Cryptids, Wild Men, and the Nephilim: What Does the Ancient World Say About the Monsters in the Woods?
When I was a little girl growing up in rural Missouri, I went to a slumber party at my friend Kimmie’s house that turned out to be a bit more memorable than anyone had planned. She lived out on the prairie in a pretty brick ranch-style house, and there was a big picture window in the living room that looked out across a flat expanse of Missouri pastureland. At some point after dark, we were all there in the living room when something seemed to dash past outside. I don’t really remember exactly what we thought we saw, which is probably significant, but I distinctly remember we were all suddenly convinced (and alarmed) that something was out there.
Under ordinary circumstances, we might have blamed a deer, a cow, somebody’s older brother, or whatever other creature happened to be available for terrifying children after dark. Unfortunately, this was Missouri during the era of Momo, our very own hometown version of Bigfoot. The Missouri Monster had become famous after reports of a large, hairy, foul-smelling creature near Louisiana, Missouri, in 1972, and stories about Momo spread far beyond the little Mississippi River town where the most famous sighting occurred. One account involved a teenage girl named Doris Harrison, who said she saw an enormous hairy creature near the woods behind her family’s home while her younger brothers were outside playing; according to the story that developed around the sighting, the creature appeared to be carrying a dead dog. Missouri, being Missouri, did not take long for search parties, newspaper reporters, curious visitors, Momo merchandise, and eventually a Momo festival to follow.
So when something streaked past Kimmie’s window in the darkness, we did not have to invent a monster. Missouri already had one for us.
I have no idea what ran past that window, and I am certainly not offering my childhood slumber party memories as cryptozoological evidence. But, what interests me now is the question underneath that memory. Human beings have been reporting strange creatures at the edges of civilization for a very long time, and the modern world has collected many of them under the relatively new word cryptids. Bigfoot, the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, Mothman, the Fouke Monster, the Beast of Bray Road, our own Momo, and hundreds of lesser-known creatures occupy a peculiar territory between zoology, folklore, eyewitness testimony, mistaken identification, hoax, and occasionally something we simply cannot explain.
But, strange creatures did not begin appearing when somebody invented the word cryptid. In fact, they were already waiting in the wilderness thousands of years ago.
First, What Exactly Is a Cryptid?
A cryptid is generally understood as a creature whose existence has been reported or claimed but has not been established scientifically. Cryptozoology is the attempt to investigate such creatures, although mainstream science generally does not recognize cryptozoology itself as a scientific discipline because many of its claims have not been tested through the normal methods of zoology. That does not mean every person reporting an unusual animal is lying, nor does it mean every unidentified creature must represent an unknown species. It simply means that a report and a scientifically established animal are two different things.
There is also a perfectly logical reason not to laugh immediately at the possibility of unknown animals. That is because we continue to discover them. In 1992, for example, scientists documented the saola, a large forest-dwelling mammal from Vietnam and Laos that was familiar to some local people but had remained unknown to modern zoology. It certainly wasn't Bigfoot wandering around Southeast Asia, but the discovery was a useful reminder that the natural world still holds surprises.
Cryptids themselves range from reasonably plausible undiscovered animals to creatures that would require some serious rearranging of what we currently understand about biology. Some reports describe ordinary-looking animals appearing where they supposedly do not belong. Others involve enormous lake creatures, giant birds, upright hairy humanoids, wolf-like bipeds, creatures with wings, glowing eyes, unusual smells, or abilities that begin moving the story out of zoology altogether.
I’m most interested in that last category for The Sacred and Strange, because not every historical culture divided reality into the same tidy categories that we do. Modern Americans tend to ask whether something is an animal, a ghost, an extraterrestrial, a demon, an interdimensional being, or an imaginary creature. Ancient people often lived with categories that overlapped differently, particularly when dealing with the wilderness, spirits, monsters, Divine beings, and creatures that seemed to belong somewhere between familiar worlds. And, once we start reading those ancient texts, we discover some decidedly strange residents.
The Bible Has Its Own Wilderness Creatures
If you’re looking for Bigfoot in the Bible there are certainly websites willing to help, but Scripture never describes anything that can really be identified as Sasquatch. There is no biblical verse that says a large undiscovered primate is roaming the forests of North America, and forcing modern cryptids into ancient Hebrew words usually tells us more about ourselves than it does about the biblical writers.
What the Hebrew Bible does contain is a world stranger than the sanitized version many of us growing up Protestant Evangelical inherited. Isaiah, for example, describes the ruins of devastated cities becoming inhabited by wild animals and beings whose identities are surprisingly difficult to translate. Isaiah 13 and 34 include the Hebrew se'irim, literally associated with hairy or goat-like beings. Depending on the Bible in front of you, you may encounter translations such as "wild goats," "goat-demons," "satyrs," or similar creatures. Isaiah 34:14 also contains the mysterious Hebrew word lilit, which some translations render as the proper name Lilith, some as a nocturnal creature, and which, in later Jewish tradition, would develop into the much more elaborate female demon Lilith. The precise meaning of the word in Isaiah remains debated, which is exactly why different English Bibles can make the ancient landscape difficult to envision.
Leviticus 17 provides another intriguing piece of this puzzle when Israel is forbidden from sacrificing to the se'irim. Whatever these beings represented to the ancient Israelites, the biblical writers were clearly working within a cultural world in which the wilderness could be associated with more than ordinary wildlife. That does not make se'irim ancient Bigfoots. It does tell us that the neat modern separation between “animal” and “spiritual being” should not be imposed upon every strange creature mentioned in an ancient text.
Then there are Behemoth and Leviathan in Job 40 and 41, two creatures that have generated centuries of speculation. Behemoth is often associated with a hippopotamus, while Leviathan has been compared with a crocodile, whale, serpent, dragon, or the older Near Eastern tradition of the chaos monster. Scholars continue to debate exactly how much ordinary animal and mythic imagery has been combined in Job's descriptions. What matters for our purposes is that the biblical writer can describe creatures rooted in the natural world while simultaneously giving them an almost cosmic quality.
Taken together, these passages give us a glimpse into the unusual assortment of creatures and beings that populated the ancient biblical imagination. And then Genesis gives us something stranger still.
A Quick Return to the Nephilim
Regular readers of The Sacred and Strange have traveled this path with me before, so I will spare you another full tour of Genesis 6, the Watchers, and the Nephilim. For anyone joining us more recently, however, we need a quick refresher before things get stranger.
Genesis 6:1 - 4 describes the mysterious “sons of God” taking human women and mentions the Nephilim, the formidable figures who were upon the earth “in those days, and also afterward.” The identity of everyone involved has been debated for centuries, but one very ancient Jewish interpretation understood the sons of God as heavenly beings who crossed the boundary between the spiritual and human realms.
That interpretation was greatly expanded in 1 Enoch, where these beings become the Watchers, descend to earth, take human wives, transmit forbidden knowledge, and produce gigantic offspring whose violence contributes to the world’s corruption before the Flood. In this ancient Jewish telling, the rebellion of the Watchers becomes part of a much larger explanation for the wickedness and violence that eventually overwhelm creation.
Two details from 1 Enoch are relevant to our present investigation into cryptids. First, the giants are said to have "sinned against" birds, beasts, reptiles, and fish, a curious statement that some modern paranormal writers have interpreted as a possible reference to unnatural breeding or the creation of hybrid creatures. The ancient text, however, never actually explains the offense in those terms, and its surrounding description of violence and bloodshed offers other possible interpretations.
Second, 1 Enoch also says that after the giant offspring died, spirits emerged from their bodies and remained upon the earth as evil spirits. Some early Christians knew versions of this tradition, although it never became the universal Christian explanation for the origin of demons, and later influential thinkers such as Augustine interpreted Genesis 6 quite differently.
I have explored all of that much more deeply in my earlier articles on the Watchers, Nephilim, and the strange events surrounding the Flood, so I will link those below for anyone who wants the whole complicated story. For our purposes here, the important question is whether any aspect of those extraordinary beings, physical or spiritual, could have survived into the world we know today.
Could Cryptids Be Descendants of the Nephilim?
Before I go any further, let me emphasize that this theory is entirely speculative. Neither Genesis nor 1 Enoch identifies modern cryptids as descendants of the Nephilim, and neither Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox Christianity teaches such a connection. Both traditions, however, affirm the existence of a spiritual creation alongside the material world, including angels and fallen spiritual beings. That understanding leaves room for a reality considerably larger than what we can physically observe, even if it doesn't tell us what might be lurking in the Missouri woods.
There is an immediate problem with the simplest Nephilim-cryptid theory. If the Flood destroyed the giants, how could biological descendants have survived, whether human-like or animal hybrids? Of course, one could propose that something similar happened again afterward, particularly because Genesis says the Nephilim were present “in those days, and also afterward,” and Numbers later uses the name. Ancient and modern interpreters have offered different explanations for that difficulty. Yet Scripture never tells us that surviving Nephilim retreated into forests, became hairy, evolved into other creatures, or established a breeding population somewhere in the Ozarks.
Of course, Genesis does contain that tantalizing phrase, "in those days, and also afterward." Whether those references imply a post-Flood survival, a repetition of the earlier events, or something else entirely has been debated for centuries. The biblical text leaves us with an intriguing question, but certainly not enough information to establish a biological lineage extending into the modern world.
But Enoch suggests another possibility. If we take the tradition at face value, what survives the destruction of the giants is not their bodies but their spirits. According to the ancient writings, those spirits remained earthbound and troublesome. That raises a very different speculative question: could some encounters that are interpreted today as cryptid sightings actually belong to the spiritual or paranormal category rather than the zoological one?
That possibility particularly interests me when it comes to cryptid reports involving creatures that seem to behave in ways we would not expect of ordinary animals. A breeding population of large primates, for example, ought eventually to leave clear trail-camera pictures, bodies, bones, scat, hair containing usable DNA, roadkill, or other biological evidence. The more extraordinary the claims about a physical creature become, the more conspicuous the absence of such evidence becomes.
Adding to the mystery is that some cryptid reports contain details that seem difficult to explain in ordinary zoological terms. Witnesses occasionally describe creatures disappearing unexpectedly, tracks that end without explanation, unusual lights, intense feelings of dread, or encounters associated with other paranormal phenomena. Such stories are difficult to verify, of course, and strange details can emerge through misperception, embellishment, or the retelling of an event. Nevertheless, they raise an interesting question about whether every experience classified as a cryptid encounter necessarily involves an unknown animal and strictly physical phenomena.
Could “Bigfoot,” for example, have become a modern cultural container into which we place very different experiences? Some sightings may involve bears standing upright. Some may be hoaxes. Some may involve misjudged distances, darkness, frightened witnesses, or ordinary animals seen under extraordinary circumstances. It also remains possible that some involve an undiscovered biological creature. And, none of those possibilities negate the fact that, perhaps, a small remainder of sightings belongs to a category we do not yet understand and cannot explain.
The Wild Man Is Much Older Than Bigfoot
Long before anybody reported Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest, ancient Mesopotamia had Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest surviving works of literature in the world, originating in ancient Mesopotamia, the region we know today primarily as Iraq. Stories about Gilgamesh, a legendary king of the Sumerian city of Uruk, were being written down more than 4,000 years ago, although the epic as we know it today developed over many centuries and survives largely in later Babylonian versions.
To put that in biblical perspective, these stories emerged in the same ancient Mesopotamian world associated with Abraham's origins in Genesis. Abraham is traditionally placed somewhere around the early second millennium BC, although historians cannot establish his dates with certainty, and stories about Gilgamesh were already being written down during that broad period. So while we have no reason to assume Abraham himself knew the story, the ancient wild man Enkidu belongs to the cultural world and general era that readers of Genesis associate with the earliest biblical patriarchs.
In the epic, Enkidu begins as a wild man living beyond human civilization. His body is shaggy with hair; he lives among gazelles, eats with animals, drinks beside them at the watering place, and frustrates a hunter by interfering with his traps. The hunter is frightened enough by this powerful wilderness man to seek help, and a woman named Shamhat, generally described as a prostitute or courtesan, is sent to encounter Enkidu. Only after Enkidu encounters Shamhat does his life begin to change. Shamhat seduces him, and after their encounter, the wild animals that once accepted him flee from his presence. She then introduces him to human customs and eventually leads him toward civilization, making her an important figure in his transformation from wilderness creature to human companion.
What caught my attention about Enkidu was how familiar his description seemed. Here was a powerful, hairy, humanlike figure living among animals beyond the settled world, frightening the hunter who encountered him unexpectedly. Of course, Enkidu was a mythological figure whose story explored the boundary between wilderness and civilization, but the image itself is thousands of years old. Apparently, human beings have been wondering who might be watching from beyond the firelight for a very long time.
Similar stories can arise independently of course, because humans everywhere have wilderness, predators, darkness, and a healthy imagination to contend with. Still, the recurrence of the wild-man figure across cultures raises a legitimate historical question. Are these stories merely expressions of a universal human fear of the wilderness, distant memories of encounters with other human populations, misunderstood animals, spiritual folklore, or some combination of all of them? I do not know, but Enkidu makes it clear that the hairy wilderness man is not a purely modern invention.
And Then Islam Gives Us the Jinn
Islamic tradition adds another category pertinent to this discussion, although here again we should resist the temptation to translate one culture's supernatural beings directly into another culture's cryptids. The Qur’an, emerging in seventh-century Arabia, talks of jinn, a real order of created beings distinct from humans and angels. The Qur’an says humanity was created from clay, while jinn were created from a fiery substance commonly translated as smokeless flame or scorching fire.
Unlike the fallen angels or demons familiar to most Christians, jinn are not necessarily evil beings. Islamic teaching describes them as an entirely separate order of creation, possessing intelligence, free will, and the ability to make moral choices. Some are righteous, others are wicked, and the Qur'an describes them as following different spiritual and moral paths, much as human beings do. They can believe in the Creator, reject Divine guidance, behave honorably, or lead others astray. In fact, the Qur’an describes both humans and jinn as beings who are accountable to the Creator for their actions.
One interesting passage appears in Surah 72, appropriately titled Al-Jinn (The Jinn). Here, a group of jinn hears the Qur’an being recited and is so impressed by its message that they embrace its teachings and return to tell others of their discovery. They acknowledge that some among their own kind are righteous while others follow different paths, and that some have submitted themselves to the Creator while others have not. In other words, according to the Qur’an, these mysterious beings have their own spiritual lives, moral struggles, and a relationship with the Divine. They are not merely supernatural creatures lurking in the darkness, but an entire intelligent population existing alongside humanity, generally beyond our ordinary perception.
That already makes jinn substantially different from animals. A jinn is not the Islamic equivalent of Bigfoot. Later Islamic folklore, however, becomes populated with jinn and other strange beings associated with deserts, ruins, lonely places, shape-changing, deception, and encounters with human beings. The famous ghul, from which English eventually receives “ghoul,” belongs to this broader Arabic and Islamic supernatural world, although folklore surrounding such beings developed across centuries.
What interests me here is that Islam describes an entire population of intelligent beings existing alongside humanity, generally beyond our ability to perceive them. Jinn are not interchangeable with the angels or demons of Christianity, but their place in Islamic belief offers another example of how ancient religious traditions understood the inhabitants of our world differently.
The Qur'an does not connect jinn with the biblical Nephilim, so any attempt to identify them as related beings would be another modern paranormal theory rather than an ancient Islamic teaching. Still, I find it interesting that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all preserve accounts of beings and experiences that fall outside our ordinary understanding of the natural world.
So What Was Outside Kimmie’s Window?
After wandering through all of this, I still cannot tell you what ran past my friend's window that night long ago. I suspect that whatever terrified us was something entirely ordinary. Rural Missouri has no shortage of creatures moving around after dark, and a group of little girls already primed by stories of the Missouri Monster would hardly have been the most impartial panel of eyewitnesses. Still, I am not convinced that every person who has reported a strange creature throughout history has simply imagined it.
Some cryptid sightings undoubtedly involve ordinary animals, mistaken identities, or the occasional enthusiastic storyteller, while others may eventually lead us to creatures science has not yet documented. And then there are those reports that remain unexplained, although that doesn't necessarily mean something supernatural occurred. As for a connection to the Nephilim, we have no evidence for one, but the ancient traditions certainly offer some unusual possibilities to consider. For now, I am content to leave that particular question open.
What I find especially interesting is how differently our ancestors understood the world around them. Ancient people told stories of strange beings inhabiting deserts, mountains, ruins, and wilderness, while we place ours in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, the waters of Loch Ness, and lonely country roads. The biblical writers, ancient Jews, and early Christians inhabited a world populated by giants, spirits, and other mysterious beings, many of whom never appeared in my Protestant Sunday school classes. Somewhere along the way, at least in the Evangelical world I grew up in, much of that older supernatural imagination seemed to disappear. Giants became uncomfortable biblical footnotes, and accounts of spiritual rebellion were tucked away in ancient writings most of us never knew existed.
I don't think recovering that older understanding requires us to believe every monster story, but I do think it deserves more consideration than we generally give it. Christianity has always valued discernment, and I see no reason why curiosity and discernment cannot coexist.
Maybe Momo was a bear, a hoax, a frightened misunderstanding, or simply one of those wonderful stories Missouri is unusually good at producing. Maybe the thing outside Kimmie’s window was an unusually large dog that spent the rest of its life blissfully unaware that several terrified little girls had promoted it into the supernatural realm. But after reading what our ancestors thought might be wandering around beyond the edges of the known world, I am not quite ready to laugh at every strange report coming out of the woods. I think I will leave a little room for mystery.
Grace and light to you all.