TX Stalker

Simple, solid, spinetingling stories...

I love reading about strange and dangerous creatures - real, imaginary or cryptid. Sharks, crocodiles, bogeymen, chupacabras, ghosts. I love watching "documentaries" or movies about them. And now I'm writing about them. Coming soon: Ticktopus.

Possibilities...

I’m not into hard horror—too much gore disturbs me. Okay, I do watch all the shark movies on SciFy, Travel and Discovery, but that blood looks pretty fake anyway, so it’s no biggie (especially if I squint). Mostly I love to read about—or view—what I call “possibilities”. I check out the latest reports and/or photos of ghosts, Bigfoot, angels, aliens and more. Fiction is fun but reports of allegedly true encounters thrill me. I assume if you’re reading this that you put more than a little faith in “possibilities”, too.

But can science ever prove that cryptids and supernatural beings exist? I learned about an exciting new tool recently that might help prove the existence of cryptids. It’s called environmental DNA (eDNA). Maybe it’s not new to some of you, but I’d never heard of it. Basically, scientists collect water, dirt or other materials in an environment then they test for any DNA...any at all.

On the program I watched, the researchers discovered deer and other specific animal DNA from a water sample they collected from a stream. They also discovered something else that was intriguing—something unidentified. Since they were investigating Bigfoot sightings near that stream, they were thrilled. Maybe it will turn out to be nothing, but the possibility is exciting.

Now, I’m not brave enough to go looking for Bigfoot, myself. I’ve been on ghost hunts and I’ve searched for big gators from the bow of an airboat. Adventures like that really get the old heart pumping enough without adding a ten-foot-tall Sasquatch to my resume. For the big guy, I’ll stick to books, documentaries and movies.

How about you? Are you brave enough to hunt for a legend, myth or monster? What are your favorite cryptids or real-life monsters? Have you done anything to witness them first-hand? Feel free to comment on my Facebook page.

Never Mind Movie Monsters...

I just watched a program on the Smithsonian Channel about the world's largest beasts. There were some scary critters millions of years ago. Fortunately, the only one still around is the blue whale.

http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/shows/worlds-biggest-beasts/0/3425021

B-Movie Monsters

Let’s get one thing straight right away: zombies creep me out in an intense way. I don’t like reading about them and I don’t like watching them. One of my sons got me to watch a few episodes of The Walking Dead. As a writer, I appreciate the storyline, but I just couldn’t handle the zombies. Other monsters are a different story, however—especially if they are B-movie monsters. Here are a few of my favorites:

The Monster That Challenged the World (I’ll always remember my stress when the little girl turned up the heat in the lab to warm the rabbits—and inadvertently heated the monster egg)

The Day of the Triffid (I get the creeps every time I see a canna lily plant—especially in the dark)

Them (as if regular size ants aren’t scary enough)

Creature from the Black Lagoon (no comment needed)

Tremors (a modern B-movie that cracks me up even as it grosses me out)

I saw some of the older movies on a Saturday night program called “Weird”, which I only got to watch when I spent the night at my grandmother’s house. What Mom didn’t know couldn’t scare me, right?

What are your favorite B-movie monsters?

The Kraken

Imagine you’re sailing on your yacht (it could happen) in the North Atlantic Ocean when the boat starts to violently rock from side to side. Swiping spilled martini off your shirt (remember, this is imaginary), you get back on your feet and lurch to the port rail. The sea tosses and froths around your boat, and a dreadful hiss fills the air. A slick, heavy muscle slaps down on the rail next to you. It smells like rotten fish and is covered with pulsing, circular suckers, and it extends down into the water where a giant eye peers up at you.

“Kraken!” you shout as you run to starboard.

Another muscular tentacle waits there. In fact, your boat is surrounded by the giant arms of the legendary sea monster. Horror freezes you, not that you can do anything anyway. Tentacles wrap around your yacht, crunching wood, cracking fiberglass, bending metal. The creature breaks your boat in half, icy waters sweep in, carrying you overboard. Your boat vanishes as the creature drags it down, leaving you adrift in the freezing waves. Hypothermia will kill you in minutes.

Unless the creature returns.

Not All Monsters Are Huge…

Another tiny monster that packs a punch is the Blue-Ring Octopus. This one is actually kind of cute with its graceful arms and lovely blue rings. That is, until you look into its creepy cephalopod eyes and read about its toxicity. A real devil-fish, the Blue-Ring is venomous enough to kill more than 2 dozen people. Fortunately for those of us who live in the good old USA, all blue-ring species live in the Pacific or Indian Oceans. Also fortunately, the folks in Australia, Japan, India and other countries within this octopus’s habitat generally don’t encounter it very often.

While not as small as the tick, the Blue-Ring Octopus is usually less than a foot in length from the top of its head to the tips of its tentacles. Most of these animals could nestle in the palm of your hand—highly NOT recommended—with its little arms barely reaching the tip of your middle finger. Its bite is usually not noticeable, which is a problem because the longer it takes to reach medical care, the worse the prognosis for the victim.

That’s not to say that everyone who is bitten by a Blue-Ring Octopus will die. After all, maybe your blue-ring recently bit something else and dispersed most of its venom. Maybe you’re a hefty, healthy person who can handle the nausea, inability to breathe, blindness and paralysis. Maybe your best buddy is right there with you and can start artificial respiration as soon as your diaphragm locks up—and maybe he’s healthy enough to keep it up until you make it to a hospital. And your buddy had better keep it up or you’ll die from hypoventilation—an inability to draw in enough oxygen to offset the carbon dioxide in your system. There’s more to it than that, of course (I am not a doctor), but basically, you’ll stop breathing if you don’t get constant, prolonged artificial respiration.

Not that you’ll find any antidote in any hospital in the world. There is no anti-toxin for the bite of a Blue-Ring Octopus. Once you’re bitten by one of these little beauties, you’ll have to tough your way through it. If you make it 24 hours, you’re likely to survive. The normal prey—crabs, shrimp and small fish—are never as lucky. Once seized by those graceful tentacles, such small creatures are envenomated and then ripped apart by the horny beak of its blue-ring captor before being devoured—sometimes still alive.

Imagine what a large Blue-Ring Octopus could do to a human being. You won’t have to imagine for long because…Ticktopus is coming!

Some are smaller than your great-great-granny’s pinky fingernail (as opposed to the weekly-lacquered acrylics of a woman with too much time on her hands—pun intended but feel free to insert your own gender-identity).

Ticks are a good example of tiny monsters. Arachnids (like spiders), ticks come in three different families. One of those—Nuttallielidae—lives only in the southern part of Africa. The other two families—Ixodidae (hard ticks) and Argasidae (soft ticks)—live all over the place.

Now that we have the boring Latin stuff out of the way, let’s examine the traits that explain why I call them monsters. You can guess the first monstrous trait: ticks suck blood. That’s their only source of food, and it doesn’t matter to them if they get it from birds, your dog…or you. To get at your blood, they cut a hole in your skin, insert a straw-like organ called a hypostome into the hole then excrete an anticoagulant so your blood won’t clot. Then they start to drink, and they keep drinking until they get full—and some of them get disgustingly full. Yuck.

There are differences between hard and soft ticks. Hard ticks have a protruding head while the head of a soft tick is hidden under its body. Hard ticks also have a shield covering their bodies—it’s called a scutum—and it’s what keeps the tick from being squished underfoot when you step on it in the woods. You pretty much have to smash one between two bricks to kill it. That is, unless it’s engorged from a feeding. Find one like that and it’s pretty easy—and disgusting—to pop it into the afterlife.

The bite of a soft tick can hurt like a poke with a hot nail while hard ticks can bite and you won’t even know it. Which do you think is worse—piercing pain or unnoticed blood-sucking? I’m not sure.

Both hard and soft ticks molt—they shed their skin after major feedings. Maybe that’s because they live in warm, humid climates. Some days my part of the world is so warm (okay, hot) and humid, I wish I could shed my skin! Especially when my skin has a tick attached to it.

What are ticks doing when they’re not feeding? Hanging out, mating, having babies—one female tick can lay as many as 3,000 eggs. That’s another monstrous trait, if you ask me. The eggs are sticky little masses that cling to blades of grass until they hatch into larvae that immediately start to feed on anything they can find—usually birds or small mammals like mice. After feeding, the larvae molt into nymphs which feed on larger animals then molt into adults. At any stage, if a tick finds you, it’s going to chow down.

So how can you avoid ticks? Stay inside, lock the doors and—well, that’s not going to happen. If you really have to go outside, don’t exhale, keep cool, don’t sweat, and don’t move. Okay that’s not possible, either, but at least keep in mind that ticks live in woods, fields, parks and backyards. They find prey by detecting carbon dioxide from breathing, sensing body heat or moisture, and by feeling vibrations as an animal walks past their grassy hiding places.

Apparently these tiny monsters are difficult to avoid. So if you just have to go outside, put on some insect repellant, wear long pants, high socks and long sleeves…you know, disguise yourself. If you do pick up a tick, remove it carefully. The best way to “pick a tick” is to grab a pair of fine-tipped tweezers, grip the tick as close to its mouth as possible then pull the tick straight out. Don’t twist it and don’t grab its body. You don’t want to leave any part of its head in your skin nor do you want to squeeze its “juices” into that hole in your skin. You could catch a disease, an infection or at least a nasty itch. And that’s when the real monster will attack—the health care system.

Okay, so is there anything wrong with a person who likes to watch bad SyFy Channel movies? I don't think so. I'm basically a normal person who just happens to enjoy a little mild monster mayhem.

And this weekend is #SharknadoWeekend, so I have been binging on some of the...well, I won't say they're the worst movies every made. Some of the acting is actually not bad. The storylines are pretty much the same--lots of big sharks in lots of unexpected places, munching on a bunch of dumb jocks and bikini-clad bit--er, unpleasant young women.

What's the draw? I'm not sure. I don't like gore. I don't usually like to watch violence. And dumb characters usually leave me cold. But I can't seem to help myself!

image copyright Tomas Meszaros (Pexels.com)

I could write for days about one of the most popular dangerous creatures: the vampire. I've read great books and not so great books that feature vampires as heroes or villains, men or women, and there are movies that fit both descriptions, too. One of my favorite TV shows was Moonlight. It didn't last long, but it was a fun and romantic vampire tale.

I'm not sure I'd enjoy writing a vampire story. Not that I believe in the blood-sucking undead. Nah. Not really.

Um...has anyone seen my Cross?

Ghosts are creatures, too, right? I adore ghost stories--the spooky kind. My all time favorite is an old novel called "The Uninvited" by Dorothy MacArdle. It has a wonderful old haunted house and several chilling scenes. A movie was made of it back in the 1940s, which is almost as good but not quite.

Another good haunted house book is, of course, "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson. That one will keep you awake for sure. It, too, was made into a movie which was high on the creep scale but I think it went a little overboard at times--and there were a couple of scenesw that weren't quite true to the book.

I also enjoy watching documentaries about ghosts, and all the ghost hunting reality series. Most of them don't spook me too much but there have been times when I've been home alone that I've wished I hadn't spent an entire evening watching such programs. And, yes, I'll admit on those occasions I've gone to sleep with the lights on!

So I watched an episode of Monsters and Mysteries Unsolved the other evening and it was about sea monsters. The Loch Ness Monster (Nessie) and the Lake Champlain Monster (Champ) were the focus. I didn't learn anything new but the documentary series did interview a couple of more recent witnesses (this century). The descriptions of each cryptid were similar to ones I've heard in the past, and the witnesses were absolutely certain they'd seen more than waves or reflections on the water. One of them even had a photo of what he'd seen on Loch Ness. Photography "experts" studied the image and decided it was a reflection of sunlight from windows on a nearby house.

Now, I was looking at a picture of a picture on my television, and not through a microscope or whatever type of equipment they were using. So my point of view wasn't the best. But to say that the image was a reflection from windows seemed a pretty far stretch to me. Of course I want to believe. I want Nessie to be real. I want to believe in myths and legends. And, in the end, what's wrong with that?

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