Ghosts or Monsters?

by Nick Redfern

People often ask me: why aren’t we ever able to secure hard, physical evidence of the presence and existence of such beasts as Bigfoot, lake-monsters, the Yeti etc? Well, it’s a very good question! Some might argue that given such creatures may be so few in number, this explains their overwhelming elusiveness. Fair enough. But what about those reports where people have seen Bigfoot vanish in a flash of light, or a werewolf-style beast do likewise? Like it or not, such cases most assuredly do exist. So, this suggests another possibility: maybe some of these “things” are not flesh-and-blood animals, after all. Perhaps, incredibly, they are the ghosts of long-dead creatures from equally long-gone eras.

Yep, the scenario sounds manifestly strange in the extreme. And, of course, it’s very much dependent on the theory that ghosts (in some form) are a reality. But, I have a number of reports in my files that are eerily suggestive of just such a possibility. And, one in particular stands out as being highly relevant to this controversial theory.

Jill O’Brien contacted me in January 2009, and had a somewhat creepy tale to tell, too, of a creature she claimed to have encountered only days before in a particularly dense area of Seattle woodland. It was, she assured me, nothing less than a fully-grown Saber-Tooth Tiger. Yes, you did read it right. But, the kicker was that Jenny’s Saber-Tooth Tiger seemed far more spectral than physical.

Just like the Mammoth, the Saber-Tooth Tiger – a massive creature that weighed up to 900 pounds, and which roamed both North and South America as far back as 2.5 Million B.C. – is widely assumed to have become extinct around 10,000 years ago. In other words, no-one – anywhere on the surface of the planet – should be seeing such a beast, at all.

Of course, in the world of on-screen fantasy, this marauding and ferocious killing-machine is a regular player, and one for who extinction plays absolutely no role at all. For example, there was the movie, Sabretooth, that made its debut on the Sy-Fy Channel in November 2002, and in which a scientist uses fossilized DNA to bring the beast back to life. Unsurprisingly, it goes on a murderous spree, slaughtering pretty much all of the cast of the movie one by one.

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