Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowYou've heard of bigfoot -- but what about the frogman? Or the grassman? In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel dive into the strange cryptozoology of Ohio.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission Control decand most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Tonight's episode is one for the cryptid fans. We're diving into some stories that might be unfamiliar to a lot of our fellow conspiracy realist outside of Ohio. You've heard of Bigfoot, you've heard of NeSSI and so on, But what about the frog Man. We hadn't heard of this until you. Noel sent along a link in a group chat.
I can't remember how I even stumbled upon it. It was just, you know, and just your typical day of googling like we do for the various things that we're looking into, and rabbit holing and yeah, the Frogman. No, I know what it was. It was a podcast that I really like called Range Touch. It's these two you'd like this one Toobin. They do a couple of different podcasts. It's sort of like a mini network. One of them is called Just King Things, where they go through every Stephen King book in order of publication, and then another one is about the webcomic Homestuck, which is like this whole weirdo bizarro, you know world that's kind of sort of Stephen King inspired. But another one is just their more regular flagship podcast, Range Touch. And they were talking about tabletop gaming and it came up some game they were reviewing that was of like a bunch of different cryptids, like a card game, and they were describing the drawings and all of the different illustrations, and the Frogman, the Loveland Frog or the Frogman of Ohio came up, and I was like, I don't think we've discussed the Loveland Frog, and he's such a cute little fella, and Ben, this led you down more of a larger big picture cryptids of Ohio rabbit hole, but we'll get to the frog.
We will indeed get to the frog. There's a bit of lovecraft in here. It's pretty cool. I've heard about Bigfoot, but what about the grassman? What about the dog man? It turns out Ohio has a ton of cryptids. Legal requires us to say allegedly has a ton of cryptids. Here are the facts.
You may not know much about Ohio. Yeah, if you don't live in the US. Oh but it's a big deal. Ohio's awesome. I got a ton of family up there. That's why it's a big deal. That's all you need to know. Done, end of episode.
It might be considered part of the country that sometimes flies under the radar. You know, You've got your Cleveland, which rocks, you know, and of course is home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But outside that, there's not a whole lot of Ohio that really makes the news on the regular.
Akron, Ohio's the best.
The natty Cincinnati.
Yeah, people forget about. Since a hip hop group, underground hip hop group I like, is from Ohio, there's there's quite a bit of good hip hop in Ohio. It's also the seventh most populous state in the entirety of the US. The population is nearing eleven point eight million, even with all the brain drain that happens in as you called them earlier, the so called flyover states. And here's a dumb fact if you want to if you want to be awkward at parties, if you consider yourself an amateur vexillologist, a word we never get to use. Ohio is the only state in the Union with a non rectangular flag, So good luck on your trivia.
Is it just more squarish? Is it tropezoid? Arambas?
It's a circle?
Man, They really get some trippy stuff going over there.
Now.
I did not know this, Ben, and I also was.
Literally about to ask you what vexillologist was, and then you got to it in short order. But wow, I thought, is it like not the rules that you have to have a perfectly rectangular flag, that all flags have to just it's one of those things that I think people just typically just do out of decorum and a sense of just like this is how it's always been done, that you take for granted the fact that maybe you don't have.
To m uniformity.
Right.
Uh, it looks it's very strange because I'm not sure of the name for it. It's a triangular with a tail.
Like a bird.
It's like one of those baseball flags like pant not pendant.
Yes, thank you, that's exactly what it looks.
Like it's like a pennant with the with the abbreviated or attenuated edge cut out. There's a triangle shape, so it's like it's like a tail feather for a bird. Anyway, you are going to be amazing at a trivia game later sometime in your life, and we wish you the best.
Like a study of flags or of shapes flags?
Okay, yes, sorry, study of flags? I would geometry be the study of shapes.
I don't know. That's fine.
It's certainly the science of shapes, which is not necessarily the same as just like the study and cataloging of them.
So I'm a bit of a shapesman myself. Yeah, well we could just say we're shapes shapes folk anyway. Also unrelated, apparently the new word to hate in the English language is the word folks. People don't like folks anymore. It's it's now fast approaching the level of disapproval that people used to hold for moist.
Whether I think it's too folksy, I don't know.
Maybe disingenuous, insincere, yeah, disingenuous, But I always I think the way we use it is fine. We're certainly not politicians trying to pretend like or not from Connecticut anyway.
I can see that when a politician uses it, they usually are using it in such a way as to make them seem like the common man.
Listen here, folks, we're all on the same page, you know, right.
I mean, we all can read, we can all agree that faberge egg depreciation is one of the prime issues of our great nations, part of them for all of us.
Hmm.
Yeah, Like any other state in the US, for thousands and thousands of years, there were tremendously sophisticated, entrenched native populations that lived there and created empires all their own. The earliest records of human habitation in Ohio date back at least thirteen thousand years, and if we were betting on the odds here, I would say probably further than that.
That's right.
It actually dates back much further to the Edena culture, who domesticated plants there somewhere around one thousand and eight hundred BC.
This group was also responsible for.
Building something with an incredibly cool and metal name, the Great Serpent Mound. And as the Adena people evolved into they really took this mound thing and ran with it.
They became was.
Referred to historically as the Hope Well Mound builders. Modern day Ohio became home to a lot of these kind of earthen constructs.
And you know, like we said, we don't know how far back human presence in Ohio goes or modern day Ohio.
What we call Ohio today.
We know that the Adena culture came out of this rich soil of pre existing communities, and they did a lot of stuff that the early US ignored. These earth works are I mean, look, folks, we are in the US South and I would hazard a guess that Matt Nole and Paul Mission Control and I have all seen some Native American mounds in person.
Is that correct?
No, you're wrong, never seen the mounds.
They have seen them and not known you know that that's what they were, because there's certainly you know, this just really doesn't Like you said, Ben, and your research, you found the description for earthworks as being sort of an overarching term for any man made earthly, you know, change in elevation. It doesn't necessarily have to be for artistic purposes, right, I mean it can be kind of functional as well, right.
Mm hmm. Yeah.
It could be a dwelling, it could be often they are sites of veneration, you know, and in some cases they are like we did episodes earlier on Mound, on mounds that were the foundations for these greats cities.
You know, if you.
Are a fan of Bethesda the game company, if you have played Skyrim, then mounds you have entered earthworks when you fight Drager, that's what they're called, right, Yeah.
To lizard people. Right, for the lizard.
People, they're the they're the dead, the Viking zombies, that's right.
Okay, Sorry, I'm thinking of a different class. It's been a minute since I played that game.
Sorry, mat were you saying, oh, nothing, They're they're places to bury the dead. That's what those tombs are, basically, they're going into Some of the mounds were used as tombs, right, some of them were not, which is a fascinating thing. And the whole reason we're talking about this about the ancient history of Ohio is because there are stories that have that have existed, that have moved down by mouth orally through years and years and years and years centuries, and uh, that's why we're talking about this stuff today because there is weird stuff that's happened in Ohio.
Matt, I have to say I love the concept of carrying stories by mouth.
It just pictures. I picture a bunch of people with their mouths closed full of stories and then just regurgitating them all at once.
You know, Oh, it's a really cool image.
And since the days of antiquity, what you need to know is the human beings have been convinced the land we call Ohio is home to strange and unusual things. Is there any truth to these legends? Let's take a look. Here's where it gets crazy.
All right again.
Turns out Ohio, depending on whom you ask, is home to many, many anomalous life forms, including one special returning guest. No spoilers, but one hint. It's decrypted with a great butt, serious abs, lots of cheeks. And before we get to that returning guest, let's talk about the star of today's show, the so called Frogman of Ohio.
But before we even.
Get into this, I just want to point out too that the term frogman is one that holds a lot of meaning in like spy culture too.
We've talked about this in terms of.
Like sort of divers that are you know, spies or associated with some sort of nefarious, clandestine activity, often wearing these green kind of flippered suits and goggles, and you see them in like Johnny Quest.
I think they appear in an episode of Johnny Quest.
But just the idea of being a frogman was referring to someone who was like a kind of a secret agent diver type.
Right.
Oh, yes, it's kind of a terrifying concept, right, a frog man. But this frogman, at least from the stories that we have seen, and allegedly there are three main stories of the Frogman or sightings. I guess let's say that we're going to get into here, but it's not really. It doesn't appear to be dangerous, right.
It's passive. Yeah, it's passive creature. It's kind of like when you see back when turtles were way more common. It's like if you walk past the turtle, if it's not a leather back, if it's not a snapping turtle or something, you're totally fine.
This the Frogman.
In most stories, people run in, humans run into the Frogman, and the Frogman is I kid, you not just vibing, just hanging out doing frogman stuff, probably waiting to play an extra in a hell Boy movie or graphic novel or you know, show up in a Lovecraft adaptation for.
Though, like hiding under a bridge, or just chilling.
But not demanding a toll of any kind, just sort of hanging out and it's just people watching.
You know, Frank Reynolds is probably more aggressive to the average human than the average frogman.
No question.
Little fella too, right, Yeah, if you look at the geography, you made a great point when you say it's by a bridge. This has this cryptid has been cited in very very specific geographical areas, and only later did it expand. It's also a pretty new legend. The first sighting, or the first one that's universally reported, occurs in the marshes near Loveland, Ohio, along the banks of something called the Little Miami River. To set the stage, there's this place called Hamilton County and Hamilton County as a place called Lake Isabella in Loveland, and Lake Isabella is part of a big, big park where people go to camp to go fishing, to get on their boats and have a nice boat weekend. One day back in well, one night back in nineteen fifty five, an unnamed traveling salesman happens by and he's going by this bridge and he sees three disturbing creatures just again sort of hanging out by the side of the road under a bridge, and many other stories, and he says, hang on way a tick. Why these guys are short and they're all hunched over. They're three to four feet tall, and they're naked. They have leathery skin, and I've seen frogs before. These things are like part human, part frog. They've apparently he had enough time. He's either a really great eyewitness or he slowed down and stared at them for a while, because he said they have webbed hands and feet and deep, deep wrinkles on their heads.
I mean, presumably a whole people, these frog people more than frog man. I mean, I'm picturing like a Smurfs type scenario or they you know, there's like a ring leader and then they each have their own individual personalities and perhaps nicknames.
But yeah, little fellas.
Three to four feet tall, like you said, Bend, just sort of hanging out doing froggy stuff. He described them as standing upright, being bipedal, having you know, the hea and face of frogs, at least in terms of the shape. And he also described like he said web feet and completely hairless.
And also, I mean he says.
Naked, which I think is interesting because you know, frogs don't really have visible like butts or genitalia. Well frog all they do have butts, but not genitalia, so the idea of them being naked is sort of funny. But yeah, they're sitting on around and under this bridge, according to our conspicuously nameless traveling salesman.
Well, we should point out that that story is a little different depending on where you find it, right, Sometimes they're underbridge, sometimes they're on the side of the road. Sometimes you know, just it depends on where you read the story.
Yeah, sometimes they're in the middle of a game a cornhole. It's just nuts.
Because I heard that one.
It's folks, Well, we just made it. That's the beauty of folklore gathering. Say, yeah, this wouldn't like any good cryptid origin story is light on specifics. Like you said, Matt, we do not know the identity of this apocryphal salesman. We don't know the names of specific roads or bridges for this story, but we do know the local lore argues this guy was in the vicinity of a community called Branch Hill. Branch Hill. If you look on you know, Google maps or your favorite orwellian surveillance service of choice, you'll see that it is on the southern side of Loveland and for a very long time in the modern day as well. The side roads in that area, you know, like your little two lanes and so on, they're not very well lit. So it's completely possible that the guy saw something. Maybe he even saw three odd looking but very human people and misidentified them. But this the weird thing about the story is this cylical nature. So it happens nineteen fifty five, right, or that's when. That's the providence of the stories. It's always reported and it becomes kind of local campfire lore, you know. Boy Scout groups tell each other this. Youth groups tell each other this when they're camping or when they're at their summer camp. Until nineteen seventy two, when things get real.
Yeah, you know, I felt it was inevitable before one of these was going to get smashed by a car or you know, shot by a hunter. I also picture them riding unicycles for some reason. I don't know the oh what up? That's the one that's the reasoning. Casey Pegwin's favorite yeah, oh yeah, it's a good one. Nineteen seventy two, a Loveland police officer enters the chat Mark Matthews shot and killed some sort of creature of unknown origin. It appeared to resemble something along the lines of a humanoid frog, and WCPO Cincinnati summarize the story. Vusly Matthews explained that the first officer to encounter the purported frog man, Ray Shaki, called him one night in March of nineteen seventy two after spotting something strange on Riverside Drive and Kemper Road near the Tote's boot factory.
And the Little Miami River. And then he's quoted as saying, naturally, I didn't believe him, but I could somehow tell from his demeanor that he did see something.
Right.
These guys know each other, they've worked together for a while, and so they can tell when something is off. They can tell when something anomalous has occurred to one or the other. So it's worth going into check it out in person or clocket. In this case, when Matthews hears this report, he doesn't immediately go to the sea. They have other stuff to do.
You know.
This is also way before X files, so he did what He didn't have a Fox Mulder archetype to play with, but he was probably familiar with the Twilight Zone. Later this month, he's driving in the same area. He's near Tote's boot factory, and he sees something skitter across the road. I shouldn't say skiter, skidder's a little bit fast and a little bit lighter. He sees something booking it across the road. In his case, it's not walking upright, and it didn't climb over the guardrail. That's the urban legend of the frogman. The frogman usually runs away and hops hops the rail back to more amphibian friendly territory. This creature crawled under the guard rail, and Matthews is probably thinking you he's got a very stressful job. He's probably thinking, I have no idea what this is, and so this is a true story. So he thinks, I'm gonna sound crazy if I tell people I saw this strange thing. I need evidence, which is one thing that always Bedevil's cryptozoology in general. So his quote at WCPO Channel nine Cincinnati is I know no one would believe me, so I shot it, and he shot it successfully. He got the body he put it in the trunk of his car.
Bagged and tagged. It.
Isn't that so American?
Though?
It's like, I don't know what it is. I don't understand it, so I'm gonna shoot it.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's not as likely it came at him or anything, or it was any imminent threat.
It was just fear of the unknown equals let's murder the thing.
Yeah yeah, Well, should we talk more about this story, guys, or do we want to move on to the third the third one that was like the primary.
I think it's important to point out that he did bring this body to his colleague Shaki, who had seen who said, who confirmed? Yes, this is the creature I saw, and it's a physical body, the holy grail of cryptos, right, second only to a living specimen. And now that we put that down, let's pause there.
Matt.
I think you're right. The first part of the story is something here reported pretty often. But as you set up so beautifully, there are there's one other story that's much more recent that people point to when they talk about Frogman. This story, an encounter with not one but two working law enforcement officials, is often touted as the most compelling circumstantial evidence for something like the frogman. However, that may not be the entirety of the story. If you read this in paranormal blogs, if you read this in your favorite coffee table compendiums of strange events, you might not have heard the second half. And we'll tell you about that after a word from our sponsors.
All right, and we're back. So let's talk about that body. That that holy grail of a thing that was in the trunk of the officer's car. It was a huge, four foot tall frogman.
It was definitely it was definitely not human. The second part of officer Matthew's story is that he discovered a large iguana and a big boy too, a real chonker, about three to three and a half feet long. And he said he recognized it once he had shot it. Once he had the body was looking at it in his trunk. But this iguana had had a real crap life before it got shot by a cop. It was missing its tail, because if you're familiar with iguana, one of the things they do as a defense mechanism is they'll shed their tail, right, So something had scared this poor creature or frightened it. He said, it was half dead when he saw it anyway. And then we've got another couple of quotes we pulled from the w CPO interview.
Matthew said he figured the iguana had been someone's pet and then either got loose or was released when it grew too large. He also theorized that the cold blooded animal had been living near the pipes there released water that was used for cooling the ovens in the boot factory as a way to stay warm in the cold marked weather. This is smart, I mean, that's just that level of like specificity about sort of the perfect conditions for such a creature to survive, right.
Mm hmmm, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. But here's the thing. Both officers knew it was an iguana. But this is not how stories go. When you're telling a story. Depending on who's writing it down or listening, or you know, whatever, that person's lens looks like it might change the story that you're telling them, right, Because these officers ended up recounting this story to somebody and then it got a little altered.
Or cut full time, right like how a television channel will cut a film to remove things that it deems inappropriate. In this case, the paranormal authors clearly decided that they wanted to keep it in the realm of speculation. It's kind of like, you know what they did. It's kind of like if you were to if you were to be in charge of cutting a movie and you said, we're going to cut out the part of the movie where the murder is solved.
Hmm, that'd be a bummer eternal cliffhanger.
I mean, I think what a lot of these stories have in common too, is just like a thing that is out of place, right that people are not expecting to see, usually under shadowy literally dark circumstances that allows the imagination to kind of run wild. I mean, certainly this account differs from our traveling salesman who saw practically a group of tiny frog people having a tea party. But I just wanted to mention I found out about a neat story when I was in Philadelphia this past week. I went to an Asian kind of outdoor street fair kind of thing in a park at FDR Park, and a friend of mine told me that recently a exotic lizard called a kimen or a cayman had they found living in this lake.
A creature that you know, could easily.
Be confused for an alligator, and there had been like these kind of urban legends of like an alligator living in this area. But it turns out that it was like something pet, perhaps an exotic lizard that somebody abandoned there. And this is very similar, you know, and without information and with something that's unfamiliar, it can really cause people to kind of just have their imaginations run wild when you start spreading in before you know what, you got frog people having tea parties.
Great exotic animals are a huge, huge factor in misidentification of things that later become touted as cryptid cases. But for all the true believers out there, you may be it may buoy your hopes to learn that misidentification of non native animals cannot explain one hundred percent of the sightings. Matthews gets kind of burned for this, you know, he felt betrayed, obviously by an author. He says, this was all a big hoax. The way people handled the story probably for book sales, that's the implication. He no longer does interviews, and he moved to Florida eventually, where people still try to contact him. For many years about this, because keep in mind's nineteen seventy two, right, and the issue is the story is so good that people redd it the way we treat all folklore. He said, let's not let facts get in the way of a good story. And the local community has embraced frogmen to a degree. Also sighting still to my earlier point about cycles, sightings still pop up. In twenty sixteen, there was a couple playing Pokemon Go, a game I will never trust, and they were in the area Loveland Madeira Road and Lake Isabella And while they were playing Pokemon Go, Sam Jacobs and his girlfriend spot something they think is Frogman. At this point, it's twenty sixteen, so are they not primed to think of frogmen when they see something unusual in this area? There also props to Sam. Sam is adamant that this was not something on the Pokemon Go screen. He said, it's a real thing, not something he was trying to collect.
I know the difference between a cartoon and an ar game and a real thing.
Yeah, yeah, there are you talking about priming. There's stories of Frogman. You're playing a game that features creatures that are based on you know, creatures we know of that are altered. Its a lot of coincidence there. But we do have a quote from Sam Jacobs. Just read it for you here quote. We saw a huge frog near the water. Not in the game Pokemon Go. This was an actual giant frog. I took a couple of pictures in a video because I've never seen one that big. Then the thing stood up and walked on its hind legs.
And he continues, this is, by the way, credit whords do this is from Fox nineteen. Now they broke the story in twenty sixteen. But I love like he is exercising objectivity here when he says, I swear on my grandmother's grave that this is the truth. I'm not sure whether it was a frog man or just a you know, a giant frog.
Either way, I've.
Never seen anything like it. So Sam is being as objective as possible. And you guys had a chance to look at the at least a still photo of this, right, Yeah.
It looks like a big ass hoax to me. Yep, with the with the eyes and somebody in a suit. Come on, the eyes are clearly they're not reflective or you know, they're lights.
Yeah, agreed, it is diplomatically put not conclusive proof of the existence.
Of a humanoid frog.
However, just like countless other communities that enjoy and celebrate their local legends, Frogman is super popular in Ohio. There was a musical about the creature called Hot Damn It's the Loveland Frog, which references again one of my favorite memes. It's that boy what up?
Uh this?
Or here comes that?
Here he's rolling.
It's that boy, yeah up, And he'd be rolling down the street.
He'd be rolling to the beat. That's all I remember. I just know he rolling.
Yeah, it's very important. It's part of modern American literature. So I just want to give a shout out to the fantastic Fringe festival, which occurs around the world. The Frogman musical, Hot Damn It's Loveland Frog was performed in twenty fourteen at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival, and Cincinnati loves the Frogman to this day.
Right.
Yeah, this year there was a Frogman Festival just outside of Cincinnati, and it was put on in March of this year, and I just we ended up speaking to two of the guys, the two guys that organize the thing, and both of them are just fascinated by it. But the cool thing is that there there are so many people in Ohio that just want to talk cryptids and want to I mean, because there's so many. We're just scratching the surface here with Frogman. And Frogman is cool because of its specific and it's you know, it's unique to this area. But there are so many stories about weird things going on out there.
But fellas, what if we had another type of man, you know, not not a frog variety, but some other one with a similar ring.
Like a lizard, like a lid man.
No, no, no, no, something a little more hairy, perhaps a little furry, you know, perhaps the man of man's best friend.
Oohoo, dog Man.
Yeah, the dog Man, which is kind of a cryptid franchise. The dog Man of Ohio first comes to local attention in nineteen seventy two. For those of us playing along at home, you'll see the early seventies, seventy two in particular, big year for cryptids in Ohio. According to the true believers, this is kind of like a werewolf.
Yeah, werewolf since for sure.
Yeah, that's a way to put it. Canine like humanoid nocturnal stands upright, So it's bipedal, and it is much more agro than either Frank Reynolds or the Frogman. Also, I just realized in the lore of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Frank Reynolds deals with the ongoing trauma of being called a frog boy, right or Donkey Brain his friend Froggy White spoilers.
Not to mention the day Man and the night Man other varieties of men. But I love this detail you found about the dog Man. Like you mentioned, it'd be more.
Agro, but the idea that it's agro.
Comes in the form of brandishing pointed sticks, you know, or rough hewn weapons.
I guess, mmmm, yeah, yeah. The stick is the most popular story. And I guess if we look at it from just a as objective as possible without debunking things immediately. If we look at it from that way, then it proves that this creature is not just by but possessing of at least on its fore limbs. It has something like a thumb digits that allow it to grasp, which dogs do not, you know, so the dogs that I have met do not.
But it's a big world.
So the dog Man is not as popular as a bigfoot, but the legend does live on and this is where we want to shout out another thing to Matt's point about the tremendous interest in anomalous organisms throughout Ohio, there are a lot of Ohio residents who are part of the North American dog Man Project or nad PUT.
That's pretty awesome. Yeah, and they're really cool bragtag group of characters. A lot of them are, you know, ex police officers, people who are just down to like take care of some dogmen. And if you've got a dog man sighting, they're going to come out there and they will help you, I guess capture footage or an actual dog man.
Like David Bikera, whom we interviewed a number of years ago and continues to run Expedition Bigfoot here in Georgia. Their team is available twenty four to seven all year round. Just reach out. They would love your reports of sightings. They're kind of like a moof on for dog man specifically. And also found a Google map overlay that shows a ton of alleged or suspected dog man sightings throughout the North American continent and down into bit of Central America as well. It's worth checking out if you're interested. It's also a little more popular now than an older cryptid that is in Ohio, in Delaware ranging up to Massachusetts. The puck Wedgie, which is unfortunately not a name for girl Scout Cookie because it sounds very much like the name for a girl Scout cookie.
Just immediately condras images of a squat, little duck like creature. I don't know why, And I know we've talked about the puckwudgie before. Was that no, you know what it was? It wasn't it our our metaverse thing? Did we talk about the puck Wedgie in the in the game for certain? For Sutain, Yeah, that's what it was.
Do Yeah, these things are weird. These things are weird, Ben, I've seen them describe a couple of different ways. But how would you describe a puckwodgee.
Having not knowingly seen one myself. The tricky thing about these this is common a lot of Native American folklore as well, is that they are shape shifters. I want to give a shout out to author Teresa Bain in her work Encyclopedia of Fairies in World Folklore Mythology. Definitely definite must read if you're a fan of folklore. She notes the puck wedgie is a two to three foot tall goblet, your Grimlin esque thing. It's a shape shifter, but it often assumes the form of sort of a human porcupine, a porcu man.
That's pretty awesome puck watching.
See.
They seem to sort of possess siren like qualities, you know, and and their ability to sort of lure people to their death. But also occasionally I ascribe the ability to whether it's organic or through some weapons I guess, launch poisonous arrows mm hmm charts.
Yeah, porcupines also can't launch their quills.
What that's a myth again. I'm playing Diablo for right now, guys, and there are definitely puckwodgy like creatures in there that shoot their spiky spikes at people. Okay, And Diablo four is just, you know, kind of take that as fact.
It's the paragon of reality.
It's basically this generation's Oxford English Dictionary.
Last Day, have you guys seen you know, obvious.
So there's all this air quality issues in New York because of the wildfires in Canada, and it's been making around. Somebody posting a billboard that says welcome to Hell New York and is the Diablo.
Image in the background.
It just looks like a nightmarish hellscape horizon.
Yep, yeah, I saw that one as well, and at first I didn't get it. But boy, good luck to everyone in New York in Canada, most particularly in Norway, where the fires consequences are also reaching across the Atlantic. What would the puck wedgie make of this? Well, the puck Dodgie probably wouldn't care too much because, as so often happens in these ancient stories of running into near human creatures, once upon a time, relationships between the humans and the puck wedgies were pretty dope until humans did some sort of trans and the puck wodgie soured on them. So if you meet a puckwodge in the wild, it's probably not gonna help you. There aren't a ton of these sightings in the modern day, but you'll find no shortage of amateur archaeologist or cryptozoologist or authors claiming to have encountered them numerous times. Again, the tricky thing is, this is an entity that can change its shape. So therefore, if we're playing the thought experiment, it's completely possible if you are listening to Tonight's show around other people, the things sitting next to you appearing to be a person is in fact a puck dodgie.
Be cool, Be cool.
Shape shifters are neat but like really untrustworthy, you know what I mean?
Come on, just be yourself.
And the thing is, this is something we've talked about in the past, with Austerrolopithecus and with the legends of wild Harry Hamani's that are around in almost every culture on every continent except Antarctica. It's the theory that fascinates, at least me so much. I want to speak for everyone. What if these stories somehow date back to actual encounters with early Homo sapiens and early relatives of Homo sapiens. The geography here might appear super wrong, right, because most of those reliced populations of mixtapes or relatives of Homo sapiens, they were in the African continent, the Middle East, parts of Europe, and Central Asia. But I don't know, did you guys see the news about the new stuff discovered just recently Homo nalati. They're called Nalletti.
It's pretty awesome, isn't It's just like one of the oldest versions of a pre Homo sapien population that was creating art. Is it art or what were they?
Yeah, they were purposely carving symbols, so purposely carving with meaning one hundred thousand years before what we call humans even picked up the brush or the you know, crush the bugs to make the de So the point is we are learning as a society more and more about the ancient past, and DNA research already kind of proves that there are a couple of other relatives of Homo sapiens have yet to be discovered. So maybe that's part of the explanation for the puck wedgie. But if we're talking about these weird primates, excuse me, I don't want to denigrate them. If we're talking about these near human, non human primates, then of course we have to intro another one. Ohio, you see, has its own version of Bigfoot. It's not the dog man, it's not the frog man. It's the Grassman. We'll pause for a word from our sponsors, and then let's go into the deep grass and see what we find.
And we're back. So grassman, is it like a pucklodgee? Is it a grass that walks around.
That would be so cool.
A walking marijuana plant, or like a he who walks behind the rose kind of children in the Corn things. I always loved the mythology of the Children of the Corn. I found it genuinely chilling and listened to the audiobook of the story recently. But that's one of those ones that the franchise just kept on franchising when it should have stopped long ago.
They spent a lot of time the sketching out the character Malachi. But you know, short stories make for great adaptations.
I really I love that one.
I love the lore of sort of a weekly godlike entity, which is a way you could describe something like Cutulhu, you know, Cthulhu. Excuse me, so, the Ohio Grassman aka the Minerva Monster is sort of a one to one description of bigfoot lore with a few key differences.
Yeah, what I've heard is that it's got longer hair, and it smells worse. Yeah, it smells worse, and it was found in grass. So rather than seeing but bigfoot in the woods, which is highly common, or things that would be described as bigfoot, the landscape has changed. That's one of the main things that Jeff One of the guys I spoke to who who did the frogman festival. He said, it's really just a landscape thing, and the longer hair is the only, really the only discerning factor between this grassman and Bigfoot sightings.
And interesting in comparison to another possible subspecies of Bigfoot, the skunk ape. The grass the grassman doesn't smell as bad as the skunk ape, but the skunk ape or swamp ape has adapted to its environment.
Also, well, once again, I'm gonna bring up the walking marijuana plant thing.
I mean skunk people refer to.
That's a that's a term that gets thrown around a lot for weed that smells really.
Strong, you know, the grass man. Sorry, I yield my time.
I think these are all just hippies and ponchos. They're smoking a lot of weed hiding out either in grass or in the woods.
Gilly suits, maybe a good gilly suit would one hundred percent make you look like look like something is some kind of cryptis similar to this.
Also one of those like Luau type grass like a like a suit version of a grass skirt kind of it's a specific type of camo. Got it looks really yeah, yeah, picturing it, yep, picturing it, so you see it in fiction.
Hopefully you never see them in real life, folks, But in fiction, in in action movies, you'll see snipers wearing gilly suits so that they can lay around for hours until they need to get that shot one hundred yards away or something. But also, how about cannabis chimp. We'll see if that works out. A chimp would be a little too short for this, but still, this is almost like this goes back to Native tribe, native community folklore about wild, hairy, humanlike creatures dwelling deep in the wild. It wasn't until the eighteen hundreds that reports of sightings began to get more attention from the United States at large. Okay, I think we should pause for a second here to say we know, especially for our fellow conspiracy realists who consider themselves a bit more skeptical, we know that this might all sound silly, but you have to remember we were able to trace down the origins of a couple of other things that were treated like myths. I'm thinking particularly Matt Noll of the se Ka remember that one.
Oh yeah, another another reason to redheads get a bad rap.
Yeah, we have a whole episode on that.
Right, mm hmmm, yeah, we're in that episode. We were able to trace back through the folklore to some archaeological discoveries that appear to confirm not all the rumors about Sea Techa in the legends, but we're able to confirm there was a population that is more than likely the origin of those legends, and they were regular people.
Yeah, and speaking back to like folklore, often in fairy tales and horror science fiction fantasy, giants are often depicted as being cannibalistic. I mean, you think about Jack and the Beanstalk. That giant is going to grind your bones to make his bread. You know, that is part of the legend of the sea see five fo FuMB Indeed.
Yeah, there's another version of Grassman and these types, a bigfoot called the wild Man of enon enon Enan, I think is how you'd say it. And it's in Ohio. It's a very similar on longer hair does kind of the same thing, lives in the same places, but it's only an Enan, and I think the specificity of it is what makes it feel special, especially to a small town.
Like that, and also the idea for lasting with the Grassman. The idea of creating nest or habitations in tall grass is quite similar to the sleeping patterns of gorillas, which also create nest right lowland gorillas in particular, I'm thinking of. We know that the answers to these things, the origins for these things are out there somewhere. We just can't assume the answers are one hundred percent what we expect. There is a returning guest here for everybody who was treating this like a trivia gabe. Who is the cryptid with the best butt around? Who is the cryptid with abs for days? You know them, you love them? He is Mothman. Yeah, And according to true believers, Mothman took some time and traveled to Ohio.
Boy that he ever cometh, he's got like a nine pack man. Seriously serious business in that region.
Well, it's really interesting to me, like talking about Ohio and Mothman, because the primary thing, right, the event that started the whole Mothman sightings was the collapse of the Silver Bridge, right and which which is a bridge that crosses the Ohio River. So it goes from Point Pleasant, West Virginia into this small town in Ohio. So I guess if you if the bridge is the primary place of the event, then it makes sense that both I guess sides of the river would have sightings if there really was something going around there. And there are a ton of sightings on the Ohio side. There's even because of that bridge collapse. The names of the people who died in that horrible accident are on the Ohio.
Side, right.
Yeah, And this is something that you can you can see in action the next time you're in that part of the world. Now, will people universally say, yes, I believe wholeheartedly a mothman? No, almost certainly not. But will they all be familiar with it? Yes, And it's always worth the time if you can to get out in the field and check out that stuff firsthand. We'd love to hear if you have some insight a mothman or any of these cryptids. And as we said at the top, we are not getting to all of the very fertile cryptid soil here in Ohio, so we want to hear your experiences. Shout out to Bessie, shout out to any other number of urban legends and local folklore. We didn't get to with any cryptid episode. We want to end by pulling together a few incredibly important threads actually finding these organisms. Yes, okay, it's true that cryptozoology is not highly regarded in the world of academia. That's not us, that's just how other scientists treat this pursuit. And it's true that we often look at folklore being confused for hard science, you know, as we ask all the time, where the bones, where's the feces? How do they interact with other creatures in a given biome? But the cool slash terrifying part. It's also true that now, more than any other point in human history, we are as a civilization, are best positioned to discover new species if we act now TikTok.
And yet one thing that I think we all run up against with these things is why isn't there more evidence?
You know?
Why are these stories always so tenuous and vague and come from multiple reports that all kind of di it. It always seems more like a historical game of telephone than actual species that are undiscovered. But I'm I'd love to see, I'd love to find out about more.
Because that's kind of what it is, right, I mean, they're just stories. That's why it's so fascinating and you can't prove it, so you hope to prove it. I think that's why people are so into going to these conferences. Why there are things like the North Georgia Bigfoot Conference that exists. I mean, that's just why.
Or Monsterfest in Ohio, and TV producers of course love a search for Bigfoot because it's guaranteed to go on for seasons. I want to go back to earlier point as attempting to make the human populations everywhere. Surveillance technology is growing ubiquitous. If something has not been discovered yet, it is more likely now to be discovered, and this moment will pass. It is a brief moment. We are coming to you amid Earth six mass extinction. If you are a cryptid hunter, now is your time. Get out there, find what you can, and please, please please tell us about it again. Shout out to Monsterfest in Ohio and shout out to North American dog Man Project. Shout out to you. We can't wait to hear what you think about this. Are their cryptids out there? On previous shows, we've said they're most likely to be discovered in the depths of the ocean at this point, maybe some relic populations in very very small corners of remaining wilderness. But what's going on in your local neck of the woods when you walk into your local restaurant or your VFW, your hangout spot. What's the monster they talk about?
Let us know.
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Yes, well, you've got a phone number. You can call us one eight three three std WYTK. It's a voicemail. You've got three minutes. Give us a cool nickname. Please let us know if we can use your name and voice on the air. A quick shout out here to that Jeff Craig guy who makes a thing called Map in Black that is an entire map of the United States with cryptozoological sightings on it pinpointed and then on. If you flip the thing over, you can look at it and see, like in alphabetical order, where all these cryptives have been seen, and what type of cryptos? Really really cool stuff, and uh yeah, if you don't want to give us a call, why not instead send us a good old fashioned email.
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