Civil War Horror

Hey folks. I'm over at the A to Z blog today talking about the A to Z blogging challenge. You'll hear all about cryptids, Ozark vigilantes, and where Clint Eastwood got his trademark grimace. Head on over and check it out!

(oh, hey! this is my 500th post on Civil War Horror!)

Photo of the Chilean Blob, one of the more loveable globsters, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

I've decided to change the blog a bit. You may not have noticed that I widened the center a tad to make for easier reading and larger photos. I've also added my Twitter feed on the righthand column. The biggest change, of course, is that I've replaced the templates bookshelf background with a photo of Civil War soldiers shooting down a pterodactyl!

I've written a few posts on the mythological Thunderbird and the various soldiers and frontiersmen who claimed to have bagged one. My hard drive contains a small collection of these photos and I might make a tiled background of them when I get the time. I certainly would have to include this charming photo of a Globster!

Legendary Beasts of Britain by Julia Cresswell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Shire Books are short, heavily illustrated introductions to a variety of British subjects. Considering how many they've published, including one on spoons, I'm surprised they haven't done one on legendary creatures. Well, good things come to those who wait. This is a fascinating look at the origins and development of unicorns, dragons, wyverns, griffins, and more.

Despite its small size, the author manages to pack in a lot of information. By the time you finish this you'll know the difference between your mermaids and your selkies, your unicorns and your yales. You'll also learn several old legends and tall tales from times past.

Creswell digs up some interesting images beyond the usual ones we often see. For example, there are several photos of misericords, those little benches they put in churches to lean against while you're standing. They were often carved with mythical beasties and make for an interesting study in unusual church art.

Since this is an examination of traditional beasts, newer appearances such as aliens and globsters don't make the cut, but you'll still find Alien Big Cats (which go back further than I thought) and everyone's beloved lake monster, Nessie.

I recommend this for anyone looking for a primer on the folklore of Great Britain. It makes for good fodder for writers too!

View all my reviews

Let's descend into a bit of silliness. This is, after all, a fiction blog as well as a history blog.

We all remember the pterodactyl from when we were kids, that weird birdlike creature with the funky head. It died out with the dinosaurs, right?

Wrong, say some true believers. Pterodactyls have been spotted all over the world, especially in Texas, which has had several waves of pterodactyl sightings. Pterodactyls have landed on mobile homes, buzzed schoolteachers on their way to work, and generally caused mayhem across the state.

Native Americans believed in the Thunderbird, a giant bird seen in the skies of the American Southwest. Cryptozoologists (people who study unexplained animal sightings) claim the Thunderbird legend may be evidence of pterodactyl sightings. Of course the legend recounts a big feathered bird and not a reptile, but whatever.

Creationists have also gotten into the game. Many of the "pterodactyls are alive" websites use the sightings as evidence that the Earth couldn't be millions of years old, otherwise these creatures would have died out.

The sightings have been happening for some time now and even the Tombstone Epitaph got into the game back in 1890, claiming that some cowboys bagged one. Many photos of the supposed creature have arisen. This is just one of them.

While I have a hard time believing in the Thunderbird/living pterodactyl, I do find the idea charming. Perhaps I'll write a story about it one day!


I took this photo from the Texas Cryptid Hunter blog, which has a refreshingly skeptical take on the phenomenon. The image is not original to them. While I'm careful to use only public domain photos in this blog, I'm not sure this one is. If it's really as old as it appears, then it's public domain. It could simply be an old fake. If it's modern, then I'm in breach of copyright, but the only way the creator could sue me is if they admitted faking the photo! I'll take that chance. :-)

The A to Z blogfest continues, and the letter G can only mean one thing--the globster!

What's a globster, you ask? It's an unidentified blob of flesh washed up on the beach. It's smelly, decaying, and generally nasty. People used to think they were some type of sea monster or unidentified species of giant squid or octopus.

I've always had a soft spot in my heart for globsters. Perhaps it's the name, or their irresistible cuteness. Perhaps it's because I always root for the underdog, and you can't get much lower than being a rotting hunk of unidentifiable meat on the beach being gawked at by local yokels.

The above photo is of the St. Augustine Monster, which washed ashore near St. Augustine, Florida, in 1896. Needless to say it caused quite a stir. A scientist who saw it thought it was an octopus because of the arm-like appendages you can see here. Journalists, of course, immediately labeled it a sea monster.

Maybe the journalists were right for once. Maybe in the unexplored depths of the ocean there are colonies of globsters, perhaps with a highly evolved civilization to hide themselves from our advancing technology. They're only spotted when one dies and floats to the surface!

Alas, I've never seen a globster. My closest brush with the unknown was "seeing" the infamous Thunderbird photo. I have to be content reading about them at Globhome.

This photo is of the Chilean Blob. It washed up on the shore of Chile back in 2003. At first it couldn't be identified, but then some party poopers at a biological laboratory checked the DNA and found it came from a sperm whale. Part of the blubber layer separated from the rest of the decaying animal and eventually made it to the beach and into the newspapers. The researchers theorize that most or all globsters may also be whale blubber.

But hey, DNA samples can be wrong, just ask anyone on death row! There's still a chance that the Lost Civilization of the Globsters will rise from the deep to reclaim their dead. . .

[Photos of the St. Augustine Monster and Chilean Blob courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

While this blog is mostly dedicated to Civil War and Old West history, my most popular post is the one I did on the Thunderbird photo and False Memory Syndrome. It's about the enduring mystery over an alleged photo of a giant lizardy bird shot down by some cowboys near Tombstone and reported in the 26 April 1890 edition of the Tombstone, Arizona, Epitaph. Check out the link for more. It includes some fun shots of various cowboys and Civil War soldiers who have downed pterodactyl-like critters.

Now another photo has emerged on the Internet. It's the best quality I've seen so far but with all the Photoshopping going on these days, excuse me if it doesn't turn me into a True Believer. I found this on Reddit from a thread that links to my Thunderbird article. Thanks buddy, hope this post gets you some traffic back! All is connected on the Internet.

Being busy with a book deadline, I didn't contribute to the travel blog Gadling as much as I would have liked this past month. Still, I did some interesting posts you might like to check out.

I wrote only one post related to the Civil War, a news brief on the upcoming commemoration of the Battle of Antietam. More history/archaeology posts include a virtual tour of Maeshowe, an old-time film short on a Western ghost town, a cache of severed hands discovered in Egypt, archaeologists searching for the lost grave of Richard III, a lovely road trip through historic Oxfordshire, a 3D laser scan of Lalibela, the discovery of the Terra Nova, and tours of the Steamboat Arabia Museum and London's Soane Museum.

I also finished up my series on visiting the Orkney Islands.

On a weirder note, don't miss the story about British police hunting for a lion in Essex, a Norwegian Nessie, and my own photo of a mysterious "sea monster".

Oh, and I discovered I appear in a Youtube video!

To see all my posts, follow my Gadling feed.

Earlier this week I did a post debunking the Civil War pterodactyl photograph that's been making the rounds on the Internet. A five-minute check of its origins story found many obvious lies.

Now the ultracool conspiracy blog Guerrilla Explorer dug deeper to find out more. Guerrilla Explorer loves a good mystery, but also happens to have a brain so he isn't taken in by surface appearances. He did what I didn't, which was to look not at the story, but at the source. That turns out to be Haxan Films, the same folks that brought us The Blair Witch Project, one of my favorite horror flicks. Read more at the link above. He also has some more info about other living pterodactyl tales that supplements my post on the famous Thunderbird photo.

I still think this would make a good short story. . .

The title of this post says it all. I love writing for a living!

I got back from the Gadling travel bloggers' summit a week ago and since then my work has led me to research the gunfight at the OK Corral, the history of barbed wire, the Lincoln assassination, torture museums around the world, the UFO crash at Roswell, and modern pterodactyl sightings! I've also networked with a ton of bloggers, debunked a cryptozoology photograph, prepped a pitch to speak at a writing conference, and wrote a press release for a photo exhibition my wife and I are doing in June.

Probably the most challenging thing I've had to do this week came from my fiction, when I wrote myself into an interesting corner and had to figure out what happens when the all-white crew of a Civil War Union gunboat has to take a black regiment upriver on a secret and possibly illegal mission. It may become the most interesting chapter in my novel and I didn't even plan it!

How can't you love a job like this?

This photo has been making the rounds for some time, and I have to say it warms my heart. Giant monsters in the Civil War? Yeah, I'm there!

It appears to show a group of Union soldiers proudly displaying a pterodactyl they've shot down. It's similar to a couple of other photos that I published in my post about the Thunderbird photo. As with those photos, I didn't ask permission to republish this. If it's really as old as it appears, then it's in the public domain. It could simply be an old fake. If it's a modern fake, then I'm in breach of copyright, but the only way the creators could sue me is if they admitted faking the photo! I'll take that chance. :-)

This image first appeared on Freakylinks, a cryptozoology page. Hit the link for a larger format of this photo plus an article about it. The author claims to have found this image stuck like a bookmark in a book titled Search for the Outer Space Gods by Jonathan Ferody, published by Harpsong Press in 1977. Searches on Amazon, ABE, and Google produced no such title or author. There is a Harpsong Press, but it wasn't established until 2003 and only published one book.

The author also states he contacted various professionals who said it looked real, including "Professor M. Nance Darbrow from the University of Florida Paleontology Department" and "Dr. Christian Barscuz, Anthropology Department, University of Arizona." At this point my bullshit detector went off the scale. I studied at the University of Arizona Anthropology department in the late 1990s and remember no such professor, even though Dr. Barscuz was supposedly there in 1998. An Internet search failed to bring up either of these two researchers at any university.

What's interesting is that this story was picked up by many other websites who simply repeated the information without spending five minutes to check, which all the time I devoted to this. Life is short, after all.

But I'm not one of those grumpy skeptics. I love the fact that some Civil War reenactors got together with a B-movie castoff and made this photo. Maybe I should make some of my own for my next book cover? At least my Civil War horror books are clearly labeled as fiction!

Today I'm participating in the Deja-vu blogfest, where bloggers are reposting their favorite old post. I first published this one back in 2009 on my blog Grizzled Old Traveler. It's a travel blog that I don't update anymore now that I blog professionally for Gadling. There are still some good posts on there, though. This is my favorite. My second favorite is Ten Reasons the Moon Landing Conspiracy theory is Stupid.

Yesterday I was chatting with a fellow writer about a book she's writing on legendary beasts. One of my favorites is the Thunderbird, a giant dinosaur-like winged creature that haunts the American Southwest, and the conversation turned to the strange role I've played in the story of this mysterious creature.


Let me say at the outset that I don't think the Thunderbird is real. With all the aviation, birdwatchers, and development in the United States in the past century, no giant flying monster could have remained undetected. My skepticism, however, makes this story all the more interesting.