Strange Labrador Monster August 28, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Here’s a creepy little report of an unidentified creature from the Canadian North East. Labrador is the mainland territory just past Newfoundland. This was the territory that c. 1000 Vikings visited to get wood for the Greenland settlement. The man writing is a medical doctor, Wilfrid Thomason Grenfell. His autobiography has several entertaining or intriguing passages about his life in what was, then, the Dominion of Newfoundland. The book, note, is happily available online: follow the link.
[328] [O]ne year while visiting at the head of Hamilton Inlet, a Scotch settler came aboard to ask my advice about a large animal that had appeared round his house. Though he had sat up night after night with his gun, he had never seen it. His children had seen it several times disappearing into the trees. The French agent of Revillon Freres, twenty miles away, had come over, and together they had tracked it, measured the footmarks in the mud, and even fenced some of them round. The stride was about eight feet, the marks as of the cloven hoofs of an ox. The children described the creature as looking like a huge hairy man; and several nights the dogs had been driven growling from the house into the water. Twice the whole family had heard the creature prowling around the cottage, and tapping at the doors and windows. The now grown-up children persist in saying that they saw this wild thing. Their house is twenty miles up the large Grand River, and a hundred and fifty miles from the coast.
Beach reports this because the ‘large animal’ seems to belong in the Sasquatch category: ‘a huge hairy man’. Though note that it had cloven feet and an eight foot stride making it rather atypical even by bigfoot standards! It does not appear in that wonderful collection by Chad Arment, The Historical Bigfoot (2006): though Chad does have three reports from Labrador. Two concern, from the same general period (1913), the Traverspine Gorilla. These were two ‘gorillas’ who ‘drove the dogs to a frenzy’. ‘It is a strange looking foot, about twelve inches long, narrow at the heel and forking at the front into two broad, round-ended toes.’ All Chad’s descriptions include the fact that the monster had a white ruff or white coloration on the fur and that it went on all fours and on two legs.
Beach particularly treasured this comment from one witness, a frontier wife, who was told that she had seen a bear.
‘It was no bear Mr. Wright. I have killed 12 bears on my husband’s trapline and I know their tracks well.’
Aged seventeen Beach once ran very fast and very stupidly from a grizzly. Then there are housewives who have offed twelve Labrador bears…
Anything else on this strange Labrador monster: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
Source: A Labrador doctor; the autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell (Boston 1919)
Bruce T, 29 Aug 2016, Sometimes people amaze me, Beach. Why didn’t they just ask the natives? The tracks they’re describing are those of a moose. A moose can be roughly seven feet tall at the shoulder, is big, hairy, and likes to hang out around water feasting on aquatic plants. It has legs nearly as long as it is tall. It’s a long animal and is a long strider. They walk like other deer, you’re not going to see the prints side by side unless it’s been standing or even closely together unless it’s running. If it’s rambling, it’s going to be line of what appear to be single tracks like any other deer in the countryside. They don’t bear antlers year round. See a cow or bull from straight on in the dark, no antlers, and it’s going to look like a tall hairy biped. The gorillas that are talked about sound like wolverines, they can go towards near in black in certain regions. Hit Wikipedia, their page is full of pics of things as described in the sightings. Their lucky they didn’t shred and eat the dogs, they’re a mean animal. Their usually solitary, which may account the unfamiliarity of them to the people who saw them. The may have also had their range reduced at that time due to the fur trade. I understand when they mate it’s akin to a fight to the death? If you get a chance check out footage of them, they’re the living breathing version Warner Brothers fictional “Tasmanian Devil”. Two of them would have scared the Hell out of those Lab’s and their owners. I wouldn’t want to be within 100 yards of one.
Nathaniel, 29 Aug 2016: With due respect to the frontier wife (who knows what she saw) it is certainly possible that bears walking on two legs (bipedal bears) account for some hairy monster sightings:
Peter Muise from New England Folklore writes in, 25 Sep 2016: A few years ago I found a very similar story to the one from Labrador, but from Cape Cod in the late 1970s. How do these tie in with Goatman or Sheepsquatch sightings? Are they satyrs, Satan, or something else? Maybe the paranormal is like a Lovecraftian shoggoth that can extrude a pseduopod or hoof as needed…
