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Aug 18, 2008 · More than 20 percent figure it's possible to communicate with the dead. Nearly 40 percent believe in haunted houses. Asked if " creatures such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster will one day be ...
- Our 10 Favorite Monsters
Other accounts depict sirens as half-bird, half-woman...
- Dragons
The most celebrated of these was St. George the Dragon...
- Our 10 Favorite Monsters
- Unicorns
- Merpeople
- Sirens
- Pontianak
- Werewolf
- Vampires
- Zombies
- Leprechaun
- Dragons
- Cyclops
In the 4th century BCE, Greek physician Ctesias describeda strange animal. It was large, fast, and strong, with a white body, a red head, and dark blue eyes. It also had a roughly two-foot-long horn—white on the bottom and black in the middle, with a crimson red tip—growing from its forehead. Catching the creature was nearly impossible, unless it c...
Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid—and the exceptionally more cheerful Disney cartoon she inspired—is probably the most famous merperson of all time, but tales of half-human, half-fish creatures go back as far as ancient Mesopotamia, and are present in legends from cultures around the world. Slavic mythology, for example, has the Rusalka, whi...
Whatever you do, don’t confuse mermaids with sirens—though they have been conflated, they’re not the same thing. Sirens were half-women, half-bird creatures from Greek mythology that ruthlessly lured sailors to untimely deaths with their song. According toBritannica, one theory is that these creatures “seem to have evolved from an ancient tale of t...
Enough with the stories about vengeful half-woman creatures who lure men to their deaths just because—let’s talk about a spirit from South Asian folklore who has a very good reason for what she does. In Malaysia, a woman who has endured suffering during death—whether it occurs in childbirth or at the hands of a man—is sometimes said to become a spi...
As it turns out, the werewolf might be as old as, well, literature itself. One version of The Epic of Gilgamesh features a story about a woman who turned a former paramour into a wolf. Men who turned into wolves also popped upin the mythology of Ancient Rome and Greece. As Tanika Koosmen pointed out in a piece for The Conversation, Herodotus wrote ...
Stories about demons that survive by sucking the bloody life force from humans have been around for millennia, but modern vampires are way more recent than you probably think: In fact, the word vampyre only pops up in the English written record around the turn of the 18th century. (Perhaps the earliest extant reference actually referred to vampires...
Thanks to pop culture, we tend to think of zombies as undead flesh-eaters that are especially hungry for braaaaaains. We have George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to thank for some of that, but not the bit about brains—thatcomes from the 1985 movie Return of the Living Dead, in which zombies were said to snack on gray matter because it took awa...
Fun fact: Googling the phrase leprechaun origins will not get you what you need to know about where leprechauns come from, but instead everything you never knew you needed to know about the 2014 movie Leprechaun: Origins. Getting the real story requires following the research rainbow right to a pot of gold, a.k.a., a piece on IrishCentral.comby Sea...
Like many of the creatures on this list, accounts of dragon-like beings go way back: They show up as giant serpents in Mesopotamian art, appear in the realm of the dead in ancient Egyptian mythology, spit venom in Ancient Greek tales, and symbolized good fortune in Chinese folklore. Interestingly, according to Smithsonianmagazine, these myths evolv...
If there’s anything we’ve learned so far, it’s that many mythological creatures probably had a basis in real animals. Cyclops, the famous one-eyed giants of Greek mythology, might be another example. They may have been inspired by the discovery of bonesbelonging to a relative of the modern day elephant. These creatures were up to 15 feet tall, had ...
- Jon Mayer
Sep 6, 2019 · In Chinese imagery, dragons symbolize imperial rule and good fortune. The dragons of Chinese legend dwelled in distant waters, and although usually wingless, they could fly. Crucially, they brought the rain, and hence the fruits of the soil. In the 12-year Chinese zodiac, dragon years are the most auspicious.
- James Burch
Ancient humans encountering whale bones would have no way of knowing that the animals were sea-based, and the idea of such gargantuan creatures might well have led people to assume that whales ...
Jan 18, 2022 · The most celebrated of these was St. George the Dragon Slayer, who in legend comes upon a town threatened by a terrible dragon, according to English Heritage. He rescues a fair maiden, protects ...
- Karl Shuker
- 1995
Jan 4, 2023 · But in the way of creatures both biological and mythical, it evolved. By 1287, the city’s coat of arms shows the monster as having the head of a wolf, the body of a bird and the tail of a snake. Within a few centuries, it had grown legs, evolving into something we would recognize today as a typical flying, fire-breathing dragon.
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Jan 2, 2024 · The Evolution Of Mythical Creatures. Mythical hybrid creatures have been a staple of mythology for centuries. From the centaur to the sphinx, these beings are often symbolic representations of cultural values and beliefs. For example, the minotaur is said to represent both strength and violence in ancient Greek culture.
