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Thursday, November 18, 2021

The Northumberland County Mystery Beasts

 The Northumberland County Mystery Beasts

By Cole Herrold

In September of 1913, the cities of Bear Gap, Paxinos, Reed Station, Elysburg, Snydertown, and Shamokin were in the epicenter of a rash of strange sightings of a bizarre creature that made its presence known in the surrounding woodlands and desolate forests. The first sighting of this creature occurred near Bear Gap and was sighted by timber dealer Jacob Leisenring who was driving his car on Brush Valley Road towards Bear Gap when he noticed a strange figure along the side of the road ahead of him. The figure was on all fours and covered in dark fur and seemingly was not use to the car's bright headlights as it seemed to disorient the creature enough that it did not realize the potential danger it was in. The creature seeing the now incoming car, began to turn around and slink back into the woods. As Jacob watched the creature return back into the woods, he was able to tell that the creature was about 30 inches in height and about three feet long. Jacob reeling in what he had just seen, returned to Bear Gap and gathered several other people to return to the location with him. When the group got to the location, they found several prints in the soft dirt. The prints they were surprised to see were very similar to a human's hand, but the bizarre thing about these prints was that they were seemingly backward.

A week before the September 15th publication Irvin Startzel and several others in his car would also encounter this bizarre creature also while out driving his car; this time, however, he was driving on a creek road near Reed Station towards his home in Shamokin when a large creature leaped out across the road and began to scamper and crawl up the nearby mountainside. Irvin, as well as everyone else in the vehicle, had a much better look at the creature and said that the creature had a striped furry body and that as it leaped across the road, the way it did so was like the movement of an ape or a monkey. Exiting their car to try to catch another glimpse of the creature, they noticed a series of footprints that were human-like and also like Leisenring's tracks were backward.

Sightings of the creature continued in Paxinos and Elysburg when farmers continually caught glimpses of a creature matching the description of what Startzel and Leisenring saw in their fields, and at night the area was filled with a cacophony of bizarre cries. While there is a vague appearance to this creature, whenever the farmers would attempt to approach the creature, it would run off, so they were unable to get a more defined appearance of the creature. The farmers and nearby towns and cities, however, even without a clear description, were on high alert as search parties in the area broke out looking for the creature. Farmers loaded countless rounds into their rifles and laid out several traps in the nearby woodlands waiting for any anomalous animal to come into their possession, yet nothing was ever found.

Sightings of this creature seemingly stopped for a time, but it would not be for long when the same or a similar kind of creature was reported in Snydertown in January of 1940. A family comprising of a husband, wife, and his sister was driving one afternoon when a creature began to walk out in front of their car. The man began to slow down, thinking that it was a deer about to come out into the road, but as he watched the creature cross, he realized it was not a deer. The creature appeared to be like a large monkey and had a long tail that it kept curved up over its head as it moved across the road. The creature had extremely bright eyes that were reflective like a deer's, and the creature was covered in dark brown hair and skin. One of the women who went on to report the sighting to the PA Bigfoot Society would recount that Snydertown has several bizarre events and phenomena said to occur there, such as a woman who went insane on a farm after saying, the devil kept coming to look in her window.

While there have been, at least to my knowledge, no other sightings of the Northumberland County Mystery Beast, the area around Paxinos and Snydertown are filled with accounts of Bigfoot. I’ve personally heard and collected several first and secondhand accounts of these encounters and am extremely surprised that there might be another cryptid in the area. The interesting thing about the Mystery Beast is that what witnesses were describing in both 1913 and 1940 seems to be kinds of Primates. While a full description of the creature was never described, the footprints left behind in 1913 appeared hand-like which is something that we see in other primates like chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, monkeys, and lemurs. The 1940 account, however, clearly seems to be a kind of extremely large monkey or lemur.

Now with that said, it's difficult to come to any true conclusion as to what species these creatures could be; their identities are not definitive; aside from that, they both appear to be primates. Skeptically speaking, there is the chance that these creatures could be escaped Chimpanzees or some other animal that escaped captivity. In the annals of cryptozoology, however, there are countless reports of large primates that are not Bigfoot-like, but more like baboons or chimps these species are referred to as Napes or North American Apes by Loren Coleman, have footprints very similar to what was reported in 1913. Another cryptid reported in North America that is of the same vein is creatures referred to as Devil Monkeys typically Devil Monkeys are described as Baboon like creatures; however, the term has been used to describe any monkey-like primate in North America such as the Danville Devil Monkey of New Hampshire which bore a resemblance to a Woolly Monkey.

Was a reverse-footed Nape or Devil Monkey seen in 1913?

Now with that said, there is the chance that the 13' and 40' sightings are of different species of this kind of creatures. While the creature seen in 1940 seems to be some huge monkey, the lack of features described in the creature seen in 1913 makes an exact identity impossible, but there are two key features that are described, the first being that the creature had some sort of stripes along its furry back which is odd because stripes are rarely seen on primates aside from lemurs and Owl Monkeys and secondly it had human hand-like feet that were backward now there is a chance that the witnesses may have misinterpreted the tracks and the footprints were forward-facing but interestingly enough in other countries there have been reports of primates with backward-facing feet the Kalanoro of Madagascar and some versions of stories revolving the Orang Pendek of Sumatra describe them as having backward-facing feet to make tracking impossible. Now there are very few references to this kind of feature in creatures in America, but it is interesting that there are alternative creatures in other parts of the world which could be possibly related.

Quick Facts:

Species/Potential Species: Mammals most likely Primates

Location: Paxinos, Shamokin, Reed Station, Snydertown, Bear Gap, Elysburg, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania

Sighted: September 1-14, 1913, January 1940

Works Cited:

Bigfoot in Pennsylvania By Timothy Renner

Humanoid Encounters: 1930-1949 By Albert S. Rosales

Danville Morning News Danville, Pennsylvania September 15, 1913

 

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