When Snow-Men Attack

The Civil War was raging across America, pitting brother against brother in the bloodiest conflict in American history. The year was approximately 1864, and an unnamed man was looking out of his window in disdain at the heavy snow falling upon the densely-wooded mountains that surrounded the broad valley which played host to the small town of Benton in Pennsylvania's Columbia County. The weather may have been the world warning him not to do what he had been planning to, but he would not be dissuaded. You see, he had been having an affair with the wife of a man who had been enlisted to fight in the war. His love lived in a secluded mountaintop cabin, and he would brave blizzard and bloodshed to reach her. However, what he would encounter as he trekked up that infernal peak would leave anyone questioning their reality - and would ultimately cost him his life...

Ice Cold 

The young man hitched his wagon and commenced the long journey up the winding mountain paths into his lover's sweet embrace. As he moved through the swirling white, he saw that he was slowly approaching an old lumber camp. Just to the side of the road was what he initially took to be a massive shard of ice rising up out of the ground. Riding up to it, he soon realised that this was no ordinary ice shard. Rather, it was a man - or at least something shaped like one. It was 'alabaster white' and appeared to be 'formed from snow' with a beard of icy spikes adorning its face, shining in the cold moonless night. 

The witness continued to draw closer to the strange apparition, perhaps thinking that his eyes were deceiving him - but he didn't have the time to do any more thinking after that before the creature suddenly started moving, leaping from its frozen position and into the back of the man's wagon. It wrapped its freezing arms around his neck and started slashing at his neck with its icicle claws. After no small fight, the man managed to repel his preternatural attacker, but the damage had already been done.

Bleeding profusely, and obviously on his way to death, the terrified traveller managed to stumble his way to the door of his lover's cabin. She let him in, and he collapsed to the floor shortly after he entered the building. For the next three days, he was entirely bedridden - often going into fits in which he would desperately try to fight off attackers only he could see. When those terrible days had elapsed, he finally died - his features left contorted 'in paroxysms of fear'. An undertaker was called up from the town at the bottom of the mountain to carry his body down for burial - and as this undertaker progressed down through the snowy wilderness, he passed by a certain lumber camp. He didn't see the creature, but he did apparently catch sight of some extraordinarily large footprints...

That's Snow Ghost!

Or is it? This story is nearly unique among the annals of Fortean literature, which is why I just felt utterly compelled to cover it. However, I'm not sure just how true it is. It was first reported in the December 2015 issue of The Curious Fortean magazine, in which it was attributed to Henry Wharton Shoemaker, an American folklorist from around the time. This actually puts us in a much better position to assume the potential veracity of such a tale. Shoemaker was actually the co-founder of the Pennsylvania Folklore Society, but has also apparently been accused of fabricating some of his tales. So it seems as if this story resides squarely in the grey area between fact and fiction, as with all good ghost stories...

Los Vampiros de Humahuaca

As they went to sleep that night, they had no idea that they would never wake again. It was nighttime in Mexico, sometime during the mid 20th Century. I can only presume that they left their windows open that night - because something awful soon entered their household. This thing had a rotund body covered in hair, and leathery wings tipped with small claws instead of arms. Large ears adorned its pig-snouted head, and it approached the sleeping couple slowly. Biting down on the woman's neck, it started to lap up her warm blood. The same fate would soon befall her male companion. Their corpses would soon be found, the telltale mark of the vampire bat upon their necks. However, these toothmarks were massive. The coroners presumably thought they must've been mistaken when they realised that the bat responsible for the two deaths would've been approximately the size of a dog! 

A Chiropteran Colossus? 

Unfortunately, hardly anything is known about the Mexican case. It is simply documented as having involved the deaths of a man and a woman at the hands (or indeed fangs) of a grotesquely oversized vampire bat - all of the rest of the details you just read unfortunately had to be extrapolated by yours truly. However, what requires less authorial extrapolation is the description of the events that occurred in the small city of Humahuaca in the Jujuy Province of Argentina in January of 1969. One Meliton Juarez, a local muledriver, told an unnamed Mexico City newspaper about his encounter with a creature of a 'horrible' aspect. He was riding his mule when an enormous winged entity passed over his head several times, terrifying his mount before apparently attacking him - forcing him to repel it by beating it several times with his whip. He would later tell the paper that he thought the creature intended to land on his mule and drain it of blood. The paper stated that the monster was thought to weigh between five and six kilograms, but unfortunately gave no other details as to the dimensions of the thing - leading me to speculate that the monster was approximately the size of a small dog. This is, obviously, far too large for an ordinary vampire bat. 

Juarez's neighbours in the Quebrada de Humahuaca valley correlated his bizarre and terrifying encounter with several unexplained livestock deaths that had taken place at local ranches in recent memory - numerous domestic fowls having had their blood drained. According to Jacques Bergier in his 1975 book Extraterrestrial Intervention: The Evidence, scientists in the area believed that the existence of such a monstrous bat was indeed possible based on the story of the couple killed by such an animal I discussed in the beginning of this article. 

Driving Me Batty 

Apologies for the shortness of this article. I found this story in the aforementioned book and figured that I should give it a bit more attention than it seems to have gotten from the cryptozoological community around the time it was published. It is disappointing that Bergier simply lists his source as 'an unnamed Mexico City newspaper', which was apparently published on January 7th of 1969. If any of my readers can find this article, I would be honoured to accept your help!