File 1264 · Humanoid
The Grafton Monster
Also known as The Headless Monster of Grafton
A seven-to-nine-foot white figure with no visible head, reported on the riverbank in Grafton, West Virginia, in June 1964 by a local newspaper reporter driving home late at night.
- First reported
- Grafton, West Virginia, 1964
- Region
- Appalachia
- Classification
- Humanoid
- Status
- Unconfirmed
The record
In June of 1964, a newspaper reporter in Grafton, West Virginia, driving home after eleven at night along the river, said he saw something standing on the bank. He described it as seven to nine feet tall, about four feet wide, white, with smooth skin like a seal's. And no head. Or a head set so low on the chest that he could not find it.
The report ran in the local paper, the Grafton Sentinel. Other residents came forward with sightings of their own, and groups went out along the river at night to look for it.
Reported description
- Seven to nine feet tall, about four feet wide.
- White or pale, with smooth, seal-like skin.
- No visible head, or a head sunk into the chest.
- Standing still on the riverbank.
Proposed explanations
No ordinary explanation was ever settled on. Suggestions have ranged from a misidentified animal or a pale object caught in headlights to a prank.
The description itself is very old. Encyclopedias and maps from the seventh century onward record a people without heads, with their faces in their chests: the Blemmyae. The Devil's Bible episode follows that thread.
The episode
Office assessment Opinion, not fact
A trained reporter filed a headless man on a riverbank. The office notes that it is very hard to describe something with no head, and he managed it in one sentence.
This office also has no head of department. We think it's going fine.
— allegedly.
Witness statement
Comedy, not a customer review. The witness is a cryptid.
No notes on the collar.
Nine feet tall, pale, and without a head. The collar is therefore a non-issue. The fabric is heavy, which I appreciate on the riverbank at night.
On the shelf: the Blemmyae
Isidore of Seville's seventh-century encyclopedia, copied into the Codex Gigas, lists the Blemmyae among its "portents": born without heads, with their eyes and mouth in their chests. The Hereford Mappa Mundi draws one at the edge of Africa around 1300. Sir Walter Raleigh reports a nation of them up the Orinoco in 1596, though he admits he did not see them himself.
Six-thirty. Thirteen hundred. Fifteen ninety-six. Nineteen sixty-four. Three continents. One description.
Sources
- Grafton Sentinel (Grafton, W. Va.), June 1964.
- Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, Book XI, chapter iii, "De portentis."
- Codex Gigas (National Library of Sweden, MS A 148), digitised by the Library of Congress, World Digital Library. Link