30 Folklore Creatures That Could Actually Exist

1. Skinwalkers. Seriously. The number of Askreddit threads I’ve seen with bizarre wolf creatures, large humanoids in the woods, and people discussing Skinwalkers is downright chilling.

2. As a form of a traditional demon, the Baba Yaga, a witch Slavic folklore.

Had an ‘imaginary friend’ named Baba Witch that lived in my barn when I was little. One time I was playing with it, and got locked in a room with no lock. I screamed for nearly 30 minutes before my mom got me out.

Fast forward a few years, and I had gotten these things called ‘Creature Cards’ which were like big cards with pictures and facts about animals and monsters and stuff. When I saw the Baba Yaga, it looked almost exactly how I’d imagined Baba Witch.

Fast forward to now, it all kind of clicked for me.

3. Might not be new to most people, but the Jackalope actually does exist… technically.

The Jackalope is a North American legend, a rabbit with antlers. In reality, it’s a rabbit suffering from a virus that causes weird growths on its head.

4. Megaconda. It’s just a really, REALLY big anaconda, and since those snakes grow continually throughout their lives, I wouldn’t be surprised if some have, in the past, gotten over 50 feet or more.

5. NYC Sewer Alligators. In the early 20th century, small alligators as pets were apparently a popular thing among kids and when they started to get too big, parents allegedly disposed of them by throwing them down the drains / into the sewers like dead goldfish. I can totally see them living off the massive sewer rats and growing to be a decent size, and a dark dank muddy environment like the NYC underground seems like a viable habitat for them.

They were also the inspiration for Doc Connors from Spider Man.

6. The Orang Pendek. It’s a small bipedal ape supposedly inhabiting the rainforests of Sumatra. A group of scientists even claim they have distinctive footprints and hair samples but its not really confirmed if it exists.

7. The Buggane. It’s an energy stealer by giving you nightmares. Lots of people have nightmares and wake up tired. Means a Buggane could’ve slipped into your mind and bedroom.

They never take enough to kill you unless you see its rat like face.

8. Shadow people. I had an experience when I was in high school that made me believe.

I told this story before, but this was at my friend’s apartment building, which his parents owned. It wad a pretty old building in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, and according to his dad it used to be owned by Al Capone, but I’m not sure how true that was. We had an apartment on the top floor that they let us just hang out in and it allowed us easy access to the roof so we could go smoke cigarettes.

One night, we were about to go up, but I had to pee, so I told him I’d meet him up there. After I was done, I went up the stairs to the attic portion that was connected to the roof. There were no lights, so we always used our phones to guide us. We had those old flip phones without lights, so you only had the light from the screen to help navigate the cluttered mess that was up there.

As I made my way to the roof door, I saw a shadow pass by me. Now this wasn’t like the shadow of something moving with the light of my phone, this shadow felt solid like a person. I followed the direction it went thinking it was my friend. I kept saying that I knew it was him and to stop playing around. It passed me a few more times, before heading to the other side of the attic and that’s when I heard my friends voice from downstairs.

He got a call from his girlfriend and was in another room talking to her the whole time. I have no idea what that shadow figure was, but it really freaked me out and I told my friend what happened and that I did not want to go back up there.

9. Thunderbirds. Native American traditions across the Great Plains have stories about Thunderbirds, and so do ancient and ancient South American cultures. Even accounting for the sharing of cultures through trade across the 2 continents, cultures that are vastly different and thousands of miles apart have similar tales of Thunderbirds. I think they’re extinct now, but I definitely think they were real.

10. Dragons just because they pop up in so many different cultures from Asia to Europe, and some in North American Indians. They seem pretty realistic minus the firebreathing part.

11. Real talk, I totally believe in ghosts. Not to the extent of all those weird ghost hunting shows on TV but I think that kind of after death thing is real. I don’t know if there’s a God and Devil but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were angels and demons that were really dead people looking to do good or bad in the afterlife. Maybe the spirit weakens its connection the longer its been dead which is why we never hear about the ghosts of cavemen and stuff like that. I dunno. It’s just cool to think about.

12. Gnomes. They exist in almost every folklore and people keep seeing them even today.

13. Mermaids. Not the ones you see in fairytales but the freaky green ones with fins and shit.

14. Sasquatch. There’s only circumstantial or anecdotal evidence, but it still seems legitimate to me. I don’t believe they are interdimensional travelers or some of the more silly crap people describe encountering (those are fun stories, though); it just seems very plausible that there is something humanoid out there keeping mostly to itself.

15. Well used to exist, but giants, too many ancient stories from completely independent cultural and ethnic groups globally to completely deny the possibility in my mind. In the not so distant past we had giant sloths, giant bears, giant cats, giant just about every other animal, humans are animals, so remains a possibility to me that there were giant hominids as well.

16. For hundreds, if not 1,000s of years, fairies have been throughout stories, literature, and tales. Little bright lights. Surly people were seeing something. Maybe it was assumed the orbs had tiny human form. Idk, could go hand in hand I suppose.

17. Mokele-mbembe. A sauropod that lurks in the massive jungle/swamp/rainforest in Central Africa.

18. I’m not superstitious, and I don’t necessarily believe in them, but I have Irish ancestry, so… I do my best not to piss off the fae. You probably won’t see anyone openly believing in them, but a surprising percent of these people follow the fae’s rules, at least in my family.

19. Wood-Elves, hidden away in the deepest parts of the world. They saw what we’re like long ago and vowed to keep themselves secret.

20. Banshee, scares the fuck out of me thinking about them.

21. The Wulver. Scottish werewolf, except it wasn’t a shape shifter, was never a human, said to be peaceful as long as it was left alone, helped lost travelers and was known to leave fish for poor families.

22. El chupacabra. It could very possibly be real, it really is not that crazy of a creature.

23. I am from East Africa and we also have mythology about skinwalkers. The most famous story is about two lions called the Ghost and The Darkness, they were two adult male lions without manes. They killed many workers of a British colonial railway and took their bodies as trophies and stored the cadavers in their cave. This is very very strange behavior for a lion or any other animal. Africans believe the the ghost and the darkness were two witchdoctors that turned into lions to fight the colonialist that were destroying the animals habitat. Both lions were eventually killed, they are now in a museum in America I think.

24. If there was an undiscovered folklore creature somewhere, I’d put all my money on it being one of the ocean ones; Loch Ness monster, Kraken, etc. Some sort of sea monster.

The ocean is so incredibly big and goes insanely deep. Who knows what we can’t see in the depths.

25. Yowies are also probably out there, along with other things. Australia (same as Canada) is so big and so uninhabited that, at least to me it’s really not that hard to accept that there are things out there that we don’t know about. I mean for all we know maybe these creatures are subterranean and are rarely on the surface.

26. Russian Yeti. There was a 3 hour documentary on Discovery and it freaked me out.

27. Bigfoot/Sasquatch. The stories of them go back hundreds of years in Native tribes. The description is not that far off from the Gigantopithecus that once really did exist. While it seems unlikely a sustainable breeding population of those could have remained alive this long, it’s not *impossible*. We’ve rediscovered other species thought extinct, and the Pacific Northwest is huge and there are a lot of very remote forests.

28. The Kraken. Giant Squid have finally been conclusively proven to exist in the last decade or so. It’s not beyond belief an even larger variety is out there.

29. Most of the ocean things I wouldn’t be surprised by. Considering coelacanths were thought to be extinct until relatively recently, I think it makes sense that there’s all sorts of crazy shit down there that we might never discover. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

30. I would not be terribly surprised for us to discover a North American ape or monkey living in the deep woods. But I will be shocked if it is more than two feet tall and fifty pounds. We humans are unbelievably bad at estimating size and distance. Ask any hunter about ground shrinkage and that is on an animal they love and know passionately and spends years staring at. Some one catching a glance of something odd and remembering it huge is not even a little unusual.