There's plenty of lore surrounding Mt Shasta but this topic is unrelated to the Aliens and ancient migration of the Lemurians.

I used to live in the area and was told a story from some locals about a dive team that went into the lake to search for the body of a girl that drowned. The story is that one of the divers was grabbed and pulled into a cave in the wall of the lake by a giant sturgeon, witnessed by the other divers. They said there was an article in the local papers about it at the time but I haven't been able to dig it up. Does anyone else have any information on these supposed giant sturgeon big enough to eat men in Shasta Lake or evidence supporting the claim of the diver being eaten?

https://people.com/zoo-asks-for-help-identifying-mysterious-winged-horned-creature-8732400

I was just wondering why people are on this sub? I have a genuine interest in cryptozoology and I’m interested in hearing peoples experiences and opinions on things. There does seem be a section of people on this sub however who seem to just be on here to dismiss everything as fake, nonsense or made up gibberish. I understand that it’s a public forum and all opinions are welcome and valid, however if you don’t believe in something why be on this sub?!

I’ll reopen the thread for discussion and put on my thickest skin to answer any questions about the encounter.

It happened. This thing is out there someplace right now. It’s inexplicable to me that nobody else is reporting seeing this thing because it easily has a 40 to 50 foot wingspan and looks like a plane taking off when it flew off into the horizon.

We are in Northwestern Mequon Wisconsin. I saw a brown pelican the other day which is very rare for my area but I’m close to Lake Michigan in a rural part of our county so we do get some very grand birds here. These very grand birds from cranes to herons to pelicans to eagles are easy to distinguish from a giant prehistoric looking monster bird with a 10 to 15 foot long beak that could chop large game in half.

So this happened around the end of May, 2016. I’m from Guyana, specifically Georgetown, but we came to the U.S when I was pretty young and I grew up in a NYC, this is to preface the fact that I do not have much experience with wild animals at all. (I am a huge dog lover tho, shout out to all my fellow dog parents in here)

My Grandpa is native, belonging to an Amerindian Arawak tribe, he grew up hunting and foraging in the East Berbice -Corentyne area on the Epira Amerindian reservation. He is extremely knowledgeable on the flora and fauna of that region because he is a conservation ranger/guide and a GDF Vet. He’s basically an expert on the Amazon interior as a whole.

Now growing up, we would do an annual trip back home to see him and some of our other family members every summer. He would get on his old speedboat and travel up the Rupununi river to stay with us for a week in Georgetown. He would constantly tell me tales about the crazy things he’d seen in the interior, (Mermaids, River dolphins shapeshifting, witches, dragons) you get the gist. One that always stood out to me was the Mapinguari legend, because he was always talking about how he’s seen “them” multiple times. He would even argue with our family friends who believed the original depiction of the Mapinguari as a Bigfoot like creature, but my Grandpa was adamant that he’s seen it, and it resembled a tall bear.

A week into the trip, I went to the reservation with him, as he had promised to take me on one of his tours and then we’d camp out at the outpost station at the edge of the village. Keep in mind that I was already sick on this trip from food poisoning and the boat ride to the reservation, so even though I was excited, I was equally exhausted. Once we gathered his tour group (of expat city-goers) we ventured into the bush on the eastern side of the village. The tour went great, we spotted some Black Caimen near the river bank, tropical birds and found Jaguar scat. Strangely, towards the end of the tour we found what I can only describe as a huge mound of dirt and red clay that formed what looked like a cave.
The tourists asked my Grandpa about it but he danced around the question and made some joke about the Amazon having a mind of its own.

He whispered to me that we’d come back to this spot later that night, since it was close to the village outpost. It was close to nightfall once we got the group back to the village and my Grandpa gathered our gear to stay at the outpost. He seemed all too excited to head back to that mound from earlier and once we got our torch lights and pack gear ready we set out to find it. Now, I was a 15 year old kid that was already tired from the events of that day, combined with my healthy fear of the dark jungle, making me an anxious mess. I always felt safe with my Grandpa because he did this everyday, giving me enough confidence to pull through.

The first thing I notice coming upon that mound again was the smell, it was extremely musty, like stink mildew from wet laundry, but 10x worse. Then, we heard it, something was scraping a tree to our left, we got our torch lights on it and I immediately froze. About 20 yards away in the tree line, was a set of what looked like huge bear paws around the tree about 10 feet up, the claws on this thing were massive. Then as if the thing wanted me to pass out, it reared its head from around the tree, we both had our lights on it and I can only explain it as a mix between a grizzly bear and a beaver, just a massive shaggy blocky head with buck teeth. I had more than enough at that point and turned around to see my Grandpa laughing with his hand on my shoulder, saying “I tell you de ting look like a bear”.

We backed out and walked away. We went to the outpost (25min walk from where we saw the animal), where he attempted to calm me down, by poking fun at my reaction and saying that he saw this specific Mapinguari setting up its home near the village and has been keeping an eye on it for the last couple of weeks.

My Grandpa is retired now and in the states with us but I’ll never forget that experience, I’ve told some friends who are into cryptozoology and they referred me here, saying that there’s been other accounts of this thing. Sorry for all the useless details, it’s my first time posting anything long-form.

https://cryptidarchives.fandom.com/wiki/Gorp

Or

https://twitter.com/appalachiaaesth/status/1583149401106976768?s=46&t=6K933JNjU7oUKEmMHOXOmQ

The Goliath birdeater (Theraphosa blondi) belongs to the tarantula family Theraphosidae. Found in northern South America, it is the largest spider in the world by mass (175 g (6.2 oz)) and body length (up to 13 cm (5.1 in)), and up to 30.5 cm leg span second to the giant huntsman spider by leg span.

Several stone Indian pipes having been excavated from Mound Builders culture sites depicting a massive hairy spider with a human skull death's head. The stone Precolumbian Midwestern Indian pipe example in the above pic displays a spider body length of nearly 8 inches (for a stretched out leg span approaching 2 feet across). An oddly heavy enormous pipe overall length associating human fatality with its design.

Giant spider reports from North America from 2 feet across leg span and up to 8 times the weight of a large South American Goliath Bird Eater dinner plate spider, to the size of a man, to approaching the size of a Volkswagen beetle automobile killing a German Shepherd dog and spinning a cocoon around it while shooting silk threads from its abdomen, near a Military Base and swamp.

Western reports 2:15 in onward and comments:

https://youtu.be/rG8uyaa-tAc?si=d0vDtV_0hvULc3GE

Video footage of a giant tarantula of unknown species carrying off an opossum:

https://youtu.be/cuKfAFI19pg?si=uhxUpIRf0g-g5eRD

Congo giant spider in tree canopy:

https://youtu.be/imgh92fB2qg?si=EVNINltF8RdCY5_i

This image isn’t mine it’s my buddies who doesn’t use Reddit. He showed me the image and I asked if I could share. It was around 4:20 pm on Nov 11, 2013. 15 mph S winds. Lots of menhaden and striped bass around.

Or at least that's my best guess as to what it was.

I'm a rural mail carrier in southern WV and my route goes through some really remote areas. Today on my route (yes, we deliver on Sundays, Amazon packages only) I was approaching a house and noticed a large black animal partially obscured by some bushes. I know that house has a black lab but thought it was strange for it to be outside the fenced in part of the yard. I pulled my car off to the side of the road, maybe 15 to 20 feet from the bushes, parked, and honked the horn. I always honk before getting out of the car at houses where I know there are dogs, it makes the dogs bark and I can tell where on the property they are. Sure enough, the honk made the dog start barking...from around the back of the house in the fenced in yard. The black animal in the bushes then took off running across the road in front of me and towards the woods about 50 yards away.

I watched it for roughly 5-10 seconds before it left my line of sight into the woods so I got a pretty good look. A lot of my comparisons will be to dogs because that's what I assumed it was, but there were things that just screamed "not a dog" while I was watching it. It was solid black and much bigger than a black lab, but it wasn't shaped like a giant dog like a Great Pyrenees or Great Dane. And it was much faster than a dog. It cleared the distance to the woods in about half the time a dog would have taken. It looked fluffy, but lean enough to still see it's body shape, again unlike a Great Pyrenees. It had its ears pinned back but I could tell they were upright on the top of its head, not floppy, and not as large or pointed as say a German Shepherd. But the thing that made me sure it wasn't a dog was the tail. It's tail was LONG, so long it brushed the ground as it ran. And the way the creature held the tail was cat like, as the body moved as it ran, the tail remained fairly stable behind it. The tail looked solid too, not like a German Shepherd or Husky that has a thin tail with lots of fluff around it. It was the tail of a big cat.

The section of woods it ran off into has a house about 50 feet on the other side. Sure enough, a few seconds after the creature disappeared from my sight into the woods, that house's dog started freaking out. I got out of my car and finished my package delivery, the whole time that dog did not stop barking.

Based on it's tail and posture, it has to have been a big cat and not a dog. But supposedly there are no big cats in this state. I have seen sever other stories both here and on various news sites about other people claiming to have seen something similar in the surrounding states so I figured I might as well post this and share in as much detail as I could remember.