Our first stop in the morning was the International Cryptozoology Museum, the bait Amber used to make me enthusiastic for Maine. Esteemed cryptozoologist Loren Coleman would be signing books at the museum this day. I was overjoyed at my luck until I remembered that Coleman runs the museum. His presence there was not as rare as a jackalope.
Even if one does not believe there is anything out there, Coleman was among the most reputable cryptozoologists working. He had written or cowritten twenty books and authored hundreds of articles. He consulted for NBC's seminal show Unsolved Mysteries and its later bevy of imitators. If he had seen farther than others, it was because he stood on the shoulders of Gigantopithecus, to paraphrase Bernard of Chartres.
When I was young and rooting out the elements of a good monster, I depended on an encyclopedia of cryptozoology he cowrote with Jerome Clark. This would please Coleman, who believed cryptozoology was a gateway to more legitimate biology. I never went further than knowing a Bunyip when I didn't see one.
Out front of the museum was a looming, nine-foot wooden sculpture of a sasquatch. It looked plaintively in the distance, as though its twenty-foot-tall father had left it at sleepaway camp for the first time. The museum was nestled between a fried chicken restaurant and a winery. For those of a more doubting bend, a few glasses of Cabernet would loosen their skepticism.
A clerk stopped us at the door to watch an orientation video starring Coleman. The point was that the museum was a collection from his research, we could take pictures but not of everything, and we shouldn't touch anything. Once the man was pretty sure we watched it, though not that we had paid any attention, he accepted our admission.
"I'm glad you could find us," the clerk said. "A lot of people go to one of our old addresses and get upset."
"You have a lot of old addresses?" I asked.
"Oh no. Only a couple, but tourist books don't update," he said. "If there is anything you don't understand, don't hesitate to come up and ask about it!"
Out of earshot, Amber whispered, "There is no way you are going to ask them anything."
I shook my head. "It would impugn my pride to do so."
Coleman founded The International Cryptozoological Museum in August of 2003, on the first floor of a house he bought for this collection. It began after the death of a fellow researcher whose family had tossed every bit of evidence he had collected. Coleman offered his museum as an alternative to a garbage truck for the estate of any cryptozoologist.
Time Magazine honored this museum as one of the seven weirdest in the world. That is high praise on a planet containing Creationists, the puppets of deceased ventriloquists, and plasticized cadavers. There are countless pretenders to the throne, roadside attractions that seduce the weary traveler with superlatives. Just as there are other theme parks in New England and other zoos but no place that can claim to be both, there is no end to places willing to trade upon ghost stories and anomalous sightings. None of those places have put in the paperwork to be legitimized as a museum.
The two floors were comprised of faked sideshow exhibits like Jenny Hanivers (a skate carcass modified to look like an imp), fur-bearing trout (a taxidermized fish wrapped in rabbit fur, evolved to survive in arctic waters), and some Bigfoot artifacts from Coleman's research or purchased from other researchers. I don't know how to quantify the cost of an antique freak show exhibit. The scent of cardboard boxes and packing tape overpowered that of frying chicken. They were moving in and had not used the totality of the space. The incurious visitor could see every exhibit in fifteen minutes and not feel they had missed anything. Even given my status as a fantasy author and dabbler of the paranormal, we didn't last much longer. I knew the myths and research the way sensible people know their times tables. My greatest surprise was that his map of cryptids made mention of Kipsy, the river monster claimed to infest the Hudson River since 1610, which was likely lost seals.
There is a paucity of factual information, or at least as factual as things get in this field. One could read a date of sighting and a location, but one could not trust more than that. I did not mind. It gave me an excuse to expound my esoteric knowledge to my tolerant wife, all of which she had heard before. In the unclear organization, Coleman claims there are over ten thousand exhibits. I could only justify this by calling each toy an exhibit. Otherwise, there would not be room to display ten thousand of anything much.
Amber was not per se a believer, but neither was I anymore. She grew up buying books about hauntings at book fairs. She reveled in the fantastic in a home with more bookcases than walls to hold them. She was the sort who would-and did-go UFO-spotting and ghost hunting with me without audible scoffing. She appreciated the feeling of going to places most pass by with a skeptical remark.
I looked with envy at the horror of a Feejee Mermaid, a gaffed freak originating in Asia the fourteenth century, a miserable creature no bigger than my forearm. Like all its kind, it resembled a mermaid only in the worst of nightmares, only as something that would attack in a pack, piranha-like. They are the torso of a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish, then mummified. If allowed to keep its fur, the ruse would be too quickly given away. Better it repels the viewers' eyes before they can overcome their disgust to look for the stitching. This example purported to be P.T. Barnum's. I found that a more charming pedigree, so I didn't look at its stitching either.
Amber pointed at the sign below. "It's from a 1999 movie, not Barnum. It's a prop."
"Is it still a monkeyfish?"
She leaned closer to the case. "I hope not."
The exhibit plaques state that these are fakes. No such animal ever existed, and these represented a pin in the history of the field of cryptozoology. Coleman supplied them to make the museum less spare.
However keen the museum might be to catalog likelier cryptids, it did not shy away from movie props, including those from The Mothman Prophecies, a twenty-two-foot thunderbird from the short-lived series Freakylinks, and rubber frogs from the movie Magnolia. The latter stretched the definition of fake cryptids, frogs far from undiscovered but strange pouring from the sky.
There was a small shrine to Bandit, Newell Partridge's dog who died chasing the Point Pleasant Mothman in 1966. Others found a large dog's body the next day, but it vanished minutes later when those people went back for it. In a story where 46 people died during a bridge collapse, it's hard not to still feel for the dog trying to protect his master.
Most of the business to the museum is Bigfoot. Humans are narcissists, and we like a cryptid that resembles us. Sea monsters, globsters, out-of-place animals, the potentially not-extinct, and mythic beasts do not hold a candle to an ape-man. Even Coleman found his way into cryptozoology through a fascination with the Yeti.
There were hair samples from undiscovered (or undiscoverable) hominids, though only to see on the other side of Plexiglas. There were no microscopes or photographs of what they look like up close and how to distinguish it from that of a bear. There was also a nineteen-inch scat from a Yeti (popular with visiting kids), kept through a preservation method I didn't care to ask after and whose secrets I didn't wish to plumb. If Coleman assured that it was Bigfoot poop, why wouldn't I take his word? He knows his shit.
On paper, cryptozoology is "the search for and study of animals whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated." This museum takes a broader tack. These animals are not disputed but "hidden." It is an optimistic mission statement. It would be quixotic to seek gremlins that exist no further than storybooks. Bigfoot exists, along with Nessie and the Jersey Devil. Their formal discovery will happen tomorrow or next week at the latest, and won't you feel silly when they are?
Cryptozoology has had its wins. Its adherents swore the coelacanth, an unlovely fish supposed dead after the age of dinosaurs, swam still. One was discovered in 1938. (It was picked up by a fishing boat, then noticed in a pile of dead sharks by a museum curator in Cape Town, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who stuffed it into a taxicab for want of more seemly transport.) A cartoon of this fish serves as the mascot for the museum. Cryptozoology chose as its poster child the okapi, which cryptozoologists claimed for decades existed. (The residents of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo had no questions the okapi was real. The colonizers assumed stories of them were the gibber of savages, as colonizers are wont to do.)
They have not had as good of luck proving most other creatures are anything more than fancy.
Not all cryptids are thrilling anomalies. A branch of them is normal animals where they shouldn't be. While I would be taken aback to be greeted by a kangaroo or tiger in my backyard-and would keep my pets indoors until the situation could be resolved-it wouldn't have the impact of a Yeti.
The most photographed spot in the museum is their lifelike Bigfoot statue. The Bigfoot used to be outside a restaurant in Minnesota. A taxidermist inspired by Harry and the Hendersons made it of musk oxen fur. He kept it in a barn, uncertain what one does with a life-sized Bigfoot, before selling it to Crookston, Minnesota, which claimed for itself the "Bigfoot Capital of the World." The town did not manage to make a Bigfoot museum to back this up. Quietly, the town sold it to Coleman.
This museum may disappoint those wanting more than the paintings and sculptures artists send to Coleman, labeled fakes, movie props, and the outright toys (which Coleman, with a sense of irony, appointed "native art"). One must approach this museum with no prejudices for what a museum should contain.
My favorite exhibit was a letter from the actor Jimmy Stewart, explaining how he smuggled a Yeti paw, thereafter called the Pangboche Hand, out of Nepal in his wife's underwear (she was not wearing them at the time). British customs had a strict rule against fingering a woman's bras. It was a stranger time for travel, clearly. (The paw, when a finger bone was tested, was likely human. One wonders how many times Mrs. Stewart washed her panties after learning this.)
We lingered in the gift shop as Amber and I picked over souvenirs. The clerk told me that Coleman was here. I had already passed by him some half dozen times. The clerk insisted I should meet him. He was unaware that I had any stake beyond my powerful social anxiety when confronted with anyone more famous than I am. Amber encouraged me to say hello, at least.
Coleman was a jovial man with a white beard and hair. If he walked up to you and said he was seeking Bigfoot, you would want to answer his questions about mysterious knocking trees and artfully broken branches. His voice had a high timbre, hoarser than one might expect given his stature, but unquestionably friendly, an elderly Jim Henson-type. He won't solve all the mysteries of the unknown world on his own, so it was best to be welcoming. He did not claim he was a believer, instead calling himself an "open-minded skeptic." This is a good default for any scientist, but more so for one who has Bigfoot poop lovingly displayed.
I shook his hand and told him I am a fantasy author from New York. I do not like telling other people I am an author, as it ranks as boasting. He was a more accomplished author and had defeated this block against self-promotion. I told him a little of Artificial Gods since that applied most to his research. I saw in his eyes the moment I became nothing more than a UFO kook. I am unclear if Coleman saw ufology as having any overlap in cryptozoology. He equated what I write to HP Lovecraft. I fumblingly tried to explain how I was different. The justification had a momentum of its own and could not be stopped from pouring out.
I bought a book for him to sign in part from deep embarrassment at my continued existence. He took from his pocket my business card so that he could spell my name right, a courtesy I am not always given. I did not ask him to include my last name, considering that too onerous. He inscribed that I ought to keep watching the skies.
When I returned, Amber showed me the souvenir she bought while I was embarrassing myself before the world's premier cryptozoologist: a tiny rubber okapi.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
