Monsters Have Always Been With Us

Forest of Distraction #28

This newsletter presents a small collection of geographic, historical, archaeological, cultural and/or artistic articles that have caught my attention. As a fantasy writer, I am fascinated by the nooks and corners of our real world and constantly find inspiration for my own world building and storytelling — it’s my hope that these newsletters are an inspirational resource for other writers, too, or for anyone who wants to learn more about our world.

What’s more frightening — the unknown that lies beyond your door, or the unknown that lies within your soul?

In His House at R’lyeh, Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming

Point Nemo is so remote that it is doubtful whether anyone has ever consciously visited it yet. The participants in the 2015 Volvo Ocean Race, on the leg from Auckland, New Zealand to Itajai, Brazil, came closer than most. As they passed by Point Nemo, it was noted that the ships were closer to the occupants of the ISS, circling overhead at an altitude of around 250 miles (approximately 400 kilometers) on one of its 15 daily orbits around the globe, than to the rest of humanity.

Thinking like that could give you nightmares, especially considering that Point Nemo is not just remote and inhospitable, but also eerie to the extreme. And not just in lovecraftian fiction.

In 1997, oceanographers picked up an ultra-low-frequency sound emanating from the depths below Point Nemo. Named the Bloop, the enigmatic sound was too powerful to be produced even by blue whales, the largest known marine creatures. Scientists have since suggested that it was made by icebergs calving in Antarctica. It has not been excluded, however, that the Bloop emanates from a giant, as yet unknown underwater animal. Perhaps Cthulhu is finally stirring because of those occult incantations. Or could he have been awakened by that steady stream of space fragments raining down on his monstrous head?

Read more: The Most Remote Place on Earth Has Space Junk and a Sea Monster

Hic Sunt Dracones

Lakes, on the other hand, are often close by, part of the fabric of everyday life—not remote or remotely exotic. And yet we have Champ in Lake Champlain; Ogopogo, Igopogo, and Manipogo in Canada, to say nothing, of course, of the alleged denizen of Loch Ness in Scotland. The fact that there are so many lake monsters to be found speaks, perhaps, to the profound unquiet we have about the waters surrounding us.

Above the surface, we presume complete control over lakes: waterways for commerce, the transportation of goods, recreation, and sports. But the murky depths remain unknown, a foreign terrain. To see a strange animal breaking the surface of a lake is to feel the eerie presence of another realm breaking through, from the unknowable world below, troubling our serene understanding of water.

Almost as soon as we see such unsettling sights in such familiar places, we seem to want to domesticate them. We call them “Bessie,” “Champ,” or “Nessie.” (Bigfoot, it should be noted, will never be called “Biggie.”) We’ll do whatever we can to dull the unnerving sensation. The prevalence of lake monster sightings, and the way we immediately try to render them harmless reflects, I think, our ambivalence about bodies of water themselves. Our closeness to places we can never fully plumb means we must immediately do whatever we can to suppress that discomfort.

Read more: Toward a Unifying Theory of Lake Monsters

Zashiki-Warashi: Spirit Children

Another Tohoku yokai made famous by the Tono Monogatari are the zashiki-warashi, spirits who haunt the tatami rooms of households, counterintuitively bringing fortune to the families they visit and taking that luck away with them when they leave—causing families to fall on hard times.

Zashiki-warashi tales speak to the ever-changing fortunes of Tono households, subject to long winters, famines, malnutrition, and natural disasters, which Ishikura says led to a culture of taking in yoshi, orphaned or abandoned children.

Zashiki-warashi are often seen playing in open rooms, Ishikura says—and anyone who witnesses it shouldn’t interfere.

Sasaki postulated that zashiki-warashi were the spirits of the children who were killed and buried in the home, again raising the specter of wide-spread infanticide of the Tohoku region in the past.

Read more: These Japanese Mythical Creatures Were Born From Disaster