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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