The Insectoid Invasion of California

Do you remember when your parents first left you home alone overnight? You must've felt very important and powerful - and perhaps more than a little scared. You were in charge of an empty house now, and every window could be a gateway to seeing something terrifying. Maybe you closed all the curtains and ran upstairs? This anxiety of yours was, of course, likely unfounded. However - the terror felt by one child in California was very much based in reality, even if that reality doesn't seem to fit with our notions of what's possible.

## The Desert Wall-Crawler

Once he'd left high school, he'd stopped talking about it - it just wasn't the sort of thing someone talked about without getting strange looks now that the world wasn't quite so magical. John presumably didn't want to be the 'Monster Guy' for the rest of his life, but that didn't stop him from spilling his story one last time to his coworker Daniel some years later. This coworker had the thought to email the tale to cryptozoologist Ken Gerhard, and it is to him that we owe the debt of gratitude for being able to hear this chilling tale now. John's house was in the high deserts of California, and on the night in question he had been left home alone. Everything was going according to plan - until he decided to open the front door and step outside to get some air.

A strange feeling came over him when he left the house. Something was telling him to look over to his side. When he did so, he likely wished he hadn't. There was something on the wall of the adjacent building - approximately the size of a man. In the darkness, John could see that the thing's body was covered in dark-coloured armour that suggested the chitin of an insect. The creature looked up at him - taking a few scuttling steps backwards up the wall so that it could face him. At this point, it promptly '*blended into the wall*' and vanished. John was terrified. He rushed back into the house, locking the door tight and closing all the blinds. He even turned off all the lights in the house out of fear that the insectoid monstrosity would somehow see him from its invisible vantage point. Unable to sleep out of pure panic, he stayed up until sunrise.

From that point onwards, the sight of that hideous creature on the wall was burned into his mind. He only ever told a few people about what he had seen, including his sister, girlfriend and Daniel. Luckily, he never saw anything else like that again. Here is where the story would end were it not for Daniel's evidently studious collection of his coworkers' paranormal stories. Another of his acquaintances by the name of Troy had had an encounter with something alarmingly similar...

## The Ghost House Ghoul

The truck, headlights cutting through the darkness like glowing beacons, rolled up outside the decrepit house. This building was rumoured to be haunted, and Troy and his friend were planning to investigate. Likely with a slight thrill, Troy turned off his headlights. As if on cue - something heavy landed on the back of the truck. The truck was a raised F-150, and this thing was heavy enough to dip it. Daniel compared it to what might happen if a 500-pound man had leapt onto the back of the truck. Looking back in what was doubtlessly panic to see if he could catch a glimpse of his attacker, Troy was able to see something jumping off the back of the truck and over the vehicle - landing in front of the hood. It was facing the truck in a hunched-over posture. It was then that the sheer strangeness of what he was seeing dawned on Troy.

As the creature slowly stood upright, Troy and his friend could see that it was seemingly covered in dark-coloured armour. Its hands '*or mandibles*' were long and odd-looking, and the hind-legs upon which it was stood looked animalistic. It was tall enough that Troy had to bend over the steering while and look up out of the windshield just to see the full height of it. Just as he did this, the monster vanished again - leaping '*thirty to fifty feet*' in one superhuman bound before landing to the side of them and starting running. Troy floored it, accelerating after the sprinting monstrosity in an effort to keep up with it. The beast was moving at somewhere between 30-60mph, turning into a dried riverbed before ultimately outrunning the truck. Troy had to stop driving where the road ended, and lost sight of the horrible thing.

## Fear in the Forest

These two encounters are discussed by Ken Gerhard in his *Menagerie of Mysterious Beasts*, but I figured that the details given in the stories are specific enough for there to potentially be other cases of encounters with the same sorts of entities in the state. I was correct - at least, if the tale told by a 2016 caller into *Coast to Coast AM* is to be believed. Ricky from San Diego, California called into the show on September 27th to tell of a bizarre encounter he had while camping with his family and a friend deep in the Sequoia National Forest. He stated that he was indeed a believer in the paranormal and cryptozoological, but clarified that thoughts of such things weren't on his mind at the time of his strange encounter.

Everyone bar Ricky and his friend had turned in at approximately 9 o'clock, leaving the pair gazing into the bonfire. Ricky decided that now was a good opportunity to listen to some music, and so he wandered over to his sister's '*forerunner*' (sic - likely a Toyota 4Runner) to take out his iPod. Just as he opened the back door of the vehicle, he felt something come crashing out of the tree behind him. He didn't just hear it - it was heavy enough for him to feel the '*huge thump*' it made. Spinning around with his flashlight illuminating the darkness ahead of him, Ricky found himself staring at what he described as a 6-7ft tall praying mantis. The breath drained out of him as he laid eyes on it - he was '*completely taken aback*' by the bizarre and horrifying being before him. The beast took a step back before melting into invisibility.

Ricky slammed the car door and ran back to the campfire, alerting his friend before waking everyone else up. Nobody believed him - and he remembers becoming really upset as his family laughed at him. His heart only sank further when he suddenly realised that he could hear a bizarre clicking noise coming from the woods all around the campsite. They were surrounded by the creatures. He told his friend about this, and when he put his ear to it he admitted that he could hear the same thing. Ricky took to patrolling the outskirts of the campsite with a flashlight, and all around them he could hear the constant clicking of the mantis creatures. '*It was really strange*'. No word on what happened next.

## Conclusions

Unfortunately, all but one of these encounters are undated, meaning that I can't assemble them into what could possibly be construed as a flap of sorts. I have no idea as to the order the events took place in - but if they all took place during the same period, then this is certainly indicative of an insectoid flap across California. If I had dates for the other two, I would be able to search through my various books to find similar events during the same timeframe - I bet I would find some.

## Sources

'*Menagerie of Mysterious Beasts*' by Ken Gerhard

*Coast to Coast AM* - September 27th, 2016