Cryptid Summer
The Mystic Pigman is barely special. No clear eyewitness accounts, no police record. The story is he killed one woman while wearing a pig’s head and then escaped capture. We weren’t even sure if pig’s head meant rubber mask or hollowed-out flesh. It was all very 1970’s horror movie. Erica said it was a boring one to start with, but Ben insisted. I didn’t care either way. I was just happy to be there. We walked the seaport as if the Pigman would be out there in the open, as if he’d still be wearing the head.
—
We hiked for the Winsted Wildman, Connecticut’s Bigfoot. Every state has one. Ours is seven feet tall with arms hanging to his knees, half human, covered in thick hair. We picked Erica up on the way. Usually she met at our place, but hers was closer to the highway, to the stretch of green mountains split open by Route 8. Ben finished a cigarette while I went inside to get her. Nothing was boxed up yet, her tables covered in rented textbooks, her wall still filled with posters and Polaroids, little notes from her family back home. I stared at my hands as Erica braided my hair, a gentle shiver pulsing up my spine. God, your hair is beautiful, she said. She held it, brought it close, breathed it in.
—
We looked for the Higganum Mucket. The townspeople held a festival for it every August, but Erica would be three states away by then. We walked by the Candlewood Hill Brook and tried to make out shapes in the brown water. No luck; everything was tadpole-sized. Erica wore a dress she’d borrowed from me, tiny impressionistic flowers, baby blue. She looked better in it, so I’d told her to keep it. We took our shoes off at the bank and waded in. I tried to grip the scummy rocks with the soles of my feet, muscles that felt under-used, vestigial. I felt more animal every day. Ben lifted the bottom of his wet shirt to wipe away what Erica had splashed across his face. We froze, watching him; I’d never seen his body in the daylight. I wondered if Erica had. When he could see again, he tried chasing us, but we had to go so slow, every slick stone below us filled with the potential to crack our skulls.
—
The earliest mention of the Black Fox of Salmon River is in a poem. A grandmother recounting the legend to fear-hungry kids. Ben was all-in on the fox. His senior thesis had been on 19th century New England, on Hawthorne, those Puritan freaks afraid of the wild. The fox’s fur is supposed to be this indescribable hue, so dark it can induce madness. I wanted to see it, even if it ultimately meant something bad, even if it bit me. I believed I could love it. I believed it could love me. It rained all day so we didn’t go, afraid the river would rise and flood.
—
I think I saw the Melonheads in CVS. We weren’t even looking for them that day. I’d stopped at the magazines and lost Erica and Ben, and when I turned the corner I could’ve sworn I saw them, these big-headed alien babies, fragile and pale. I wasn’t scared. They were just little guys. When I looked again, they were gone. I found the two of them in wound care; Erica was looking at the tiny patch of poison ivy running up Ben’s forearm, the one I’d been applying calamine to every morning, sometimes even when he woke in the night, the itch so strong. She was turning over his wrist, her thumb rubbing small circles. I didn’t tell them about what I’d seen. I didn’t think they’d believe me.
—
We went to Old Saybrook to find the Blockheads. There’s only one account: 1957; a blinding light through a schoolteacher’s window, waking her; a craft hovering above her clothesline; weird entities moving past each other, heads like clear cubes with red rubber balls inside, bodies like cloaked triangles. A glow before they zipped away. We stuffed flashlights, sweatshirts, two six-packs of Miller Light, and a beach blanket into Ben’s car, packed it all in between remnants of the final semester, filled notebooks, coffee cups streaked with mold. We parked in a field and ate small bites of mushroom chocolate. We watched the skies, me in the middle, our cans of beer sweating in the still-hot dark, the sky so terrifyingly open. But between them, I was fine. Cocooned. And then everything felt entwined—the songs of katydids and crickets, the slow, drunken paths of lightning bugs, his hand on my bare thigh, then higher, and then hers, too, and then their mouths, the warmth, this strangeness within me no longer strange, but still impossible to describe.
—
We went to Hubbard Park looking for the Black Dog. We avoided the green goose shit haloing the pond. Old ladies chucked full bread slices to ravenous ducks and we paused, watching them eat. Ben said he knew the way to Castle Craig, the highest point. His family had taken him every year as a child, but he’d never seen the dog. We followed and looked for signs—tufts of fur, tracks in the soft mud. If you see him once, it’s good luck. Twice, bad. Three times and you die. Erica was scared. I’d never seen her like that. We hung back a little. Are you afraid of dogs, I asked. It’s not that, she said. But I pretended it was. I let everything else hang between us. If we see him, we leave, I said. Okay? Once is fine. We never have to come back.
—
We looked up the Frog People of Danbury. There was only time for one more. Erica had cancelled the last three times—too far, too busy, too pointless. I got the sense everything was packed up already. I leaned over Ben’s computer as cartoon images loaded, smiling frog heads on normal human bodies, three of them. Look at them, Ben said. They’re so happy. He enlarged it. That’s not what they really look like, Erica said. Do you want to just get pizza or something? She checked the time on her phone with a secretive tap. I tried to grab the mouse from Ben. Find a real picture, I said, there’s got to be a real picture. I gripped his arm as he typed, as he clicked around. I rested my head on his shoulder. He went through Reddit threads, through interviews and weird links and comments. I could tell he felt as wild as me. As desperate. We just needed a little bit of proof. We just needed to show her.
- Cryptid Summer - February 10, 2025
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
