Saturday 1 March 2014

The Demons of the Urban Wastelands


I have read many stories similar to this over the years. An animal, who should not be in a specific urban location, or a supernatural-type creature sighting in abandoned neighbourhoods. The first time I came across this was being told about sightings of giant wolves stalking the ruined and desolated South Bronx in the late 1970's. This became the inspiration for the book and movie The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber . 

The latest such story of this nature comes out of Detroit, as accounts of people seeing Big Foot (this previously took place in the 1970's also in Detroit) are being reported in the run down and abandoned suburbs of the decaying city. According to Cryptozoology News, the Brown family were driving through such an abandoned neighbourhood and claim they spotted a creature “about seven feet tall” with “short, reddish hair” reaching through the window of a broken-down house.

“Face was human looking, as crazy as it sounds,” Mr. Brown recalled. “I got to see the animal’s eyes and all, big and dark, with a huge head, like a triangle shape." He claims the creature, once it emerged from the house, began beating the ground with a stick in a threatening manner. "The kids were screaming in the back seat like crazy and my wife was trying to calm them down," Brown said.

What makes this interesting to me is the psychological aspect, in that these 'sightings' seem to be a form of emerging folklore whereby modern humans experience supernatural entities in vacant urban areas in the same way our ancestors experienced such phenomena in dark forests and remote mountain passes of the past. Perhaps the mind creates these experiences to deal with the unknown danger of being in such locations. In the 1960's, clowns were commonly sighted in 'changing' US neighbourhoods - walking through the streets for no reasons, or looking out the windows of empty houses - as the racial demographics of the community were changing away from Whites to other ethnic groups.

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