Dark Watchers?
There is some debate on if ghosts should count as cryptids. I’m going with yes with this one because nobody is sure if these are ghosts. They’re certainly creepy and unnerving if you see them. Nobody knows what they are, so could be anything from ghosts to trick of the light to a local family of cannibals living in the wilderness.
Found in California’s Saint Lucia Mountains, these beings have been around since the 1700’s. They are tall (10 feet tall) figures wearing hats and capes. Usually described as shadowy men, they appear on mountaintops at twilight or dawn when the light isn’t very strong. The stories say nobody has seem them up close and those that have approach would disappear.
Much of the Dark Watchers come from fiction though. John Steinbeck wrote of them briefly and his son claimed to have seen them as a child. John’s mother also believed in them and claimed to trade gifts, but not with any actual contact. Poet Robinson Jeffers also mentioned them, but gave them a physical description while most sightings have them as featureless figures. So, it’s clear the fiction plays around with these beings, which remain unknown.
The reality probably isn’t as interesting. Tricks of the light is a possibility. Pareidolia is another one because it is when our brains seek out familiar shapes and patterns in our environment. It’s the same thing that has people seeing Jesus in things or the Man in the Moon. A third option is people are suffering from lack of oxygen from the high elevations as well as exhaustion. Finally, it could simply be that a person or animal happened to be standing there at an angle that made them appear huge. You know, like Bigfoot just hanging around at twilight and being mistaken for something else.
Actually, there is another option called the ‘Brocken Specter’, which I think is pretty cool. This is an optical illusion that makes the viewer’s shadow bigger on the clouds or mist ahead of them. It happens when the sun is behind a person who is looking into a misty area. Their shadow is projected forward in a triangular, inhuman distortion to make it appear larger. The only issue I see is that the person supposedly has to be looking down into the misty area while the Dark Watchers are said to be seen from above or possibly on level ground. Maybe people just have the angle wrong?
