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Tuesday, February 8, 2022

The Blackwood Centaur

 The Blackwood Centaur

By Cole Herrold

Blackwood, New Jersey, seemingly is an unsung Greek Monster breeding ground as, over the years, at least two creatures from the Myths of the Mediterranean Sea seemed to of appeared in the small community. The earliest account was a strange pigman/minotaur hybrid reported in 1976 known as the Blackwood Pigtaur (see its entry for more info). Sometime later, however, in the winter of 2000, another Homeric beast was claimed to dwell in the nearby community. This account I had originally come across several years ago on About.com's paranormal archive “Your True Tales," and unfortunately, at the time, I was not able to acquire a copy as I had some naïve notion that the account would be there forever. This was not the case and it, along with several other bizarre cases, seemed lost to time, that is until I was doing research on another New Jersey native and found the entry in the Messiah of Fortean filing Albert Rosales’s mandatory-to-own book series Humanoid Encounters which has managed to save most of the cases. So, a personal thank you to Albert Rosales for his incredible resources and hard work. Now on to the encounter.

One night an unnamed witness was driving home from a nightclub in a heavy snowstorm. It was about 2:00 in the morning, and the witness was returning home from a late night of partying at a nightclub that was not from his home. He was in his Ford Explorer and was about to turn onto Erial Road, where his house is, when a strange figure began to run out in front of his truck. The creature was only about 20 yards from his vehicle, and he could see that it was dark gray and seemingly four-legged, which at first made him think that it was a deer. Yet as he looked out into the darkness and up from the lower portion of the creature, he noticed that the quadrupedal body grew into the trunk of a man’s upper torso. He stared in absolute shock and with a twinge of terror at the man-like appendages and took note that not only was the creature's equestrian or cervine lower quarters graying from assumedly age, but so too did the creature's man-like face. The witness watched as the elderly creature stared at him with eerily human eyes before it began to run once more into a nearby wooded lot that was adjacent to his backyard. The witness proceeded to return home completely terrified, dripping with sweat and trembling. He then, after running to the assumed safety of his home, proceeded to lock the patio doors and watched the woods from the backyard just in case the creature decided to make a comeback. As he waited and watched, however, the creature never did return, and as far as being reported, it was never seen again.

Humanoids and specifically creatures known as Manimals have always interested me cryptids like Mothman, Owlman, and of course, Bigfoot, for example, are some of my personal favorites, but these entities, while bearing some human-like qualities, do tend to be more reminiscent of animals very few have features that one could point to as truly human. With creatures like the Centaurs or Flying humanoids such as the Butler County Gargoyle or Butler County Faerie (See entries for more info), they seem to be eerily human and not something such as a bipedal ape, reptile, or bird that is man-sized. So, it raises the question, especially in this case, just what could this creature be as it does not seem to match the known realms of Zoology or Paleontology.

Skeptically speaking, this creature evolutionarily should not exist. When looking at chimeral beasts and creatures such as flying humanoids, some merfolk accounts, and of course my personal favorite, the Jersey Devil, the main problem with their existence is that their bone structure defies our current understanding of how species evolve. Wings, for example, are essentially highly modified hands that are adapted for flight as opposed to walking or grasping. Currently, in nature, no vertebrates have multiple appendages that one would associate with this feature; insects, arthropods, and the like do, but their bodies are built extremely different compared to how we currently understand bilateral symmetry and in general skeletal development in vertebrates. So with cases such as classic Chupacabras or the Jersey Devil, for example, which are described as having both wings and small front legs, this is currently an impossibility as we have no evidence of multi-winged organisms in the fossil record. This same argument also includes Centaurs as basically what is described is a similar skeletal structure of a human's but fused to that of a horses; this would have to imply that there would be three sets of appendages, two that developed much like a horse's and one that continued to function or evolved to be like a set of human arms. This evolutionarily is impossible at our current understanding of how organisms develop, even though such features would be advantageous.

From a not so skeptical standpoint, horse-humanoids that are seemingly fused at weird angles or in almost perfectly cut ways are actually surprisingly common, while one can easily point to the Centaur from Greek Myth as a reference, sightings of similar creatures have been reported elsewhere and in modern times. In Scotland, there is a rather nasty creature that is a variation of centaur-like creature known as the Nuckelavee; this abhorrent abomination is described as having the full form of a horse head, hoof, and tail but also having a humanoid figures upper torso including arms and head growing out of the middle of the back like some sort of macabre tree. All this is even more disturbing when one also mentions that the creature has no skin and that the horse head has a single cycloptic eye peering out of its skull. This creature, unlike centaurs in the Greek myths, which were a mixture of both savage and wise, is completely nefarious; it would ruin crops and genuinely cause unspeakable horrors to any who would run in with it. Reports of centaurs or centaur-like creatures have appeared from time to time in other countries and states as well such as Mexico, Ireland, Virginia, Arizona, Michigan, and another sighting of a similar creature in the Sourland Mountain also of New Jersey. So perhaps these reports are extremely small populations of a kind of cryptid. Perhaps there was some early hominid population or something like that that either through some genetic mutation or altered homeotic hox gene developed an additional set of legs or even arms and that over the several millions of years perfected this feature into enabling it to move faster while still being able to utilize its hands for toolmaking or foraging granted this is a serious long shot, but perhaps it could have happened. Fossils are notoriously unreliable in the sense that while they are factual in the existence of creatures that lived on our planet, they do not sum up all the life that existed on our planet. For an organism to become a fossil, it needs to be in an ideal location at an ideal time, or else it'll just decompose to nothing. For example, most of our early hominid fossils are incomplete are partial skeletons, and for most fossil species, partial specimens are all we really know of them. There are most certainly entire fields of partial remains or entire small populations of organisms that never became fossils or even more probable when one looks at the early methods of paleontology either destroyed, lost, or placed in the vaults of the Smithsonian until some scientist just happens to stumble upon it. The amount of data they have that has not been gone through is staggering hence why some of the most groundbreaking finds in recent history were discovered under their very noses. Perhaps some bizarre evolutionary offshoot of multiple jointed organisms is still buried somewhere, be it in the vault of the Smithsonian or in some desert or under some building, and if or when it's discovered could prove that such creatures did exist or are at least possible.

While the cryptid route anecdotally seems to be the only possibility for these beings, it's by far not the only one. It is unlikely that these beings are ghosts or Extraterrestrials, but I will say that for the extraterrestrial route, there is always the chance that in these cases, there could be some craft hidden in the nearby woods or underground. One popular possibility that was written about in Dante Alighieri’s epic poem Inferno as part of his Divine Comedy features centaurs as a kind of denizen from hell. In Dante's hell, many mythological creatures are claimed, such as Charon, Cerberus, Geryon, the triple bodied creature featured in the 12 labors of Hercules, Medusa, the Furies, the Harpies, the minotaur; of all these classic monsters, however, Dante also encountered three specific centaurs Chiron, Nessus, and Pholus. It's from works as Dante and the general demonization of pagan figures that many views such creatures solely as demonic, but to play devil's advocate, what if they are correct. Perhaps these entities are, in fact, infernal beings who had over the course of centuries in those ancient times convinced people to hold them as gods are in reverence for some malicious purpose and that these beings are authentic demons. Now while one cannot take such a possibility off the table, I do not feel that this is the case. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are relatively new religions, and it's from these Abrahamic religions that most of our perceptions of demons come from and for me to view any phenomenon from this lens which would place almost any phenomena as godly or demonic is frankly just too biased and simplistic for how the world and every other aspect of life is. Plus, those religions, while important, make up only one portion of a wide web of beliefs that ALL need to be taken into consideration; this includes native beliefs, Shinto, Hinduism, paganism in all forms, etc. In this case, this being, even from a considerable demonic identity, did not behave aggressively or do anything that one would associate with the infernal kingdom.

There are two other major possibilities that stick out in my mind as to where this being comes from and, in doing so, just what it might be. The first is, of course, this being could be some interdimensional entity that comes from some dimension where such forms of evolution are common, and for some reason, either intentionally or unintentionally, it ended up here. This would explain the countless sightings over the years and why there's never been official physical evidence of their existence as well as how such a creature could come about.

The other possibility, which depending on your interpretation, could be just an extension of the interdimensional aspect, is that Centaurs are a kind of fae. The fae or faeries, in general, are several species and races of countless types of supernatural beings that are linked to nature. The fae are often linked entirely to Europe, especially in Ireland and the United Kingdom, but almost every culture has some version of them. In Japan, the fae exist in the Yokai as these beings are a colloquial term for bizarre entities that seem to exist for specific purposes, usually for no clear reason, and many bear many similarities in behavior to their European brethren. Native cultures in North, Central, and South America also have tales of diminutive humanoids and bizarre beasts associated with nature; these entities range in shape, size, and purpose but all have almost identical features and abilities to those seen in Europe and Asia. The creatures from Greece are often linked as their own kind, but there are many parallels to the fae, namely with entities such as the dryads, naiads, nereids, and the like, and when one looks at the satyrs, fauns, and centaurs, they too are a kind of being of the woods and interconnected with nature beings that are separate from the divine and the human world. It's from this that perhaps Centaurs are a member of the fae as well. The more I research Fortean cases, the more I think there might be something to the fae or the Fae hypothesis and that it is perhaps it is a much wider and deeper phenomenon than we currently are aware of. However, as with all cases that I mention, the hypothesis is mere speculation.

Centaurs are a bizarre mystery as one does not expect to see one running around in modern times and in a location so far removed from the islands around the Mediterranean Sea. I have several theories as to just what these creatures are, but none are conclusive, as with almost all the creatures that exist in the realms of Fortean studies. I have hopes that eventually, these mysteries will be answered and that these entities, whatever they are and wherever they come from, are part of our knowledge of our world, yet I have doubts that I will see it in my lifetime. Its cases like this that not only pique my interest but also show that once was old is new again and that our monsters and gods are not dead but still living amongst us, hiding in the shadows of the night just out of our sight but on those rare chances just maybe we’ll see them and the legends will continue for generations to come.

Quick Facts:

Species/Potential Species: Mammal

Location: Blackwood, Gloucester Township, New Jersey

Sighted: Winter of 2000

Works Cited:

Humanoid Encounters: 2000-2009 By Albert S. Rosales

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