I’d wanted to take the cardboard figures straight to the recycling center, but Frances talked me into keeping them. I looked now at the TV version of myself with makeup, clad in my usual uniform of Levi’s, black T-shirt, beat-up leather jacket, and boots. “Fan favorite,” I said aloud, shaking my head.
On the wall above my desk hung my degrees from UNC Chapel Hill, where I’d majored in anthropology and minored in psychology before going back for a master’s in folklore—the title of my thesis was What Our Monster Stories Tell Us about Who We Are. Beside the degrees hung other photos: a snapshot of me with a group of people dressed as monsters at a convention; me standing next to Rachel Loveland, the director of Shadow People; me on the stage doing a TED Talk on the role of monsters in modern society. And last, my favorite, me and Charlie hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains a couple of summers ago when he came to visit.
The bookshelves were full of books on anthropology, folklore, and monsters. The only thing I’d kept from childhood was Gran’s copy of Frankenstein, which was tucked in there between Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, some passages still faintly underlined: torrent of light.
The bottom shelf was packed with copies of my own book: The Monster Hunter’s Companion, published five years ago. Sales had jumped since my appearance in Monsters Among Us—the publisher had done an edition with a TV tie-in cover, and they’d sold ten times more copies in the last six months than they had in the previous five years combined.
I pulled out my phone and sent a quick text to Frances: Trip to Louisiana was cut short. I stopped at home, but have to take off again.
Two seconds later, Frances responded: New monster?
A new lead on an old one.
When will you be back?
Not sure. Can you hold down the fort here?
Frances sent back a thumbs-up emoji. Then: What do you want to do about Brian?
I sighed. Tell him I’m away on an important hunt, I texted. Somewhere without cell service and you have no idea when I’ll be back.
You can’t put him off forever.
I’m not putting him off. I’ve already given him an answer—it’s just not what he wants to hear.
He’s stubborn.
Well, I’m more stubborn.
Frances texted back with a smiley face and Safe travels.
I closed with I’ll leave a check for you in the basket, feeling an odd little twinge when I realized that the person I was closest to, the one I spent the most time with on a regular basis, was someone I paid. But this was my choice. Wasn’t it? My life didn’t leave a lot of extra time for socializing for the sake of socializing. And that was the way I wanted it. At least, that’s what I told myself. Because every time I tried to make actual meaningful connections with people, I ended up feeling the way I did when the cameras were on me—like it was all acting, pretending to be something I wasn’t.
I set down my phone, sat at my desk, and opened the lowest drawer, pulling out the thick file folder that contained years’ worth of research: the printed copies of each girl’s face, the carefully gathered facts. Everything I knew about the missing girls.
I might never have discovered the pattern on my own. In 2002, I was in Upstate New York investigating numerous sightings of something described simply as Pig Man. A sheriff I interviewed explained that locals thought the creature was the result of genetic experiments the government was doing to create animal-human hybrids.
I nodded when I heard this. Man-made monsters were their whole own category. I’d investigated many creatures that were the supposed results of government experiments: alien-human hybrids, wolves with human DNA, zombie soldiers who couldn’t be killed by traditional weapons. I’d heard plenty of stories, seen some blurry photos, but never collected any real evidence.
The truth was, I’d never found solid proof of any of the monsters I hunted. I gathered stories, other people’s photographs. I looked at plaster casts of footprints, jars that held tufts of strange fur. I interviewed eyewitnesses, listening to their stories with a trace of envy and deep longing, always thinking, Why couldn’t it be me? I captured the occasional odd sound on my digital recorder: far-off howls and moans, always sounding less frightening than sad. I’d spent hours and hours in the woods, in cornfields, in old mines and abandoned houses, at the edges of rivers and lakes, searching, waiting, willing them to show themselves to me. Year after year, I chased the monsters, feeling just behind them, touching their shadows sometimes, but never able to actually catch a glimpse.
Back in New York, I’d listened to the sheriff’s Pig Man stories and theories: “The body of a man, face like a pig. And he doesn’t speak, he squeals. Folks say he escaped from the government facility on Plum Island and made his way here. We’ve got a lot of thick woods, perfect cover for him.” The sheriff didn’t flat-out admit to believing that this creature existed, but he didn’t exactly deny it either. I asked him if he’d ever seen the creature himself. “You spend enough time out in those woods, you see some strange things,” he’d said, but wouldn’t elaborate. I asked him a few more questions, then listened as he told me about Nadia Hill, the back of my neck prickling. “That girl who went missing last year, she went around telling people she’d been meeting the Pig Man out in the woods. The story the kids like to tell is that he’s the one who took her. Did it on the full moon because that’s when he’s the hungriest.”
“But what really happened to Nadia?” I’d asked. “Was she ever found?”
The sheriff had shaken his head, looked down at the ground. “No. She hasn’t shown up yet. Do I think the Pig Man took her into the woods to be his secret wife and raise little piggy babies, like the kids say? No. Nadia ran away, plain and simple.”
I told Nadia Hill’s story on my podcast and blog about the Pig Man. The comments blew up: Was there really a monster in Upstate New York who took a girl? Blog visitors left comments sharing rumors they’d heard about other people, mostly children and teens, who’d been taken by various monsters around the country: a boy in Maine who’d been carried off in the jaws of a giant catlike creature; a girl who disappeared after she followed a silver lady only she could see into a cave in Kentucky.
Most of the stories were just that: stories. But some weren’t. These were the ones that got my attention, sank their teeth in, and wouldn’t let go.
And then the email came. From a user who called herself MNSTRGRL.
Took you long enough to catch on, sister. Nadia Hill wasn’t the first. And she won’t be the last. Come find me, Monster Hunter. I dare you.
I wrote back immediately: Is it really you?
The email bounced back as undeliverable. No such address.
I dove into new research, spending hours online, and soon discovered a pattern of teenage girls who had gone missing on full moons, all from towns with reports of a local monster.
The earliest match I could find was thirteen-year-old Jennifer Rothchild, back in 1988. She’d disappeared from a little town in Washington State with a lot of bigfoot sightings. And Jennifer had told her friends she’d met a creature in the woods, a creature who spoke to her. She’d vanished on the night of the full moon in September. The woods were searched by police, dogs, and teams of volunteers. Signs were put up around town. The police questioned her friends, her teachers, members of her family. No trace was ever found. No one ever heard from her again.
In 1991, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Morales disappeared from Farmington, New Mexico, after telling people she’d seen the Dogman and was going out to look for him on the full moon.
In 1993, Sandra Novotny in Flatwoods, West Virginia, showed her friends a blurry photo she’d taken of the Flatwoods monster. She went into the woods to get a better picture and was never seen again.
Sixteen-year-old Anna Larson vanished from Elkhorn, Wisconsin, in September of 1998 after telling her little brother that she’d met the Beast of Bray Road, that the Beast had told her she was special.
Each girl disappeared on a full moon after claiming to have met some sort of legendary creature.