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Tea’s Weird Week: Hot Cryptid Summer (Part 1)
Local legends have drawn tourist dollars for decades, attracting curious legend trippers. Celebrations like West Virginia’s Mothman Festival (Sept. 20-21) and the Ohio Bigfoot Conference (which happened earlier this month) draw big crowds, but in the last few years the number of festivals celebrating lesser known cryptids have grown. Frogman Fest (which happened in March) in Loveland, Ohio, for example, was inspired by an odd case of a 4-foot-tall frog sighting in 1972. I really love to see towns across the country embrace these strange stories and have some pride in them! I decided to list out some summer cryptid fests for all you legend trippers. This column has listings May through August, I’ll write a part 2 of this in August to list more taking place end of summer and into fall.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. If this sort of thing is your jam, I recommend signing up for Sharon Hill’s Pop Cryptid Spectator Substack, which explores representations of “pop cryptozoology” including updates on cryptid themed events.
Hodag Heritage Festival (May 17)
Rhinelander, WI
Wisconsin’s favorite cryptid, the Hodag, dates back to a hoax from the 1890s by town prankster Eugene Shepard, which evolved to become the love and pride of Rhinelander. I wrote more about this for Milwaukee Magazine last year: https://www.milwaukeemag.com/what-is-the-hodag-rhinelander/
Hodag Heritage Festival has been around about five years now and has grown quite a bit. The line-up for this Saturday looks really fun: a pancake breakfast, talks related to folklore, a Hodag calling contest, and much more. It’s organized in part by The Hodag Store. More info: https://www.rhinelanderchamber.com/hodagheritagefestival
Grafton Monster Festival (June 13-14)
Grafton, WV
West Virginia is one of the country’s most cryptid-dense states. Mothman of Point Pleasant is the most well-known, but there’s a lot of other strange creatures out of time and space running around there. Take, for example, the Grafton Monster, a cryptid described as being 7-9 feet tall with white, seal-like skin, and no discernable head, but a face peering from the creature’s chest. It was said to give a loud, deep bellow. There were several sightings around Grafton, WV in June of 1964.
More info on the 2nd Annual Grafton Monster Festival, organized by The Grafton Monster Museum: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61563258026085
Big Muddy Monster Festival (June 21)
Murphysboro, IL
Also known as the “Murphysboro Mud Monster,” this Bigfoot creature described as being slathered in mud, was first seen by a couple getting hot and heavy parked on a lover’s lane in southern Illinois in 1973. Several other people claimed to see– and smell– the stinky cryptid. Big Muddy has since become an iconic symbol of Murphysboro. More info: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100094542990087
Veggie Man Day (July 13)
Fairmont, WV
Another West Virginian cryptid and a strange one. The “Vegetable Man” was a humanoid entity that looked to be made out of plants that was allegedly encountered by a West Virginian hunting in the woods in 1968. The first Veggie Man Day is taking place at the Frank & Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center. More: https://www.facebook.com/events/s/veggie-man-day-2025/1177423897211539
Squonkapalooza (Aug. 2)
Johnstown, PA
Based on Pennsylvanian lumberjack lore, the Squonk is said to be a butt ugly cryptid that is constantly weeping over their own ugly appearance. Aw, poor Squonk– I like you just the way you are. Like all of the festivals I’m listing, Squonkapalooza is a nice mix of craft/art vendors, presentations, and entertainment. Check out more: https://squonkapalooza.com/
Fearsome Folklore Festival (Aug. 23)
Murfreesboro, TN
This one doesn’t focus on a particular entity but is a free, “family friendly folklore and cryptid themed celebration.” Speakers, live music, cryptid drawing workshops, and a petting zoo– I’m assuming the zoo is of known animals and not cryptids. Both Squonkapalooza and this one are created by Cryptid Comforts.
More info: https://www.facebook.com/events/1256884292699296
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Please Clap Dept.: Speaking of festivals, this one isn’t cryptid related, but I’m co-organizer of typewriter/ innovation/ writing celebration QWERTYFEST MKE. We are launching fundraising next week and need your help to meet our goals. Stay tuned!
Next week on TWW: Apocalypse Every Show Now. Want TWW delivered to your inbox? You can sign up for my Substack HERE. Follow me on: Facebook Bluesky Instagram
Tea’s Weird Week: Favorite Words of 2024 (and where I wrote ’em)
Words! Some just feel better rolling off the tongue than others. I’ve been trying to keep track of some of my favorites over the last year. Here’s 12 I love (and by extension, some of the best articles I’ve written for various publications this year). I’m looking forward to more word usage in 2025. Happy New Year!
LANDLUBBERS: “Goth Barge has developed a following for their Dark Wave fueled boat cruises, but they do plenty of sets for landlubbers too.” —Madcap Milwaukee Calendar: Who Will You Ask to the Goth Prom?, Shepherd Express, Jan. 30.
LYNCHIAN: “If you want to make the experience even more immersive, show up ‘dressed in your Lynchian best’ to win a prize in the costume contest.” — Madcap Milwaukee Calendar: Furries and Motorcyclists Assemble; Music for Your Lynchian Lifestyle, Shepherd Express, Feb. 14
PENDING: “Pending approval, the statue will be placed in a corner of Elm Park they hope to rename Gygax Park and will feature a likeness of Gary Gyagx sitting at the head of a table, where visitors can sit down and join him for a game.”– Dungeons & Dragons All Started In This Tiny Wisconsin Town, Atlas Obscura, March 28
CAPRINE VINYASA: “Share your yoga mat with a baby dwarf goat in a session of “caprine vinyasa,” or goat yoga, a trend that dates back to an Oregon farm in 2016.” — Madcap Milwaukee Calendar: Buffy Prom is Ready to Slay, Shepherd Express, May 8.
GOTHABILLIES: “These sour goths don’t like looking out their window to see their moonlit lawn filled with cybergoths, dark wavers, deathrockers, gothabillies, and other new-fangled creatures of the night.”–I’m on a goth boat: All aboard Milwaukee’s Goth Barge, Milwaukee Record, June 4. Please Clap Dept.: This article was included on the “25 favorite Milwaukee Record stories of 2024 list.”
TERRAZZO: “Waitstaff zipped across the hall’s terrazzo floor, delivering plates of fried cod and perch to the maze of tables, each decorated with a centerpiece vase featuring minature American and Serbian flags and colored carnations nestled amongst the condiments.”– Generations of Politicians Have Passed Through Serb Hall, Milwaukee Magazine, July 2024
CLACK: “With both parties satisfied with the deal, Dul sits at his Olympia SG-1 typewriter, and with a clack clack clack he types the customer a receipt, turning a crank to pull it free from the platen (the roller that holds the paper).”– Gen Z is into typewriters, Chicago Reader, Sept. 19
CLOWNADO: “The success of those movies led to a score of low budget entries like Killer Clowns: Unleashed (2016), Crispy’s Curse (2017), Clowntergeist (2017), Clown Motel: Spirits Arise (2018), and a film title that perhaps sums up the Trump administration in a single word: Clownado (2019).”– Political Monsters: How Presidents Influence Horror Movies, zine/e-book, October 2024
BLOWHOLE: “The band’s logo, a mohawked humpback whale in a leather jacket (with an enormous safety pin piercing the noble animal’s blowhole) breaching the water while defiantly raising a flipper, was a common sight on the streets, plastered everywhere on flyers and stickers slapped on dumpsters and electrical boxes.”– The Terrible Curse of the Humpbacks, Riverwest Radio Ghost Walk booklet, October 2024. Please Clap Dept.: Illustrator Ashley Altadonna captured what I thought this logo might look like exactly:
SCHTICK: “I sell a drink, put the money in the register; at the end of the night, I count the money – immediate gratification,” Guenther says. “I make a new customer, I tell a joke, people laugh, and that’s my schtick.”– A Short Guide to Milwaukee’s Dive Bars, Milwaukee Magazine, October 2024
HODAG-GREEN: “Then, in 2018, he went all in, giving the exterior of the shop a Hodag-green coat of paint and rebranding as The Hodag Store.”– Do You Know the Legend of the Rhinelander Hodag? Milwaukee Magazine, October 2024
KRAMPUSSCHLAP: “Krampuschlap,” a game where people slap each other as hard as they can, is revealed to be “the favorite game of Krampusnacht” in the action comedy Red One. At Milwaukee Krampusnacht, we partnered with Best Place on a “Krampusschlap” drink special (cider and Fireball) and set up a photo opp so people could pretend they were being slapped by a Krampus hand. —Milwaukee Krampusnacht website and social media promotions
Tea’s Weird Week: Hodag vs Snallygaster
It’s so thrilling to have the podcast back on the air for a “season 2.” We kicked things off this season with an epic showdown between two local legend contenders. As I say in the intro to this podcast episode, we love folklore and legends at Tea’s Weird Week. There’s so many small towns across the country that have some story about a monster lurking in the forest, creeping a country lane, or swimming in the local pond. For many of these towns, their monster story is their main claim to fame– consider, for example, Mothman– who has made Point Pleasant, West Virginia a tourist destination.
This episode talks about the Hodag, monster celebrity of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and the Snallygaster of Fredrick County, Maryland.
I’m very well familiar with the Hodag. My parents took me to Rhinelander during a trip “Up North,” just so I could see photos and a sculpture of the monster in the Lumberjack Museum and they got me a t-shirt and a plush Hodag. People are still make a pilgrimage to Rhinelander to get souvenirs, as I found when I talked to Ben Brunell, proprietor of the Hodag Store (thehodagstore.com) for this episode. But what the heck is a Hodag? Well, I wrote an entry on it for my book Wisconsin Legends & Lore (2020, History Press) and here’s an excerpt:
Perhaps the most uniquely Wisconsin monster in this list is the Hodag, a fearsome animal with giant horns, fangs, and a row of spines down its back. It’s frightening and yet also a sign of civic pride in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where the Hodag story originates.
The Hodag, I hate to spoil so quickly, was a hoax. It was created by one of Wisconsin history’s most colorful characters, Eugene Shepard, who worked in the timber industry as a land surveyor and later in life ran a resort near Rhinelander. He hung around lumberjack camps, and as you might recall from the last chapter, claims to be the originator of Paul Bunyan folklore. He was an early circulator of the tall tales, but taking his word on anything would be hard to do as he was also a well known practical joker.
Among his many pranks were fooling people at a resort he ran into believing he had a unique, rare breed of scented moss on the property (which was regular moss doused in perfume) and a fake muskie he had rigged up to leap out of the water to entice guests into taking fishing trips. He liked to enlist a friend to pinch people’s legs on public transportation while he imitated a growling dog to fool them into thinking they had been bitten. To be in Shepard’s vicinity was to be a practical joke victim in waiting.
Shepard’s hoax with the longest-lasting impact began in 1893 when he claimed he had encountered a Hodag, a beast based on lumberjack folklore. A Hodag, lumberjacks believed, was the ghost of a disgruntled ox. In 1896, Shepard claimed he had captured the beast (by putting chloroform at the end of a long pole and knocking the monster unconscious). Several other details about the life of the Hodag were embellished and reported by Shepard and others—the Hodag preferred to dine on white bulldogs, for example, or that its young were delivered from a set of 13 eggs.
While scrolling through Instagram, I discovered the American Snallygaster Museum and was delighted by the story. The Snallygaster is a weird bird/octopus/dragon hybrid– depictions have varied slightly, some show it with one eye or three eyes, tentacles on it’s mouth or body, etc. The legend came with German immigrants who settled in Frederick County, Maryland. It’s not a story as well known as the Hodag or Mothman, but Sarah Cooper, creator of the American Snallygaster Museum (snallygastermuseum.com) is hoping to change that. She’s assembled art and other artifacts that’s she’s been displaying as a pop-up, but is working on a permanent location.
The Hodag Store and the American Snallygaster Museum– two spots to add to your monster road trip!
Tea’s Weird Week, S2, Ep02: Hodag vs Snallygaster: In addition to talking to Ben Brunell (Hodag Store) and Sarah Cooper (American Snallygaster Museum), me and Heidi had a lot of catching up to do on weird news– Miss Information is back with a trivia question (answer to win fabulous prizes), and we close the episode out with a beautiful track from Mere of Light, “Moon from a Well.” Additional music: “Mecha vs Titan” by Kaijusonic/T.Reed/ Tao X Productions and “Demon Business” by Android138.
Listen here: Tea’s Weird Week S2 ep01: Hodag vs Snallygaster (podbean.com)
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Tea’s Weird Week: Hold on to Your Buttocks, TWW Podcast Season 2 is About to Shake Down
There’s many things I like about the Tea’s Weird Week podcast, but one reason it is dear to me is that it’s been a part of my social time, a chance to talk to cool, interesting people, some I’ve known a long time, others I’ve just met. After wanting to do a podcast for years, the pandemic downtime finally caught up to me and like a million billion other people, I got that podcast rolling. TWW has a great crew– my co-host Heidi Erickson, sound engineer Android138, and trivia host Miss Information. We did a 13 episode inaugural season that ran January through April. Like a lot of things I do, it was a case of building an airplane while flying it, but I think it turned out well.
In season one, we had some really fun original music by Android138 and other music guests, an interesting array of interviews with people like writer and UFO podcaster Ryan Sprague, the yodeling dominatrix Manuela Horn, Lake Monster expert Scott Mardis, and Patch O’Furr, a furry investigative journalist, just to name a few. We also did things like an episode based on audio from my 2017 tour of the Luxury Survival Condos.
I love having a weekly discussion with Heidi for the Tea’s Weird Week News segment about topical stories and classic strange cases; a couple people won big answering Miss Information’s trivia, and we closed out each episode with a track by an awesome indie band. I guess the podcast follows a sort of weirdo late night show format– opening monologue/interview, weird news talk, bonus skit stuff (like some of the music bits and the “Comedy Roast of Zorth“), trivia question, song. We try to have fun and inform you about the very weird world around us.
You can listen to the entire season on your preferred platform choice– find the episode list and links to all platforms here: Tea’s Weird Week Podcast | (teakrulos.com)
We’re working on a new 13 episode season 2 (summer season) right now and we’ve got a lot of great stuff going. I’m going to tell you about the first 3 episodes we got in production and some of the ideas we have beyond that.
(S2, EP01.) Hodag vs. Snallygaster. We love local lore at Tea’s Weird Week. Many small towns across the country have some story about a monster that lurks in the woods, stalks a creepy country lane, or swims in the local pond. We talk with the proprietors of the Hodag Store in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and the American Snallygaster Museum in Frederick County, Maryland about their homespun monsters. (airs 5/21)
(S2, EP02.) The Marvelous Miss Fit. I met Miss Fit– bodybuilder, charity fundraiser, and Real-life Superhero star of The Adventures of Miss Fit while working on my book Heroes in the Night. A stereotype of Real-life Superheroes is that they are dorky, delusional Batman-wannabe white dudes. Miss Fit bench-presses that idea, then body-slams it, then puts it in a headlock. She’s just rad, is what I’m saying. (airs 5/28)
(S2, EP03.) Lost in the Schroeder’s Books Vortex. Imagine a bookstore that looks like something out of an episode of Hoarders, run by a mysterious and eccentric woman, a hodgepodge tsunami of books ranging from the worthless to the priceless. Well, you’ll have to imagine because the West Allis, Wisconsin Fire Department shut Schroeder’s Books and Music down years ago, but we get one last look as the store is being cleared out and remember the sights and smells of the store, plus a dramatic reading of some of the store’s Yelp reviews. (airs 6/4)
After that I’m not sure what order these might appear, but we have episode ideas in the works that include interviewing Nick Redfern about his new book, a visit to our friends at Dead by Dawn Dead & Breakfast in Manitowoc, a Bohemian Grove episode, and much more, plus some great music and intriguing trivia.
After that, we’ll take a short summer vacation and then season 3 will really be all out because it will be our fall season– lots going on. As I wrote in a 2019 Tea’s Weird Week column, “October is Mad Boo-Business.” We’ll be recording live from some events, doing our own live events, some ghost investigating.
You can see me and Heidi do the news segment live in the Tea’s Weird Week Facebook group (and hopefully I’ve figured out how to hook Streamyard to YouTube), we’re going live this Friday, May 14, 5pm CST for S2, ep01.
Tune in!
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