wife. Together, they had had two daughters – Violet, who was eight years old as of that May and DeAnne, thirteen years of age. Nearly as soon as they stepped into the house, Margie noticed a strange feeling coming from one of the storerooms in the back of the building. Violet seemed to feel the same thing, holding her stuffed kitty doll ‘Muggins’ up to her mouth and whispering ‘I hope we don’t have to sleep back there’ into its cloth ear. DeAnne and Loyd helped Margie unpack the family’s stuff before it got dark – they were all hoping to go out hiking in the woods while it was still light.

Now wandering through a narrow forest path, the family were approaching a beautiful waterfall. This was going to be two weeks of rural idyll, they doubtless thought. The two girls were walking ahead of their parents when a ‘strange kind of mist’ settled around the group. Visibility rapidly declined to zero, and in the confusion Loyd and Margie called out desperately for their girls to follow the sound of their voices and come back to them. DeAnne responded immediately, quickly retreating back to the comfort of her parents’ arms. The family clung together in the ‘frightening’ fog, calling out for Violet but receiving no response. Just as the icy daggers of panic were starting to set in, the mist dissipated into nothingness just as quickly as it had come. Violet’s voice called out from behind them, prompting the other three to turn around in astonishment. That shouldn’t have been possible. They had been on a narrow path, shouting her name. There was no way she could’ve walked past them. However, when they asked her how she had done this – she replied that she hadn’t walked. Instead, she said ‘They carried me through the air and set me down again. It was pretty scary but they promised they wouldn’t hurt me.’ She apparently hadn’t heard the desperate shouts of her family, and hadn’t seen any fog. Margie would later say that she regretted not packing everything up and leaving that instant – but in that moment she decided not to let her ‘imagination’ run away with her. Whatever was wrong with the property would soon lift itself out of the realms of possible dismissal in such a way.

As they had dinner that night, they were presumably all trying to keep their minds off the bizarre events of that afternoon. Well, all of them save for Violet. After she had finished her food, she started preparing two plates from the leftovers. When Margie approached her and asked what she was doing, her daughter replied that ‘they’ must be fed twice a day, or they would become very angry and force the family out of the house. Margie asked about the identity of the mysterious ‘they’ – and the response allowed her to put worries of home invaders from her mind temporarily. Violet said that they were ‘the two little people who carried me in the air above the trail and who live in the storage room’. Margie likely smiled at this, thinking that her daughter was just playing a game – and she told her to go ahead, walking with her to the back storage room. Violet opened the door eagerly and set the plates down on the floor, before kneeling down and waiting the arrival of her diminutive friends. Everything was still for a moment, before Violet broke the silence and told her mother that the little men wouldn’t eat while they were watching. With this, she took Margie’s hand and stood up. The pair hadn’t taken more than two steps out of the room before the storage room door suddenly slammed shut with a loud bang – making Margie jump and momentarily shriek in shock. Loyd came running to the sound of the commotion, and when he asked what was happening, Violet matter-of-factly replied that they were feeding the little people in the back room. Her father assumed that she was talking about vermin of some kind, and so chided her before opening the door to have a look…

Eating the leftovers from the two paper plates just behind the slammed door were two plump and satisfied-looking rats. Margie and DeAnne looked in to see these rodents as well, and Loyd responded to the sight by finding a nearby broom and walked towards the room to shoo the pests out of the house. Violet begged him not too – seemingly afraid of angering the rats – but Loyd paid no attention to his daughter’s cries. However, just as he was reaching the door – armed with his trusty broom, the door once again slammed violently shut. Presumably sighing with annoyance, Loyd reached for the handle and tried to open it – only to find that it wouldn’t open, no matter how hard he tried. Eventually, he gave up and wandered off – mumbling about the door having somehow locked itself from the inside. Quite how he imagined this happening is unclear to me. As soon as Loyd had left the scene, the door opened itself once again, and two plates were seemingly pushed out onto the floor. They had been licked clean. Violet smiled up at her mother, telling her that the little men had enjoyed the potato salad and Jell-O, but that they wanted more of the baked beans. ‘They don’t really like to be called rats, but they can look like anything we want them to’, she added.

Curious, Margie asked her youngest daughter how she could hear what the so-called ‘little people’ were saying – to which she replied that she could hear their voices inside her head, which was also how the entities had spoken to her when they had met on the trail. Perhaps starting to allow her disbelief to suspend, Margie continued to ask questions. When she asked what the creatures looked like when they weren’t rats, Violet answered that they looked ‘like two little people… but weird little people with funny, crinkly faces’. Margie henceforth agreed to help her daughter feed the little people. Even if they were just rats, it seemed that she didn’t particularly mind. For the next few days, this is exactly what the mother-daughter team did – in secret from the other two members of their household. Loyd busied himself reading, Margie worked on her music compositions and their daughters either read or worked puzzles. However, this peace was about to come to an end. Nobody else knew that Loyd had just laid out a rat trap that he’d bought in the local village earlier that day.

On the fifth afternoon of their stay in the cabin, just before sunset, Margie heard the awful noise of metal slapping onto wood, accompanied by a high-pitched scream. Baffled and alarmed, she ran into the room and found Violet there with her hands pressed against her temples in agony. The dreadful scream was coming from her. In that instant, Margie somehow knew that one of the elven beings that had been co-occupying their holiday house had been caught in the rat-trap (I am also not certain how she knew about the rat-trap to begin with) and that the telepathic bond they had seemingly formed with her daughter was causing her to feel all the pain of the ordeal. Running to the storage room, Margie threw open the door and found – to her ‘everlasting astonishment’ – two diminutive humanoids clad in green. One of them was trying to free the other from the metal bar of the rat-trap which had slammed closed across his foot. The elf in the rat-trap had his mouth wide open in a silent scream, which was seemingly issuing from Violet’s mouth instead. Gritting her teeth and summoning all her courage, Margie darted forward and clasped her fingers under the bar of the rat-trap and lifted it just high enough for the elf to free his foot and escape from the painful situation. As soon as the entity had removed his foot from the trap, both critters disappeared in a flash and Violet stopped screaming. Coming from some invisible source – Margie heard a tiny voice say with anger ‘If it’s rats he wants, it’s rats he gets!’

Margie had barely recovered from the bizarre situation when her eldest daughter came running down the hall yelling hysterically about rats. There were rats everywhere. Dozens and dozens of the furry vermin had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and were currently in the process of completely overrunning the cabin. Realising that there was no other real option – the Bredlow family gathered up what they could from the ruins of their perfect vacation and fled the house. To this day, Margie remains convinced that she and her daughter achieved contact with something utterly inexplicable.

This story comes from The Inhumanoids by Barton M. Nunnelly, which is a great book for the sheer diversity of the humanoid encounter stories told within its myriad pages – but is unfortunately not nearly as great when it comes to sourcing these stories. I have been able to track a few of the tales related in the book back to Neil Arnold’s Monster! The A-Z of Zooform Phenomena, which should be notorious for misrepresenting and distorting stories into one-sentence paragraphs. Also, the story of the Vampire of Croglin Grange is included within it as well – which I was able to debunk as a hoax/Penny Dreadful chiller with just a Google Search. This fairy story, while intriguing and fun, may well just be another spooky urban legend – but then again, the evidence for this claim is just as solid as the evidence for the opposite claim. There is no source listed for where this story originally came from.

1958: The Bigfoot Hoax That Wasn't

Artwork by Rick Spears, I think?

Raymond Wallace was born in Clarksdale, Missouri on April 21, 1918 - and has since posthumously risen to fame as one of the most prolific Bigfoot hoaxers the world has ever known. He was known to use large, badly-crafted foot-shaped wooden shoes to create the tracks supposedly left by the unknown primate. He is also even said to have been behind the famous clip of a hairy humanoid filmed by Roger Patterson on October 20, 1967. These claims to fame were made after his death by his nephew, Dale Lee Wallace, after his uncle's death in 2002. He had allegedly started hoaxing the world in 1958, when he went stomping around one of the construction sites he owned in Northern California. It was the tracks he left on this occasion which became the first to mean that the creature behind them was referred to as Bigfoot. However, some evidence suggests that Wallace's hoax in 1958 might've outgrown its creator - and that the creature might've somehow sprung to life...

Calling His Bluff (Creek)

A photo of Jerry Crew holding his famous footprint cast

Jerry Crew arrived to work on a Wallace-owned construction site in Bluff Creek, California on August 27, 1958. He was busy bulldozing some nearby brush to make space for a new road when he caught sight of some odd footprints pressed deeply into the ground beneath him. He got down off his bulldozer and took a closer look at the prints - and it would be this action that would ultimately launch Bigfoot into the public consciousness. Crew and his... well... crew decided that the tracks were perhaps the work of a prankster - and apparently already knew to point the finger at their boss Ray Wallace. They knew that he was 'demented' and would probably have been the one behind the unconvincing tracks. A county sheriff even went as far as to publicly accuse Wallace of creating the tracks. However, a longer line of tracks would appear that year in September, and would convince Crew and the other workers that there was perhaps more to the story than they had initially thought. Casts were taken of these prints after a taxidermist named Bob Titmus declared that they were too faint to be used as evidence just by themselves and the story made the front page of the local newspaper, and this is technically the first time the term 'Bigfoot' was used to describe the culprit critter.

Ray and Elna Wallace as of 1947

Although the crew had originally settled on the assumption that the tracks were naught more than hoaxes, there were some interesting anomalies which seemed to show the holes in this conclusion. After the original tracks had been found - the workers on the site decided that the monster making the footprints must've also been behind some other disturbances on the construction site. For example, a 450-pound drum of diesel had vanished one summer previously - leaving only its imprint and some odd footprints in the dust behind. It had obviously been picked up and moved as opposed to dragged. It later reappeared at the bottom of a nearby gulley. The foliage on the other side of the gulley had been broken by something large, suggesting that perhaps something had thrown the drum into the gulley. Another example of this odd phenomenon was brought to the crew's attention by one of the Wallace brothers - Wilbur 'Shorty' Wallace. A 700-pound spare tire meant for a road-grading machine had found its way into a ditch thanks to some mysterious force. Some of the footprints found around the moved equipment varied in depth, indicating that whatever had left the prints was actually carrying the objects - something which Ray Wallace might not have been able to do.

The condition of the second trail of tracks (the ones which resulted in Titmus coming to the scene) is also worth mentioning here when discussing the possibility that perhaps the Bigfoot activity in the area wasn't just the work of an opportunistic hoaxer. The tracks made a trail of several miles in length, which went deep into a steep and mountainous forested area. Bob Titmus and Edward Patrick, another man on the site, decided to follow the trail into the woods. As they made their way along this impressive trail (even more impressive if we're to assume that the then-skinny Raymond Wallace made it), they came across yards worth of coiled 3x16 inch steel-braided wire. This wire would've weighed over 100 pounds, and had apparently been dropped in an area covered with brush of sufficient density that the two men couldn't continue past it. Patrick was left with the distinct impression that it wouldn't have been possible for Ray Wallace to have carried this wire up such a sharp incline and to have dropped it in such a well-forested area. The only tracks leading to or away from the wire were the ones supposedly made by Wallace's cast, and these prints allegedly continued off into terrain that even Titmus couldn't brave. Patrick had been initially skeptical, but now he felt that something mysterious was almost certainly afoot.

While there is no doubt that Wallace was behind quite a lot of hoaxery during the genesis years of the Bigfoot phenomenon, there also seems to be at least some doubt that he was behind all of it. He was aided by a man named Rant Mullins who constructed the crude stamps he used to create Bigfoot tracks, and he even possessed a Bigfoot suit which was worn by his wife to make fake photographs. After Ray's death in 2002, his family decided to release the information regarding the tools he had used to 'invent Bigfoot' - and it turns out that not one of the foot-shaped stamps matches up with the cast taken of Crew's trail of mystery footprints. The holotype Bigfoot cast taken of one of the prints found by Crew is just over 16 inches in length, while none of Wallace's stamps come close to this measurement.

Ray Wallace's stamp (right) against Crew's trail (left)

Realistically, all we can say is that Ray Wallace may have been responsible for the find that resulted in the coinage of the name 'Bigfoot' - and that's not even for certain. He was a prolific hoaxer, but the father of Bigfoot he was not. So if Mr. Wallace wasn't behind all of the destructive phenomena taking place around his construction sites, then what was? Perhaps a real monstrous creature was summoned into existence by the certainty of its existence held by some of the workers - like a Tibetan Tulpa? Then again, it seems as if something was throwing tires around the site at least a year before Wallace stepped into some exceptionally large shoes. There are certainly plenty of reports of hairy humanoid monsters that predate 1958, and so perhaps a Sasquatch really was wandering around Bluff Creek all those years ago, and the opportunistic practical joker decided to expand on its activity? It's a mystery that will likely go unsolved, despite what the public at large may believe. Ray Wallace did not invent Bigfoot.

Sources

Raymond L. Wallace - Wikipedia

'Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend' by Joshua Blu Bluhs

'The Ray Wallace/Rant Mullins Mess' - bigfootencounters.com

'Bigfoot - The Curiosities of 1958' by Bob Gymlan on YouTube

Forgotten: The Kundanbagh Horror House

He must've eventually gotten used to the bodies. There were three of them, lying prone on the dust-covered bed. The first time Mohammed Sajid broke through the window into the two storey house was some time in early Summer of 2002, and since then he had been routinely making his way into the abandoned home - after all, there was nobody alive in the house to watch him. He would often raid the empty rooms, opening all the almirahs (armoires) and rifling through the cheque books of the departed family. It was only when he was caught by the local Shahinayathgunj police during another crime that he finally told the story of what he had found in that accursed house. This confession would jump-start a media journey down a bizarre rabbit hole involving three unexplained deaths, witchcraft, and a house full of ghosts...

Something Terrible Happened Here...

One of the many photos of the house

The house in question was nestled in the city colony Kundanbagh within the city of Hyderabad, which is the capital of the Indian state of Telangana. Mohammed Sajid was arrested sometime in early September of 2002, and the police soon began their investigation of the abandoned house about which he seemingly had so many stories. This police investigation either took place on the 7th of September 2002, or one week later - the sources are unclear. A 56-year-old divorced woman from West Godavari named Jayaprada lived in the house with her two daughters, but this small family hadn't been seen by their neighbours for months. The last time anyone had said that they'd seen them was in June - and the stories the neighbours had to tell about this family were worrying to say the least. The community said that the people who lived in the house were 'a queer people' who apparently practiced witchcraft or something very much like it.

They would apparently light candles at midnight and walk around their house, and strange noises were often heard coming from the building. People reported that they had sometimes seen what appeared to be bottles of blood hung out on their verandah (open air porch). One of their daughters was said to have sometimes been observed sat outside on the porch playing with one of these blood bottles. Despite their garbage bins being just two minutes' walk away from the house, they would always use the car to travel this minuscule distance. Jayaprada would use an axe to chase away passersby - and it is said that her husband had left her because of how dangerous the family was. There was no money flowing into the house, no cable connection. Two to three years' worth of electrical bills had been paid in advance. A complaint had been filed about the odd family by some students from a nearby college roughly two years ago, according to the assistant commissioner of police for the area, P. Rama Rao.

The police soon learned that the family had mysteriously gone missing in June of that year - nobody saw them and presumably everyone was much too scared of them to go up to their door and enquire as to their wellbeing. Newspapers from June 21st had piled up on their porch, and the front door was locked from the inside. The police soon found the entrance which had perhaps been used by Sajid, however, as they discovered that there was a side door which wasn't padlocked. When the policemen got inside the house, they noted that the entire place had been ransacked - perhaps thanks to Sajid's handiwork - and that the family's clothes had been neatly stacked next to their bodies. Various documents were scattered all over the floor. The bodies were badly decomposed. The temperature had not been too high during that period, and so putrefication had been much slower than it might otherwise have been, meaning that the neighbours had not even noticed the stench of decaying bodies. A bottle of black liquid was discovered in the room where the bodies lay, and it was promptly sent off to a lab for analysis along with the bodies for autopsy.

Tall Tales

After such an upsetting incident (which was reported in local newspapers at the time and so is unlikely to have been a total hoax), it is hardly surprising that legends started to take root. Although details about what came of the autopsy examination are seemingly nonexistent - with a report from the time simply resorting to speculating that the cause of death was poisoning - stories about what this autopsy found have seemingly sprung up in the absence of any real information. Well, either this or there is real information that I have failed to find. What these stories say is that the autopsies revealed that the family had been dead for six months. This, of course, placed something of a spanner into the works of a purely materialistic explanation of this whole situation - the family had stopped being regularly seen three months after they had supposedly died. The residents of the surrounding city of Hyderabad were now questioning who they had been seeing performing those bizarre rituals and threatening passersby with axes.

Although the house lacks electricity after having been derelict for over a decade now, lights are apparently still turned on at night for no discernible reason. The gates are always locked, and there is a line of large rocks across the driveway for some nebulous symbolic purpose. There is a story about a cyclist whose headlight spontaneously went out as he entered the lane on which the haunted house is situated, resulting in him immediately getting into an accident with one of his friends who was driving along the lane from the opposite direction. The police are now apparently very present around the house to prevent any would-be ghost hunters from breaking and entering.

The Sowmith Testimony

A Quora forum user named Sowmith Raja claimed to have once been something of an afficionado for the stories surrounding the mysterious house. He lives in Hyderabad, and if his testimony is to be believed then he found something far stranger than any of the other stories while investigating the alleged haunted house. He discovered that the house which had been photographed and previously thought to have been the house in which the strange things had happened didn't quite fit the description of the property given in the story. There was no garbage disposal point two minutes away from it - and the nearest garbage disposal point was two minutes away from a different house. Beside the house which had been photographed was a lane which split into two. One of these lanes was fairly well-lit with streetlights while the other was completely dark. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the dark lane was the one which had the garbage disposal point on it and thus also had the real haunted house.

A photo that might portray the castle

On this lane there are three doors which are painted dark green, and are higher off the ground than normal doors. The three doors all lead to the same stretch of grounds, and contained within these grounds are several structures - a bungalow (as is sometimes described in variations of the main story despite the supposedly legitimate haunted house being two storeys high) and a castle-looking building. This odd space is apparently what is known as the Kundanbagh Haunted Palace, and it is much less well-known than the fake house which was apparently highlighted as being the location of the crime by the CID to stop people breaking in - as they allegedly did one Ramadan in order to ransack the place and vandalise a Honda City car which had apparently been previously parked outside this haunted palace.

A photograph which might portray the gates

The story about the light on the upper floor always being on in the haunted house is said to instead refer to the castle building by Mr. Raja. He says there are nightly police patrols around the haunted palace area, and that there was once a sign on the gates which read 'CID RESTRICTED AREA'. However, I must admit to being somewhat skeptical of what Mr. Raja is saying here on the grounds that he seems to have been able to enter this highly guarded area and yet it seemingly never occurred to him to take any photographs which could be used as evidence for his claims. Then again, there are a few photographs floating around the Internet which show the so-called haunted house as being a very different looking structure to what is normally depicted in other mainstream photographs, and this odd structure has dark green doors...

Turning on the Light

A blogger by the name of Aditya Chintha claimed in 2013 that he had solved the mystery of the haunted house and that he had conclusively debunked the claims made about it. He did so in a blog post which was later taken down 'due to the concern of the people in the neighbourhood'. Luckily, I have been able to retrieve the original post thanks to the Wayback Machine - and the story he uncovered is intriguing not least because it flies directly in the face of much of the rest of the testimony given about what may or may not be going on in the Kundanbagh house. He too lives in Hyderabad, and so during the summer of that fateful year he went out with a group of his friends to try and find the house. While he initially had some difficulties locating it, thanks in no small part to the reluctance of the people in the neighbourhood to reveal where it was - he and his companions were eventually able to find it - and they were sorely disappointed. It looked like a normal house. The gates had been locked and there were indeed rocks out in front of of the driveway, but a conversation with a neighbour cleared this up quickly - the residents of the house (yes, there were apparently people now living in the house) had locked the gate to discourage potential ghost hunters from breaking in while they were out on summer vacation. The stones were apparently placed there to make sure that people couldn't use the driveway as a free space to park their cars or bikes. Aditya thus considers the story to have been conclusively debunked. I am not so sure...

A photograph taken by Aditya Chintha depicting the gates and the stones outside said gates.

Theories

The neighbours to which Aditya talked said that the story about the strange family and their unexplained deaths had been true - and I am also inclined to believe that this is the case. It was reported in the Times of India newspaper in 2002 as the story broke. The details about the family and their deaths can all be backed up with proper sources - but unfortunately the detail about the autopsy finding that the family had died three months before they went missing cannot be verified as of yet. I will of course continue searching for a source, but I have not currently found one which I am comfortable with trusting. Aditya's explanation makes some sense in this context - and if we are to assume that the story about the ghostlly manifestations is false then we are still faced with an odd story about a family of witches who died under mysterious circumstances.

The testimony given by Sowmith Raja is intriguing, especially in light of the seemingly distinct buildings shown in different photographs from across the Internet - but unfortunately the lack of photographs taken by Mr. Raja himself points towards his story having potentially been fictional. Overall, the whole situation with this literally ungodly house is a tangled web of conflicting accounts. I've presented the information - make up your own mind.

There's Something in Devil's Hole!

It was 1969. Brushing his mattted brown hair out of his eyes, Charlie Manson looked up at the sun beating down on his Family from above Death Valley, Nevada. Perhaps he thought he was destined to be the 20th Century Moses - he was leading his followers through the desert towards a safe haven in which they could live. He had wandered for days through the desolate wastelands, and he now believed that he had finally found his Promised Land. He was now in the Amargosa Desert - one of the hottest areas in the Western Hemisphere, and only separated from the ominous stretches of Death Valley by the Funeral Mountains. He was looking at Devil's Hole - a fissure in the ground that led straight down into a labyrinth of flooded caves. However, Manson was certain that he wasn't just looking at the entrance to caves occupied only by water - instead, he was staring at the gateway to a lost underground city, and to the 'Bottomless Pit' mentioned in the Biblical Book of Revelation (9:1-12). The US Government was covering this up. All he had to do was drain the floodwater from the caverns to reveal what would surely be a haven for his flourishing cult in which they could escape the coming Helter Skelter Apocalypse. Legend has it that he would spend three days inside the observation area above the hole, meditating and trying to figure out a way to drain the caves of water.

Teleporting Fish and Tiny Tsunamis

Death Valley was declared to be an American National Monument in 1933 before finally being officially recognised as a National Park in 1994. There is a detached unit of this same National Park in what is called the Ash Meadows Complex, and this specific unit is called Devil's Hole - a geothermal pool situated within a limestone cavern. Its waters have a near constant temperature of 33°C, and a salinity which is just as consistent. It is at leas 500ft deep, but the bottom of the pool has never been mapped. As far as anyone knows, it might as well go down forever. There is an opening at the surface of the pool which is approximately 6x18ft wide, and leads down into caverns which are at least a further 300ft deep. Geologists JM Landwehr and IJ Winograd have stated that the pool formed over 500,000 years ago. Tectonic activity from earthquakes as far away as Indonesia, Chile and Japan has been recorded in the pool - which makes itself known in the form of small-scale tsunamis within its cavernous depths. Water has been observed to splash up to heights of up to two meters onto the walls of the hole.

The mysterious pupfish in question

The hole is also home to a confusing biological enigma known as the Devil's Hole Pupfish. The pupfish is unique to the hot, oxygen-poor water within the mysterious chasm - and has been described as the world's rarest fish. There are naturally usually no more than 500 of these fish, meaning that they were one of the first species to be officially protected by the Endangered Species Act in America as of 1966. Local landowners do not have the right to draw water from the hole due to the laws surrounding the protection of the rare fish. They have been found at depths of up to 66ft in the hole, but normally forage on the algae and diatoms growing on a shallow rock shelf near the surface. The population of these exceptionally rare fish has been decreasing from 200 in 2005 to only 75 in 2013. This decline is as of yet unexplained. The mysterious element of this information, which might otherwise be uninteresting from a Fortean perspective, is that it seems as if the fish appeared in the hole as soon as the hole opened up. According to University of California researchers Ismael Saglam and Michael Miller, it seems as if the collapse of the cavern's roof and the near-instant colonisation of the pool by this unique species of fish may have been caused by an 'unidentified geologic event'. So there we have it - teleporting fish!

Into the Abyss

Of course, the Endangered Species Act and other conservation acts by the US Government now protect the hole from any unwanted visitors - but such was evidently not the case in 1965, and this fact would cost two children their lives. Three young adventurers took the plunge into Devil's Hole in the darkness of nighttime on June 20th of 1965. They were going skin-diving that fateful Sunday night, and were presumably simply eager to make memories among their friend group. There were actually four of them originally, but one apparently had decided that it wasn't a good idea, and had stayed on dry land. The one diiver that survived the experience would forever be left with memories of a very different kind. Among the original three were brothers-in-law David Rose (aged 20) and Paul Giancontieri (aged 19) - and they would be the unfortunate two would never be seen again after getting into the water that night. 20-year-old Paula Rose, who had been married to David for two months at the time, was waiting outside the hole for her husband to emerge - and so was Giancontieri's mother - and both were horrified when only one diver clambered out of the water.

The search effort began soon after this horrifying double-disappearance. Fourty-five rangers and volunteer divers patrolled the cave for days, splitting into teams of four or five men each and diving to depths of 315ft with the aid of air tanks strapped to their backs. One of these divers was a man named Jim Houtz, and reporter Chris Dixon for the surfing magazine The Inertia spoke to him about his experiences with diving down into Devil's Hole in 2011. Just before the search commenced, he was giving a presentation on diving at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club to about sixty or seventy people. He suddenly got a call from the Federal Government asking him if there were any air pockets down in the hole - to which he replied in the affirmative. He quickly went up to Los Alamos accompanied by a small crew, whereupon he was met by a seaplane - a Grumman Albatross - on the runway with its engines running. He and his men boarded the plane, and they promptly took off, leaving the hatch open in their haste. They tried to land in the Ash Meadows Complex, but after three or four attempts they decided that this would be impossible. Instead, they landed at Nellis Air Force Base at dawn. The state police were out there, along with the military and the media. Houtz set up his first team of two men, including Harry Wham - who had accompanied Mel Fisher on a failed treasure-hunting dive in 1957 and would later be murdered by family members in 1981. They descended into the hole in increments, with divers at two different junctions to combat any issues that might've been posed by decompression. When Houtz got down to the lower chamber of the endless pit, he found a snorkel mask and a diving fin. A dimly-lit flashlight was discovered tied to a rock, and a decompression chart was later found as well. Houtz made a point of saying that once someone gets that deep, they will start to suffer from nitrogen narcosis, which induces a drunken state and makes it far more likely that they'll do something stupid. He had been training to overcome this.

A photo of Jim Houtz in Devil's Hole

Houtz returned to the surface and notified everyone about what had happened, and then said that he would go back down to recover the last of the discarded gear. He made it down to a depth of 325ft, which was marked by a little ledge after which the vast underwater pit opens up like a colossal inverted funnel. The water apparently gets slightly warmer as it goes deeper. Lt. Walter Butt of the Clarke County Sheriff's Department said that they would've continued the search if there was 'any indication that the bodies could be discovered'. The search for the missing boys was called off just before midnight on June 22nd 1965 - and their bodies have never been found.

Out of the Abyss?

It was Spring of 1892, and the unincorporated community of Daggett in San Bernadino County, California was about to be seized by monster fever. One Mr. George May reported to The San Francisco Examiner that sightings of a colossal reptile had been taking place around the community, and that a party was being organised to pursue the creature. According to May, EW Spear was seemingly the first to see the monster after having followed a strange trail he had found. He described the entity as being 'thirty feet long and thoroughly unpossessing'. Spear promptly retreated from the scene and would later tell his story to the local community, only to be laughed at. Henry Brown became the next witness, seeing the same creature and beating just as much of a hasty retreat from the beast's territory.

Oscar W. Clark now becomes our central figure. He was a geologist working with the Royal Academy of Sciences, and had been staying in Daggett to research the geological features of the coast there. He was on his way through the Death Valley desert to get some rest in the resort city of Coronado when he caught sight of the colossal critter. He was approximately 30 miles away from Daggett by 6pm when he stopped to rest, having already made some exciting additions to his fossil collection. He stole a glance to the Southwest through the desert haze, whereupon he saw a strange entity moving along roughly one mile away from his position. He approached it - and was 'both elated and horrified' to see something completely unlike anything else he knew to exist in our modern era. He described the immense creature as being 30ft long and as partially walking on its hind feet and partially 'dragging itself through the sand'. It left strange tracks, showing three-toed feet and 'a peculiar scratchy configuration' in the sand beneath it whenever it changed from walking to dragging itself. Its forelimbs were very short, but it sometimes used them to grasp at scraggly pieces of foliage to eat. There was a 'strong, conical spine' on the thumb of the forefoot. When the animal was stood upright it was said to be 14ft tall. Its head was the size of a large cask and was shaped like that of a horse. The body was as large as an elephant's, and its tail reminded Clark of that of an alligator. The whole thing was liver-coloured with bronze spots, and its eyes were described as being the size of saucers and as projecting out from its head - gleaming with fire. Steam-like vapour was exhaled from its mouth, and apparently smelled of 'something awful'.

An oil painting of an Iguanodon by Zdeněk Burian

He claimed that the monster was on the edge of a 'great sinkhole of alkaline water' which his guides had previously informed him was bottomless, and he speculated to be a remnant of Death Valley's days as an 'inland sea' (Lake Manly in the mid-Pleistocene era). Clark crept up on the beast, waiting in the sand approximately 100 yards away from it - from which vantage point he was able to watch the creature for half an hour. After this time had elapsed, the beast let out a 'blood-curdling' bellow - bringing itself to the edge of the hole before lashing its tail and falling into a dormant state. Clark took this as his cue to leave the scene - taking the opportunity to attempt to obtain the assistance of his guides in capturing the sleeping monster. However, they were apparently terrified and refused to help him.

According to the newspaper report, he would eventually send a description of his experience to the Smithsonian Institution so that they might consider organising a scientific party to capture the reptilian fiend. He said that he was 'rather anticipated' by the testimonies of Spear and Brown, and claimed that the monster he had seen was 'living proof of the exact authenticity of the researches made by savants into the field of paleontological study'. He was apparently certain that what he had seen was a specimen of 'Iguanodon Bennissantensis of the European Jurassic' - satisfied that his deductions were 100% correct based on his knowledge of the geological features of the Pacific slope, specifically of the Death Valley area. The species 'Bennissantensis' does not actually exist, but the species 'Bernissartensis' does, and so I am satisfied that this is not a slip-up which renders the story an obvious hoax. Of course, it seems likely that this incident was just one of the many such happenings fabricated by bored journalists in the days of yellow journalism. Researcher John LeMay analysed the report and proved to be unable to match the people mentioned in the article to any real people, unfortunately.

Conclusions

LeMay, however, also pointed out that the bottomless pit mentioned by Clark in this report was likely Devil's Hole, and then went on to talk about Loren Coleman's observation that places with the word 'devil' in the name are often rife with reported paranormal activity. If the reports that I've presented in this article are anything to go by, then it is clear that Devil's Hole is no different to any of the examples cited by Coleman.

Sources

'Devil's Hole' on Wikipedia

Information Provided by the National Park Service

'In A Hole' for The Economist

'We Know Where the World's Loneliest Species Came From' for BBC Earth

'Devil's Hole' on spookygeology.com

'Haunted Hikes' by Andrea Lankford

The Tuscaloosa News on June 23rd, 1965

'A Conversation with the King of Abalonia' for The Inertia

'Devil's Hole' on atlasobscura.com

'Cowboys and Saurians' by John LeMay

Full Spectrum Dominance?

Today, the cofounder of the research group to which I belong (The MRG) is here to talk about the UFO phenomenon's historical expansion attempts, and which of these are still very much active today and which have been abandoned by the Other for inscrutible reasons. Without further ado, I present to you - HL! 

The Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24th, 1947

It all started on June 24th, 1947. The Phenomenon had its 20th Century genesis, buzzing the skies of our humble planet with baffling aerial objects. In about three years time on from this, the Phenomenon stepped up its game and started landing these strange craft in isolated fields and disgorging equally incomprehensible entities. Some people would even talk to these creatures, and a lucky (or unlucky) few would get a firsthand look at the innards of their UFOs and maybe even their supposed home-worlds. 

Meanwhile, the Phenomenon had moved towards breaching the other great unknown on our planet - the deep blue sea! Here, it would clearly connect this new group of anomalies - known as Unidentified Submersible Objects - with the first class of conundrums. It would show UFOs emerging from the abyss and flying up into the skies, and would compose vast apparitions of motherships dropping probes into the world's oceans. Just as it did in 1947, it was soon employing a new type of apparition. These were phantom submarines that could move through water like a hot knife through butter, moving faster and with more agility than anything known to the US or Soviet Union at the time - or indeed today. The next step was to show that the entities behind the Phenomenon had started to colonise our planet and exploit it just like we had. A lucky (??) few were taken by these strange submarines and given tours around vast underwater bases, usually comprised of great tunnels criss-crossing the seabed. 

Now that both air and sea were dominated by these impossible, otherworldly creatures, there was one domain left to be conquered - the very ground we walk upon. The vehicle of choice this time would be strange automobiles, zipping along secluded country roads without wheels or with impossibly sleek designs. It wasn't rare to see these vehicles sucked up by UFOs or flying off into the great beyond on their own accord, usually driven by strange humanoid entities.  It would also associate these weird 'Cosmic Cars' with colossal underground bases, and strange complexes hidden away in the middle of nowhere. This was one of the first great failures of the Phenomenon, however, because these high strangeness events never really caught on, so to speak. They remained something very much on the down-low, in the liminal space between public knowledge and total obscurity.

And so the master plan of the Cosmic Trickster to infiltrate all terrain remained just that - a distant plan. Perhaps human culture somehow selected UFOs and USOs as feasible enough, but everything else as far too outlandish to exist. Some of the concepts associated with the Cosmic Cars have seeped into Fortean subculture regardless, however, such as the Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMBs) of MILAB encounters and the 'Tic Tac' UFO bases supposedly situated somewhere near Catalina Island in California. However, the dream of the Cosmic Trickster to successfully take over all that we might hold dear has fortunately remained naught but a human's nightmare...

Well wasn't that intriguing? I have slightly different theories about the nature of the UFO phenomenon, and so I don't agree with all that has been said here - but I think that there are valid points to be gleaned from this material. The elements as perceived within esoteric culture have always had their elementals - beings of Earth, Fire, Water and Air. Perhaps that's what we're looking at here with this 'Full Spectrum Domination'? Anyway - I hope you enjoyed this, and I hope you'll look forward to further explorations of HL's Fortean worldview.