The Winged Terror: Origins
By C.M. Saunders
Blood Lake, the second Dylan Decker horror western, is out from Undertaker Books. Being a heady mix of fact, fiction, and accepted folklore, these stories are great fun to write. The first book of the series, Silent Mine, featured a subterranean race of gnome-like creatures similar to the fabled "knockers" prevalent in virtually every culture that cultivated mining. In Blood Lake, the threat comes from above rather than below.
In Blood Lake, the antagonist is a creature known colloquially as the "Winged Terror." The name might be a bit corny, but to me it perfectly encapsulates a huge flying bird-like entity that might show up periodically and carry people off to their doom. The Winged Terror itself is an amalgamation of several things.
Firstly, the Mothman, which famously terrorized Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the sixties and made such an impression Richard Gere made a film about it. My version also incorporates elements plucked from the Jeepers Creepers movies, mostly related to feeding cycles and the like.
If you look deeper, history and folklore are littered with examples of huge airborne assassins akin to long-extinct pterodactyls (Winged Terror, get it), such as the pouakai of Maori legend, the Japanese Varan, and the Scottish boobrie. Similar tales come from central Europe, the Middle east, and let's not forget the Welsh dragon, or wyvern. To clarify, it is generally accepted that though similar in appearance, the dragon is distinguishable from the wyvern on account of having four legs as opposed to two. But who needs legs when you have wings? The fact that so many diverse cultures around the world have such similar stories in their distant pasts is interesting, and you can't help but wonder if some of them may have had a common source. Perhaps the most famous bird-like predator is the Thunderbird of Native American culture, which has been depicted in one form or another for at least 4,000 years.
And here's where things get weird. Or more weird. When I was a kid I devoured books about monsters and the supernatural, and I vividly remember seeing an old black-and-white photograph in one of those books showing a group of frontier men holding up a dead Thunderbird-type creature. That was probably when the seed of the Winged Terror, star of Blood Lake, was planted. The thing is, that never happened. I just thought it did. And so did many other people. If you do a Google search today it will throw up numerous versions of the image in question, and even gives you a source. Apparently, it was published in the April 26th 1890 edition of the Tombstone Epitaph. However, there is a copy of that particular periodical stored in the Library of Congress, and it contains no such photograph. The one floating around the internet, reproduced here for your amusement, is fake. The "real" photo doesn't actually exist. It never did.
Go here for a deep dive into that particular branch of the story
Now, the case of the missing (or imagined) Thunderbird photo has slipped into the pantheon of stories attributed to the Mandela Effect, where people supposedly "remember" things that didn't happen. The name comes from scores of people "remembering" Nelson Mandela dying in jail in the eighties, when in reality he died a free man in 2013. There are lots of other examples, including a long-running debate over a hyphen in the KitKat (Kit-Kat) logo and whether or not the cartoon series was called Loony Toons or Loony Tunes, with more turning up every day. It's a thing. And it's very unsettling. A 2022 article on the Curious Archive website explores the fabled Thunderbird photograph and its links to the Mandela Effect in more detail, if you're interested.
But what could be causing these false memories, if that's what they are?
The easiest explanation would be that they are simply the result of human error, and evidence of the inherent fallibility of memory. Ask anyone in law enforcement how notoriously unreliable memories can be. However, some claim the Mandela Effect is proof of multiple universes co-existing, or some kind of inter-dimensional existence, while others maintain that there has been a glitch in the matrix. More adventurous conspiracy theorists often connect it with Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments into quantum physics. True, I don't recall any talk of the Mandela Effect before September 2008, which is when the LHC was first fired up. Or maybe that in itself is a false memory. Who knows? There are so many levels to this weirdness. All I know is I am (almost) sure I saw that Thunderbird photograph in a book when I was a kid, so sure that decades later I wrote a story about it.