I forwarded this e-mail to my cousin Chris who may know something.

Best

Little three feet tall folks, covered in slick fur that take over beaver-dams, and steal shirts off of clothes lines. (that would be a full garment for a tiny person, and presumably they don’t have a textile industry of their own..) They live up and down the White River in Indiana, and are responsible for making the “arrow shot” or tiny arrow heads that most anthropologists call “ritual objects”.

I grew up hearing about them, and the older folks in my family all swear by them. They used to get into the barns in Beanblossom Indiana, and give birth, then run back to the river.

The only place I have ever seen them published is in Fate magazine, but I grew up taking for granted that they were real. From my great-grandmother: “Oh heavens yes, the puckwudgies, when I was a little girl pa found a mess of ‘em in the hay loft, as they do when one of ‘ems givin’ birth….daddy killed ‘em with a shovel…some nights I still think I can hear ‘em a screamin’….”

Wow, I didn’t know this thread was still going, so I apologize for the late reply. Anyway, thanks for clearing things up about there being recent tsuchinoko sightings. The wording in one of your earlier posts made it sound like (at least to me) the tsuchinoko was just an old legend, like unicorns in European folklore.

I do feel that there could be a real animal somewhere behind the stories, as definitely there are real Japanese animals that seem downright magical if one is to look at the folklore attached to them. The kitsune (fox) that you mention features heavily in Japanese myth and is a prominent fixture of countless old tales. The fox was said to be the servant of the rice god, Inari, and is prominently represented in shrines devoted to this deity. Kitsune were also said to have many evil powers, such as the power to possess an unsuspecting person’s soul, and there were actually exorcism rites for dealing with those possessed in such a way by foxes. All this despite the fact that it is a very real creature. The same goes for the extinct Japanese wolf, the tanuki, Japanese monkeys, snakes, and others. So with the kappa, who knows? Maybe there is some sort unknown animal, a grain of reality at the heart of these stories, but it is hard to say what it could be when considering the outlandish properties it is said to have.

I personally feel that although sightings of the kappa continue to this day, they tend to be in a category somewhere along the lines of sightings of little green men. The sightings are not usually incredibly reliable in my opinion and they are not very frequent, so i take them with a grain of salt. While I will say there is the chance that a real animal lies at the core of the myths, I tend to feel that this is likely a folkloric creature we are dealing with here.

Someone with enough time could probably develop quite a case for the Wodewose/Wudewasa (European Wild Man) being an unknown hominid wiped out by encroaching humanity. After all, someone’s already tried to prove he’s Santa Claus.

Ones that intrigue me, and just seem freaky, would be the Hide, Lindorms, Minhocao, Mulilo, Beast of ‘Busco, Flying snakes, the Giant Salmon of Lake Hanas, Giant Toads of Hubei Province, Sanderson’s bioluminescent lizards, bioluminescent frogs seen by Jonathan Downes, Tatzelwurm, Loveland Frogmen, Steller’s Sea Ape, and of course, Trunko. The Yowie and Skunk Ape would be on here too, except they still get good press.

I could go on, but I think I’ve already won the award for #1 cryptid name-dropper on this thread!

I first learned of it through my readings on Japanese mythology, and years later, was quite surprised to see it considered by some to be a possible cryptid (Kind of like saying centaurs or satyrs are cryptids…then again, people are still seeing them too).

As for the Japanese ascribing mystical powers to conventional animals, I know that the fox is in a category all its own when it comes to that sort of thing, yet nobody disputes that they exist.