I found a series of allegedly “true” Cryptid sightings and stories from https://www.liveabout.com/cryptids-monsters-and-weird-creatures-2594778 that I wanted to post a few of here. See the original website for the full set, these are the ones I was particularly interested in reposting:
Cornfield Creature
I used to work at a cheese factory on the edge of a cornfield in southwestern Minnesota. There were a series of days in the summer of ’04 or ’05 where it was so hot that the milk being delivered to us in trucks would evaporate before we got it. It made work easy; the dearth of milk denied us any actual labor, but management wouldn’t let us not come to work, so we would show up and mess around all shift.
I was working nights at the time. It was 2 or 3 a.m., and I was out on the loading dock watching bats fly around the floodlights, because I liked being out in the cool night air. The corn was about as high as my shoulder, so about 5′ 10″.
As I was watching the bats, I looked down at the edge of the cornfield. Something was moving there. It was the size of a small child and very, very skinny. Pale, with something that looked like a head of straight, black hair. It moved in a sort of jerky gait, like someone dancing “the robot” badly. It moved in chunks: legs, then hips, then torso, shoulders, neck and finally head. It was looking back into the cornfield, or at least I felt like it was.
I felt prickly all over. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was a heron or something at first, but it looked too much like a person. It didn’t move like a person, though. Gradually, step by step, it moved toward me. Letting my curiosity better my fear, I moved toward the edge of the dock, which was raised a few feet off the ground. When I got within a few feet of the edge, the thing looked at me. I was paralyzed. I could have run, but I was stuck somewhere between terrified and intrigued.
It moved, its “face” still pointed at me. It ratcheted its body in that disconcerting, jerky movement toward the cornfield and went into it. I tried to watch where the field moved as it passed, but the corn remained perfectly still. I noticed that all the crickets were silent. After a few minutes, nothing happened. I stood out there for an hour, but it never came back. I never saw it again.
— Frank Semko
Florida Sea Monster
This story takes place, I think, in the summer of 1995, making me 9 years old. Practically every other year, my family would take a trip to Florida. We would usually go to Disney World, but my mother was getting sick of that, so that year we actually didn’t go to Disney World to my sister’s and my dismay.
On one of these days, we were on a beach. I don’t remember what the beach was called, but the people sitting next to us mentioned it being the bottom tip of Florida. After a while of nothing happening, everybody was either in the ocean or sunbathing silently. A woman sitting to the left of us pointed past us, to our right, asking, “What is that?” We all turned and looked to a surprisingly vacant corner of the beach. There were no people down there, but what was there was something really strange.
We all got up to get a better look, very quickly forming a crowd around it. If I had to describe the creature we saw in one word, that word would be “cartoonish.” I will never forget what it looked like. It was green and looked like a ball of slime about the size of a basketball. It had tentacles resting on the ground around it with two longer tail-like tentacles sticking out of its back. The thing that was the most bizarre and made it look cartoonish were its eyes, which were on stalks that stood about a foot off its body. The eyes looked creepily human and just looked at us in an almost disinterested way. The other strange thing about it was its mouth, which never seemed to close, and where you’d expect teeth were tooth-shaped fleshy protrusions. No one, not even the creature, seemed scared, and after a while it lazily slithered back into the ocean.
There were roughly 10 witnesses to this thing, and we all spent most of our time talking about what it must have been. One idea was that it was a parasite organism for a much larger creature, one also possibly never identified.
— Adam G.
The Kitsune (Fox Spirit)
Back in September of 2004, I was hiking in the Arashiyama area outside of Kyoto, Japan. I had decided to leave the touristy area and set off alone in a random direction toward the mountains. I found myself on an old trail through the forest.
After a while, I encountered an old man with a long white beard. He carried a staff and was dressed in coarse blue robes, like a peasant out of a Samurai movie. He saw me and told me to follow him. Being more curious than anything, I walked after him as he led me further into the forest.
He spoke at length about the beauty of nature, how people cut down forests and polluted the Earth, and told me that humans must learn to protect and respect nature. During the whole exchange he never spoke about himself or asked any questions of me. After a while he said he had to leave and showed me another trail, saying I should take it when I wanted to go back to the city. He then left by that trail.
I happened to pass the same place on the way back that evening, so I took the trail the old man showed me. Only minutes later, I ended up completely lost and couldn’t even find the trail itself to retrace my steps. It was getting dark out, and as I shone my flashlight around I noticed an old white fox watching me from nearby. I could have sworn it was watching me with an amused look on its face, but as soon as I shone my light on it, it ran off into the bushes.
I remember reading all sorts of old Japanese stories and legends about fox spirits that can take human form, and I feel like I may have seen one that day.
— Bryan T.
Invisible Sprinting Humanoids
Working as a police motorway patrol-woman in Portsmouth, England, I’m frequently confronted with situations that are both bizarre and unnerving. However, the incident that occurred on the 25th of November last year is by far the most unusual of them all. During a routine speed camera set up in the city, around 6.30 pm (at which time it was completely dark,) our speed trap picked up random tracings of nonexistent objects hurtling past at 30 to 40 mph.
The devices are not actually known to malfunction, so we trained the camera on the road surface to see what we picked up. Sitting in the back of the patrol van, we were shocked to discover on the screen that the camera was picking up what can only be described as human figures, running up and down the street approximately 40 ft away from the vehicle, only barely visible through the night vision filter. They were of average height, had a silvery hue, and were sprinting up and down the central reservation (the dividing surface between two opposite lanes on a motorway) repeatedly, and very fast.
I admit I did not exit the vehicle to investigate, but apparently I didn’t have to. Only about 10 feet away, at the side of the road, one of these silvery entities just appeared on the screen. Female, approximately 6 foot, and standing motionless facing away from the van. She was dressed in scantily clad clothing, not unlike that a young woman on an evening out may wear. I was extremely freaked out, especially considering that leaning out of the window, there was absolutely no evidence of anyone standing that close to the vehicle. As the first vehicle only five minutes from the first sighting drove past, all visible evidence of the entities had vanished. Nothing occurred from that time till the end of my duty at 9 p.m., and yet, when I played back the footage from the camera, the silvery objects and the woman are not on the tape!
Obviously, I did not report the incident, but friends and fellow officers agree that it is highly unusual, and none of them had experienced anything of the like before.
— Cassandra J.
