Posted by: Loren Coleman on January 8th, 2008
As the voters go to the polls in New Hampshire, it is a good time to pause and recall the “Giant Monkey” of Danville, New Hampshire. Have you heard about it?
On September 9, a few years ago, in rural Danville, New Hampshire, search parties were engaged in looking for a Giant Monkey spotted near Pleasant Street and Kingston Road.
During a period of the previous two weeks, at least ten cryptid Giant Monkey sightings were reported to local authorities. Danville Fire Chief David Kimball was among the first to see the cryptid running across Kingston Road.
Others, like Pleasant Street resident Vivian Wicker, 58, said she heard the monkey hollering outside her home. “It wasn’t a sound I had heard before,” she said, describing the noise as a hooting or a strange howling sound, unlike a dog’s.
Wicker heard the sound every couple of minutes.
(The moniker “Wicker” happens to be one of those strange “name game” markers, which has turned up most infamously in the lore of the Wicker Man. In the Son of Sam murders of New York City, the deciphering of the “Wicker” symbolism has been attempted by law enforcers, writers, and anomalists alike. The British film The Wicker Man premiered in America in 1974 and was screened in New York City by a group called Abraxas in April 1977, during the apex of the Son of Sam killings. One event in the killings noted was of the Wicker Street shooting of a German shepherd, perhaps by the Son of Sam. David Berkowitz lived a block away from Wicker Street. In the background facts in some evidence from the murders, a hit man who allegedly participated in both the Son of Sam and Double Initial murders, John Wheat Carr, signed himself, “Wicked King Wicker.” Others said Berkowitz signed his name “Son of Sam Wicked King Wicker.” Cryptopolitics and the name “Wicker” seem to go hand in hand.)
But few were thinking about the twilight language significance of the witness’s name during those days in early September in New Hampshire.
What was on the minds of the locals was the terror, instead, of the size and weird out-of-place nature of the sighted creature itself.
The darkly colored, hairy Giant Monkey reportedly measured about eight feet long from his tail to his hands, Chief Kimball commented to the media.
Local residents were said to be “getting very nervous about the eight feet.”
On the Monday after the weekend of all the local media attention and Giant Monkey searches, NBC-TV News sent a film crew to Danville. The camera people, producer and reporter spent their time recording a human-interest story that was scheduled to air nationally the next morning, on “The Today Show.”
But it never aired.
The report was never shown.
The date for the scheduled screening was Tuesday, September 11th, 2001.
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.