Regular Episode
#141 – THE CRYPTO-KID
Fair warning: this episode gets into the genuinely gruesome science of what happens to animal bodies after death — lividity, predator feeding behavior, surplus killing, and the decidedly unglamorous post-mortem processes that tend to generate vampire-monster panics in rural communities. Not for the squeamish.
🐾 Origin Story: From MonsterQuest to the Museum
Colin traces his path into the field through a cascade of formative encounters: the 📚 Goosebumps 💵 series by R.L. Stine, then the History Channel series MonsterQuest — specifically an episode on the Ohio Grassman, a hyper-aggressive Bigfoot-type creature described as capable of pulling riders off horses. Living in Ohio made the terror feel local. At 13, a visit to the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine — and a meeting with its founder, Loren Coleman — sealed the deal. Colin walked out having spent his entire vacation budget on books from the gift shop.
🧛 Bloodsucking Beasties: The Bladenboro Vampire Beast
Colin’s CryptidCon lecture, titled Bloodsucking Beasties and Shadowy Stalkers, examines a category of cryptid encounter that goes well beyond the Chupacabra: livestock killings attributed to vampiric creatures. His gateway case is the Beast of Bladenboro, a wave of violent animal attacks in Bladenboro, North Carolina from December 1953 through January 1954.
During that period, dogs, poultry, cats, and sheep were found dead with crushed skulls, ripped-open jaws, removed tongues, slashed flanks — and apparently drained of blood. More than a thousand hunters from across the state and beyond descended on the surrounding swamps and forests, at times outnumbering the town’s own residents. The episode fueled a regional panic. Notably, no formal autopsies were performed on any of the animals; the “drained of blood” conclusion was reached simply because no pooled blood was found near the carcasses — a significant evidential gap, as Colin explains below.
Bladenboro now hosts an annual Beast Festival to fund the local high school band program, which Colin finds more civic-minded than most cryptid tourism ventures. Alongside the panther sightings, the episode produced several mundane candidate culprits: several bobcats were shot in the area, a strange spotted cat (possibly an ocelot) was struck by a car, and a very large local dog named Big Boy — reportedly fed exclusively on blood and slaughterhouse scraps — had escaped the week before the killings began.
🔬 The Science of “Exsanguination”: Why Drained Blood Is Usually an Illusion
This is the part of the episode that earns its content warning — and its real educational value. Colin walks through the taphonomic and behavioral realities that routinely get misread as evidence of vampiric predation:
– Lividity (livor mortis): When an animal’s heart stops, blood thickens and pools by gravity toward the lowest point of the body. Cutting into a carcass or repositioning it will reveal little visible blood — not because the animal was drained, but because the blood has migrated internally. Veterinarians, Colin notes, have said it can be genuinely difficult to determine whether an animal has been exsanguinated even with direct examination.
– Throat attacks: Most mammalian predators — domestic and feral dogs, coyotes, wolves, big cats — instinctively attack the throat. Puncture wounds or slash marks near the neck are therefore the rule, not the supernatural exception.
– Surplus killing: Under certain conditions, carnivores will kill far beyond their immediate nutritional needs. Colin cites a case near Salem, Ohio in 1977 in which 134 sheep were killed in a single night, each by a single bite to the throat. A pack of three or four wolves has been documented killing over 300 elk in a few hours.
– Scavenger access points: Animal hides are tough. Scavengers enter carcasses through soft-tissue openings — the rectum, genitalia, eyes — producing wounds that look surgical or deliberate to an untrained observer. (This also explains many features of cattle mutilation reports, which Colin is careful to treat as a separate phenomenon not directly connected to his livestock-attack cases.)
– Post-mortem distension: As internal gases expand, wound margins stretch and change shape, further distorting the appearance of injuries.
Colin is emphatic that he is not a zoologist, but he has sourced his material from veterinary literature and credible scientific interviews. His neighbor is a farmer who had never heard of lividity or surplus killing despite regularly losing animals to coyotes — a reminder that farming expertise and post-mortem biology expertise are entirely separate skill sets.
🐔 The Abominable Chicken Man of El Reno
Among the stranger cases Colin has uncovered is the Abominable Chicken Man of El Reno, Oklahoma (December 1970). An anonymous farmer heard his chickens being attacked at night, went outside armed, and found the coop door ripped off and broken in half — and all 110 of his chickens gone, with no bodies, only feathers. On the ground were giant humanoid footprints; bloody handprints covered the door and walls. The farmer sent photographs and the actual coop door to Lawrence Curtis, then director of the Oklahoma City Zoo, who reportedly kept the door in his office until he retired and concluded the prints were “definitely primate” but not bear — a description that predictably prompted Bigfoot speculation.
Colin is skeptical: the logistics of a single creature silently removing 110 panicking chickens from an enclosed space in minutes strain credulity regardless of what the creature was. The case was written up uncritically by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark in 📚 Creatures from the Outer Edge 💵, by John Keel in 📚 Strange Creatures from Time and Space 💵, and by Colin and Janet Bord — none of whom raised the logistical problem. It’s a good illustration of how Fortean literature can function as a chain of uncritical repetition rather than accumulating scrutiny.
📰 Monster Panics and Local Journalism
A recurring theme in Colin’s research is the role of small-town newspapers in shaping — and sometimes inventing — monster narratives. His archive goes back to the 1870s, and he’s found that local papers would run daily updates on creature panics even when nothing new had happened, reprinting all the earlier encounters to fill column inches. Once the community lost interest, coverage would vanish entirely with no resolution reported.
He also finds that creature panics sometimes serve as a backdrop for other community tensions: a case in Massachusetts in the 1950s generated sustained coverage not because of the cat sightings themselves, but because factory workers were quitting their jobs to hunt the creature — partly as a protest against the stench from a nearby dump. In Granby, Connecticut in the 1940s, a panther panic produced the headline “Granby Cat Used as Alibi for Canoodling Teens” after armed teenagers claimed they were hunting the creature in a local wildlife preserve. Historical newspapers, Colin notes, also present archival headaches: married women are often identified only as “Mrs. [Husband’s Name],” and witnesses are sometimes listed by nickname only — making follow-up research nearly impossible.
🌱 The Next Generation Initiative and Colin’s Future Plans
Beyond his research, Colin is working with the CFZ on what they call the Next Generation Initiative, an outreach program and community for young people interested in cryptozoological research. He argues that there are many talented young researchers whose work goes unnoticed because they haven’t built public visibility — a problem he’s trying to address both personally (through publishing, lecturing, and his radio show) and organizationally.
On his radio program, The Crypto-Kid, Colin aims to go beyond case recitation and focus on ideas: what do these phenomena mean culturally? What are the plausible explanations? Upcoming guests at the time of recording included Lyle Blackburn and skeptical researcher Sharon Hill. As for his long-term career, Colin is eyeing wildlife conservation or zoology — ideally working with a zoo or on a government conservation program — with cryptozoology as an adjunct passion rather than a livelihood.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Creatures from the Outer Edge 💵 by Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman
– 📚 Strange Creatures from Time and Space 💵 by John Keel
🔗 Related Links
– Beast of Bladenboro — Wikipedia
– Livor Mortis (Lividity) — Wikipedia
– Surplus Killing — Wikipedia
– Cattle Mutilation — Wikipedia
– Eastern Cougar — Wikipedia
– International Cryptozoology Museum, Portland, Maine
– Centre for Fortean Zoology
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
In this episode of MonsterTalk, we interview cryptozoology enthusiast Colin Schneider, a young and enthusiastic researcher of Fortean and paranormal topics about his research into animal exsanguination. It’s a fun discussion of the field of cryptozoology, the disturbing topic of animal mutilation and the work done by the British organization, the Center for Fortean Zoology.
Warning: The content of this episode includes graphic discussion of violent animal mutilation and the icky stuff that happens when animals die. Not suitable for the squeamish.
Of Interest
- Colin Schneider’s Facebook Page
- The Crypto-Kid Radio Show (Monday nights at 8 pm)
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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