Over the course of a few days, a strange cryptid was sighted in Dover, Massachusetts, in 1977. Strangely enough, it seemed that only teenagers were among those that sighted this fleshy biped.
Driving home on April 21st, 1977, 17-year-old William “Bill” Bartlett and his two friends come across a creature on the side of the road. Bartlett is the only one to see it, and dismisses the figure as a cat or dog… Until he gets closer.
The minute his headlights flash upon the creature, he realizes its far from an ordinary animal.
Bartlett describes it as having a large, watermelon-shaped head resting on a thin, twiggy body. It reached only about 4 feet in height and had two glowing orange eyes. It went from crawling on all fours to being bipedal with ease.
Unfortunately, neither of Bartlett’s friends seemed to notice the creature before the car sped off and the Dover Demon was out of sight.
Only a day later another teenager, 15-year-old John Baxter, is walking home from visiting his girlfriend’s house when he sees a figure approaching him.
He called out, thinking it might be someone he knew, but got no response. The figure darts away, but curiosity got the best of Baxter and he followed.
There, across a gully and standing on a rock, was the Dover Demon. Baxter describes its feet looking as if they “molded” to the rock (possibly gripping it with spindly feet) and having a similar body to a monkey.
According to Baxter, the creature had a head shaped like a “figure-eight” and glowing eyes (this description seems to match the sketch Bartlett made above). Baxter, feeling quite uneasy by the sight, retreated to the road and was driven home by a passing couple.
The Dover Demon is a cryptid that has only been sighted in a small pocket of time (similar to the Owlman, as discussed in an earlier blog post).
Due to this, skeptics believe it more likely to be a hoax or misidentification than a real creature. Some believe it to be a baby moose, though others argue that Massachusetts isn’t normal moose habitat.
Others believe it to be an escaped (and illegally owned) pet Gibbon. Unfortunately, due to the creature’s lack of sightings (apart from the initial few days in ’77) it’s unlikely that we’ll ever truly know just what the Dover Demon was.
Featured image from Cryptidz.Fandom.com (and is actually a character known as a “Grim” from the video game Resistance 3). Other images from WikiMedia Commons. All images on this site are free usage!
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