1- Fearsome critters
This covers a few different ones but I feel I can lump these together. Fearsome critter stories stared within American logging camps as a way to haze new members and as a way to explain natural phenomena (loggers going missing late at night, strange sounds in the forests, having to be drunk on the job).
Some of them are maneaters and some of them mostly harmless but all are super wacky looking.
The hugag is my favorite
He's like a moose-camel-duck
2-Selkies
Selkies are creatures that can shapeshift between human and seal. Stories of this legend come mostly from Scotland, Ireland, the Faroe islands, and Iceland. A Selkie sheds their seal skin when they turn human and can only turn into a seal again with it. A lot of stories revolve around creepy moids waiting for selkies to turn into a human so that they can steal their seal skin and forcefully marry them. Real moid moment
I like the theory that the story of Selkies started when Finnish, Sami, and eskimos came into contact with the Scottish and they simply believed them to be a whole other species.
3- Set animal
The Ancient Egyptian God Set was identified with this guy
There's not much else to say other than that they made up a whole new kind of animal.
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My favorite is the kelpie because it's an absolutely r-slurred idea for a cryptid. For those unfamiliar, it's some sort of eldritch demon horse that appears as a normal horse and tempts and entices people (usually children) to go for a ride on its back. Once they're on, it jumps into the bog and drowns the riders, who have somehow magically become stuck to it.
I never liked horses so it's a very funny image to me that someone would come across a strange horse, loose in the wild, and would ever consider a fricking pony ride on that thing. How does a horse even tempt you to ride it?
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That's not a normal looking horse 🐎
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That's the demonic form revealed after you've already been trapped. According to some myth, it otherwise appears as a normal looking horse with a black coat and mane, and no signs of anything weird except maybe having some pond weeds or a marsh-y smell on it. According to other myth, Scottish children are so r-slurred they'll ride the horse that has snakes for hair and a 12 foot long back. They just all clamber on top that thing like it's the cat bus from Totoro.
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Maybe in ye olden days riding horses was a super special thing for scottish children
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