Creative History

  The nomadic herders who live in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia call the creature Olgoi-Khorkoi and have known about its existence for generations.  Olgoi-Khorkhoi means “Intestine Worm” because of the cryptid’s blood red color.  It is said that the Olgoi-Khorkhoi can grow upwards of seven feet in length and that it rises from beneath the sands of the desert in a flash to spray its unsuspecting victims, both human and animal, with a corrosive acidic venom that kills them almost instantly and turns everything it touches the color yellow. For over a thousand years, until the twentieth century in fact, the existence of the Olgoi-Khorkhoi in the sands of the Gobi Desert was virtually unknown outside of Mongolia.  But a chance meeting between a famed American paleontologist named Roy Chapman Andrews and the Prime Minister of Mongolia in 1922 at a dinner party in the capital city of Ulaan-Bataar, while Andrews was visiting Mongolia for research on his groundbreaking book a...

  November 15, 1572.   The weather in Kriesbuhl, a small picturesque farming village in the foothills of the Swiss Alps is cold, even for that time of year, but clear. On that day, a Saturday, Hans Buchmann, an impoverished peasant farmer, has a debt to pay.  He owes sixteen florins, roughly the equivalent of $600 in today’s money, to a creditor in the nearby market town of Sempach.  Hans has been borrowing heavily against his small plot of land to make ends meet and provide for his family. But no matter how much Hans borrows, the money seems to always disappear and his family remains impoverished. Lucky for him this fall’s crop has been quite lucrative and he’s saved up the money to pay off his creditor.  Now in the crisp early morning sunlight Hans is preparing to walk the four miles to Sempach to pay off his debts.  Unfortunately, for Hans, the road from Kriesbuhl to Sempach is mostly uphill and through wooded terrain, but in November of 1572,...

                      They appeared overnight on February 8-9, 1855. Cloven hoofprints that went on in single file straight lines across a distance of nearly one-hundred miles in the county of Devon located in the southwest of England. Two nights after a heavy snowfall temperatures in the region dropped to well below freezing, unseasonably cold for any time of year in that part of England. The freezing temperatures caused a hard icy layer of frost to form atop the freshly fallen snow. When residents across Devon awoke on the frigid sunny morning of February 9, 1855 they were shocked by the sight that greeted their eyes. Not only did the hoofprints seem to go on forever, and be everywhere at the same time, but they had broken all the way through the icy snow and went all the way down to the earth below. Some hoofprints went straight up the sides of houses, up sheer walls and over rooftops, while others went up a...

            The evil queen commands the huntsman, “Kill her and as proof that she is dead bring her lungs and liver back to me.” The huntsman doesn’t kill her.  Instead, he sets out into the forest and slaughters a wild boar.  He brings the liver and lungs of the boar back to the evil queen and his ruse works. Greedily, the evil queen devours the entrails that the huntsman brings to her in a frenzy of cannibalistic ecstasy. In a few years, a magic mirror tells the queen that she has been deceived by the huntsman, and she sets out once again to kill the young maiden.  This time she believes she has accomplished her goal after pretending to be a farmer’s wife and convincing the maiden to eat a poisoned apple. But the queen has been fooled yet again.  The girl did not die.  The poisoned apple has only caused her to lapse into a sort of coma after becoming lodged in her throat.  Her seven companions, all suffering fr...