Decemystery (2022.3) 29: The Vampire Caterpillar of Scotland

 

A needless bit of detail: I’m listening to “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith while I write this. A lovely piece of music for a story like this; it’s my specialty to have inappropriate background noise while writing about absolute silliness.

As I have said countless times, I pick some stories solely for the name. It’s just how I operate; I know that plenty of folks gravitate toward eye-catching titles. Trust me; I have friends I talk to—they’re just Internet friends. Nonetheless, if I ask them which story piques their interest more, ones like The Space Penguins of Tuscumbia will be chosen over The Kecksburg UFO Incident nine times out of ten.

Names carry a lot of weight, and that’s one reason I chose today’s story. With a name like The Vampire Caterpillar of Scotland, how could you not want to learn about it? Vampires are awesome, and caterpillars are interesting. Put them together, and you have an unbeatable duo! Right? Well, the only way to find out is to dive into this enigmatic tale of vampirism in the form of a giant creepy crawly! Also, I choked on a piece of a chocolate chip cookie shortly before writing this part. Still listening to Aerosmith, by the way.

Decemystery (2021) 4: The Spectral Moose of Maine

 

Welcome back to my blog! Today, we’re taking a trip to Maine, the home state of United States Senator Susan Collins and horror icon Stephen King. Fun fact: they live on the same street and, amusingly, King absolutely loathes Collins. Now that that fun fact is out of the way, let’s just get straight to the point.

Two years ago, I covered the story of the “Ghost Mammoth”. Last year, I had thought about covering another ghostly animal, but real life hindered that. This year, however, I shall redeem myself by covering the Spectral Moose of Maine. Also, let’s just pretend that the header image above is of a ghostly moose and not just a regular one. Sorry, I didn’t feel like poaching an image from one of today’s sources. Anywhoozle: let us begin!

Decemystery (2020) 7: Mokèlé-mbèmbé

This story is dedicated to my friend Marcus. Sorry it took so long to get around to covering this.

Howdy, this is RMS Vertigo and we’re sailing down a river. Mud and dirt is being torn up because we’re about thirty-five times the legal size for a small river and there are a ton of really pissed off hippos chewing at the steel hull of this bad boy. We’re committing illegal acts of sailing the likes of which we haven’t seen since the era of the pirates and I feel perfectly fine.

You see, dear reader, in this world: I can be whatever I want. I can be an astronaut dancing on Venus as the immense heat makes my flesh melt off. I can be the King of Arcadia and on my way to Atlantis. I can also be an author who doesn’t sit on his bed typing out write-ups that about five people read on the daily.

Lucky for me, I am none of those things and am instead sitting here eagerly awaiting to tell you this story. It’s one that I’ve had on my to-do list for almost as long as the Somerton Man, though I never got around to it more out of pure laziness rather than time constraints or anything of that sort. I feel a great sense of disappointment not having tried to slot it into the last two days of that failed May series I did, but alas, emotional distress overtakes all—even the determination to make something out of the Cookie Monster.

Anyways, what is this fiendish cryptid? Well, It’s a relatively famous cryptid that’s been featured in films like 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters and on shows such as Destination Truth. Its legacy is up there with the likes of the J’ba Fofi in the way of local legend, but its real selling point is that it’s a living dinosaur. Yes, Jurassic Park is real and if we all go to Africa and bless the rains, we too can have the RMS Vertigo crash into a living fossil. Woo-hoo!

Okay, well, let’s finally get to it. This cryptid is known as Mokèlé-mbèmbé and its reputation is as long as its neck. So come, let’s continue on down river and get trampled on like a Wal-Mart employee on Black Friday. Awooooooooogaaaaah.

Mystery: The Flannan Isles Lighthouse

 

This story is dedicated to my friend Jif. Thank you for being so supportive.

Lighthouses: they can tell you a thousand stories from the outside. Within their interiors, the number increases a thousandfold. They’re simplistic demeanor and lonesome, desolate atmosphere is a brilliant masquerade put on by the even more simplistic architectural structure. In simpler terms: lighthouses are unique. For something that ends up being a home for a man to help bring seafaring men and women back to shore, they end up telling you more stories than a war veteran can. Whether that be due to the isolatory nature (which is a case of depression waiting to happen) of them or because of sick sailors arriving back at shore to seek treatment.

Lighthouses also typically become secondary homes for their keepers; this in turn leads to them becoming haunted beyond belief. Big Bay Lighthouse and St. Augustine’s Lighthouse are two that come to mind when one thinks of a haunted cigarette-building (at least here in the United States). Though the haunted variety of these buildings will have to wait until December. For now, I want to shift the focus onto something a lot more unique.

As stated earlier: lighthouses are a case of depression waiting to happen and this is by no means hyperbole. They are, through and through, something that can drive a man insane. You needn’t look further than watching 2019’s The Lighthouse to feel like you’re going mad—especially if you thought that Robert “Battinson” Pattinson couldn’t act. Though really, can you blame anyone? Isolation from human contact—or being stuck in a building with other people you loathe—is bound to drive someone to lose their mind. So what do you do? Well, some may say you’d kill the people you don’t like, throw them to the waves, and then pretend that they “fell into the ocean”. Others may suggest you quit. Then some may say you jump into the ocean and become an ocean man.

Unlike most other times on this blog, that question is not something I will discard because it serves as a segway into another topic entirely. Rather, that question is part of today’s story through and through. The Flannan Isles Lighthouse is notorious for a great many reasons. Known as the location where three lighthouse keepers vanished, this guiding light for many a sailor was the inspiration for the aforementioned film The Lighthouse and conjures numerous images of lonesomeness and silence. So let us take a trip to over a century ago and seek out the truth to one of the world’s most maddening unsolved disappearance cases.

Mystery: Giant Scuttles

I scuttled away with this from a Cryptozoology wiki.

I recently finished picking stories out for my megalist of 5,000 mysteries and I’m feeling really energized by that. So, in celebration, the month of May will have a daily blog post for some of the mysteries that will be on said list. To kick things off, let’s take a look at one of the funnier stories I found while searching for worthwhile material: the cryptid known as the Giant Scuttle.

Mystery: The Tunguska Event

Aerial view of the Tunguska blast site nowadays.

Death from the skies!

This is what seems to make tabloid headlines every few months. NASA or some other space agency (though it’s almost always NASA) supposedly says that there’s a “killer asteroid” headed our way in X years. When it hits, we’re all dead! Just like the dinosaurs before us, we will be wiped out by a giant space rock and there’s nothing we can do about it.

These claims are, of course, clickbait. No one from NASA has said that there is a dinosaur killing sized chunk of space rock that will crash into our happy little planet and make us all enter the Forever Box. Alas, we can’t let facts get in the way of some good clicks for sensationalistic journalism.

Still, that doesn’t mean that our rocky friends from space haven’t hit us before. Every year, a plethora of meteors strike Earth, but they’re either too small to do any damage or burn up as they enter our atmosphere. In other instances, they do land, but are unnoticeable or make for a good viral video because they light up the sky.

In some rare instances, they actually do some damage and kill a lot of life. One good example of this is 99942 Apophis, a 1,080 foot wide asteroid that caused a pretty big scare when it was said it may hit Earth in 2036. An asteroid the size of Apophis typically strikes Earth once every 80,000 years. It wouldn’t cause an extinction level event mind you, but folks on YouTube and tabloids would have you believe otherwise since they made it out to be a doomsday rock from the high heavens.

A comparison of the Empire State Building and Eiffel Tower to 99942 Apophis.

Nowadays, they say that Apophis has a 1 in 150,000 chance of hitting Earth on April 12, 2068. These chances are subject to change and given that’s not for another 48 years (rounded) as of the time of this writing, one can bet that it’s likely we’ll either be able to send Apophis to Mars, Venus, or just straight out of the Solar System. Or, even more likely, Apophis will whoosh by our planet and go on its merry way.

Though what if it didn’t? What if it—or another still sizable asteroid—were to hit us? What would the damage be like?

As I said before, there have been asteroids that have hit Earth. There have also been meteors and comets. The thing is: it’s very rare, but when it happens, people definitely know. The devastation can be tremendous and the loss of life can be unbelievable…

Unless it lands somewhere remote, where the loss of life is minimal and nobody really notices it. This is  the case of today’s story, which has become known as the Tunguska Event. While many have come to accept the theory that what caused this incredible event was a comet, some remain unconvinced. As such, we’re going to take a look and see if we can discover the truth behind it all. So let’s dive in!