My sister once saw a werewolf. She didn’t tell Mom or me until almost twelve years later. The sighting was so traumatic to her and her three friends that none of them ever spoke about it after it happened. They simply turned their car around and came home.
It was about 1959 and we were living in Farmington, New Mexico. My older teenage sister and her friends had been quietly invited to a beer party at Jackson Lake, just off the La Plata Highway. Jackson Lake is said to be an inverted volcano with a natural spring that fills up the small lake. I’ve heard people say that if you swim or row out to the middle, the water is warmer—as if it is being fed from an underwater hot springs. The trees here are sparse and the scrub brush rarely grows over four to five feet in height. No modern lighting facilities are around, except for the occasional dim lights of a distant house or farm. At least that is how it was in the 1950s.
My sister said she and her friends were trying to find the dirt road turn off in the dark and got lost on another dirt road. As the car turned around a bend in the road, the headlights hit a scrub brush and something behind the bush suddenly stood up—quickly showing it’s height to be seven or eight feet tall. My sister said it had intelligent glowing eyes and a dog’s snout instead of a nose. It had long dangling (and very hairy) arms and hands. Strangely, she said it was wearing a man’s jacket, but the sleeves rode high up on the unproportionally long arms. It was also wearing a loosened tie around its furry neck. The jacket and tie were obviously several sizes too small for its massive body.
The creature seemed to exude an unspoken warning to them about getting out of his area, and the girls willingly obeyed. Only one of the girls said, “What is that?” They all remained silent as they turned and quickly got off the dark back road, drove onto the La Plata Highway and went directly back home to Farmington. Their previous giddy party plans for the beer bust now seemed very unimportant.
A young Michael Landon had just starred in “I was a Teenage Werewolf,” and Vampira was burning up the TV screens as the sexy hostess to scary movies in California. She was also kept busy as an actress by Ed Wood in some of his classically bad films. Vampira (actress Maila Nurmi) developed the original character that Elvira (actress Cassandra Peterson) later copied and improved upon. The atmosphere during the 1950s was set for a scream factor (fear release) and amusement at scary things, rather than investigation. It was highly unlikely that anyone would have believed my sister and her friends at that time but they never even tried to tell anyone about it. I think they were shaken to the bone and they all buried it deep inside, hoping never to see anything like it again.
For the last fifty years, I have also occasionally heard stories of large creatures that people see through their windows at night in small out-of-the-way farms and rural communities. They claim to see huge walking beings silently moving about, with strange animal faces and long hairy arms.
I have tried to think of what these things might have been. In the 1950s some of us in New Mexico had heard of the Abominable Snowman or a Yeti in Asia, but few of us had heard of Bigfoot. Could it have been a type of Sasquatch that my sister saw?
I went back to Farmington for a year in 1969 and I began to hear stories of Night Crawlers from the locals. The story was that sick or unwanted babies were sometimes deserted in the vast empty spaces of the desert southwest. The babies had been expected to die. Coyotes, dogs, and maybe wolves took them to suckle and they developed into feral children and then into reclusive animal-like adults who existed by hiding themselves well during the daytime. They survived by scavenging food from trashcans and dumpsters or through primitive hunting techniques. They also may have raided old clothes, blankets, and other materials to wear for warmth from garbage and dumpsters. Rome was said to have been founded by Romulus and Remus; who were both feral children, raised by a she-wolf. Can feral humans be more than a myth?
I have often thought Bigfoot and other strangely shaped creatures have been abandoned or lost children who became feral. They would easily become naturally suspicious of humans and develop excellent hiding and survival skills. Perhaps at one time there were so many of them, they could have formed groups or hidden communities.
Maybe nature adapts feral individuals into larger and hairier creatures to live more comfortably in the elements. It only takes a few months for a cute little pink farm pig to turn into a wild, large, hairy, aggressive boar with tusks—if allowed to escape into a wild setting.
If Bigfoot really exists, maybe we aren’t giving it enough credit for intelligence. Because it usually smells bad and looks animalistic, we automatically discredit its intelligence. If feral children are not found before the age of seven or so, they usually have a very difficult time developing language skills, social interaction, or human characteristics. They continue to move like animals, sniff at everything, walk on all fours, growl, etc.
Another possibility for the werewolf illusion might be a sighting of an American Indian who embarks on a type of “Vision Quest” in which they believe they become a particular animal. Sometimes the seeker will dress in elaborate attire and alienate other humans while searching for enlightenment. The animal may be a totem or a form by which they find answers to their questions, develop greater physical strengths, or skills. Although this is usually done in a spiritual form, some people claim to see the strange creatures incurred by these seekers.
I have thought the heads of odd night creatures were simply elaborate native headdresses, made with animal heads, fur, fangs, etc. Constructing large ones would certainly add to the height of their frame and probably be much more intimidating.
When I asked my sister about this possibility and if her sighting could have been part of a headdress, she said “No.” I could tell she reluctantly thought back on it and said, “I saw the mouth move when it growled and showed its fangs. The eyes blinked once or twice—and it had that long snout—like on a dog. And, its nose was wet.”
I suppose I will never know how to exactly identify what my sister saw, but I thought this was an interesting experience. Unreal creatures may be living close by us, but I don’t think I have ever heard of one purposely hurting someone. These beings may act in threatening ways in order to protect themselves, their hidden young, or their territory. The feeling of terror that humans experience while watching these creatures could be a naturally developed form of fear “pheromone” emitted by the creature. The unexplained creatures could just be scared and frightened of us also.
I think we just have to respect that and cut them a wide path—if indeed you should ever come across something—unexplainable.
—Raven DeVille
