The Wazooey Man

It was 1973, and two boys were playing in an arroyo (gulch or dry creek) in the Pueblo area of Colorado when they had an experience that they would never forget. They came across a creature that they would later nickname the ‘Wazooey Man’.
They were playing with their air pistols when they noticed that they were being watched by ‘two huge red eyes’. Presumably shocked by the bizarre sight, one of the boys started firing BB pellets into the eyes - seemingly prompting them both to be picked up by an invisible force and thrown down into a ravine. A large wooden post came out of the ground and hit one of the boys on the head. Utterly terrified at this point, the boys took off towards their truck only to realise that they had somehow lost the ignition key.
With this new hindrance, the panicked youngsters ran to the road and started trying to hitchhike - but they noticed that ‘some form’ resembling ‘a mobile haystack with two huge red eyes’ would manifest every time they tried to go west, and force them to retreat back the other way. There is little information on how they escaped the situation, which they presumably did because they must’ve lived to tell the tale.
'The Hard-To-Believe-But-True!: Book of Colorado History, Mystery, Trivia, Legend, Lore & More' by Carole Marsh

Gatorman! Science Confronts the Monstrous

The Lizard-Man from Animal Planet's Lost Tapes

Cryptids are, by their very nature, extraordinarily elusive. People only rarely happen to see one - and even rarer are cases in which people see one of the mysterious creatures multiple times. Almost unheard of, however, are cases in which cryptids seem to follow someone around - stalking them like unearthly hunting hounds. This is exactly what happened to an anonymous Floridian zoology scholar between 2010 and 2013. He was relentlessly pursued by a monstrous reptilian creature from the depths of St. Johns River...

Menace to the Manatees

The witness was 18 years old in 2012 when he sent his testimony to cryptozoological investigator Linda Godfrey. He was then working as a volunteer at a Florida paleontology museum, and was working towards gaining degrees in zoology and paleontology. Suffice to say, he was certainly a witness qualified to differentiate a known animal from something anomalous. He swore to Godfrey that his story was absolutely truthful, and she has stated that she finds that his expansive knowledge of the local area's flora and fauna makes his tale especially compelling. She is the first person that he told about the incident who wasn't involved.

He lives on a canal system that feeds directly into the St. Johns River Delta, whcih is a large river system spanning most of the East side of Florida. Wildlife in the aforementioned river will sometimes come up into the canal for various reasons, and these lifeforms usually include fishing birds, dolphins, manatees and even sometimes bull sharks and alligators. The canals are bodies of brackish water - seeing as the fresh water meets the ocean there. The water within them is usually fairly shallow, but it is impossible to see the bottom (or any of the amazing fauna present within their diminutive depths) due to the thickness of the silt and mud in the water. It is sometimes to murky that people have nicknamed it the Black Tea River. Details of an object more than three inches away from the surface are invisible, and objects are entirely invisible if they are over a foot from the surface.

The witness was on Spring break when hints of the existence of the strange creature that would later come to plague him started making themselves known to him. It was mid-March of 2010, and he was out on his dock rinsing his family's small sailboat. A few thick clouds hung overhead, but in general it was a good day with plenty of sunshine. He had just finished washing the boat when he saw a manatee drifting through the water towards him. They are apparently attracted the sound of running hoses, seeing as they enjoy drinking the flowing water. He turned the setting down on the hose a little before slinging the hose over the side of the dock to allow the gentle aquatic mammal to drink. He noticed that it was moving slightly oddly, but his concerns were confirmed in a bizarre fashion when the creature rolled over and revealed several deep bite marks on its front flipper in a u-pattern. He had never seen a manatee with bite marks on it before - they are supposed to have no natural predators due to their large size and tough hide. Usually all scars on the bodies of the majestic animals come from boat propellors, but the way this mark had been set into the hide of the creature showed that it was definitely the bite of an animal which had done this. The thin lines left by a shark were not present, and while alligators fit the conical-shaped marks left in a narrow row by the teeth that had bitten the manatee, even large bull gators were not usually big enough to take on a manatee. As he further examined the manatee, it became ever clearer to him that there was something massive and unidentified living in the ecosystem. The creature's body was riddled with cuts and bites, and a piece of its tail flipper had seemingly been torn off. Whatever was large enough to attack a one-ton manatee would be able to devour a person with ease.

Later, he and some fellow dock workers took the boat out onto the river for a brief joyride - but the 'joy' part of this expression might've been lacking seeing as he was continually plagued with a feeling as if he was being watched. He would brush it off, however, seeing as they would sometimes encounter other boaters and the feeling could've perhaps been attributed to their presence. Eventually, they docked themselves on a small island where the witness said he would often see quite a few pelicans and egrets nesting. It was near nesting season, and yet he couldn't see a single bird on the island. There were birds on the other mangrove islands, but they were conspicuously absent on this one in particular. As he explored the island, he kept finding broken branches up to and beyond his height. There were no game birds on the island and so it wouldn't make sense for hunters to have been present, and tourists tended to avoid it due to the marshy terrain. A human explanation didn't make much sense for the absence of birds either, seeing as it seemed unlikely that entire colonies of birds would abandon a safe haven from raccoons and possums because of a few people in the forest. There were no visible tracks underneath all the fallen leaves, but he was able to see slide marks 'too angular to be a boat' on a piece of sand on the far side of the island. He started to get the feeling that he was being watched again - and it was getting dark out - so he decided to abandon the island.

It was early June of 2011 when our anonymous witness ran into the swamp monster again. He was out in the wilds of River Lakes Conservation Park with his Boy Scout troop, and the sun was beginning to set. It was 7pm and he decided that he was done roaming the wilderness, and so set about returning to camp. However, in order to get back home, he needed to cross a path of swampland. Despite the sky still being fairly bright and only minimally overcast, the thick tree cover made it seem quite a bit darker. River Lakes Conservation Park is a large cluster of swamps, lakes, forest and savannah that borders the waterways connecting to the St. Johns River on the mainland side. He approached the marshy terrain between him and his destination, and as soon as he did so the forest went silent. He had previously been seeing a lot of deer and songbirds, and had even heard the yowling of a bobcat, but it was as if they had all suddenly left the area. This was 'very unsettling'.

'Swamp Creature' by BerSverk88 on DeviantArt

He was circling around the marsh, crossing under a thicket of pine trees before he suddenly heard something making a small splashing sound in the water. At first he brushed it off as having been a fish, but then he started to get a very uneasy feeling. Conscious that he was potentially in danger, he was just about to pick up his pace when he once again heard something shift in the water as well as what he speculated could've been a small hissing noise. He turned just in time to see a dark figure stood under some cypress trees before it ducked down into the water. In the brief few moments he was able to lay eyes on it he was not able to make out many of its features, but judging by the fact that the water was approximately 4ft deep and was roughly at its waist-line, it seemed to be inhumanly tall. In general - 'the outline just didn't look right for a human'. It was only about 60ft away from him, and panic set in when the creature dived underwater as if heading straight for him. The witness was terrified, and high-tailed it back to camp as quickly as he could.

Over the next two years, he would sometimes hear strange noises at night if he was staying anywhere near the swamps, river bottoms or secluded woodlands. It was as if the creature was perhaps following him. These sounds were usually pretty distant and sounded far away, but sometimes he could relatively clearly make out noises such as bellows and hisses. Granted, there were plenty of vocal species living around these areas such as bobcats, coyotes and owls - and so, likely for his own peace of mind, he attributed the unsettling noises to these creatures.

First Contact

It was April of 2013, and the manatees were just coming out of their Winter retreats back into the river and its canals, and our anonymous witness decided to go out to the water's edge to see them - as well as getting some exercise at the same time. It was a nice day, relatively clear with only some distant clouds. He boarded his kayak and paddled out of the canals into the river mouth, continuing on until he spotted a small, uninhabited inlet on the side of the river. Manatees would usually float around such areas because of the ample food supply and still water - and the witness had been successfully manatee spotting around this specific islet numerous times. He rounded the river bend and faced the lagoon, in whcih he could clearly see the 'kick marks' made by the manatees' broad tail flukes. Strangely enough, however, the animals seemed to be swiftly leaving the lagoon despite it only being noon. Manatees tended to stay in the lagoon and the surrounding canals until around seven o'clock before slowly leaving it in herds - but this was not the case today. However, he dismissed it, seeing as he only saw one manatee departing the lagoon - and there were sometimes sea cows that broke the pattern.

He was now getting tired of rowing, and so he made one last push into the lagoon before setting his oar down on his lap. The lagoon was beautiful, and it was surrounded by a calm expanse of forest. He pulled out his water for a drink, failing to register the strangeness of the fact that birds were entirely absent from the scene. Something under the water bumped into his kayak - but he wasn't particularly startled, seeing as he had been bumped into by a lot of different things before. He was stationary in the water and so he knew that if something had hit him then it would have had to be moving - but that could mean lots of things. It could've been a floating log, a large fish, a manatee using the boat bottom as a back scratcher or perhaps even a bull shark doing an exploratory bump to judge whether or not the kayak was an appropriate food item. He immediately guessed that it was a manatee, seeing as they were the usual inhabitants of the lagoon - prompting him to look over the edge in hope of catching sight of the serene sea cow. There was certainly something big moving down there - it was dark in colour and about the length of a manatee, but despite these features he was left uncertain as to its identity as it swiftly swum away. However, a disturbance on the surface of the calm water signified that the object was turning around - but he still wasn't suspicious, seeing as manatees would often come back around to boats for repeat scratches. His sense of tranquility would quickly vanish when he felt the bump on the bottom of the boat for a second time, however. It was 'all wrong' - it sounded like something solid moving across an old washing board. A manatee would've made a single, gentle bumping sound. Bull sharks and dolphins don't make noises like this thing had just done either. A heavy weight of dread was starting to pool in his stomach, and as the shape moved out from underneath his kayak he decided that the best course of action would be to get out of the water as soon as possible.

Photoshop rendition of the case

The creature's outline was at least as long as his kayak - 14ft or more - and it was considerably broader than the boat for the first two-thirds of its body before tapering off into what was presumably a tail. The shore of the lagoon was sandy and only 10ft away from him, and so he thrust his oar into the water and rowed as quickly as he could to get up onto the sand. He beached his kayak and ran a short distance across the beach. Finally feeling safer, he then turned around and watched as the shape approached another part of the shore roughly 20ft away. As it passed into the shallower and clearer water, he could see more of its features against the white sand. It resembled an alligator with dark scales and a series of bony scutes running down its back, explaining the bumping noise on the bottom of his kayak. It was big enough for it to have had to be a particularly large male gator, and so the witness backed up further onto the beach. However, the longer he watched, the less like an alligator the thing seemed. It was the correct colour - black with a tint of blue - but its skull seemed to be much taller vertically than the broad skull of a regular gator. He said that the head shape reminded him of a less extreme version of that of a Rauisuchid (an extinct Triassic group of Archosaurs with very dinosaur-like skulls). Alligators have very short arms, and yet this creature's arms were long enough to pass the top of the body in profile. There was obvious muscular tissue showing through the creature's arm scales, and the fingers (of which there were most likely five) seemed much longer than usual - but of course it was hard to tell where the scales ended and the claws began and so any estimation of the length of the digits may not have been accurate. The monster lifted itself up off the ground, and the witness could see that its legs were at least twice as long as those of a regular alligator. The hind legs were 'curled up' to a larger degree, implying that they were likely longer than the forelimbs. The hind legs were also thicker than those of a normal gator, and all four limbs were held in an erect posture directly beneath the body like a mammal or a dinosaur as opposed to in a sprawling position like a regular reptile.

The witness felt the blood rush out of his face when the monster suddenly swung its head around to look right at him - perhaps seeing him through its peripheral vision or smelling him. It pressed its forelimbs down, 'like it was doing a push-up' before rising onto its hind-legs like a bear and staring directly at the witness. He was terrified - attempting to scream but finding that he couldn't make any noise. The creature was very heavily-built, and was at least 6.5-7ft tall. Its underbelly was a whitish-yellow colour, and its pectoral bones and muscles were visible through its chest. He also thought that he could see its ribs, but there were no genitals visible (but this is normal for reptiles, which have internal genitalia). Its arms hung down to the sides, reaching down to its hips - and the witness guessed that its palms were facing downwards. The tail, resembling a normal alligator tail, slumped down on the ground as one would expect. There were no lips on the creature, leaving the teeth clearly visible. Instead of comparing it to a human, the witness said that it looked more like a bear or perhaps an ape with shorter arms. Its posture seemed to be hunched over.

The beast raised its arms up at the elbows and let out a piercing hiss, not unlike that of a regular alligator but much deeper - opening its mouth and snarling before rattling its throat like gators are wont to do and making a bellow that was so deep that the witness claims he was able to feel it in his body. The witness was just about to turn and run when the creature also turned, wandering off into the forest, and taking about ten steps on its hind legs before dropping down onto all fours and vanishing into the foliage. He could hear it rustling around in the brush for about a minute further after that. Dumbfounded at what he had just seen, he stood there for a minute before making the wise decision to rope his kayak to a tree and follow the nearby highway home instead of getting back into the water where the creature could potentially get at him more easily. Later, he drove back to the lagoon in his truck - accompanied by his friend and armed with a machete - to retrieve his kayak.

Tick Tock Croc

The witness was still in a state of absolute terror after his encounter with the horrifying unknown, but later that day he and the same friend from before made good on a promise that he had previously made her that they would sleep in his sailboat which had two wide mattress benches in the cabin. He was hiding just how scared he was being back on the water, and the fact that it was now dark and raining did nothing for his composure. Visibility was still good, though, because the clouds weren't that thick and the rain was fairly light. Come 10 o'clock, they sealed the cabin door and turned out the lights - and his friend fell asleep in about ten minutes. The zoologist stayed awake for another hour (which he knew because he had brought his watch) - both listening to the peaceful sounds of the storm and trying to put what had happened earlier that day out of his mind. Eventually, he fell asleep to the sound of rain gently splashing against the porthole window.

The Witching Hour had dawned when the central figure of our story stirred awake once more. It was roughly 3am, and he couldn't work out why he had woken up. The rain outside had lightened to naught more than a light drizzle, but there was still some sporadic thunder. Looking out of the porthole, he could see that there were no people out partying on the canal or anything - and so he at first concluded that perhaps there had been a flash of light from a neighbourhood house sensor, or maybe lightning had struck somewhere nearby. He looked out of the portholes and the plexiglass doorway, but failed to catch sight of anything explanatory for his sudden awakening. All he could see out there in the dark was a distant street-light obscured by a tree. Eventually, he lay back down and tried to go back to sleep - but this was when he heard the hissing sound. Chills ran up his spine.

Desperately hoping that he had imagined the noise, or just that it hadn't come from what he thought it had, he peered out of the porthole facing the entrance to the canal and saw a figure on the distant side of the canal, illuminated by the dim nighttime light. Rain was pinging off its scaly body, and he realised with a sickening sinking feeling that it was indeed the monster from before. He somehow knew that it had followed him back from the river, and was now coming straight for him - he can't explain how that thought 'warped' into his mind. Panicking, he knew that the cabin had no weapons and that he wasn't even old enough to carry a firearm. His house was nearly 100ft away from the canal, and he could see that the monster was getting closer and closer. It was now only 50ft away - just at his neighbour's sailboat. His only thought was to find some way to escape from the impending monstrous attack, and so he turned and shook his friend awake. She sat up and blinked - taking a moment to come back to full consciousness before her eyes widened further than he had ever seen - she was looking behind him, and just then two loud thumps echoed out through the deck. I can imagine the spidery feeling that must've tickled the back of his neck as he dreaded looking behind him. When he plucked up the courage, he saw that the creature was right up against the boat, peering into the cabin through the porthole.

The Pristichampsus from Primeval

The earlier thumps must've been it putting its arms against the side of the boat, judging by the way that said arms were positioned as the creature pointed its head downwards so that its eyes (on the sides of its head instead of forward-facing) could look into the cabin. The couple were terrified to move out of fear of doing anything to possibly provoke it. Don't move. Stay quiet. All it would take for the creature to break into the boat would be climbing onto the lower portion of the boat, only about 2ft above the water level, and breaking the plexiglass. The creature's breathing was very loud, and only rang out roughly once a minute. Although the sense of threat never faded from the situation, he eventually came to realise that the creature seemed more curious than hungry. He says that the strangest thing about it was how its bronze-amber eyes seemed to glow. He tried to rationalise this by saying that it was likely eye-shine or 'some sort of bioluminescence'. The eyeshine of normal alligators is bright red. The monster stayed there for approximately five more minutes before letting out a short grumble and backing away from the boat. At first, he was scared that it would circle back around and crawl onto the boat, but instead it just lowered itself back into the water and swum off into the stormy darkness.

The pair were so terrified and paranoid that they thought that perhaps the monster was lying in wait as a sort of trap, and so they waited in the cabin until about 9am that morning before making their move back to the house, running all the way. From then on, he has been afraid to go onto the dock at all despite having previously loved to go down to the river regularly. The water is dark enough that he would never be able to see it if it was coming for him. The last update to his story came in the last days of December 2013, when he once again encountered the gator-man after his two dogs had come running back from the dock in a state of great fear. He ventured out into the darkness with a torch, and raised his beam just in time to catch an enormous shape on his dock. It emitted a loud bellow like a mature alligator. The witness was horror-stricken - it seemed to have followed him home...

Back into the Shadows

There have been no further updates, at least according to where the story leaves off in Linda Godfrey's book 'American Monsters'. This, of course, does not mean that no updates are yet to be published or are simply unknown to me, seeing as the aforementioned book (which is my source for this article) was published in September of 2014. I feel that it is likely that there have since been updates sent to Godfrey, but that she has published them in other books and I have thus missed them.

The Peter Pan Possession: The Curious Case of Cornelio Closa

A photograph of the boy in question as an adult

The year was 1965, and 'The Invisible Boy' had moved on with his life as best he could after what had happened to him. Two correspondents from the United Press International arrived at his house to interview him about the bizarre events, but he was retiscent at best about retelling the story in the company of strangers. What had taken place had happened approximately thirteen years previously, and the Invisible Boy was now the visible man. He was twenty-five years old, married, and the father of two children. Vicente Maliwang and his photographer Eduardo Martinez desperately wanted to speak to him to gather his description of what had happened to him, and he reluctantly agreed. His father, twenty-three-year-old sister and eighteen-year-old brother accompanied him. Before he spoke to the journalists, he told his wife to remove the children from the house. She already knew about the event, but he wanted his children never to know. He admitted that he would prefer to forget that it had ever happened. It felt like a nightmare. Now fully prepared for his interview, the Invisible Boy sat down and started to speak...

The Unearthly Child

An illustration of a pixie by John Bauer

Cornelio Closa Jr. first took the plunge into what he would later describe as being like a 'frightful dream' made real in September of 1951. He was only thirteen years old, and was in sixth grade at Zamora Elementary School in the city of Manila. He and his friend Rudolfo Carmine were walking home from school across a large field one day, when Cornelio suddenly came to a dead halt. Slowly, he started to point towards a seemingly-empty spot just in front of a nearby brick wall. Rudolfo described Cornelio's eyes as 'almost bulging out of their sockets'. Cornelio said that she was beautiful. He was looking at a girl roughly his age, dressed in white with long blonde hair that reached down to her waist. Rudolfo was baffled, unable to see anything where his friend was looking.

The girl's bare feet floated above the grass as she gently moved to be beside Cornelio. Although she never opened her smiling lips, Cornelio would later say that he was able to 'hear and understand' what the strange girl was saying to him. When she touched his hand, he claims that he felt different - very light. His awareness of his surroundings faded. To Rudolfo's horror he suddenly seemed to 'disappear from sight'. It was only a temporary vanishing - and Cornelio said that he had no memory of what had happened when he was away with the girl. He eventually returned home, and chose not to tell anyone about the experience.

After this first bizarre meeting, the usually mild-mannered Cornelio started behaving 'like an animal'. He became sullen, angry and antagonistic - and would now regularly fight with his parents and refuse to eat food. His mother said that she was 'losing control' of him with each passing day. She gradually got used to his new behaviour, however, but this begrudging acceptance was shattered on one particular evening when he seemed to appear 'particularly flushed and sick'. The doors and windows of the house were locked, and yet Cornelio suddenly vanished from sight - disappearing into thin air right in front of his mother. She was horrified. Cornelio would later tell Maliwang that the blonde girl would appear to him often, and that when he was with her he felt that he was somehow no longer real despite everything around him still seeming to be normal.

His schoolteacher started to complain to his parents that he was skipping school, and his father was faced with no choice but the take his son's vanishings extraordinarily seriously. He even enforced accompanied marches to school, but even this could not prevent the strange girl from snatching him away from his classroom. The girl regularly appeared to him in school, holding out her hand and filling Cornelio's body with a strange 'sensation' before the only thought in his head was the need to go with her. He didn't have a choice in the matter. His family locked all the doors and windows at home, but this did nothing. He would continually vanish - if the door was closed, he would simply walk through it 'as if it were open' - before hearing the cries of shock from his classmates after he disappeared. Sometimes he would disappear for three days, having no concept of his own as to for how long he had been missing.

A photograph of Cornelio Closa

Cornelio hid objects around the house and stole money from his parents. He even leapt at his father in a wild fury and smashed dishes. Desperate, his parents resorted to sending him off to a national mental institution and then to a welfare center, but neither of these branches of mental health professionals had any ideas as to what was going on. Authorities assured his parents that he was just a normal boy, and said that he would be better off living with his parents before sending him home. Having been given no answers for their son's violent behaviour, they were faced with no choice but to bring him to a juvenile correction facility. There, he was so disruptive that he had to be tied down to his bed before finally being sent home once again. His parents had now resigned themselves to living with a 'monster' instead of their son.

There were regular disturbances at school, including punch-ups. His teacher, Mrs. Agospi, had previously found him to be a 'quiet boy' but now thought of him as a 'nuisance' that she didn't want in her class. He would fight with anyone at even the slightest provocation - sometimes being able to take on three or four boys much larger than him and never be held down by them. Agospi said that it was as if Cornelio had 'superhuman strength'. A few days after this bizarre fight, Cornelio was called up to the blackboard at the front of the classroom to give a presentation. He stood at the board for a few minutes before simply evaporating into thin air. He was solid, then transparent, then invisible. The entire classroom saw it, and the teacher immediately resigned. This turn of events, according to Agospi, caused Cornelio to laugh 'a hideous kind of laughter' that sounded as if it didn't even come from a human being, let alone a small boy.

Sleep had also become impossible for him - he would feel as if his clothes were burning when he tried - and then he would see the girl enticing him to follow as soon as he opened his eyes. According to the testimony he would give Maliwang, there were many times when he and the girl would float around the city. Together, they went to the cinema several times and visited the International Fair that was being held in the city at the time. He never felt 'exhausted or hungry' when he was with her, and nobody else seemed to notice them on their phantasmal sojourns around Manila. They would sometimes go to restaurants together, and vanish conveniently when it was time to pay for the food they had ordered.

There were occasions where the whole family would be in the front room of their house, with the children playing on the floor. While everyone was watching, Cornelio would vanish and leave behind a foul stench that caused the other children to start coughing and vomiting. When he vanished, his parents would be dismayed at their son's absences which would sometimes last for two days or more. He would reappear in his bed, seemingly sleeping peacefully despite the windows and doors having been literally nailed shut at this point.

The Exorcism of Cornelio Closa

With all this chaos unfolding - and obviously being reported in the local media - it was not long until religious leaders started taking notice. An Evangelical missionary named Dr. Lester Sumrall took a great interest in the case, and he visited Cornelio's home and talked to the teacher who had quit after his disappearance. She had apparently suffered a signficant mental breakdown as a result of having witnessed the event, and never recuperated enough after it to start teaching again. Sumrall also hired policemen and other investigators to verify the complete truth of the matter, and the policemen returned to him with sworn affidavits. Reverend HA Baker also travelled from the United States to the Philippines to investigate the case, contacting Cornelio himself as well as his parents, Mrs. Agospi and his neighbours. He wrote to Sumrall to confirm the latter's belief that the case was genuine - it apparently went on for a full year, getting worse and worse.

A photograph of Cornelio from Sumrall's
documentary

A Methodist preacher tried to help Sumrall, but said that the boy had disappeared right out of his hands. Sumrall decided to venture onto the front-line of the case and perform what was effectively an exorcism on the child. Cornelio was brought to an Evangelical service whereupon he was intensely prayed over by Sumrall himself. Lord Jesus, we plead Thy holy blood; be free in Jesus Christ's Name! These prayers brought the haunting to a grinding halt - and the next time Cornelio caught sight of the young girl, she morphed into a hideous being that seemed to be extremely angry. The girl vanished for good after this.

Uncrossing the Wires

Yes, my reference to a cross in that subtitle was a pun. This is the obligatory section of this admittedly-fantastical article in which I discuss the credibility of my sources. As you might've guessed with the sudden prominence of Dr. Lester Sumrall in the narrative towards the end of the article, an interview with him carried out by Christian author Michael H. Brown is one of my main sources for the information I have displayed here. Sumrall is an Evangelical missionary, and so of course has a vested interest in creating and promoting the belief in evil spirits for the purposes of soul-saving. This might've given him a motive to lie about what had happened with Cornelio, and my other source (trusted paranormal author Brad Steiger) lists some of the events as having happened differently to what was related by Sumrall. For example, Sumrall's description of the events seems to be one year ahead of when Steiger claims the events took place. Cornelio's age also varies by a factor of one year between the different sources. Steiger says that Cornelio's trip to the mental hospital was able to cure his bizarre affliction, but Sumrall says that this did nothing and that Cornelio actually had to be incarcerated afterwards. The only mention of anything resembling an exorcism included by Steiger is the brief note that 'two pastors' added to the curing of Cornelio's demonic affliction after his trip to the mental hospital.

Steiger also focuses much more on the disappearance aspect of Cornelio's case, while Sumrall (understandably) instead chooses to place the emphasis on the possession symptoms experienced by Cornelio. Then again, Steiger's mention of the case is in the context of a chapter on interdimensional travel and mysterious disappearances. A documentary on the case has been made by Sumrall, and although I must admit that I have not yet watched it, I highly doubt that he would promote it if it didn't support his claims. I think that Steiger was focusing on one specific aspect of a much broader case, and so - just this once - I am siding with Sumrall in terms of how the story should be told.

Sources

'The Awful Thing in the Attic' by Brad Steiger
'An Incredible Case of Possession' on spiritdailyblog.com

Infinity in Somerset: A Serpent Tale

William Johnson grew up in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and the schoolhouse he attended stood secluded in the middle of a far-flung field. This field was so difficult to access that students would often spend a decent portion of each morning just walking there. Annie Whitney and Caroline Bullock were collecting Pennsylvania and Maryland folklore for their 1925 journal article on the subject when Johnson contacted them to talk about a bizarre memory of his from when he was sixteen (which was likely to have been in 1886) - he can remember his school being haunted by a colossal, physics-defying serpent.

A Tale of a Tail

The trigger for the seemingly unique haunting was the construction of a new building on the school site in Jenner township - '16 miles west of Johnstown, in Somerset Co.' - and this new building fell on an old crossroads. An individual only described as a gray-haired old man is said to have warned the school that the crossroads on which they were choosing to build was haunted, and it seems that he was right. As soon as the building was completed, something utterly incomprehensible started to make its presence known on the premises.

Like clockwork, a gigantic serpent would appear 'in the dark of the moon' - and although its head and tail were seemingly always hidden the schoolhouse, it would lay its colossal scaly body (over a foot in diameter) over all public highways that led to the seemingly-accursed building. According to the testimony given by Johnson to Whitney and Bullock, the students often had to cross over the abhorrent reptile if they wanted to enter the house in the evenings for 'spelling schools and the like'. He described the scales on the creature as being 'sharp' as opposed to slick like those of a normal snake, and that if anyone accidentally touched it while trying to step over they would 'stick' to it before being spontaneously thrown to the ground. Apparently, not everyone had the ability to see the mysterious serpent, but everyone was affected by its presence in the same way - they would all be thrown to the ground if they stepped on it.

The haunting seemingly stretched beyond the schoolhouse, with the thing's massive body running across numerous different properties in the local area. One man by the name of Frame apparently became so terrified of the nonsensical phenomenon that he sold his holdings and moved out. Joe Leversos puchased the now-empty haunted house, and he was able to raise a large family on the property with no trouble. It wasn't that he was unaffected by it - it was just that the community had started to adapt to its presence. Joe's children had lost their fear of the mystery snake. Local men under the influence of liquid courage would sometimes pluck up enough determination to attack the entity with various objects such as fence stakes. Of course, this never actually affected the reptile, but it was the thought that counted. Johnson then proceeded to name other witnesses involved in the case - Joe Boyer and Jeremiah Mowery - the latter of whom was a preacher.

Nobody ever saw the head or tail of the reptilian apparition - with the only thing visible of it being its seemingly endless body. The implication of the story is that the creature must've been at least a mile in length. William Johnson eventually moved away from the town at the age of thirty, and the snake was still manifesting there when he left - which was roughly at the turn of the 20th century. Interestingly enough, there is a mythological creature called the Amphisbaena - a dragon-like serpent which has a head at each end, which each grab onto each other so that the creature's body is like a ceaseless loop. The particular relevance of records of such a folkloric entity is that Pliny claimed that a pregnant woman who stepped across an Amphisbaena would miscarry - showing that there are at least some historical records of belief in an endlessly-looping serpent with destructive consequences for those who stepped over it.

Source

'I Heard of That Somewhere' by Michael D. Winkle

Beast of Cole Hollow Road

Eighteen-year-old Randy Emmert and a group of his friends were apparently the first ones to be confronted by the stinking simian spectre that would plague the area around Pekin, Illinois in the summer of 1972. Emmert had his encounter in early May, but eventually over 200 reports of the pale ape-like creature known as 'Cohomo' or the 'Cole Hollow Road Monster' would stack up...

Cohomo!

This illustration appeared in the Chicago Tribune

Emmert and his friends noted that the terrifying creature made a loud shrieking noise, and described it as being very large and covered in white hair. They apparently believed that it made its lair underneath a local abandoned house, but there is no indication as to why they came to this conclusion. Emmert originally didn't want to report his sighting out of fear of being thought to be insane, but he eventually pulled through. Little did he know that his report in May would kick off an outbreak of monster hysteria two months later.
The next widely-publicised sighting was on July 25th, and was reported by the Creve Coeur authorities who had apparently received a story about something big swimming in the Illinois River. Just one day later, over 200 phonecalls had been logged by the East Peoria police as coming from terrified townsfolk who had allegedly seen the hirsute horror. Also on the evening of the 26th, the Tazewell County Sheriff's Department took a presumably-frantic call from a man living in Eureka who had apparently been partaking in a family birthday party at Fondulac Park in East Peoria when he caught sight of at least one UFO. He and the rest of the party all saw some bizarre lights moving in a vertical position before going down behind some trees and disappearing. These lights left a vaporous trail behind them. Other reports included such incidents as the monster being seen walking in the forest, roaming back-yards, patrolling riverbanks and even destroying one unlucky caller's garden fence. The police - led by then-sheriff James Donahue - were skeptical of the reports but logged them nonetheless.
On July 28th, a woman in rural Pekin had a run-in with Cohomo while picking berries by an old mine. The witness was so terrified, according to her testimony to the Tazewell County Sheriff's Department, that she fled the scene immediately and left her purse behind. That same night, East Peoria Police claimed that a further two reliable citizens claimed to have seen said furry fiend. The creature was described as having long, u-shaped ears and a red mouth with sharp teeth. It had thumbs with 'long second joints'. Overall, it was compared to a mix of an ape and a caveman. Newspaper articles from the time stated that monster had a distinct stench about it comparable to that of a wet dog, rotten eggs or akin to sulphur. Early articles from the local Daily Times newspaper originally suggested that perhaps the Missouri Monster 'Momo' had migrated to Tazewell County, seeing as it had been seen just one year before the monster mayhem kicked off.
A search party even eventually took to the East Peoria woods in search of the simian monstrosity. This party consisted of roughly 100 armed men, and they patrolled the thick forest for quite a long while before one hapless volunteer accidentally shot himself in the foot and the search was promptly called off for health and safety reasons.
Another twist arrived in this already-bizarre story in 1991 when Emmert (held to be the first witness) called the Peoria Journal Star to claim that he had made the entire thing up. He and his friends had apparently invented the entire story to frighten another friend of theirs who worked late shifts at a local gas station. However, this obviously doesn't explain the rest of the 200+ reported sightings during this brief monster flap. So we are left to ask, what on earth happened in Tazewell County in the summer of 1972?

Sources
'Did a Hairy Monster Stalk Tazewell County?' published by FLOutdoorsman
Cryptid Profile: Cole Hollow Road Monster by the Pine Barrens Institute

Xuc and the Alux

Illustration by Harry Trumbore

The moon hung over the ancient ruins of the great city of Mayapán late on night in 1977. Xuc (pronounced like Chuck) was just tending to the last his duties that night as the caretaker of the historical site when he became aware of odd noises coming from somewhere near to the ruins of the Temple of the Birds. Curious, and sensing that something was perhaps amiss seeing as the site was meant to be closed to visitors past 5pm, Xuc approached the temple and was confronted with an attack by a creature that he had previously assumed to be mythical.

The 'Mayan Pixie'
Xuc compared the sound to a machete chopping wood, and presumably wondered what on earth a woodsman would be doing in that area at the time. He unlocked the entry gate to the site and proceeded in the direction from which the odd sounds were emanating. He had just rounded the corner of the Temple of the Birds when a small clay pellet was flung from some unseen location - whizzing past dangerously close to his head.
Xuc compared the sound to a machete chopping wood, and presumably wondered what on earth a woodsman would be doing in that area at the time. He unlocked the entry gate to the site and proceeded in the direction from which the odd sounds were emanating. He had just rounded the corner of the Temple of the Birds when a small clay pellet was flung from some unseen location - whizzing past dangerously close to his head.
Ducking behind a mound of fallen masonry in alarm, Xuc could now hear a further barrage of the aforementioned pellets pelting the stonework defending him from the onslaught. The rain of rocks briefly paused, allowing Xuc to take a peek out from his hiding place to try and snatch a glance at where exactly the projectiles were coming from. He was utterly flabbergasted to see a tiny humanoid silhouetted in the pale moonlight. It had a disproportionately-large head, a jet-black beard and appeared to be wearing a white huipil (a traditional Mayan garment resembling a tunic). A full-sized machete was slung over the creature's shoulder, being almost as long as the bizarre critter was tall.
What happened immediately after this is unknown, but I think it is a fair assumption to say that Xuc likely ran from the scene in terror. However, his fear didn't stop him from returning the next morning to collect the pellets that had been thrown by the entity. He amassed about eight of the anomalous objects, and they were described as being roughly the size of walnuts and as having been apparently baked to the point that they were akin to bullets in terms of hardness.

Source
Apparently the original source for this story is an article written in Fate Magazine by one Bill Mack for the August 1984 issue of said magazine. He had personally spoken with Xuc in the late 1970s, and had been given the impression that he was a 'personable' and intelligent individual. When Mack expressed some skepticism as to the veracity of Xuc's claims, the caretaker then revealed the eight pellets he had recovered. Fate Magazine is obviously not available online - and so I instead found this story in 'Lost Cities of North & South America' by David Hatcher Childress.

Wrath of El Pombéro

Illustration of the character in question

Said Pombéro (no relation to Pom-Bears) is a rapacious dwarf-like creature originally attested to in Guaraní culture - but of which legends have since spread across Argentina, Paraguay and Southern Brazil. It is described as a diminutive humanoid with black skin and hairy extremities, and is usually said to be a harmless trickster figure - but is sometimes also known to kidnap women and force them into having sexual intercourse, and to commit other such heinous acts. Of course, this wildly unpredictable entity is naught more than local folklore, right? Well - according to a testimony given by one Liliana Nieves - this allegedly-mythical critter is all too real, and extremely violent...

Dark Forces in Barrio Santa Teresita
The community was already in a state of fear due to the recent appearance of a Aguara Guazú (maned wolf) in the area - which they had linked to the legendary werewolf-like monster known as the Lobizón. This general unease would reach a boiling point, however, when all hell broke lose in Barrio Santa Teresita...
Liliana's harrowing ordeal began on February 17, 2004 (the Tuesday before her story was told by the online news source El Norte Digital) when over 10 witnesses would concur that they saw a rain of stones fall onto Liliana's house - located 'at 31 and 0000 street in Santa Teresita'. Although everyone could see the stones falling, nobody except Liliana could hazard a guess at who was throwing them. The terrified homeowner claimed that she saw something tearing mandarin and tomato plants out of the ground in her back-yard, and then caught sight of a person running away from the scene. Her husband and another unnamed man chased after the entity, leaving Liliana alone in the house with her sister-in-law, Norma Cordoba.
While the two women were alone, a brick suddenly hurtled into the roof. Liliana frantically called Norma over to where she was standing, saying that she could see another entity. Norma said that she caught her first glimpse of the creature when 'a shadow shot out toward the back of the property'. The shadow in question continued to pelt the house with debris until 4am, at which point Norma had a breakdown and was taken to the hospital.
The rampant poltergeist-like activity briefly eased up, with nothing happening on Wednesday leading the beseiged family to perhaps dare to assume that Tuesday's events were naught more than a cruel prank. This hope, however, would be dashed when the assault resumed on Thursday - this time with even more ferocity. Norma was in bed at the time, and Liliana and her husband were sitting outside on the patio when stones started to fall onto the roof again. Norma got out of bed, presumably terrified that her ordeal was about to repeat itself, and went outside to see that her other neighbours were all aware of the commotion. The rocky rain struck Liliana's house and neighbouring properties alike, and at this point a decent portion of the community was stood outside in their back-yards gawking at the phenomenon.
All the houses in the neighbourhood are linked by a common patio, filled with trees with branches that touch the ground. It was into this forested area that Liliana strayed in an attempt to locate the source of the stone-throwing - this was evidently a bad idea, seeing as she didn't reemerge for quite a while. Frightened, her neighbours started to call out to her and received no reply until a local man ventured out into the forest to find the missing woman. He was successful in this operation, but what he found was almost certainly not what he was hoping for. Liliana was sprawled on the ground suffering from what appeared to be the aftermath of a savage blow to her face, severely wounding 'part of her eye and mouth' - leaving it 'all broken'.
When Norma was asked about how Liliana described her attacker, she claimed that her sister-in-law had said that it was a humanoid entity about waist-height on her - and that it had 'covered her mouth, dragged her to the bushes and beat her'. The creature apparently abandoned its hapless victim when it heard her neighbours calling for her, and was gone by the time they started searching for her.
When the community brought Liliana inside, she suddenly fell down onto the floor and begged her brother and neighbours to vanquish whatever it was that was grabbing onto her feet. Confused, the bystanders stood her back up only to watch her collapse back down onto the ground 'as if her feet were being pulled out from under her'. This frightening force was completely invisible to Liliana's would-be rescuers, but they rained down machete blows onto the space around her anyway in the hope that they would hit the imperceptible assailant. Liliana was completely hysterical, desperately pleading with the bystanders to save her from this phantom attacker. The police eventually arrived and took Liliana away to the psychiatric ward of the Hospital 4 de Junio, where she remained until February 21st of that year.
It was roughly midday on that Saturday - the 21st - when deacon Dionisio Castagna of the San José Parish visited the village, speaking to and praying with the frenzied locals. He agreed to bless their homes, and didn't question whether the story was true or not - simply saying that they should 'strengthen their faith in God and reaffirm family ties' in order to stay safe.
Mario Obregon, Liliana's brother, said that she would frequently say that the creature would appear and say that 'it wanted to take her away'. Trying his best to help, Mario would stand in front of his sister and try to defend her to the best of his ability, but could never even catch a glimpse of the assailant. Liliana said that the entity would continually appear despite her brother's attempts to protect her. A neighbour apparently came onto the scene with a crucifix and started to pray, but this seemingly only angered the creature - it would attack Liliana even more viciously and frequently. This episode was what frightened the locals the most, seeing as it was clear to them that there was seemingly an invisible force that was trying to push and drag Liliana. She said that it was a 'little man, all black' resembling an imp, and eventually the neighbours took her out of the house in an attempt to evade the entity, because it kept threatening to take her away into the forest and beat her.
According to a police report taken during the same period, a woman had been the victim of a brick attack on Friday (20th of February) at around 02:00am. Oddly, this is the same time as when the Aguara Guazú appeared in the neighbourhood. The police were dispatched the scene and apparently noted that there were brick shards on the ground near the site of the attack. An hour later, a deputy sheriff by the name of Aldo Fernandez led an operation to return to the site - and was alarmed to find that a large number of bystanders claimed to have seen the woman in question being 'lifted and thrown against the wall' by an invisible force, apparently resulting in her being severely bruised and needing to be hospitalised.

Chronology
Okay so as you can tell this is a very intriguing case, but the chronology of events seems to get a bit confused towards the end of the report. This is through no fault of my own, and this jumbled situation was present in the original source article. As far as I can tell, Liliana was attacked by the creature while out searching for the source of the stones, was brought inside where she was repeatedly pushed over by the entity - so much so that Mario stepped in to protect her but ultimately failed, leading to the community members taking Liliana outside to escape the threats of the creature. It was then that the police came. That's what I make of this, but I can see that other interpretations of the timeline might also be valid...

Source
El Norte Digital - February 22, 2004. The specific article within this issue was found as the last case detailed on this website. My antivirus software says that ads were blocked on this page, and so you might need to do the same...