Lore 245: Evasive

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It was one of my favorite middle school toys. Now, keep in mind, I grew up in the middle of the 1980s, so there were a lot of favorites to pick from.
Transformers, G.I.

Joe, Mask, and He-Man, all the classics you'd expect. And of course, the always popular Lego.
Sadly, I don't remember what this toy was called, but I can describe it.

It was a tray that held three pieces of plastic that combined to form one larger plate, and on each of them were raised drawings.

The full set had a number of complete drawings of fantastic creatures, but the plates had been split into top, middle, and lower thirds, allowing kids to mix and match them.

Want the feet of a bear, but the torso of a dragon and a human head? Just find the pieces and put them together.

And when you've built the perfect set, you could place a piece of paper over all of them and rub a crayon over the raised drawings, giving you the perfect homebrewed coloring page to complete.

It's an ancient fascination, really, the combination of various parts into an unnatural hybrid.

It's been a feature of the sci-fi genre for nearly a century and a half, too, showing up in early hits like The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G.

Wells and modern blockbusters like Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3. It seems that we will never get tired of remixing the world around us.

As you'd expect, this hasn't always been done for pure entertainment.

In a world before photography and instant global publishing, news traveled glacially slow, giving it the chance to shift and change over time.

One whispered story of a mysterious animal could easily become a larger-than-life legend of a monster that most people were only too happy to believe.

Of course, believability isn't the same thing as truth, but throughout history, folklore has put a handful of creatures on the map that represent the opposite problem.

Stories that are fantastical in almost every way, and yet, despite centuries of exploration and scientific advancement, have left us with an unsettling possibility.

Some of them, it seems, might actually

be real.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

It's the sort of thing that you'd expect to see in one of those historical mystery thrillers like the Da Vinci Code, a large Renaissance manuscript complete with decorative drop caps and rustic typesetting, and on nearly every page, the woodcut of some new, oftentimes strange type of creature.

A lot of books like that have been published over the centuries, but if you want a gigantic 4,500-page exploration of that sort of thing, Historia Animalia by Konrad Gessner is the place to start.

But be warned, It's certainly a thick journey to take. Gessner was a Swiss naturalist and physician, born in 1516 in the city of Zurich.

Some historians refer to him as the Swiss Pliny, hinting at the Roman historical writer Pliny the Elder, and maybe that's okay. Gessner certainly was prolific.

Over the course of his career, he published 72 books and left another 18 manuscripts behind when he died in 1565 at the young age of just 49. Historia Animalia was his five-volume masterwork.

Each book focused on a different type of living creature, with one on birds, another on reptiles, and yet another on land animals who gave birth to live young rather than through eggs.

But the one I want to guide you toward today was all about fish, and inside that massive tome are some pretty amazing creatures. Take, for example, the sea monk.

No, this wasn't an aquatic spin-off of the hit detective comedy show. These creatures were first spotted as far back as the 1200s and documented by a guy named Albertus Magnus.

He was a scientist and philosopher, as well as a Dominican friar, and he brought all of those skills into his description.

The sea monk was a mysterious fish that had a head covered in white flesh except for a band of darker color near the top.

It reminded people of the way monks would shave the tops of their heads, leaving a band of hair just above their ears.

But below that human-like feature, the sea monk had the mouth and teeth of a fish. And they weren't very nice, apparently.

Legend has it that these creatures would lure travelers out of their ships and into the water, after which the sea monk would capture them and drag them down into the depths and would then eat them.

People were still talking about the sea monk centuries later too.

A French naturalist wrote about the creature in the mid-1500s, although he called it a monkfish, not to be confused with the real monkfish that we know today.

A lot of the French accounts of the creature seem to pinpoint its home as the Baltic Sea in the waters off the coast of Sweden.

So when Gessner published his collection of aquatic animals, he included the popular seamonk in the book.

He pretty much borrowed everything from the French stories from just a couple of years earlier and even reproduced reproduced the same illustration.

Although, to be fair, it's an image that would fit better into an episode of Scooby-Doo than Aquaman.

The drawing shows what appears to be a frightened or excited monk, a real human religious guy, wearing what looks like a fish outfit.

It's honestly not very frightening at all, but pretty dang entertaining regardless. And then there was the sea bishop.

First spotted at the southern end of the Baltic Sea near Poland, this fishy monster was immediately brought to the king.

It's said that once it was standing before the ruler, this sea bishop made gestures that suggested that it wanted to go back into the water, possibly even making the sign of the cross.

Hence the name, right? Sea Bishop.

The illustration that accompanies this creature in Gessner's book shows a mostly humanoid figure standing on two legs, arms stretched out to show pointy fingers, and a bishop's hat upon its head.

Honestly, the only thing fishy about the drawing at all is that the guy's shirt and hat are covered in scales. A couple more examples.

For those of you who love a good, fantastical menagerie, Gessner did manage to include sea monsters that weren't members of the clergy.

One of those was the Ichthyocentaur, which was basically just fish centaurs. They had the upper body of a human, the back legs of a horse, and the tail of a fish.

Gessner himself referred to them as sea satyr or sea demons. But if you're trying to conjure up images of a normal centaur with a fish tail stapled on, you'd be wrong.

Gessner's illustration shows something more hideous, with a face like a dog, human arms that end in crab-like claws, and the long, curving body of a fish. And lastly, there's the sea monkey.

Technically referred to as the Simia Marina in Gessner's writings, the sea monkey looks absolutely nothing like those ads you used to find in the back of old comic books. What did they look like?

Well, the illustration shows what is essentially a fish with the head of a monkey. A monkey whose fanged mouth is open in a horrifying scream.

And look, these are fun creatures to explore, aren't they? Ancient sketches that represent the artist's whimsical creativity more than real-life experience.

Conrad Gessner's Simium Marina and Catholic fish combos honestly just seem like bizarre fantasies, overactive imaginations that created a hybrid of what we know and what we fear.

Two centuries later, though, a respected naturalist would make a report that called all of these notions into question.

Sometimes we have to know the person before we can understand their work. George Steller was born in what is today Germany back in 1709 and eventually trained as a botanist and a surgeon.

And those were skills that led him to Russia, where he worked as a physician to an archbishop in St. Petersburg.
Now, Steller was was an interesting fellow.

His hero was another German naturalist named Daniel Messerschmitt.

Although hero might not be strong enough of a word for his obsession, when Messerschmitt died in 1735, Steller apparently sought out and wooed the man's widow Brigitte.

They got married two years later. Like I said, Steller was obsessed.
Their marriage wouldn't last long, though.

Less than a year after their wedding, Steller headed out on a scientific expedition and he would never return.

But the experiences and writings that he left behind highlighted a different kind of marriage, the intersection of folklore and evidence.

In 1740, George Steller found himself on board a ship called the St.

Peter, which was part of a mission to sail east from Russia and up into the northern Pacific in what some historians call the Great Northern Expedition, looking for a passage from Russia to North America.

And if that makes you think of things like the Bering Sea and the Bering Strait off the coast of Alaska, you're right on target.

In fact, the captain of the ship that Steller was on was a Dutch guy named Vitus Bering. Their journey had a lot of problems though.

Bering hated Stellar, which made tensions on the ship a bit strained and he kept him trapped on board for nearly the entire journey.

He stepped foot on land only twice and one of those times was due to the St. Peter wrecking on an uninhabited island.

Bering died there and today that island, like the sea around him, is named after him. And there you have the general context.

But don't worry, Stellar's journey did yield something that you and I would find interesting.

On August 10th of 1741, while sailing a little south of Kodiak Island, the crew spotted an unusual creature, so unusual that they spent over two hours watching it, trying to figure out what it was.

Steller described it as roughly four feet long with a dog-like face, pointed ears, and a body covered in long hair. The coloring was odd too, reddish-white on the belly, but gray on the back.

He also noted how the creature's face appeared to have a mustache that looked a lot like the stereotypical Chinese mustache known as the Fu Manchu, which is long and hangs down on each side of the mouth.

It wasn't an otter, at least according to Steller's description of it.

This animal's body ended in a fish-like tail, which it used to swim incredibly fast as well as raise itself nearly halfway out of the water.

And it did this over and over too, remaining there for minutes at a time, just sort of watching the humans on the ship, moving its eyes from face to face in utter fascination.

And clearly, the feelings were mutual. Stellar took notes and everyone else muttered and chatted among themselves.
They even watched as the creature performed tricks with a large piece of seaweed.

And because of all of this, do you know what Stellar called this mysterious animal? He channeled his inner Conrad Gessner and referred to it as a Simia marina, the sea monkey.

Over the years, people have debated what exactly it was that Stellar and the others had witnessed. A seal or an otter are the most common explanations.

But again, Steller was an accomplished naturalist. He knew how to spot undiscovered creatures.
There are a bunch that still bear his name today too, like the Steller's sea eagle and Steller's sea cow.

Basically, he knew his stuff, so a lot of people doubt that it was a mistake. And maybe the answer can be found in a story from two centuries later.

Back in 1965, a sailor named Miles Smeaton was out off the coast of Atka Island, which is part of that long, curving tail that extends out from Alaska into the Bering Sea. Smeaton wasn't alone either.

His daughter and another friend were also on board, and they spotted something odd.

It was an animal about the size of a sheep with long hair all over its body that seemed to be gray on the back and red on the belly.

Smeaton's daughter pointed out that the creature's head looked a lot like that of a dog, and hanging down from the nose on both sides of its mouth were, and I quote, drooping Chinese whiskers.

If George Steller had taken the time to ask the indigenous peoples of Alaska, he would have been pleasantly surprised.

They had their own stories of a creature in the waters there, described as a man-like seal, with the head and face of the former and the body of the latter.

And they seem to have acted as bad omens too, which might actually explain his later shipwreck.

In some tales, it's said that if a hunter managed to pull one of these man seals to shore in their net, it was a sign that misfortune was headed their way.

And the creature existed beyond the oral tradition, too, showing up in a number of carvings and painted art objects.

Back in 1910, there was an anthropologist working with the indigenous peoples farther north at the geographical top of the Alaskan coast at Point Barrow.

And while he was working there, he did some hunting, just sort of exploring the area and soaking in the sights and sounds. One day he spotted a creature similar to the one Stellar had seen.

It apparently raised its head out of the water right in front of him and it frightened him so much that he rushed back to the local village and told the indigenous hunters about it.

I can imagine them laughing a bit at him, but also murmuring with wonder. There was a lot of healthy respect for the creature there.

But they did tell him that it was a shame he hadn't killed it, because if he had, he would have been blessed with the power to successfully hunt any animal he wished.

Now, of course, seal-like creatures aren't unique to Alaska. Longtime listeners of this show will remember discussions about another mythical being known as the Selki.

What's often forgotten though is that Selki as a term comes from the old Scots word selk, which means seal. And you see that connection in a lot of the stories.

Selkies are often portrayed as seals that can come ashore and shed their skins to take on human form.

According to legend, you could tell if a person was one by checking their hands or feet for webbing between their fingers and toes.

And in most stories, if their skin is stolen while they are in human form, they'll be trapped on dry land until they get their skin back. Where did they come from?

Well, there are a lot of theories in that little corner of folklore. Some thought that Selkies were fallen angels punished to live on Earth.

Others whispered that they were once human but had committed grave crimes and were doomed to live forever as seals. In some stories, Selkies can only transform once a year at Midsummer's Eve.

In others, it's possible to do so every nine nights. In almost all of the tales though, the Selkies are presented as seducers of humans.

One common explanation for when young women went missing was that, of course, a Selkie had taken her to be his bride.

Many Selkie stories have a sort of happily ever after vibe, with perhaps a hint of darkness. But I want to leave you today with one that's a bit less mainstream and a whole lot more horrifying.

It comes from the remote Faroe Islands, situated far north of Scotland, sort of equidistant to Norway and Iceland and the UK. And it begins like so many other Selkie stories tend to do.

In the tale, we meet a man who is walking to an evening Christmas church service.

His path takes him along the coast, and as he passes a spot with a rocky cave high above the path, he notices two things. One, there seems to be a party going on inside the cave.

And two, there's a large pile of seal skins on the beach nearby. Stopping for a moment, he picks through the skins and plucks out one of the smaller ones, tucking it under his coat.

Perhaps sensing trouble, the people in the cave above, elves it turns out, come running down to the beach and each one grabs their skin, throws it over their shoulders, and dashes for the water.

All but one. When the rush is over, the man looks up to see one of the young female elves still there.
no sealskin in her hand. And you know how this plays out, right?

She asks him for her skin back, but the man refuses. He soon uses this as leverage to make the girl marry him.

The couple go on to have a number of children, and the man keeps his unwilling wife's magical seal skin locked in a trunk, always keeping the key with him so she can never leave. Romantic, right?

One day, the husband leaves his seal wife home with the kids while he heads out to attend yet another Christmas service.

But when he had changed out of his work clothes into something a bit more fancy, he forgot to take the key with him. So she grabs it, unlocks the trunk, and retrieves her stolen skin.

Like I said, that's the typical beginning to these stories. But in the version from the Pharaoh Islands, there's more.

After regaining her magical skin, she hides all of the knives in the house and even puts out the fire, hoping that it will disarm her husband, literally and figuratively.

And of course, she returns to the sea and to her sulky husband. So, happily ever after, right? Well, not really.
One day, she gets word that her human husband is planning a massive seal hunt.

So, she uses her magical powers to appear to him in a dream the night before.

She warns him not to kill the large male seal who is her beloved husband, and she describes her two seal children to him as well, and begs him to spare them. And the guy, well, he ignores her.

On the day of the hunt, he and the others kill indiscriminately. In the process, the selky woman's entire family is slaughtered.

Honestly, it's a bloodbath, and the sort of gruesome element that used to exist in a lot of folktales before big media companies started cleaning them up and making them friendly.

Back at the house, the hunter and his friends are dividing up their catch when the Selki Woman bursts through the door. Not in human form this time though, but as an enormous troll.

She notices a certain smell in the air and glances at the fire where a big pot of stew is boiling away. Stew that contains the flesh of her husband and two children.

Furious at what he and the others had done, she cursed them all. But sadly, no curse could ever bring her dead family back to life.

People tend to have a certain opinion about how the world around them should function.

And sure, there's a lot of variety to those worldviews, with some leaning a bit too far into utopia and others standing firmly on the side of evil.

But at least when it comes to the wildlife of planet Earth, we're mostly unified, which is why the oddities always stand out to us.

Think back to the first time you ever learned about the platypus, which looks like someone stitched a duck's bill onto a beaver.

That always makes people stop and think because it breaks those unspoken rules. They don't seem, well, natural.

At the end of the day, the work of people like Conrad Gessner and George Steller might leave us with volumes of animals that only existed in the imaginations of their day and age.

But they also serve as proof of our fascination with the unexpected, the rule breakers, and the what-ifs. And it still happens today, by the way.

You don't need a 16th century naturalist to find examples of creatures that defy our expectations.

Just look at the rumors that flew around in 1938 in the summer resort town of Wasaga Beach in Ontario, Canada.

In early June of that year, a mysterious creature was reportedly spotted in the water just offshore. A creature that everyone agreed was seal-like, but not a seal.

Descriptions of the animal claimed that it was roughly eight feet long, dark in color, and thick. But despite that, it swam at an unnatural speed.

Sightings always happened in the early evening, between 6 and 8 p.m., and typically in a spot of water that was about 200 yards offshore where the water was deeper.

According to an article from the Daily Sun-Times that summer, it has a round head like a seal and it can swim as fast as any motorboat.

Now, the first person to spot the creature was a woman named Mary Marr. Although this being the 1930s, the papers didn't interview her.
Instead, they asked her husband Thomas the questions.

He said that at first he thought it was just an abandoned canoe, so he climbed into his own boats to row out and retrieve it.

When he got within 15 yards, though, Marr claimed that the shape suddenly sped off and vanished from sight, and, I quote, churning up rollers like a steamer.

He had lived in the area for over 25 years and had never seen anything like it. Word spread quickly, as news about such things has a tendency to do.

And of course, there were theories about what it might be.

One man even made a strong case for the creature actually being a loon, which he believed hovered so low over the water that it cast a shadow and made it look massive and dark.

I do need to say though that Mary and Thomas Marr owned a grocery store right there along the beach, directly in line with the evening sightings.

And thanks to the rumors and excitement over the legend, that meant that more and more people were coming to visit and in the process spending more cash at the Marr's shop.

One reporter noticed this coincidence and Thomas is even quoted in the paper as saying, no sir, we don't sell beer here. Still, it certainly makes you wonder.

As for the truth, well, no evidence was ever found. For skeptics, that's clear proof that the sightings were nothing more than wild rumor.

For the believers, it meant that there was still hope that the creature might be found. Both sides have a shot at being right.
That is, of course, until the monster finally shows its face.

I hope you've enjoyed today's tour through some of folklore's oddest animal hybrids.

Fish with monks' haircuts, underwater bishops, screaming fish monkeys, you name it, the pages of history seem to have it. But we're not done just yet.
I've saved one last tale to share with you.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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It's hard to shock people who work at a slaughterhouse, but in 1886, that's exactly what happened. They worked at Frankton Junction on the North Island of New Zealand near the city of Hamilton.

Someone had left a 70-pound sheep carcass hanging on a hook, only to come back and find it completely picked clean, right down to the bones. But not everything was gone.

Whatever had done it had left behind a clue. Strange, bloody, reptilian footprints that led away from the carcass and out to the nearby creek.

Newspapers of the time referred to it as a Saurian monster, the word hinting at any kind of large lizard. Just think of it this way.
Saurian puts the Saur in dinosaur.

Naturally, people started to feel threatened and afraid. Men began to set up watch in the area with rifles in hand while they waited for the monster's return.

There were rumors that it was spotted again here or there with one witness claiming that it resembled a sea serpent with the head of an alligator.

Another witness, a boy, said that the monster chased him all the way home. Other sightings placed the monster in the nearby river.

There were many stories of the creature thrashing the waves with its massive tail.

Two men who were trying to cross the river in a canoe reported that the beast almost capsized them, and they got a good look at it in the process.

Long body like an alligator, massive jaws filled with razor-sharp teeth, and entirely covered in shaggy black hair. Almost overnight, the monster became became the boogeyman for everything.

Folks remembered how a local Maori girl was found dead near the river the previous year, the flesh stripped clean from one of her arms. Obviously, they said, the beast was responsible.

Here's the trouble, though. New Zealand doesn't have any reptiles that are over a few inches long, and certainly no alligators.

Although some people theorize that an alligator could have been brought over from Australia. Except Australia has crocodiles, not alligators.
But what New Zealand does have is folklore.

In Maori tradition, there's a creature known as the Taniva, which is sort of like their version of a dragon or a serpent. They typically live in natural places too, like caves and lakes and rivers.

Later that year, in November of 1886, a similar creature was spotted on the other side of Hamilton.

One witness claimed that he had seen it over two dozen times and gave the same description as before. Long snout, seven or so feet long, and covered in black hair.

And this time, people of the area managed to capture it. When they did, they claimed that it turned out to just be a gray seal.
The trouble is that type of seal doesn't live in New Zealand.

One other person though managed to kill the Saurian monster about a year later.

A local policeman in Ragland Harbor told the newspapers that he stumbled upon the monster sleeping on the beach, so he pulled out his gun and put two bullets through its head.

The newspaper article also includes the monster's dimensions. It was 12 feet long, six feet around, and instead of a tail, it had two weird screw-shaped propeller-like things.

Apparently, the animal's corpse was even dissected to learn more, and then its skin and bones were removed for preservation, later being set up for display in Auckland.

Which means that we could all go and see it now and figure out what it really was, right?

Well, not so fast. You see, just a week after the preserved monster was installed, the store it was inside of caught fire and everything burned to the ground.
Sometimes the truth is evasive.

Just when you have the fingers of your mind wrapped around it, it suddenly slips away.

This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Cassandra De Alba and music by Chad Lawson. Don't like ads? We've got a solution.

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