The Monster Missive: Sn. 21 Ep. 15 & Sn. 21 Ep. 16 (Patreon)

Our weekly newsletter, brought to you by MAU team members, Delainey Bowers and Conor Ryan, every Friday.

Quick note about the Missive - Sadly this will be our last one. It has become too big of a time requirement for our team to handle, as much fun as it has been to put it together. We are sorry to disappoint our readers! We will keep the door open for its possible return in the future.

-Show Notes Spotlight-

A more in-depth look at some of the research covered in this week's Tuesday and Thursday episodes.

Despite the fact that Virginia is for lovers and at least one of us on the team was born a hater - on Tuesday’s episode we finally did a deep dive into the spooky side of the Mother of States. And while residents of Virginia are no strangers to unmarked black helicopters circling their homes at all hours of the day, we hear that there are even stranger things in the skies there. According to NUFORC, Virginia ranks 18th in the U.S. for UFO sightings. Right now we’re at 2,896 reported sightings – the most recent being a sighting of a small light moving erratically over Richmond on June 6, 2026. Also, Stacker made a handy list of cities there where you’re most likely to have a run in with a mysterious craft. To help you plan your next vacation to The Cavalier State, here’s a condensed version:

10. Woodbridge [44]

9. Arlington [50]

8. Fairfax [54]

7. Norfolk [63]

6. Roanoke [65]

5. Fredericksburg [66]

4. Chesapeake [70]

3. Alexandria [118]

2. Richmond [140]

1. Virginia Beach [193]

So you’re telling us we can sit at a seaside restaurant, pound back fried crab, slam Bloody Marys, and also have a pretty good shot at seeing some UFOs? Guess Virginia Beach is going to be where the next MAU Team Building™ session is!

We would also be remiss if we didn’t mention the famous Nash-Fortenberry UFO Sighting. From the Wiki entry, 

“The Nash-Fortenberry UFO sighting was an unidentified flying object sighting that occurred on July 14, 1952, when two commercial pilots (William B. Nash and William H. Fortenberry) claimed to have seen eight UFOs flying in a tight echelon formation over Chesapeake Bay in the state of Virginia…the encounter was corroborated by several groups of independent ground witnesses. The case was listed in the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book as an ‘unknown.’”

Sounds like swamp gas to us!

Now it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Old Dominion has a few spirits wandering within its borders. The Virginia Company of London was chartered by King James I in 1606, which led to the establishment of the ill-fated settlement of Jamestown in 1607. Of course, those settlers weren’t the first people who occupied the region and Virginia is home to a number of Indigenous peoples including the Chisca, the Algonquian, the Powhatan, the Chickahominy, and the Pamunkey. Basically, all of that means there are a whole lot of locales in the state where people have done a lot of living, a lot of dying, and apparently a lot of carrying on as spirits after they’re six feet under. Virginia.org was kind enough to compile a list of the 12 most haunted sites in the state, so here are a few of our favorites from the list,

St. Albans Sanatorium (Radford)

“Built in 1892, the building that would later become St. Albans first operated as a Lutheran Boys School with a rough and competitive reputation. The sanatorium opened as a psychiatric hospital in 1916 and was a facility  known for its lobotomy and electroshock therapy procedures. Like many early healthcare institutions of the early 20th century, overcrowding, outbreaks, neglect, and death were common. As a result, St. Albans is said to be a hotbed of paranormal activity, including ‘disembodied screams, conversations, and footsteps,’ full-bodied apparitions of former patients, and medical equipment that moves on its own.”

Bracey General Store (Bracey)

“Originally opened in 1900, the Bracey General Store was one of the first of its kind in the area. It brought locals in for all sorts of goods and household items, even carrying coffins for more unfortunate occasions. In addition to Bracey residents looking to stock up on home supplies, the general store was frequently perused by travelers passing through town, as the store was located near the train depot.”

Visitors to the store have reported muffled footsteps, cold breezes, shadowy figures lurking in corners and the storage room, and the restless spirit of a former cashier who has never clocked out.

Gadsby’s Tavern (Alexandria)

According to the legend, in 1816 “a young woman traveled to Alexandria on a ship with her husband, contracting a disease on her journey that led them to seek rest and rehabilitation at the inn. However, once brought to Gadsby’s, her health quickly deteriorated, and on her deathbed, she made all of the people that attended to her swear an oath to never reveal her identity. To this day, no one knows who she was.

She is buried in St. Paul’s Cemetery with a gravestone marked ‘Female Stranger.’ Both the cemetery…and Room 8 of Gadsby’s Tavern are supposedly haunted by the ghost of the young woman.”

As it turns out, there’s a lot more to dig into on this last location. Part of the reason this legend has endured is because of how eye-catching the extremely long inscription on her tomb is. According to Wikipedia, it reads,

To the memory of a

FEMALE STRANGER

whose mortal sufferings terminated

on the 14th day of October 1816

Aged 23 years and 8 months

This stone is placed here by her disconsolate

Husband in whose arms she sighed out her

latest breath, and who under God

did his utmost even to soothe the cold

dead ear of death

How loved how valued once avails thee not

To whom related or by whom begot

A heap of dust alone remains of thee

Tis all thou art and all the proud shall be

To him gave all the Prophets witness that

through his name whosoever believeth in

him shall receive remission of sins

 Acts. 10th Chap. 43rd verse.

Over the centuries there has been a ton of conjecture as to who this woman was - hypotheses range from, “the daughter of disgraced Vice President Aaron Burr, who was lost at sea in 1813” to a theory that, “the woman was Sarah Curran, fiancée of Irish Revolutionist Robert Emmet, who may have been forced to marry a British naval officer.”

And honestly? This is a pretty good bit for a headstone, so if you want to live in infamy after you die it might be worth considering going the anonymous inscription route!

On Thursday’s episode, Travis let us in on the luxurious life of a screenwriter in Los Angeles, which sometimes means you are driving a van full of actors to and from set for some extra cash. While he was doing this one night, he saw a green craft hover and then shoot into the sky. Thanks to the fine folks at NUFORC, there are actually a wealth of reports from within the past six years that are similar to our caller’s experience. Here are just a few highlights:

NUFORC UFO Sighting 172537 (Tarzana, CA – October 17, 2022)

“I only caught the tail end of the anomaly, as it flew down below the tree line about a quarter of a mile from me.  It was a massive blue/green meteorite type fireball that I would have to roughly judge to be five to ten feet in diameter. The tail of the fireball was very small. It was all very bright. I heard no light or sound when/if it landed or made impact.”

NUFORC UFO Sighting 159194 (Temescal Canyon, CA – September 5, 2020)

“Driving home from work at 1:30 am on 15 Freeway by Nichols exit. Green fire ball came flying down. Possibly crashed in the hills. Looked like when someone is shooting a roman candle firework but was ×100.”

NUFORC UFO Sighting 166509 (Garden Grove, CA – October 4, 2021)

“At approximately 7:21PM, during a heavy lightning show, which is quite unusual for California, we experienced an oblong glowing streak traveling horizontally which we believe to be a UFO for the duration of approximately 4 seconds.”

NUFORC UFO Sighting 170459 (Ridgecrest, CA – July 16, 2022)

“I saw a very large bright intense green fireball. It looked pretty much like the fireball that was seen over San Diego at 10pm on the same night. They said it was a meteor but two in the same night? In two different places? At two different times?”

And while meteors don’t move like our caller described, it is worth mentioning that meteors can sometimes be mistaken for UFOs, especially if a witness has never seen one in-person before. Just a few months ago, CBS shared this video with the context,

“An apparent meteor lit up the skies over Northern California over the weekend, drawing hundreds of reports from viewers across the region.

The fireball streaked across the sky a little after 8 p.m. Sunday. As captured by several videos and described in numerous reports, the fireball streaked for around five seconds and burned bright green.

The sighting comes as part of a recent surge in meteor activity nationwide. Over the past week, three meteorites have been spotted across the country — including one in Ohio, another in Houston and now the latest over California's Central Valley.”

And although it isn’t as fun as reporting a UFO, if you happen to catch sight of a meteor burning through the sky and want to share that info, The American Meteor Society has this handy-dandy reports page! And if you want to increase your odds of seeing a fireball in the sky, here’s their Meteor Shower Calendar to help you plan your stargazing appropriately.

On Thursday, Morgan was kind enough to share his personal experience of touring the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, which included some miraculous communication with a spirit via dowsing rods. For those unfamiliar with the asylum, according to Wikipedia,

“The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum was a psychiatric hospital located in Weston, West Virginia…The asylum was open to patients from 1864 until 1994. Although the building was originally designed to accommodate 250 patients, it became overcrowded in the 1950s with 2,400 patients and eventually closed after years of decline. After being abandoned for several years, the asylum was sold at auction in 2007 and has been open for tours and other events to raise money for its restoration since 2008.”

Then, if you’ve never experienced dowsing rods before, See Scan gives a good breakdown of what they are,

“Dowsing, or water witching, refers to the act of using two L-shaped instruments, one held in each hand, in an attempt to discover the position of something underground. That something can range from water to underground utilities, and sometimes even extend to hidden archaeological structures.Dowsing rods can take the form of something as simple as two bent tent poles or something that has been purpose built. Y-shaped dowsing rods are often made from the branch of a tree. L-shaped variants are most commonly made of metal…The origins of dowsing trace back as far as the Greeks in the mid-fifth century. Herodotus reported the use of wooden Y-shaped forks for finding water.”

This practice eventually became intertwined with spiritualism and you may find dowsing rods in a ghost hunter’s tool kit in order for them to ask yes/no questions of a spirit, as Morgan described in his call.

One explanation that many skeptics use to shrug off dowsing is the Ideomotor Effect. Again, from See Scan,

“In essence, the ideomotor effect refers to actions that are unconscious and involuntary movements that occur because of prior experience, suggestions or expectations. Priming or thinking of a motion can cause muscle movements that can be used to explain how dowsing rods will move without any perceived action by the user. Facilitated communication and Ouija boards have been attributed to this phenomenon as well.”

And in this segment, famous skeptic James Randi rips apart a man named Greg Price from Minnesota, who attempts to win the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge and submits a video of his dowsing abilities as proof. A big part of his argument leans on this Ideomotor Effect (and also an apparently unyielding desire to always be a wet blanket).

If you, too, hate fun and want to learn more about the effect - this video from Seeker and this video from SciShow Psych are good entry points to that rabbit hole. However, if you are looking for absolute proof that dowsing is real, then look no further than this video of a water diviner in action from 1954.

We heard from Don on Thursday, who shared his experience of seeing what he could only describe as a “small brontosaurus” cross the road in front of him while he was stationed in Iraq. A quick tidbit – no fossils of land-dwelling dinosaurs have been discovered in Iraq (or most of the Middle East, really) since the region was submerged underwater during the Mesozoic Era. So, what did Don see?

One strong contender comes from an user on this Reddit thread,

“There are a small number of cryptids who have had their entire (alleged) habitat destroyed. The afa of Iraq, described as a giant venomous lizard, is one of these cryptids. The marshlands it lived in were mostly destroyed in 1991 by the Saddam Hussein government.”

This caught our attention, and according to Cryptid Wiki, 

“The Afa was a large cryptid lizard reported from the marshes of the Tigris River in Iraq. The Afa may have been a large undescribed species of monitor lizard. Karl Shuker notes that the marshes of southern Iraq were drained in 1991, forcing the Madan people to relocate and turning the marsh into a desert, which would certainly have had a negative impact on any already-rare animal living in the area.”

Seems like this might fit the bill! Now for those of you that want to learn more, the Afa was included in this Monster Quest episode and there is a more in depth video titled the Mokele Mbembe Documentary that covers sightings going back centuries.

So while the afa might truly be the best contender for the bold brontosaurus that crossed Don’s path, we couldn’t help but include a few more dinosaur-adjacent cryptids from around the world! 

First, there’s the Megalania. From this Wiki,

“The Megalania…is a very large lizard-like Cryptid, resembling a Komodo Dragon. It inhabits southern Australia. The creature has been sighted many times in the last century, and some sightings suggest that it lives also in New Guinea. 

In July 1979, [Australian cryptozoologist] Rex Gilroy was informed of footprints of the creature found in a recently plowed field. Across the field were 30 or so tracks from what looked like an enormous lizard. Rain had ruined most of the tracks but Gilroy was able to make a plaster cast of one that had been preserved. 

Also in 1979 a sighting of megalania arose, this time by the best possible witness. Herpetologist Frank Gordon. After conducting some field work in the Wattagan Mountains in New South Wales, Gordon returned to his vehicle. After starting his engine he saw what he at first thought was a log, scampering off. It ended up being a lizard of some 30 feet or more in length.”

Then there’s the Arica Monster, which according to this Wiki,

“..is said to be a theropod-like creature that inhabits the vast Atacama Desert of Chile, South America. It has descriptions fitting both those of a dromaeosaur [a feathered bipedal dinosaur] and a kangaroo.

The Arica Monster was first spotted in the Atacama Desert of Chile in 1980. Witnesses describe a run in with a huge kangaroo-like, bipedal monster in the deserts. In addition, a military officer…says that he spotted two of the beasts while traveling with two other adults and two children in a vehicle. He was quoted as seeing ‘a huge beast, much like a two-legged dinosaur, with huge thighs.’ They described the creature as being exactly like the raptor from Jurassic Park.”

And finally, coming in from Cuba, is the Gitmo Bird. According to Cryptid Wiki,

“In 1965, near Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Patty Carson was walking home with her little brother when they noticed something large rummaging through tall grass by the side of the road. She recounted how a featherless, winged creature that was as tall as a man and possessed a plenitude of small, needle-like teeth, as well as a long tail with a tip shaped like a diamond, suddenly popped its head and shoulders up over the top of the grass. She described it as a ‘flying dinosaur,’ and said that it was very close, only about 30 feet away.

Similarly,  a U.S. marine by the name of Eskin Kuhn, who was stationed at the base in 1971, reported seeing what he described as two 'pterodactyls' one day while taking a break outside of the barracks."

Meanwhile here at HQ, we thought we might have seen a dinosaur walk by the break room the other day, but it was just Derek in his Barney costume again. We always seem to forget it’s his favorite thing to wear on Casual Friday!

-Here There Be Headlines-

A round-up of bizarre, curious, head-scratching news stories that leave you saying "huh."

It’s time for us to drive to Milwaukee and set up a few giant lawn skeletons in front of city hall out of protest for their unreasonable citations against spookiness. These are some of the stories that we’ll be thinking about on our ride!

You can pry these 12’ skeletons from my cold, dead hands

The brain keeps going, and going, and going

“Like sands through the hourglass…”

Jurassic Park but make it cavemen

Haunted Historical Headline