I was doing some wandering this past week and ended up in Portland, Maine, a delightful town that, among its other attractions, is home to the International Cryptozoology Museum. While there are plenty of smaller museums dedicated to specific monsters and critters, the ICM is the only all-purpose cryptid museum in the world, so I knew I needed to make a point of stopping in while I was in town.
And I’ll tell you: I wasn’t disappointed. The museum is relatively small but jam-packed with very neat displays and artifacts. Even as an avid student of cryptids, there were a few creatures featured in the museum’s exhibits that were new to me. I also picked up a new reference book with even more new finds, Loren Coleman & Jerome Clark’s Cryptozoology A to Z:
Yesterday, I went to the second annual Squonkapalooza in Johnstown, PA. Similar to events like the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant or the Flatwoods Monster Convention in Flatwoods, Squonkapalooza is a celebration of a regional cryptid—the squonk, in this case, which is one of my favorite critters and one I highly recommend checking out if you’re not already aware of it.
One of the things I went to at Squonkapalooza was a talk by Ronald L. Murphy, Jr. on the meaning of the squonk. During the talk he mentioned some of the animals that used to live in Pennsylvania and are now extinct, like the woodland bison and wolverine. There are others that are officially extinct in PA but are still occasionally sighted, like the mountain lion and wolf. As he said it, if you see a wolf in Pennsylvania in 2024, then you’ve seen a cryptid: a creature that shouldn’t exist in a given place, time, or understanding of reality, and whose existence has not officially been proven.
Brownies have always been one of my favorite mythical creatures. Part of this comes from being a natural night owl and introvert; I feel a certain kinship for beings that only work at night and unseen. But they also intrigue me from a metaphorical standpoint. They work selflessly, never demanding credit for doing chores—but that doesn’t mean they’re creatures you can take advantage of. Ignore them too long, or treat them poorly, and brownies turn into bogarts: malevolent tricksters that steal and make milk go sour.
Brownies are just one of the many little people in world myths and folktales. I’m in the beginning stages of a new novel project that will use a variety of little folk. I’ve been reviewing my folklore research in preparation and thought other writers might also find inspiration in some of these lesser-known little people from around the world.
I’ve been particularly fascinated by ghosts of late. They’ve always intrigued me to some extent—as an avid horror fan, I’ve enjoyed plenty a ghost story over my lifetime, though I haven’t played with hauntings in my fiction until the last few years. I mostly avoided them because of how widespread they already are. It’s just like dragons, vampires, or zombies—the world already has so many stories about them that they can quickly veer into tired cliches if a writer isn’t bringing something new to the trope.
One thing that sets ghosts apart from other fantastic creatures is that they’re one of the supernatural elements most likely to feature in literary fiction. From Hamlet’s father to Sethe’s daughter in Beloved, there are ample examples of hauntings across the literary canon. I see two potential reasons for this:
A lot of people don’t think of ghosts as speculative. In a 2021 survey, 41% of respondents said they believe ghosts exist, a similar percentage to those who believe in demons. That’s lower than the percentage who believe aliens exist (57%) but much higher than belief in bigfoot (13%), vampires (8%), or werewolves (9%).
Ghosts and haunting are easy ready-made metaphors for emotions like grief, regret, loss, and nostalgia. This is reflected in our euphemistic language for these feelings—you might say someone is “haunted by the past” or that a place is “a ghost of what it once was.” Ghosts are reminders of what used to be, unchanging intrusions of the past on the present.
Their ephemeral nature makes it easier to insert them into a narrative. The “suspension of disbelief” factor is lower with a ghost than something corporeal because the reader has less of an expectation that it would leave physical signs and evidence. This also allows for more play between what’s real and what’s imagined by the narrator, especially in first-person narratives.
