Globsters Abound In The Gasp Menagerie
Globsters.
I love that word.
It’s the term created for and adopted by followers of cryptozoology for marine critters that wind up dead on the shores of the world’s oceans that are generally icky, slimy, and very blobby.
Many of these have come up lately, the most recent reported out of Malaysia, and I thought it was time these were addressed here in the Menagerie.
The Indonesian Globster of 2017
I get at least one of these stories sent to me every month, and there’s a reason I don’t run them: 99% of them are easily explained.
Globsters are a phenomena because they land at a very specific crossroads in the human experience: rarity and imagination multiplied by horror. The famous Montauk Monster, not really a globster but still a strange dead thing washed up on a beach, was just a poor, dead raccoon. Remove the fur, some front teeth, and put it in the water and sun for awhile, and you have something monstrous in appearance that parked the imagination of millions. Because we never see that animal in that state, our instinct is to write it off as something unknown and bizarre.
A great composite showing the Montauk Monster was a raccoon carcass.
This is also the source of many chupacabra reports: coyotes with a specific type of mange that robs them of their hair and discolors their skin takes something familiar, makes it look monstrous, and strikes our imaginations. That the disease is rare in that stage drives home the instinct to call it otherworldly.
Globsters are, 99% of the time, whales. By the time they reach land, they don’t appear to be whales anymore, because what reaches land is bloated, decaying soft tissue. If you debone just about any animal, it’s going to look nightmarish. Make that animal a mammoth sea creature never seen above water, and that nightmare is pretty terrifying.
When whales die, they can sometimes float. If they decay while floating and getting picked away by smaller scavengers, the skeleton can just slide out and sink into the deep. You’re left with a pile of whale. Remember blubber? Whales are made of a lot of it, and blubber is a gelatinous mass…one whale can be made of tons of it. Add in some musculature and a few remaining bones, remove some chunks that have rotted off or been eaten by scavengers, and you have a misshapen blob that doesn’t remotely look like a whale.
Rarity comes from the combination of things that create a blobster. Sometimes whales just sink, others are eaten at sea. It takes a specific combination of events to be left with the blobby mess of a globster. Even once one is created, it has to find its way onto a shore where people will find it. Considering the sheer size of the oceans of the world, the odds of this happening are incredibly small.
Another big contributor to the globster world is the basking shark. When a basking shark decays, their relatively small skull and spine tend to remain, along with their fins. What’s left looks like a creature with a long, thin neck, much like the fabled Loch Ness Monster. In reality, that tiny head supports a gigantic mouth made mostly of cartilage and soft tissue. Basking sharks are massive for sharks, thus their corpses can appear monstrous. The famous Zuiyo-maru Corpse photographed in 1977 was a basking shark.
The infamous Zuiyo-maru carcass. Experts agree it’s a basking shark.
I did say early on that 99% of globsters have a simple explanation. There have been some that do not, and deserve special attention.
Several reported Cadborosaurus carcasses have washed up in the Pacific Northwest that match descriptions of live creatures sighted in the area. That they also match drawings and lore from Native American groups in the area dating back hundreds of years adds to the authenticity The Naden Harbour carcass is particularly compelling, which had a head that didn’t quite match a basking shark skull.
The Naden Harbour ‘cadborosaurus’ carcass.
Perhaps the best globster story of all time is Trunko, a poor beast who holds the title as the only globster spotted alive. According to witnesses, the beast struggled to escape two killer whales offshore before finally beaching and dying. It gained its name due to an elephant-like trunk on its face. Unfortunately, this was in 1924, so all we have are a few poor quality photographs and legends to work with in identifying the beast.
Image of “Trunko” from 1924
So before you flip out over the next pile of smelly goo that shows up on the shore of a beach somewhere, remember: if you bet that it’s a whale, you’re going to win money almost every time.
Explore The Gasp Menagerie!
Have a weird story? Potential evidence of the supernatural, or at least something hard to explain? Spot any creepy critters out there roaming the wilds? LET ME KNOW! I’d love to talk about it and possibly write it up right here in the Gasp Menagerie. You’ll get appropriate credit, of course, and everyone else will get fresh creepy (as opposed to fresh Creepy, which, trust me… nobody wants that) to enjoy. As always, I can be found at mrdark@dreadcentral.com. Now get out there, find some weird, and let’s get this party started.
Categorized:News
