The Story Behind Hidden Creatures: Wisdom of the Cryptids

Before I became interested in cryptids, I was interested in dinosaurs.

Growing up, I imagined becoming either a scientist or an artist specializing in paleontology. Dinosaurs fascinated me because, by modern standards, they seemed almost impossible: enormous and extraordinary creatures inhabiting landscapes radically different from our own. Reconstructing them required evidence, scientific reasoning, and inevitably a certain amount of imagination.

They were strange creatures.

But they were strange creatures that had unquestionably existed.

Perhaps that was the beginning of my fascination with the uncertain border between the possible and the impossible.

The first true cryptid to capture my imagination was Bigfoot. I grew up in rural south Mississippi, where Bigfoot was the strange creature everyone seemed to know about. Whether people believed in it or not was almost secondary. The story was simply part of the cultural landscape.

When I was a teenager, long before the Internet made it possible to investigate an extraordinary claim within seconds, I remember hearing a news story that two men had discovered the body of a Bigfoot.

For a brief moment, my whole world seemed to stop.

Something that most people regarded as legend had apparently become real.

The story was eventually investigated and found to be false. There was no Bigfoot body waiting to overturn everything we thought we knew about North American wildlife.

But strangely enough, the disappointment isn’t what stayed with me.

What stayed with me was the moment before the answer arrived.

For just a little while, something impossible had seemed possible.

I have never quite lost my fascination with that threshold.

Looking for Hidden Animals

My interest in cryptids has always existed in three overlapping worlds.

Scientifically, I am fascinated by their form. What kind of animal might produce the reported footprint, silhouette, sound, or behavior? How would such an animal move? What would it eat? How could it survive within a particular ecosystem?

Folklorically, I want to know the story. Where did the account originate? Who told it? How has it changed through retelling? Why did this creature become important to a particular community?

And artistically, I ask another question: how do I reconstruct something that may never have been documented—or may never have existed at all—in a way that makes another person curious enough to learn more?

Those questions eventually led me more deeply into cryptozoology, generally understood as the search for animals whose existence has been reported but not established by mainstream zoology.

Cryptozoology is widely regarded by scientists as a pseudoscience because many of its claims lack the repeatable evidence and methodology required by formal scientific investigation. That distinction matters.

Curiosity should not require us to abandon rigor.

But rigor should not require us to abandon curiosity either.

The history of zoology contains reminders that “unknown to science” and “nonexistent” are not identical ideas. Animals such as the okapi and saola entered Western scientific literature surprisingly recently, while creatures such as the giant squid existed for generations at the intersection of maritime observation and sea-monster lore before scientists were able to document living specimens directly.

None of this proves Bigfoot, Mothman, or any other cryptid exists.

It does remind us that the natural world has never been obligated to reveal all of itself at once.

Cryptids Live at the Edge

I grew up in the humidity-soaked landscapes of south Mississippi, among pine forests, swamps, and magnolia blossoms that seemed to glisten in the moonlight.

The natural world there never felt abstract.

During the day there were snakes to watch for: coral snakes, rattlesnakes, moccasins, king snakes, and others moving through the heat. At night, a different population seemed to inherit the landscape. Owls called from the darkness. Bobcats, raccoons, and opossums moved through places that looked entirely different once the sun disappeared.

Once, I heard what sounded like a panther screaming somewhere in the woods behind my childhood home.

It was not a place where you needed invented monsters to make the landscape feel alive.

There were already enough perfectly real things with venom, claws, teeth, thorns, and defensive strategies to keep a child attentive.

Perhaps that is partly why Bigfoot stood out.

The story occupied another category entirely: something that might be moving through the same woods as everything else but remaining just outside the boundary of what could be proven.

I have also always felt at home in the dark.

As a lifelong insomniac, I spent countless hours awake while everyone else slept. Our house was cooled by open windows and an attic fan, which meant the outside world was never completely shut away.

Night sounds entered the house freely.

So I listened.

Over time, I learned to separate one sound from another.

An owl.

A raccoon.

Something moving through leaves.

The rhythm of insects.

A call somewhere beyond the yard.

The darkness became less frightening as it became more familiar.

But familiarity never made it entirely knowable.

There were still sounds I could not identify and movements I could not see. There were occasionally experiences for which I had no immediate explanation. I sometimes wondered about wandering spirits or other presences, but I learned not to rush toward certainty in either direction.

Some mysteries could be investigated.

Some could be explained.

And some simply remained mysteries.

Perhaps this is why cryptids so often appear at edges.

Forests.

Swamps.

Mountains.

Deep water.

Lonely roads.

Night skies.

These are places where visibility falters and certainty becomes less comfortable.

A city at noon encourages confidence.

A forest after midnight does not.

The cryptid seems to belong somewhere inside that difference.

A Monster Is Never Just a Monster

My academic background in folklore and mythology taught me early that stories are rarely static.

An encounter with something unknown may begin in fear. Someone sees a shape they cannot identify, hears a sound unlike anything familiar, or experiences an event they cannot explain.

Then the storytelling begins.

Humans repeat the encounter, question it, embellish it, compare it with other experiences, and gradually fold it into a larger cultural framework.

What begins as raw fear can become something much more complex.

A warning.

A teaching tool.

A source of entertainment.

A symbol of place.

A shared identity.

Sometimes even a beloved local character.

The monster slowly becomes a neighbor.

Not necessarily a safe one.

But a familiar one.

And familiarity changes a story.

This is one reason I don’t think cryptids can be understood only by asking what they physically are. We also have to ask what they have become.

Who tells the story now?

Why does the community keep telling it?

What has each generation added or removed?

What does the creature mean to the people who inherited it?

Cryptids evolve because human stories evolve.

Their descriptions change. Their personalities shift. Sometimes they become more frightening; sometimes they become humorous, commercial, protective, tragic, or strangely endearing.

The creature may begin as an unknown shape beyond the tree line.

Eventually, it becomes part of how a community understands itself.

And once I began thinking about cryptids this way, it became impossible for me to see them merely as monsters.

They had already become characters.

The next step was recognizing them as archetypes.

When the Cryptids Became Archetypes

Hidden Creatures began for me in an unexpectedly strange way.

I was traveling through a region associated with a remarkable amount of cryptid folklore when I became intensely ill. I am rarely sick, yet for nearly two days I could barely get out of bed.

Unable to do much else, I began reading.

And reading.

And reading.

I consumed the mythology of the region almost compulsively: strange-creature reports, unexplained encounters, local legends, historical accounts, and the stories of the people who had carried those traditions forward.

At some point, something shifted.

I began wondering whether my physical reaction might have been psychosomatic—not evidence of anything supernatural, but perhaps the response of a mind and body immersed in an unfamiliar landscape saturated with stories and uncertainty.

What mattered most, however, was the change in the way I began seeing the creatures themselves.

My undergraduate training included Jungian psychology, and I started recognizing patterns that felt larger than individual monster stories.

These creatures could function as archetypes.

They reflected deeply human responses to experiences that resisted ordinary explanation.

Mythology is one of the ways people shape the unknown into something they can live beside.

Archetypes make those explanations personally relevant.

They shift the question from:

What happened to those people?

to:

Where does this story live in me?

Once I began asking that question, the creatures changed.

The Jackalope became The Wanderer.

The Flatwoods Monster became The Channeler.

The Ningen became The Deep One.

Mothman became The Watcher.

They were no longer simply objects of curiosity.

They had become mirrors.

Mothman and the Watcher

Mothman may be the clearest example of how that transformation happened.

I have been an introvert all my life and have often found myself standing slightly outside the center of things: observing, listening, studying people and circumstances before deciding how—or whether—to step into them.

For me, Mothman naturally became The Watcher.

The creature is often imagined on the periphery of human activity: perched above, glimpsed at a distance, appearing briefly and then disappearing again.

Whatever one believes about the original reports, that image carries an archetypal quality I understand immediately.

The Watcher survives through observation.

There can be strength in knowing when not to rush forward.

In noticing patterns.

In understanding a room before entering it completely.

In seeing what others overlook.

I learned early that careful observation could help me navigate a world in which I did not always instinctively feel that I belonged.

Observe other people, and sometimes you can find your way into the larger human story.

In that sense, Mothman became more than a character in my deck.

The Watcher represents a strategy I understand intimately.

And that was when I knew what Hidden Creatures was really becoming.

From Creature to Companion

The finished project became Hidden Creatures: Wisdom of the Cryptids, a 36-card oracle deck built around creatures from folklore, reported encounters, regional traditions, and the strange borderlands of human experience.

Each creature carries its own history.

But each also carries an archetypal role.

Some ask us to wander.

Some to observe.

Some to confront appetite or fear.

Some to descend into the emotional deep.

Some appear in unlikely partnerships.

Some hide.

Some transform.

The point is not that every reader must interpret a cryptid exactly as I do.

Quite the opposite.

That is the nature of archetypal imagery.

The story provides the shape.

We bring ourselves to it.

A person encountering The Watcher may recognize solitude.

Someone else may recognize vigilance.

Another may recognize patience.

Another may recognize the uncomfortable experience of standing at the margins.

The cryptid remains strange.

The human experience beneath it does not.

The Naturalist and the Folklorist Do Not Have to Fight

I have never found science and folklore incompatible.

They simply ask different questions.

Natural history may ask:

What animal could have left this footprint?

Folklore may ask:

What did people decide the footprint meant?

Science investigates physical evidence.

Folklore investigates human experience.

Art can sit comfortably between them.

Misidentification, exaggeration, hoaxing, cultural borrowing, and faulty memory all belong in serious conversations about cryptids.

But acknowledging those possibilities does not make the stories meaningless.

Sometimes explaining the animal still leaves us with the much more interesting question of why the story endured.

We do not have to believe every extraordinary claim in order to remain curious about it.

And we do not have to solve every mystery before it can teach us something.

Why We Still Need the Unknown

We live in an age of astonishing access to information.

A bird can be identified with an app.

A road on the opposite side of the world can be viewed from a phone.

Answers that once required days of research can appear in seconds.

And still we tell monster stories.

Still we look toward the woods.

Still we wonder what might be beneath deep water.

Still we occasionally feel the old instinct to look twice at something moving at the edge of our vision.

Perhaps mystery reminds us of something information cannot entirely replace.

Humility.

Wonder.

The knowledge that our understanding is unfinished.

I have spent much of my life looking closely at the natural world. The closer I look, the less ordinary it becomes.

Wonder creates attention.

Attention creates connection.

And connection can create care.

Perhaps that is another gift hidden inside our strange creatures.

They ask us to look again.

Hidden Creatures

I began working on this deck thinking I was illustrating cryptids.

By the end, I understood that I had been illustrating human beings through cryptids.

The Wanderer.

The Watcher.

The Deep One.

The Channeler.

The Hidden One.

The Unlikely Pair.

These are strange creatures, certainly.

But we know their territory.

We know what it is to wander without certainty.

To watch from the edge.

To hide.

To hunger.

To descend.

To encounter someone—or something—we do not understand.

To change.

The monsters keep pointing back toward us.

Hidden Creatures: Wisdom of the Cryptids is scheduled for publication in 2027, but its real origin stretches much farther back: to dinosaurs, Mississippi pine forests, a teenage Bigfoot story, open windows at night, and a lifelong willingness to remain curious when an answer does not immediately arrive.

I don’t think the world becomes richer simply because every mystery remains unexplained.

But I do think it becomes poorer when we lose the ability to wonder.

Somewhere beyond the porch light, beyond the road, beyond the last familiar trail marker, human beings have always imagined something watching from the trees.

Perhaps sometimes there is.

Perhaps sometimes there isn’t.

Either way, the story follows us home.

Science asks us to investigate.
Folklore asks us to remember.
Art asks us to imagine.

And somewhere among all three live the hidden creatures.