Among these was the Nemean lion, a great cat born to Typhon, the godlike creator of monsters, which was later nurtured by the goddess Hera. A description of this beast as a fierce man-eater with skin that could not be harmed by mortal weapons has been attributed to the Greek scholar Apollodorus (180–120 BC).

With human exploration of the natural world in its infancy, the first environments of mystery encountered were the wild spaces just beyond town. Thus, it is unsurprising that some of the earliest monsters in human history are merely fierce animals with extraordinary characteristics.

 The Aché people of Paraguay hunt with bows and arrows to this very day and, unlike humans in most other parts of the world who sit alone at the top of the food chain, they are hunted. Jaguars share much territory with the Aché and eat many of the same small mammals that the Aché depend upon to survive. However, jaguars also readily kill the Aché themselves, inflicting an 8 percent mortality rate on males in the population.

terrified of even coming close to us.

A lion might not look particularly monstrous while sitting caged in a zoo, but make no mistake, a midnight encounter with one in the wild would change that perception in a hurry

 In the midst of the darkened jungle, it sniffs the wind and catches the scent of a lone human not more than a mile off. Saliva dripping from its sharp fangs, it eagerly sets off in search of its prey. There is but a sliver of a moon in the sky, but this doesn't matter to the creature’s inhuman eyes. The scent grows stronger and the beast slows its movements to a crawl as it silently stalks its prey from the depths of the forest. Then, in a split second, it springs into action. Claws rend flesh in a single swipe. Blood gushes forth. Jaws sink deep into the shoulder, snapping bones as if they were twigs. In an instant, the human is dead.

Although the frightening visions happened several more times, she did not tell the neurologist about them. Her EEG results were normal, and in August, she was discharged from the sanatorium. Just before the start of school in September, there was another seizure. Her new classmates found her withdrawn and “deeply religious.” During checkups with various specialists, she was diagnosed as having some circulatory problems, but nothing was done about those. Instead the family physician, noting renewed seizures, prescribed another anticonvulsant.

EEG

Anneliese was born in 1952, the daughter of a Catholic lower-middle-class artisans’ family. Her father, and his father before him, owned a sawmill in Klingenberg, a small town in Bavaria, where Anneliese grew up. She was a sickly child and one year behind in school because of a number of childhood illnesses. But in her studies she did quite well. Then, about the time of her sixteenth birthday, she briefly blacked out in school, and the following night, she had a convulsive attack and bit her tongue. She felt that a giant force was pinning her down. It lasted about fifteen minutes.

Eventually, with the help of one of the defense lawyers, I was given access to all of the court documents, more than eight hundred pages. Father Renz, the principal exorcist, let me have a copy of the sound tapes of forty-two exorcistic sessions. I went to Germany and interviewed all the principal characters involved in the story. Some of them wrote down their own recollections for me. So short of actually being there at the time of the exorcism, I had as complete a fieldwork record as was possible to assemble after the fact. It made it possible for me to reconstruct what happened to Anneliese Michel, and to formulate a conjecture about why she died.

I was alerted to the case by a brief item in Newsweek (23 August 1976), which reported that this twenty-three-year-old university student, an epileptic, had died while being exorcized. Supposed demons, among them Lucifer, Judas, Nero, and Hitler, had spoken from her mouth. There were tapes available of the exorcistic sessions containing “incoherent screams mixed with furious profanity.” I filed the item for future reference as another modern case of demonic possession.

ampires are without a doubt the single most adaptable monster that mankind has ever dreamt up. Unicorns and griffons have come and gone within the dreams of man, yet the vampire has remained.

The “blood” that the gravediggers must have seen was in fact not blood but rather bodily fluids loaded with enzymes escaping the corpse, some of which apparently bubbled up from the mouth and, being mildly acidic, dissolved part of the shroud

In 1576 the plague was ravaging the Italian city of Venice; it was believed by some to be spread by vampires. In an attempt to gain the upper hand on the undead and help bring the widespread disease under control it is speculated that the gravediggers who buried plague victims took matters into their own hands. Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence in Italy found the skeletal remains of a woman who had a brick wedged into her mouth, a telltale sign that it was assumed that she was a vampire. Borrini believes that the gravediggers would have returned to the mass grave with more bodies for burial after a two- or three-day absence.

Then, there are those people who hold a deep-rooted fascination with the vampire; to them the vampire is not a monster seeking lives to claim in sadistic acts of terror and violence night after eternal night. Rather, the image they fancy is that of a poor Byronic figure in need of understanding, compassion, and love. To the fans of paranormal romance, the vampire with his hundreds of years of sexual experience to draw from is a near perfect lover: passionate, dominant and seductive—it loves only her, wants only her, needs only her, the one person who can save him from an isolated, dismal and droning eternity of loneliness.

To those people who believe that there are such creatures in the supernatural, bloodsucking predators who stalk mankind in the night, just hearing this word aloud in a crowded room instantly draws their attention to the speaker. All eyes turn to face him as their bodies tense up, becoming like a herd of deer in the communal process of deciding whether or not to bolt.

This tale, recounted by Montague Summers in his The Werewolf in Lore and Legend, is one of the most horrifying and gruesome of the tales of men changed to wolves to be found in folklore and legend. An old woman slaughtered; a small boy mutilated; a four-year-old girl killed and eaten, the only evidence of her existence the hollow in her parents’ lives and a neglected arm left behind, perhaps because the murderers were chased away before they were able to finish their meal by a woodcutter with a sharpened axe or perhaps just left behind because the beasts had grown full and content, having reached their limit, the arm like the last drumstick in a bucket of chicken when you push back from the table. The community was left to wonder who the next victim would be, listening for the howl of wolves in the distance, for that horrible sound of scratching at the door.

From this short story we discern What conduct all young people ought to learn. But above all, young, growing misses fair, Whose orient rosy blooms begin t’appear: Who, beauties in the fragrant spring of age, With pretty airs young hearts are apt t’engage. Ill do they listen to all sorts of tongues, Since some inching and lure like Syrens’s songs. No wonder therefort ’tis, if over-power’d, So many of them has the Wolf devour’d. The Wolf, I say, for Wolves too sure there are Of every sort, and every character. Some of them mild and gentle-humour’d be, Of noise and gall, and rancour wholly free; Who tame, familiar, full of complaisance Ogle and leer, languish, cajole and glance; With luring tongues, and language wond’rous sweet, Follow young ladies as they walk the street. Ev’n to their very houses, nay, bedside, And, artful, tho’ their true designs they hide, Yet, ah! these simpering Wolves! Who does not see Most dangerous of Wolves indeed they be?

. She didn’t know what we wizened adults have come to understand: it is usually someone you know, usually someone in the family.

I always imagine her with her hood pulled down over her eyes, one hand clutching the cloth tightly at her throat, head bent, startled by every snapping twig, every cry of a bird. But this incorporates too much of my own fears and insecurities into the picture. The girl, Little Red, is an innocent, like Adam and Eve in the garden, and her innocence protects her from fear. She walks down the woodland path to her grandma’s house without a worry in the world, chasing every butterfly, smelling every rose. It is this innocence that is almost her undoing.

when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.

But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.  You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it.  If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it.  There is also a more subtle problem.  When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science.  In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people.  During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.  So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.  They’re doing everything right.  The form is perfect.  It looks exactly the way it looked before.  But it doesn’t work.  No airplanes land.  So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.  

We obviously have made no progress—lots of theory, but no progress—in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how­ witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked—or very little of it did.

By quietening down the engines and using bioluminescence to attract it, they managed to see this most extraordinary animal in its natural habitat. It serenely glided into view, its body rippled with metallic colours of bronze and silver. Its huge, intelligent eye watched the submarine warily as it delicately picked at the bait with its beak. It was balletic and mesmeric. It could not have been further from the gnashing, human-destroying creature of myth and literature. In reality this is a gentle giant that is easily scared and pecks at its food.

The giant squid continued to dominate stories of sea monsters with the famous 1870 novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne. Verne's submarine fantasy is a classic story of puny man against a gigantic squid.

One Norse legend talks of the Kraken, a deep sea creature that was the curse of fishermen. If sailors found a place with many fish, most likely it was the monster that was driving them to the surface. If it saw the ship it would pluck the hapless sailors from the boat and drag them to a watery grave.

"Monsters say something about human psychology, not the world."

"This inhuman place makes human monsters," wrote Stephen King in his novel The Shining.

The specter of Salem witchcraft haunts the American imagination.

The tragedy has at different times been judged by both amateur and professional historians to be the result of religious fanaticism; power-mad ministers; hysterical girls; local disputes; mass hysteria; misogyny; anxiety caused by political turmoil, frontier life, and Indian wars; hallucinations caused by rotting grain; psychological distress; or even a result of the persecution of “real” witches.

The bare bones of the story alone constitute a sensational set of facts with a ready-made potential for drama.

n 1692 two young girls were struck with a strange and disturbing set of symptoms that ranged from fevers to hallucinations and what were described as “fits.” Medical and religious consultation arrived at a diagnosis of witchcraft.