While driving around one day I ended up playing a “thought game” with myself where, in an effort to brainstorm ideas for short horror stories, I considered what things scared me most. The first things that come to mind for many of us involve sickness and disease, as evidenced by the growing number of films today which revolve around humankind being introduced to foreign strains of bacteria and infections, often leading to bizarre malformations and eventual death like in Danny Boyle’s film 28 Days Later, as well as the Resident Evil series based on the popular video game.

But as I began to consider what really scares me deep down, I was able to relate my fears to my long-time interest in cryptozoology, and touch on something that I find both truly strange and fascinating, yet nonetheless terrifying. My own greatest fear, at least along the lines of a “what if” basis, would have to be strange creatures living deep within the earth.

Jeff Long’s novel The Descent, upon which the film of the same name was loosely based

Many films have focused on creatures living below us as their premise, including the classic on-screen interpretation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which featured a race of ”blue skinned hairy monsters that toil beneath the earth” called the Morlocks. More recently, two films released around the same time in England in 2005, The Cave and The Descent, dealt with white-skinned proto-humans with a lust for blood who inhabited cave systems. The latter of these two, unlike most horror films these days, struck a chord someplace within me when I first saw it in theatres, and initially I had felt that the intense claustrophobic elements of the story, involving a group of women spelunking in an unknown cave system in the Southern United States, might have been at the heart of the scare (although I have to consider that my discovery of a cave opening that extended far back into the hill behind my residence at the time, and within only a few weeks of seeing The Descent in theatres, might also have contributed).

Later on, I picked up a copy of Brad Steiger’s classic book Monsters Among Us, in which Steiger masterfully considers actual reports of civilizations and encounters with people who might live below us. It began to dawn on me that, indeed, it may not be merely the darkness, the claustrophobia, or the general fear of the unknown associated with caves that I might have likened to fear. In fact, last summer the L. E. M. U. R. Paranormal Research team and I conducted an investigation of an reportedly “haunted” cave system more than 300 feet below ground in eastern Tennessee, and if anything, I found the cool, almost climate-controlled environment below the earth to be enjoyable in many ways. Instead, what seemed to be at the root of the matter was the fear of something else… something not quite human, but a proto-human element similar enough to you and I to be comprehended, but able to scare the living daylights out of us to boot. Could such entities be living beneath the earth someplace, unbeknownst to the world here above?

As a side note, here in the south I grew up hearing the old phrase, “if you go looking for trouble, you’ll find it.” True to form, I began to dig around for reports of critters from beneath the earth, and guess what I found…

One of the earliest “classic” reports that comes to mind has to do with a pair of green-skinned children said to have been discovered near Woolpit, England. The earliest original sources describing the occurrence date back to the 12th century, where English historian William of Newburgh (1136-1198) included “the Green Children” in his main work Historia rerum Anglicarum, a history of England from 1066 to 1198. Sometime between the years 1135 A.D. and 1154 A.D., it is said the two strange children were found near the town of Woolpit, where according to legend, workers in the area had been harvesting their fields when they heard crying off in the distance. Upon investigating they discovered two children; both the boy and the girl were an eerie green color, and seemed terrified, huddled together near a pit. They were ranting and raving in some unknown language, and their clothes were made of a strange looking material which could not be identified.

The children, taken to the home of a man named Richard de Calne, refused to eat or drink anything that was offered until someone brought them “some fresh bean stalks”, which they opened with haste. Upon finding the pods inside, they began to cry, but quickly ate their fill after being shown that the beans merely lay within. According to Newburgh’s account, the boy sickened and died before he could acclimate, but his sister would go on to regain her health, and with time even lose the strange green hue from her skin until she appeared no different from those around her. However, of particular interest is that, with time, the girl was said to learn to speak the local dialect, and that “she said that she and her brother had come from a land with no sun; the people there, all green, lived in a perpetual twilight.” Regarding their departure from this place, she said that she and her brother “had heard bells, become entranced, and then the two of them were in the pit and could see the light from the mouth of it.”

Modern reports, though seldom verifiable with any greater ease than stories like that of the Green Children, have nonetheless been related from time to time as well. In contrast to the “martian-esque” green children from the last account, often creatures described in recent times tend to bear a closer resemblance to those seen in the modern horror films, not totally unlike those from The Descent. One interesting story along these lines which I remember coming across dealt with a troglodyte-like “mud-man”, having first appeared on the Cryptozoology.com forums back in 2006. The thread for this story can be viewed by clicking here and scrolling about one fourth of the way down the page.

Another instance made its rounds on the web beginning back around 2001, and again early last year on Loren Coleman’s Cryptomundo blog. The account detailed an event dating back to the late childhood of the individual sharing the story, having taken place somewhere in the Midwest while he was a teenager. One evening around dusk he had ventured into an area of forest adjacent to a park and behind a length of chain-linked fencing that separated the forest from a large paved area behind a gas station. Many local children had talked about a “monster” they had seen in this forest, which the gentleman relating the story had believed to be a large white dog. He had gone into the forest alone, leaving his bike with his girlfriend and travelling on foot. After a few minutes the “thing” appeared; it looked similar to a man, completely naked and hairless with white clammy skin all over, and though travelling on all-fours was able to keep up alongside the boy, who by now had broken into a run. He described many of the features of the face to be “alien-like” in that a slit and small holes existed in place of where the mouth, nose, ears, etc would be. Toward the end of one retelling of his account, the gentleman, who appeared under various similar nicknames on the different forums where he shared the story over the years, had expressed that he thought the thing was “some sort of human”, though it probably lived underground as indicated by its appearance.

How feasible is it that sub-human monsters or other creatures might inhabit elaborate cave systems far beneath our city streets and country roads? As I’d mentioned, these sorts of notions are the very stuff of my own nightmares, and if there is the slightest chance that they might exist, I certainly hope they’re far enough down so that they can remain undisturbed; and more importantly, so that they won’t disturb us!