History is full of stories of monsters that terrified our ancestors.
But where did these monster myths come from?
Certainly, some of them were purely metaphorical, but there are at least a few that might have
been based on actual things.
Here are mythical monsters that might have actually existed.
In Greek mythology, the Lernaean Hydra was a multi-headed snake-beast confronted by Heracles,
son of Zeus.
Or you might know him by his Roman name, Hercules.
Not only was the hydra fearsome, but Heracles also found it incredibly hard to defeat because
each of the hydra's heads he lopped off quickly grew back.
It wasn't until Iolaus, Heracles' nephew and occasional sidekick, got the idea to burn
the stumps after the hydra was decapitated that Heracles was finally able to slay the
monster.
While there weren't any real 50-headed serpent beasts in Ancient Greece, the concept of a
hydra might have been based on something much less fantastical, but still quite remarkable.
Ordinary snakes are common all over the world, and like many other animals, they can occasionally
suffer from a condition known as polycephaly, wherein the snake can have two or even three
heads, but can potentially otherwise be completely healthy.
While polycephalic snakes are very rare, it would only take one or two sightings of one
for it to turn into a telephone game of legends and myths.
Modern biologists now consider snakes with polycephaly to be a very likely origin for
the hydra myth, before artistic license turned them into monsters with dozens of heads, according
to the BBC.
Regeneration among reptiles is also not unheard of, which might have inspired the detail that
their heads grew back, too.
History and mythology are full of aquatic humanoids, half-fish and half-human.
Mermaids are generally considered to be beautiful fish-women who largely avoid humankind but
are otherwise not dangerous.
Not so for their mer-cousins, the sirens, though.
Most famously seen in Homer's The Odyssey, sirens are more birdlike, often depicted as
having wings or even beaks, in addition to fish and human features.
Sirens are said to sing a deadly but enchanting song that draws sailors into the depths.
Odysseus' crew is able to resist by blocking their ears with wax and, in the case of Odysseus
himself, being tied to the mast without wax so he could hear the song.
What might have inspired these legends is something we're pretty familiar with now,
though.
Modern researchers think ancient sailors probably saw manatees or dugongs, both of which have
large arm-like flippers and can turn their head side-to-side, like humans.
From a distance, these creatures might look more human-like than they do close-up, and
thanks to poor nutrition and mental strain from isolation, you also can't rule out that
those who saw sirens or mermaids might have just hallucinated a few extra details.
Today, vampires have great PR and are depicted as slick, smart creatures, drinking blood
from the living and hiding from humanity's watchful eye.
But let us not forget classical stories of vampires.
Typically, these involved lots of people dying all at once, someone blaming the deaths on
a recently deceased person, that person is exhumed, and inside the coffin they find the
deceased's hair and nails have grown, they have blood on their mouth or chin, and there
are scratches inside of the coffin lid.
These kinds of stories are part and parcel of vampire legends, and several common pre-Dracula
myths hit many or all of these points.
But modern historians think what actually went on was much simpler.
Disease was very poorly understood, as was death.
Remember that how disease spreads was largely unknown until recent times, while illnesses
like cholera could quickly wipe out an entire town and leave them scrambling to figure out
why.
On top of that, premature burial wasn't terribly uncommon.
"It's a coffin!
A coffin, let me out!"
"It's your coffin, my love, enjoy it."
And natural decay was a mystery.
It's likely many "vampires" were actually people mistakenly buried alive or dead bodies
undergoing ordinary decay that were misinterpreted as signs of vampirism, such as the body purging
fluids through its mouth, which could be mistaken for blood, or "growing hair," which is actually
due to the skin shrinking and exposing more of the root.
From King Kong to Donkey Kong, giant apes are a big part of our culture.
While modern stories about large primates focus mainly on Bigfoot, Sasquatch, the yeti,
and so on, giant ape myths were actually fairly common in the past, too, albeit not as sensationalized.
Instead of hairy, bipedal creatures with human-like features, giant ape myths were just that.
Regular apes, only bigger.
These myths were especially common in places that actually have apes, such as the jungles
of Africa.
Throughout centuries of exploration, stories emerged of travelers encountering remarkably
strong apes the size of a human or larger.
African tribes had stories spanning back centuries about them.
No evidence ever came forth regarding these giant apes, though, and so they were largely
regarded as a myth or even a hoax.
It wasn't until 1847 that the truth was revealed: giant apes were actually real, and they were
soon given the official name of gorillas.
Before that, science had no idea gorillas were even a thing.
Some of the legends about them were exaggerated, but there really was a species of large apes
we just didn't know about.
African peoples who had passed stories about giant apes through generations were thus permitted
to tell western science "we told you so," as they saw fit.
Every seafaring culture has stories of massive sea serpents, thrashing through the water
and occasionally threatening ships and sailors with huge, terrifying teeth.
Norse mythology had one so large that it encircled the whole world.
In Judaism and Christianity, a massive beast called Leviathan stalks the seas.
Even more modern legends, such as those told by pirates, included these huge monsters.
While the natural conclusion might be to assume these legends originated from a misidentification
of an eel of some kind, in truth, there's been something even scarier in the water for
thousands of years.
One of the oldest living shark species, the frilled shark calls the deep sea its home,
and like many deep sea creatures, it looks super weird.
Without the long fins we typically associate with sharks, the frilled shark wriggles through
the sea and has multiple sets of barbed teeth, perfect for tearing things to shreds.
Sightings outside of the deep sea are incredibly rare.
The frilled shark is so old National Geographic refers to it as a, quote, "living fossil,"
because the species has barely changed in 80 million years.
Another possible culprit is the frilled shark's fellow deep sea denizen, the goblin shark.
While not as serpent-looking as the frilled shark, the goblin shark is utterly terrifying,
like something out of the Aliens universe.
It'd be shocking if our ancestors didn't tell scary stories about them.
In Japanese folklore, there are humanoid, amphibious, often turtle-like creatures about
the size of a child known as the kappa.
"Kappa!"
"Kappa?
Cappuccino?
That makes me hyper.
What's a kappa?"
They pop up a lot in Japanese mythology, but haven't really made their way across the ocean
so much.
Still, they do show up a little in the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts movie series,
and plenty of anime and video games have nods and references to them.
Basically, they're mischievous gremlins that live in rivers and streams.
They love cucumbers and, oddly, sumo wrestling.
They usually pull mean-spirited but harmless pranks, but they can also sometimes attack
or even drown unsuspecting humans.
One interesting feature is that they're usually shown to have a flat or bowl-shaped head which
collects water.
If that water dries up or spills while they're on the surface, the kappa is severely weakened.
Many of these legends were based on sightings of a real animal, the Japanese giant salamander.
It's an amphibious creature, quite large, and it does have a flat head, which may have
been where the detail about kappa having a flat or indented head came from.
The salamanders are incredibly rare and endangered nowadays.
They are protected by the Japanese government, so if you find one, maybe avoid sumo wrestling
with it.
Before the flesh-eating zombies of The Walking Dead and George A. Romero movies, there were
voodoo zombies - humans raised from the dead and forced to do the bidding of a voodoo practitioner.
While these particular zombies didn't necessarily eat flesh, they were undead, shambling monsters.
They may or may not decay like their modern zombie brethren, depending on the source.
"Get outta here!"
Legends of these zombies went through centuries, and it wasn't uncommon to hear of a nefarious
person raising the bodies of the recently deceased and using them like slaves.
In fact, there were occasionally tales of former zombies returning to a more human-like
state, as if they just stopped being dead after a while.
In the 1980s, researcher Wade Davis headed to Haiti to look into this for himself.
There, he discovered what may have been the concoction that made real-life zombies.
The "deceased" weren't dead at all.
Instead, the unsuspecting victim was dosed with tetrodotoxin, found in the puffer fish,
which caused a paralysis not unlike death that wore off in a few days.
Davis came to believe victims were given this drug to make them appear to die, and then
after several days, their body was retrieved and forced into servitude, where they would
be given powerful psychoactive drugs on a regular basis to keep them pliable and obedient.
The Algonquian, native to the United States and Canada, have a legend of a beast called
the wendigo.
The legends vary.
Sometimes the wendigo is a monster that eats human flesh, but in other cases, the wendigo
isn't a physical being, but an evil spirit which possesses humans, causing them to become
cannibals and perform other monstrous deeds.
Some psychiatrists think there's a less paranormal, but still creepy explanation.
They call it "Wendigo psychosis," and according to American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales,
it's a cultural disorder specific to First Nations people.
Effectively, the psychosis manifests as a belief one has been inhabited by a wendigo
and causes the afflicted to suddenly crave human flesh.
While the myth of the wendigo started out as just a story, those stories were so effective
that wendigos became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Someone could become a wendigo by being afraid they were a wendigo.
Greek myths feature several cyclopes, such as the one encountered in The Odyssey, Polyphemus.
Like most others of his species, Polyphemus is a giant, one-eyed creature who happens
to not be terribly smart.
Odysseus is able to trick him without too much effort by getting him drunk and telling
Polyphemus his name is "Nobody."
This sets up the greatest dad joke in antiquity when Polyphemus tries to tell his fellow cyclopes
that "Nobody" attacked him.
Oddly, many cyclops legends are set on or around the isle of Crete.
This might seem inexplicable without the historical context that Crete was once home to a species
of dwarf mammoths that were typically much smaller than an adult human, according to
Nature.
What does that have to do with the cyclops?
Historians suspect the myths originated from Greek explorers finding the skulls of these
tiny behemoths.
A mammoth skull has a large, central socket.
It's for their trunks, not their eyes, but to someone who had never seen one before,
it might look to be an oversized humanoid head with a central eye socket.
So, working backwards from these skulls, the ancient Greeks imagined they belonged to 20-foot-tall
monsters with a single eye and ran with it from there.
The ancient Mayans have a creation myth where Cipactli, a giant sea monster often depicted
with a single, huge tooth, was killed by Tezcatlipoca, and then the Earth was made from the monster's
body.
The Mayans weren't the only ones with stories of sea monsters with giant teeth, either.
"You're gonna need a bigger boat."
Many cultures have even created myths and legends about enormous, oversized sharks,
far bigger than any seen today.
While there are some pretty large sharks out there, such as great white sharks well over
20 feet, these mythological sharks are much bigger.
Could there be some unknown, massive shark species out there that terrified our ancestors?
Well, yes, potentially, but what's more likely is these stories were inspired by the fossils
of real sharks that went extinct long before humankind came along.
The megalodon, an ancient ancestor of modern sharks, was absolutely enormous, around 50
feet long, according to the Natural History Museum.
While megalodons went extinct over 2.5 million years ago, their fossils aren't exceptionally
rare, and it seems the ancient Mayans found some of these, as they've been found in their
caches, and seemed to have inspired their legends about Cipactli.
While the megalodons went extinct a very long time before humans came around, these giant
fossilized teeth still freaked out the Mayans and several other cultures, as well.
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