Strange Phenomena: Where Monsters Roam

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strange Phenomena: Where Monsters Roam
By Scott Corrales
© 2004, 2026

Monster-lore may not have reached the level of intricacy in Latin America that it has displayed in the United States and in Europe, but the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas (and Spain) have made significant contributions to the storehouse of Fortean lore. In some of these regions, sightings of bizarre entities or outright monsters have been closely link with the practice of so-called “black magic” – a belief that is particularly strong in the nations of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile and Brazil), in the Caribbean and in southern Spain. We shall presently examine some of these strange and unnerving events.

In April 2004, Argentina’s Diario de la República newspaper ran the sensational story of a child who had been attacked by an unknown entity that received the popular moniker of El uñudo (The Clawed One). Even though youngster experienced little more than a good fright, the manifestations of this creature caused a stir in the community of Justo Daract and its surroundings. El uñudo had already appeared before some young women, prompting one of them to pass out. The young women had left their night school classes at 11:00 p.m. and reported having been confronted by a frightening entity wearing a black mask and with long nails on their fingers – a creature capable of climbing up the flagpole in the town square with the ease and elegance of a squirrel.

Maura Avila, a reporter for a local radio station, had conducted several interviews with local witnesses and made the following statement to the press:

"I was informed that there was a great deal of movement in Barrio Norte, near the hospital, and we headed there just as the police arrived. We learned that El uñudo had appeared -- a character who has gained notoriety in Justo Daract because he/it has been appearing for several days now, and has now terrified an 11 year-old on the corner of Liniers and Los Andes [...] Those who claim having seen El uñudo [say] that it doesn't have human form, rather an animal one, adding that it walks on four legs and hops, being capable of very swift movements." Avila added that the locals had discussed the existence of “black magic cults” in the area and feared that El uñudo could have been an entity summoned during the course of some unspeakable ritual – especially as the timing of these manifestations coincided with Easter Week.

Search brigades were hastily formed to go on a monster hunt reminiscent of the two hundred man posses that scoured the Puerto Rican countryside in 1995 hoping to find the Chupacabras. The good people of Justo Daract, aided by the local police and members of the neighborhood watch, found themselves walking along the train tracks in the dark due to a report that claimed the creature had climbed to the very top of the grain silos by the rails. The dangerous climb to the top of these structures revealed nothing of interest.       
     
Later on that same week, neighborhood watch volunteers reported seeing El uñudo climbing up trees in a residential neighborhood after having seen it cross a soccer field. "It jumped over the barbed wire fences with remarkable agility and moved with such long strides that it appeared to be floating on air, and was impossible to reach," reported the witnesses.

On April 8th, another young woman returning home at 3 a.m. on her bicycle reportedly saw the strange character jumping from one rooftop to the next at the 331 Viviendas neighborhood of Justo Daract. Terrified beyond words, the girl pedaled furiously back to the local bus station – ten city blocks away – in order to take the bus home. Drivers and workers at the terminal attested to her distraught condition. Something strange – whether human or not – was scaring the hell out of the locals.

Descriptions of El uñudo now ranged from “large and with a mask and horns; small and apelike, black or brown, with a nude upper torso and covered with tattoos; walking upright or on four legs; leaving goat-shaped hoof prints; climbing trees, pipelines or metal silos; jumping over wire fences and large lagoons, swift and elusive,” according to El Diario de la República.

Other sources reported that despite their failure to locate the supernatural intruder at the grain silos, officers had managed to apprehend the creature at some point, but that it eluded capture in a display of inhuman strength and “the slippery nature of its body” – a quality it shared with the Malaysian orang minyak or “oily man” who became a focus of mass hysteria in the 1960s.

Descriptions of El uñudo ranged from a Springheel Jack-like figure, draped in dark clothing and with its face covered by a mask, owing its name to a pair of black gloves with long metallic nails. This caused many to believe that the night stalker of Justo Daract was merely a teenager trying to act out his own variation of the character Wolverine from the movie X-Men, which had been a hit throughout Argentina. 

Were people in this region superhero-happy? Yes, if other news accounts were to be believed. Another bizarre character, dubbed El cuervo (The Crow) due to its resemblance to the bird had been reported in 2003. Yet many insisted on El uñudo’s paranormal credentials, despite words of the local priest. “If it is a supernatural force,” cautioned Padre Fabián, “it would evidently be some game of the Devil to confound people, since at this time of the year their attention should be fixed on Christ.”

Manifestations of El uñudo became lessened toward the end of April and vanished altogether in May.  Did some local joker hang up his costume until the next bout of superhero mania graces the silver screen, or did the Clawed One return to the nether region that houses similar entities, like Springheel Jack and the Mattoon Gasser?

On Saturday, 13 November 1983, Eusebio Sánchez, 56, was returning to his home in the Spanish village of Vegas de Coria, walking alongside his mule with a cargo of cabbage. As he approached the bridge of Cruz de Animas, he noticed a shadowy figure creeping behind him. Unsure if it was one of his fellow villagers, Sánchez waited for the figure to come within range: it was tall and entirely black, "tall and thin like a statue", with enormous arms. Ominously, the dark apparition asked him: "Don't you know me?" and proceeded to jump -- a la Springheel Jack -- across the bridge and into the night.

Vegas de Coria was in the grip of a supernatural phenomenon. The tiny village in the Extremadura region of Spain was barely a speck on the map, and far from any major city. Journalist and crack UFO investigator J.J. Benítez drove to Vegas de Coria in order to investigate the phenomenon first hand. The end result was a superb document entitled La Quinta Columna (The Fifth Column), which appeared in 1990.

Sánchez was not the only witness to the dark figure's frightening maneuvers: Two days before, Nicolás Sánchez (no relation) was about to open the door to his house when he heard a moan issuing from the middle of the street. He turned to look and noticed that it was a small black "bundle", as he described it. His curiosity piqued, he walked over to it. It was 9:45 pm.

"[...] When I was four or five steps away from it, that "thing" began to grow, getting bigger. Before I knew it, I was standing in front of a figure some six feet tall or more, advancing toward me with a sound like the gnashing of teeth. I got goosebumps. I began walking backward a few meters, and the "giant" followed me. Jesus! I was so scared I couldn't speak. I wanted to call out to my parents, but it was impossible. I still don't know where I found the courage from, but I crouched and picked up two stones from the house wall, one in each hand, and I was willing to defend myself. I never got to raise my arms, though: just as I was about to hurl the stones, I shouted, "Take this, Satan!" and the creature stopped. It did an about face and headed up the road. Before it went out of sight, there was a large, lightning like flash, which made no sense, since the weather was good."

All of this coinciding with a outbreak of UFO sightings and landings in well over a dozen locations throughout Spain, including a sensitive military installation on the straits of Gibraltar.  Benítez went on to examine other UFO related monster sightings elsewhere in Spain, such as an electrifying sighting on the beaches of Conil, not far from the city of Cádiz, in October of 1989: a group of teenagers on the beach one early evening witnessed in terror the sudden appearance of two majestic, luminous figures after having observed the maneuvers of UFOs in the skies above them. The teenagers ran away in panic, regrouping some thirty meters away from the entities, which proceeded to transmute into a human male and female, dressed in street clothes. Through the aid of binoculars, the teens were able to observe the transformation and render accurate descriptions later on. The mystery couple walked away from the beach and toward the town's streets, mingling with the populace.

Things weren't over yet: a small white patch of what appeared to be fog was heading for the shore at a high rate of speed. From the cloud emerged a monstrous figure, nine feet tall, with a white, pear shaped head and clad in a black "jumpsuit". It stared at the frightened teenagers and then began walking in a westward direction. Lázaro and Pedro  two of the five teens  ran after it, stopping short when it turned around to look at them with eyes "like two black eggs." The stare was enough to cause them to beat a retreat, as the giant became lost in the darkness. All the while, the brightly hued UFOs continued to execute their aerial maneuvers. It would seem as though the sudden appearance of the nine foot tall giant was somehow geared toward keeping the five witnesses from following what would have been an understandable course of action  following the creatures that turned into humans   by reinforcing their fear.

Puerto Rico, well known for its heavy UFO activity from 1988 through the mid ‘90s, has also been a source of strange creature reports. While witchcraft is practiced under many guises on the island, not all the sightings are connected to the dark arts but to the nocturnal activity of UFOs: unusual birds, ranging from pterodactyl like creatures to small, fanged predatory avians have been reported since the 1970's, when the UFO activity began in earnest. A 1988 report from the Laguna Cartagena area stated that the witness saw two humanoids "in what appeared to be uniforms" guiding a large, hairy simian being. The trio "disappeared into the ground." Reports in a local tabloid, El Vocero, point to the depredations of a "mandrill" among the livestock of many farms on different parts of the island, an explanation sanctioned by the authorities as the reason for the strange mutilations. It is more than likely that the real culprit is a "big hairy monster", as opposed to an itinerant mandrill.

Mexican investigator Dr. Rafael A. Lara suggests in an issue of Terra Incognita, the journal of the Center for the Study of Paranormal Phenomena (CEFP) that all monsters-- ranging from the BHMs to Nessie and the UFO monsters seen by the adolescents at Conil -- are little more than "distortions of space time (which is to say, the past projected to the present or the future to the present)." He shares the same as other researchers in that these creatures could well be "rationalizations of the evil dwelling within our unconscious." The big hairy monsters have been identified by some Mexican researchers with the humans that were turned into apes, according the Aztec tradition in another "age of the sun", which ended with enormous winds destroying life on earth.

Another outbreak of UFO related monsters that went largely unnoticed occurred in the Dominican Republic. 

The locality of Barahona  a small town in the Caribbean nation's sugarcane producing region  was beset by two terrifying entities that were allegedly responsible for the large number of mutilations of farm and domestic animals. In December of 1978, a creature resembling a large black dog (similar to the "Black Shuck" of Great Britain) repeatedly mutilated small animals like dogs, cats, chickens, and rabbits under cover of darkness and with chilling finesse: it made its way into chicken coops and pens by somehow opening the gates without destroying them. Local residents believed that the otherworldly creature had some sort of "intelligence" that allowed it to elude their best efforts at catching it (the same observation has been made by monster hunters worldwide).

In a matter of months, the murderous phantom dog was joined by an even more fearsome manifestation: a cadaverous being resembling a human female. Those who managed to see it closely noted that its face "appeared to be covered with cotton" (some sort of ectoplasm?). The entity was also blamed for a number of mutilations.

Barahona is almost on the border of voodoo ridden Haiti, and it is, in fact, an area that has received much negative publicity in recent years on account of the suffering experienced by Haitian sugar cane cutters at the hands of Dominican taskmasters. The locals were much more willing to believe that the entities were the product of some sorcerous lore than UFOs, even though the entire island happened to be in the grip of a small "flap" for a number of weeks that preceded and followed the mutilations. 

While Barahona was victimized by its two monsters, UFO occupants were being seen in a suburb of Santo Domingo. Five women sitting on the porch one evening watched as a brilliant object in the night sky fired two beams behind a nearby hill before disappearing. The women believed that it was some sort of airplane until they noticed two lights advancing toward them from the darkness. The lights turned out to be three conical humanoids with what appeared to be lanterns fastened to their chests.

Frightened at the sight of the beings, the women began screaming for help, drawing the attention of other neighbors. In retaliation, the three creatures began to make loud noises "similar to the rapid opening and shutting of a metal door". By the time the nearest neighbor had responded to their call for help, the beings had disappeared.

In the same suburban area, a watchman was confronted by robed, cat eyed entity. With a prayer on his lips, the watchman swung his heavy machete at the thing, which tried to duck the blow and proceeded to vanish instantly. Startled by the unexpected outcome, the watchman proceeded to inspect the dark, wooded surroundings all by himself: of such stuff are real heroes made.