Monsters — ProjectMoosed Research Lab

PROVEN DOCUMENTED UNPROVEN MISIDENTIFIED FABRICATED

Every claim on this site carries one of these grades, earned from primary records read first-hand — the FBI's own file, the peer-reviewed DNA papers, the Otago eDNA dataset, the 1732 Visum et Repertum, the parish burial registers of the Gévaudan. PROVEN — a primary document or dataset settles it. DOCUMENTED — a credible official or scientific record exists; interpretation remains open. UNPROVEN — testimony or claim only; nothing physical carries it. MISIDENTIFIED — shown to be a known animal, object, or effect. FABRICATED — proven hoax, forgery, or admitted fabrication.

603Graded entries — Grade Register v5

66PROVEN

248DOCUMENTED

187UNPROVEN

70MISIDENTIFIED

32FABRICATED

128Items held unverified — no grade carried

Participant confession: Christian Spurling (1994, via researchers Martin & Boyd) — a 12-inch plastic-wood head and neck on a toy submarine, built for Marmaduke Wetherell, photographed by Ian Wetherell, fronted by R. K. Wilson. […] Note: Also graded FABRICATED at T3 Case 1 (Surgeon's Photograph) — same grade, merged here (Reconciliation R2).

Loch Ness · T2 #68

FABRICATED

The silver bullet of Gévaudan — Chastel's bullet cast from a blessed Virgin-Mary medal — is a literary invention, not a period fact

No contemporary report contains it. The prayer-and-silver-bullet story enters through Abbé Pourcher's 1889 edifying oral tradition (itself flagged as not backed by contemporary reports) and the large-calibre blessed-bullet version is the invention of the French writer Henri Pourrat, two centuries […] Note: Filed by T5 inside its section A ("PROVEN" section, "filed here because settled"); the item's own grade, as printed in T5's grade column, is FABRICATED and it is entered under FABRICATED here.

Werewolves · T5 #A4

DOCUMENTED

The Scientist's contemporaneous analysis; the journal's site launched Feb 4, 2013, and the Ketchum paper was its only study

T1 #14 · Grade Register v5 source

(a) THE EXISTENCE CLAIM: a breeding population of giant bipedal primates lives in North America

UNPROVEN

T1 #15 · Grade Register v5

FABRICATED

On thawing, the "body" was a rubber ape costume — a rubber foot was found by the promoters' own examiner; Whitton and Dyer admitted it was a costume Note: Also graded FABRICATED at T3 Case 4 (Georgia freezer body) — same grade, merged here (Reconciliation R4).

T1 #29 · Grade Register v5 source

FABRICATED

T2 #68 · Grade Register v5 source

The Wetherell hippopotamus-foot "monster tracks" (Dec 1933) as monster tracks

FABRICATED

Natural History Museum, Jan 1934: both casts identical, from a single young hippopotamus foot — of the kind used as an umbrella stand Note: Also graded FABRICATED at T3 Case 2 (hippo-foot tracks) — same grade, merged here (Reconciliation R3).

T2 #69 · Grade Register v5 source

FABRICATED (as sightings) / DOCUMENTED (as art)

A named digital artist's 2018 creation, documented in the scholarly folklore record; the art is real, the sightings built on it are manufactured

T3 #13b · Grade Register v5 source

Tranche 5 — the trials, the Beast of Gévaudan in full, and clinical lycanthropy: what the record proves happened, what was claimed inside it, and what explains it.

PROVEN 3 · DOCUMENTED 26 · UNPROVEN 23 · MISIDENTIFIED 1 · FABRICATED 3

A man called Stubbe Peeter was executed at Bedburg near Cologne on 31 October 1589, by wheel, pincers, beheading and burning, together with his daughter and his "gossip"

PROVEN

The sentence and its execution are stated in the contemporary 1590 London pamphlet, a printed primary document whose two surviving copies (British Museum; Lambeth Palace Library) are catalogued in the ESTC (S101735); […]

T5 #A1 · Grade Register v5 source

Clinical lycanthropy exists as a real, recurring psychiatric presentation: patients sincerely believe they have become, or are becoming, an animal, and may behave accordingly

PROVEN

Keck, Pope, Hudson, McElroy & Kulick (1988), Psychological Medicine 18(1):113–120: review of admissions to McLean Hospital since 1974 identified twelve cases, duration one day to 13 years, "generally associated with severe psychosis, but not with any specific psychiatric diagnosis or neurological […]

T5 #A2 · Grade Register v5 source

PROVEN

Ward's first-person account (the man who was there), four photographs specified; a print set with Bourdillon's inscription sold at Christie's 2014 with the account quoted in full. (What made the print is T6 #36, UNPROVEN)

T6 #5 · Grade Register v5 source

The Pangboche hand existed as a monastery relic, photographed by Peter Byrne in 1958 and treated as a ritual object tied to the monastery's luck

DOCUMENTED

Monastery custody and Byrne's 1958 photographs are the documented core; everything about the hand's origin is graded separately (T6 #39)

T6 #11 · Grade Register v5 source

Byrne removed a finger from the Pangboche hand and wired a human replacement into it; the Stewarts carried the removed finger into the UK

DOCUMENTED — consent disputed

The removal, replacement and rewiring are common to all versions; Byrne's 2011 account says the lamas agreed (replacement + temple contribution), other versions say theft

T6 #12 · Grade Register v5

The "yeti finger" held at the Hunterian Museum, London, was tested in 2011 by Rob Ogden (Edinburgh Zoo / RZSS) and is human

DOCUMENTED

A named institutional analyst, on the record to the BBC, with a described method — but no peer-reviewed paper and no deposited sequence was ever published; graded DOCUMENTED, not PROVEN, for exactly that reason. (The finger as a yeti finger is T6 #56, MISIDENTIFIED)

T6 #13 · Grade Register v5 source

Hillary pronounced the Pangboche hand "a hoax" during the 1960–61 expedition

DOCUMENTED — on contaminated evidence

Hillary did not know he was examining a composite: original material plus Byrne's wired-in human bones. His verdict is on record; it cannot authenticate or condemn the original bones

T6 #14 · Grade Register v5 source

Osman Hill's reading of the London finger as hominid / Neanderthal-like (1960)

DOCUMENTED as a claim; superseded

The period's senior British primatologist moved the wrong way on the specimen; the same specimen tested human in 2011 (T6 #13)

T6 #15 · Grade Register v5

Messner's published thesis: the animal behind the yeti legend is the chemo/dremo, a brown bear (Ursus arctos) that rears and moves upright

DOCUMENTED as his published conclusion

My Quest for the Yeti (2000), after 11 years of expeditions. Its application to his own 1986 animal is T6 #37, UNPROVEN

T6 #16 · Grade Register v5 source

The Kemerovo conference and Azasskaya/Karatag field trips happened, 5–8 Oct 2011, organised by Burtsev's International Center of Hominology with the Darwin Museum and Tashtagol administration, on Governor Tuleyev's initiative

DOCUMENTED

Burtsev's own unedited report plus contemporaneous reporting

T6 #17 · Grade Register v5 source

Meldrum's accusation that the Kemerovo event was orchestrated to promote tourism

DOCUMENTED as a participant accusation

Meldrum, on the record within weeks: evidence "right on cue," only right-foot impressions, ridges consistent with a rigid wooden imprint, Burtsev photographed inside the "nest"; the region's subsequent yeti branding is consistent context, not proof. (The event's own claim is T6 #66, FABRICATED)

T6 #18 · Grade Register v5 source

(a) THE YETI EXISTENCE CLAIM: an unknown ape-like animal lives in the Himalaya/Tibetan Plateau

UNPROVEN

Every physical item that could be carried to a laboratory has resolved to a known animal or a human (T6 #1, #13, #34–35, #55–56); every item that could not be carried away remains testimony or a melted print (T6 #36–38). No body, bone or verified tissue of an unknown primate exists

T6 #32 · Grade Register v5

(b) The Shipton print was made by a yeti

UNPROVEN

Ward himself, in Wilderness and Environmental Medicine (1997): the yeti attribution "seems untenable" — he proposed a cold-tolerant local inhabitant with a possible foot abnormality, and listed bear and langur as alternatives, closing "it is doubtful if this puzzle will ever be solved"

T6 #36 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Messner's 1986 eastern-Tibet night encounter was with the chemo (brown bear)

UNPROVEN

Single witness, at night, no photograph, specimen or cast of that animal; the encounter is testimony and the identification an inference from it. (His published bear thesis is T6 #16)

T6 #37 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Taylor's bear-overprint reading of the Shipton print

UNPROVEN as applied to this print

The overprint mechanism is real bear behaviour and Taylor matched casts of bear paws to the photographs (2017) — but the original print melted in 1951, uncast; an interpretation, not a test

T6 #38 · Grade Register v5 source

(c) The Pangboche origin story: a monk found a dead yeti and brought its hand and scalp to the monastery

UNPROVEN

Monastery legend attached to a ritual object; no contemporary record. (The "scalp" half belongs to Khumjung's separate relic — T6 #55 — and the two must not be merged)

T6 #39 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Edwards & Barnett's proposed mechanism — the diagnostic T base is a C→T deamination artefact of historic hair

UNPROVEN

A well-grounded possibility, never demonstrated; Sykes's team disputed it (raw data "of excellent quality"); neither side published the decisive cloning/consensus replication

T6 #53 · Grade Register v5 source

(infer.) The Pangboche Hand itself was human / a hoax, inferred from the London finger

UNPROVEN

The hand was never DNA-tested as an object and was stolen in the 1990s; on Byrne's own account the London fragment's chain passes through a human-bone substitution — the human result fits both "relic was human" and "the stand-in was tested"

T6 #54 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Sykes's claim that hairs 25025/25191 had a "100% match with DNA recovered from a Pleistocene fossil more than 40 000 BP of U. maritimus… but not to modern examples"

MISIDENTIFIED

Edwards & Barnett (2015): the 100% match was to a modern Alaskan polar bear (GU573490, Little Diomede); the fossil (GU573488) differs by one transition. Sykes's team conceded the error in print. Supersedes the first half of T1 #26 — see R8

T6 #34 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Sykes's interpretation: the two hairs came from "a previously unrecognized bear species, colour variants of U. maritimus, or U. arctos/U. maritimus hybrids"

MISIDENTIFIED — with the standing caution of R8: the Ladakh hair (25025) was re-tested by Lan et al. 2017 and is Himalayan brown bear; the Bhutan hair (25191) has NEVER been re-tested — its brown-bear identity is the parsimonious inference, not a direct re-test, and this register does not print "both hairs brown bear"

The sequences are genuine bear sequences (nothing fabricated); the reading built on them collapsed — the locus cannot separate the species (T6 #3), and Lan et al.'s complete mitogenome from the Ladakh hair (YHB, apparently the same specimen, shared locality + Icon Films provenance) groups unambiguously with extant Himalayan brown bear (T6 #1)

T6 #35 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) The Khumjung "yeti scalp" is a yeti scalp

MISIDENTIFIED

Burns 1962, on the sample cut in London 23 Dec 1960: skin "probably made from the skin of an animal closely resembling the sampled specimen of Serow, but definitely not identical with it"; no resemblance to bear; no evidence of human/sub-human origin — a manufactured cap of serow-like goat-antelope skin. Her hedge is printed because the primary report claims no exact species match

T6 #55 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) The London "yeti finger" as a yeti finger

MISIDENTIFIED

The tested fragment is human (T6 #13); whatever else the Pangboche hand was, this finger is not evidence of a non-human animal. (The inference about the hand itself is T6 #54, UNPROVEN)

T6 #56 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Kemerovo's "95% certain / indisputable proof" as the consensus of the scientists present

FABRICATED

The language was drafted by Valentin Sapunov (a literature professor); Jeff Meldrum — a sympathetic invited credential, not a hostile sceptic — refused to sign ("science doesn't work by committee") and the statement went to press anyway; he called the event "orchestrated," with evidence appearing "right on cue" (his accusation is T6 #18, DOCUMENTED)

T6 #66 · Grade Register v5 source

Alma / Almasti & Zana

Zana of Tkhina was a real woman who lived and died at Tkhina, Abkhazia, and Khwit was her son

PROVEN

T6 #6 · Grade Register v5 source

Zana's genetic ancestry was modern human, traceable to present-day East African populations (mtDNA L2b family)

PROVEN

Population-genomic analyses in Margaryan et al. 2021; the authors' own frame: "a clear example of how prejudices of the time led to notions of cryptic hominids"

T6 #7 · Grade Register v5 source

The Almasti testimony corpus exists as a collected record (Koffmann's 300+ Caucasus interviews, ~30% rejected by Koffmann herself as unreliable; Shackley's 1982 Antiquity review)

DOCUMENTED as a record

Shackley, "only half sceptical," mapped an east–west report band from the Caucasus to Inner Mongolia and argued feasibility only

T6 #27 · Grade Register v5 source

Zana's capture narrative (hunters, sale between owners, Edgi Genaba's estate at Tkhina)

DOCUMENTED as collected oral history

Gathered at Tkhina from 1962 onward by Mashkovtsev and Porshnev, a century after the event, and printed in Porshnev (1968); its details cannot grade higher — while the woman herself and her children are PROVEN (T6 #6–7)

T6 #28 · Grade Register v5 source

Sykes's 2013 Bigfoot Files result: Zana's mtDNA was 100% sub-Saharan African; she was "most probably a slave brought to the region by the ruling Ottomans"

DOCUMENTED — in its narrow mtDNA form, confirmed by the 2021 genomes (T6 #7)

Tested saliva of six living descendants and a tooth from Khwit's exhumed skull; the press release itself rejected the Neanderthal reading

T6 #29 · Grade Register v5 source

(a) ALMA/ALMASTI: a relict hominid population survives across the Caucasus–Pamir–Altai band

UNPROVEN

The Porshnev/Koffmann/Shackley file is reports and argument; Shackley (1982) argued only feasibility and an open question; no body, bone or DNA has ever been produced

T6 #45 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Topilsky's troops shot an Almas in the Pamirs (dated 1917 in Shackley)

UNPROVEN

A named senior officer's detailed, circumstantial description — and no specimen, photograph or second examiner; the body was left where it fell; retold decades later through Porshnev's programme

T6 #46 · Grade Register v5

Mapinguari

Giant ground sloths existed in South America into the late Pleistocene/earliest Holocene, incl. mylodontids bearing dermal osteoderms

PROVEN

The fossil record; this is the calibration fact under David Oren's Mapinguari thesis, graded as a claim at T6 #47

T6 #8 · Grade Register v5 source

Mapinguari is a widespread figure of Amazonian Indigenous and regional tradition, under local names (Karitiana: Kida harara, Kida so'emo, Owoj/Owojo)

DOCUMENTED as ethnographic record

NYT reporting from Rio Branco (2007): nearly every Amazonian tribe has a word for it, usually "the roaring animal" / "the fetid beast"; the single-eye and belly-mouth motifs are filed as folklore motifs — Oren himself dismissed the single eye on that ground

T6 #30 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Oren's strong thesis: a living giant ground sloth survives in Amazonia and is the Mapinguari

UNPROVEN

A credentialed zoologist's real papers (1993, 2001) built on 100+ testimony accounts; after ~10 expeditions: no body, bone, or testable cast; his obtained samples resolved at T6 #57–58

T6 #47 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Oren's weak thesis (2007): the legend preserves folk memory of contact with the last ground sloths

UNPROVEN

Oren himself: "whether such an animal still exists… we can't answer yet"; as stated, the memory hypothesis is untestable — filed as attributed opinion, not a finding. (The sloths' existence is T6 #8, PROVEN)

T6 #48 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Oren's Mapinguari hair sample

MISIDENTIFIED

Identified as anteater hair

T6 #57 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Oren's Mapinguari stool sample

MISIDENTIFIED

Identified as tapir faeces

T6 #58 · Grade Register v5

(b) The Cueva del Milodón skin as evidence of a recently killed ground sloth

MISIDENTIFIED

The fresh-looking skin launched Neomylodon listai and survival expeditions; radiocarbon put the cave's skin/dung/bone at ~13,500–10,200 BP. Fresh-looking is not a date

T6 #59 · Grade Register v5 source

Yowie

Australia has no native non-human primates, living or fossil

PROVEN

Australian Museum faunal record: ~40 million years of island-continent isolation; monkeys are listed among the eutherian mammals absent from its native fauna — there is no native primate lineage for a relict Yowie to descend from

T6 #9 · Grade Register v5 source

Hairy-man figures under many distinct regional names are in the Aboriginal Australian record (Ridley's 1875 "Yō-wī," a night-roaming spirit, among the Gamilaraay; doolagarl, quinkin, joogabinna and others as collected by Healy & Cropper)

DOCUMENTED

Ethnography documents tradition, not a specimen; the first written form of the very name denotes a spirit and gives no height, hair or footprints

T6 #19 · Grade Register v5 source

Joyner's origin argument: the modern Yowie-as-ape was unknown before the mid-1970s and is a conflation built on the older "yahoo" layer and Gilroy's 1975 press construction

DOCUMENTED as a published historical argument

Joyner compiled the 19th-century material himself (1977) and published to counter the new Yowie; Healy & Cropper concede the Gilroy press-release mechanism he points to

T6 #20 · Grade Register v5 source

(c) Aboriginal traditions, as recorded, describe a biological ape species (the Yowie origin claim in its strong form)

UNPROVEN

Post-1788 ethnography cannot by itself prove a tradition's present form pre-colonial, and no cited source converts a named spirit/hairy-man figure into a primate; rival origin readings are on the record as proposals

T6 #40 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Gilroy's 3,000+ collected reports and footprint casts as evidence of a relict Australian ape

UNPROVEN

Alleged Yowie tracks are inconsistent in shape and toe number; on his own community's record (Healy & Cropper's stated distrust; a critical study finding invented material in his adjacent Burrunjor claims), the Gilroy archive cannot be filed above testimony-grade. The AU$200,000 1970s capture reward remains unclaimed

T6 #41 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Tested "Yowie hair" in the one first-person account following samples to named examiners

MISIDENTIFIED

Van Herwaarden's 1923 orang pendek encounter exists as a published contemporary account

DOCUMENTED as an account; the animal UNPROVEN (T6 #42)

A named surveyor's detailed description; he lowered his rifle. One man's testimony, no specimen or photograph

T6 #24 · Grade Register v5 source

Chivers's reading of the Davies/Sanderson 2001 Kerinci footprint cast: "definitely an ape with a unique blend of features… did not match any known primate species"

DOCUMENTED as an examiner's opinion

A Cambridge primatologist's verbatim opinion — on a cast, an impression, not an animal; the species claim it is used to support stays UNPROVEN (T6 #42)

T6 #25 · Grade Register v5 source

Deliberate camera-trapping for orang pendek in Kerinci Seblat — FFI/Holden ~3 years from 1995; National Geographic/Tse 2005–09 — ended without an image

DOCUMENTED negative result

The same decades of Kerinci camera work do photograph tigers, clouded leopards, tapirs and the rediscovered Sumatran ground cuckoo; "no one has really looked with cameras" is false for this forest

T6 #26 · Grade Register v5 source

(a) ORANG PENDEK: a small bipedal ape species lives in Kerinci Seblat

UNPROVEN

A century of the file: no body, bone, verified photograph or replicable DNA; the examined items resolved (T6 #57, #60–61) or stayed contradictory (#44); the deliberate camera record is negative (T6 #26)

T6 #42 · Grade Register v5

(b) Debbie Martyr's personal sightings (first reported 30 Sept 1994)

UNPROVEN — testimony

Testimony from a credible, named, long-serving conservation worker — and still testimony; no photograph was taken at any of her sightings. Her 1989 cast was sent to the National Parks Department and lost

T6 #43 · Grade Register v5 source

(b) Davies 2009 orang pendek hair as an unknown primate

Ogopogo

T7 #6 · Grade Register v5 source

Morag reports date to 1887; 34 incidents by 1981, 16 multiple-witness; LNIB extended operations to Loch Morar in Feb 1970

DOCUMENTED

Report corpus record

T7 #35 · Grade Register v5 source

Simpson's own written account of the 1969 Morar incident exists: the thing "bump into the side of the boat," McDonell fending with an oar, Simpson firing his rifle, the animal sinking away

DOCUMENTED

Simpson's 1969 account as published. (The incident as a 25–30-ft unknown animal is T7 #75, UNPROVEN)

T7 #36 · Grade Register v5 source

(a) Morag — a breeding population of large unknown animals in Loch Morar (headline H3)

UNPROVEN

Testimony only, flagship item a two-man account with no physical trace (§3)

T7 #74 · Grade Register v5

The 1969 Morar incident involved a 25–30-ft unknown animal

UNPROVEN

Two witnesses, no physical trace, one written account (T7 #36); the rifle shot left no carcass in Britain's deepest loch

T7 #75 · Grade Register v5

Storsjöodjuret

T7 #10 · Grade Register v5 source

The two Discovery mockumentaries are documented broadcasts with documented backlash: Monster Shark Lives (Aug 2013) drew a record 4.8 M viewers; Shark of Darkness: Wrath of Submarine (10 Aug 2014) drew 3.8 M; Discovery declined to apologise and pointed to fine-print disclaimers

DOCUMENTED

Contemporary reporting; AP. (Both films as documentaries are T7 #107/#108, FABRICATED)

T7 #62 · Grade Register v5 source

(a) Megalodon survival (headline H9)

UNPROVEN as a claim; the extinction itself is PROVEN-grade (T7 #10)

Last reliable occurrence ~3.6 million years ago on a re-vetted global dataset; every "fresh tooth" date rests on an invalid clock (T7 #103); the belief's modern engine is two fabricated TV films (T7 #107–108)

T7 #91 · Grade Register v5

Modern megalodon "sightings" and viral clips as a class

UNPROVEN

Greenfield's 2023 coded review of the corpus: they resolve to hoaxes or misidentifications of known sharks

T7 #92 · Grade Register v5 source

The Challenger teeth's "young" ages (11,000 / 24,000 years, Tschernezky 1959)

MISIDENTIFIED

MnO₂-crust dating is invalid: accumulation rates used were 20–30× too fast, the teeth's dentine had fully decayed before crust growth began, and deposition was intermittent — Belyaev & Glickman 1970, via Greenfield 2023. (The "45,000-year" figure and the exact dredge year are HELD #71/#72)

T7 #103 · Grade Register v5

Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives (Discovery, Aug 2013), as a documentary

FABRICATED

A dramatised fiction in documentary dress: actor "marine biologist Colin Drake" (Darron Meyer), fabricated evidence, fine-print disclaimers only; the events it depicts did not happen. (The broadcast and backlash are T7 #62, DOCUMENTED)

T7 #107 · Grade Register v5

Shark of Darkness: Wrath of Submarine (Discovery, 10 Aug 2014), as a documentary

FABRICATED

MISIDENTIFIED

Scheider & Wallis (1973) independently re-derived Sheldon & Kerr's Loch Ness biomass ceiling at 15,725 kg vs the original's 15,675 kg by a different method

PROVEN

MISIDENTIFIED

(b) The widely circulated modern "pterodactyl shot by hunters" image traced by Karl Shuker

FABRICATED

The part-first rule: in every case in this file, a physical part crossed first — no live sighting was credited before a physical part existed in scientific hands. A part needs no witness: the colossal squid was described from parts recovered from a dead whale's stomach, by men who had never seen the animal. The part outranks the portrait, permanently — the okapi's skin settled its existence in 1901 while its wild photograph waited until 2008, and the giant squid's beaks settled it in 1857 while its live photograph waited until 2004. Proof is an event with an address: object, examiner, institution, date.

Giant squid — a beak from the 1853 carcass; the animal named from parts in 1857; photographed alive only in 2004.
Okapi — two strips of hide in 1900; skin and skulls in 1901; photographed wild in 2008.
Mountain gorilla — a carcass in 1902, about two years from the first physical trace.
Komodo dragon — skin and photograph of a shot animal in 1910; described in 1912.
Coelacanth — specimen first, in 1938: there was no prior claim; the fish itself was the report.
Megamouth shark — the single entangled specimen of 1976, with no prior claim of any kind.
Giant panda — a pelt in 1869; skin and skeleton in Paris the same year.

MISIDENTIFIED

Sclater's own published act (Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond. 1:50–52, 1901), corrected within the year by the skull — the Proven File's clearest case of a real animal wearing a wrong first name

T9 #23 · Grade Register v5 source

Folklore Bench — 77 graded entries

Tranche 10 — the folklore bench: the wendigo, the Haitian zombie record, the Prague golem, a survey of ghouls, trolls, ogres and giants, Black Shuck, skin-walkers, and Slender Man. Traditions are graded as traditions — a tradition can stand fully DOCUMENTED in the published record without its referent being real. The three anchors at the head of the section are the bench's fixed points: a statute, a pamphlet, and a forum post.

PROVEN 3 · DOCUMENTED 38 · UNPROVEN 20 · MISIDENTIFIED 11 · FABRICATED 5

Anchors

The Haitian Penal Code provision on lethargic coma: Article 246, as amended in 1864, qualifies as attempted murder the use of substances that "without causing actual death, produce a lethargic coma more or less prolonged," and as murder if the person is then buried

The community believed it, acted on it, and buried the consequences of acting on it; belief and consequence are documented (B11), transformation is not. The parallel to T5's transformation items is exact, and the grade is the same on both sides of the cultural line

T10 #B13 · Grade Register v5

The "~70 documented cases of wendigo psychosis" of the popular literature

MISIDENTIFIED

What the number counts is Teicher's file of mentions — gathered from two centuries of heterogeneous documents, many second- or third-hand, many involving no cannibalism at all. Printed as a clinical case-count, it identifies a bibliography as a ward census. (Teicher's exact tally is HELD #119)

T10 #B5 · Grade Register v5 source

Zombies

The zonbi of Haitian Vodou: a person whose ti-bon anj (awareness, memory, will) is taken and held by a bokor, leaving an animated body without will, kept as a slave; distinct in the tradition from the zonbi astral (a captured spirit, not a body)

DOCUMENTED (as a tradition)

Documented in the ethnographic record continuously from Métraux forward, and stated in the same terms by practitioners to every investigator in T10's zombie section, hostile and sympathetic alike (Littlewood's summary of the belief-schema he went to test; Davis's ethnography agrees on the schema)

T10 #C1 · Grade Register v5 source

Zombification functioned in Haiti as a social and legal practice, not only a belief: secret societies (Bizango and cognates) tried offenders and imposed zombification as a sanction worse than death; the state's law met it halfway (A1); and the sanction was actually enforced through the courts at least once in the modern record — Wilfred D.'s uncle was arrested, confessed (he later said, under police torture), and was sentenced to life imprisonment for zombifying his nephew

DOCUMENTED

Davis's ethnography (the sanction reading) and Littlewood's case file (the uncle's conviction and life sentence are court facts inside the Lancet study's narrative, and the uncle's torture claim is printed with them). Two independent investigators, opposite conclusions about mechanism, same documented institution

T10 #C2 · Grade Register v5 source

Clairvius Narcisse was admitted to the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, Deschapelles, on 30 April 1962, deteriorated with fever, haemoptysis, pulmonary oedema, hypothermia, and hypotension, and was pronounced dead on 2 May 1962 by two attending physicians; his sister Marie Claire identified the body and thumb-printed the death certificate; he was buried 3 May 1962 near L'Estère

DOCUMENTED

Hospital record as reproduced in every serious treatment; the BBC obtained an official copy of the death certificate for its documentary, and the hospital's own records clerk confirmed the admission and certification on camera decades later. The certificate's existence and content are documentary; what the certificate certifies — death — is graded separately at C7

T10 #C4 · Grade Register v5 source

The man who approached Angelina Narcisse in the L'Estère marketplace in 1980, addressed her by a childhood nickname, and was recognised by family, neighbours, and his former physicians, was Clairvius Narcisse

DOCUMENTED

Psychiatrist Lamarque Douyon (director of Haiti's psychiatric centre) tested the man with intimate family-history questions constructed with the family; he answered correctly; 200+ relatives and residents attested the identity to the BBC. No DNA comparison was possible. Identity by recognition and knowledge-testing is strong documentary evidence; it is not, and is not printed as, proof

T10 #C5 · Grade Register v5 source

Littlewood & Douyon, "Clinical findings in three cases of zombification," The Lancet 350 (1997): 1094–95 — Case FI, a woman buried in the family tomb after a febrile illness c. age 30 and found wandering three years later, recognised by a facial mark; tomb opened by court order and found filled with stones

DOCUMENTED (event as investigated); her diagnosis — catatonic schizophrenia — DOCUMENTED (as the paper's published clinical finding)

The paper's case narrative as carried in the scholarly summaries and Littlewood's follow-up writings: EEG and CNS examination unremarkable; the authors themselves left her "return" unexplained by the diagnosis and floated entombment-alive as a possibility they could not exclude — a honesty the retellings usually drop

T10 #C9 · Grade Register v5 source

The Lancet authors' general conclusion — that there is no single explanation for recognised zombies, and that mistaken identification of mentally ill, brain-damaged, or learning-disabled wanderers by bereaved families accounts for many cases, while entombment-alive under rural death-certification conditions cannot be excluded

DOCUMENTED (as the paper's finding — the position the clinical record, as actually investigated case by case, supports)

Littlewood's own statement of the conclusion, in his own venue, matching the paper. Note what the conclusion is not: it is not "zombies are impossible," and Littlewood prints the residual uncertainty himself

T10 #C12 · Grade Register v5 source

Felicia Felix-Mentor: Zora Neale Hurston photographed a woman at the Gonaïves hospital in October–November 1936 and published her in Tell My Horse (1938) as a returned zombie — a wife and mother said to have died in 1907

DOCUMENTED (the encounter and the photograph — the photo ran in LIFE, 13 Dec 1937); the identification of the woman as Felix-Mentor: MISIDENTIFIED

Haitian psychiatrist Louis Mars examined the case against the record: the real Felix-Mentor had been lame in the left leg from a fracture and would have been far older; the photographed woman's physical evidence contradicted both. Mars read via secondary summary in T10's pass (HELD #120) — the section's softest load-bearing source, flagged there

T10 #C13 · Grade Register v5 source

Narcisse's account of the interval: poisoned at his brother's instigation over a land dispute, conscious but paralysed through his own funeral, exhumed by the bokor, beaten, kept two years as a plantation slave in the north, freed when a fellow slave killed the master, then sixteen years a wanderer because he feared his brother

UNPROVEN

One man's testimony, uncorroborated for the plantation years (no plantation, master, or fellow slave was ever produced or identified to an investigator), and structurally convenient (it explains an 18-year absence in a way no living witness can check). His symptom narrative matches tetrodotoxin poisoning and matches what a man of his culture would know a zombification should feel like. Testimony is the ceiling — the same ceiling this lab applied to Ostman and Roe in T1

T10 #C6 · Grade Register v5 source

Narcisse was a reanimated corpse — i.e., he actually died in 1962 and was returned from death

UNPROVEN

Nothing in the documented record (C4–C5) requires death; every documented element is satisfied by apparent death, mistaken certification under 1962 rural-hospital conditions, or — at the limit — the poisoning scenario of C8. "Returned from the dead" is the interpretation the tradition (C1) supplies, not a fact the documents contain

T10 #C7 · Grade Register v5

Wade Davis's tetrodotoxin thesis: "zombie powder" (coup poudre) containing puffer-fish tetrodotoxin (TTX) induces the death-like state; Datura stramonium ("concombre zombi") paste on revival, plus salt deprivation, maintains the slave state (Journal of Ethnopharmacology 1983; The Serpent and the Rainbow 1985; Passage of Darkness 1988)

UNPROVEN — the most thoroughly tested monster mechanism in this lab, and it failed its tests in print (powder composition DOCUMENTED; TTX causation UNPROVEN)

The laboratory war is a matter of journal record. Yasumoto & Kao, Toxicon 24 (1986): two of Davis's own samples assayed at ≤64 ng/g TTX — "insignificant traces" — and the powders' strong alkalinity would destroy TTX in any case; their conclusion: the claim that TTX "is the causal agent in the initial zombification process is without factual foundation." Benedek & Rivier, Toxicon (1989), reported 20 µg/g in one sample; Yasumoto & Kao's rejoinder attacked the method and disclosed that Davis had himself repeated the rat bioassay on a sample and found no biological activity, a result his books do not report. Davis's defences defend a possibility, not a finding. Davis's books were not opened in full in T10's pass (HELD #125) […]

T10 #C8 · Grade Register v5 source

"An estimated 1,000 new cases of zombification are reported in Haiti every year"

UNPROVEN

An estimate Littlewood himself repeats as an estimate ("estimates suggest"), with no enumeration, registry, or survey behind it anywhere in the literature T10's pass could find. It measures the belief's social weight, not a case count — and is printed here as exactly that

T10 #C14 · Grade Register v5 source

The undead claim itself — that Haitian zombies are corpses returned from actual death

UNPROVEN

After ninety years of investigation by believers, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and one Harvard ethnobotanist with a film deal: every testable case resolved as a living person (misidentified, mentally ill, or — Narcisse — a certified death whose mechanism was never established), and the one proposed mechanism failed its assays (C8). The claim is UNPROVEN, not FABRICATED: no investigator has shown the tradition was invented in bad faith, and the tradition's social reality (C1–C2) is documented fact

T10 #C15 · Grade Register v5

The often-quoted statute is "Article 249 of the Haitian Penal Code"

MISIDENTIFIED

The provision is Article 246 (A1). The wrong number descends from William Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929), which quoted the lethargy clause under "Article 249"; White Zombie (1932) then used the mis-citation in its script and publicity, and a century of retellings — including Live Science and the ACS's ChemMatters — copied Seabrook's number instead of the code. A clean specimen of T3's lesson: grade the transaction, and check the citation against the document

T10 #C3 · Grade Register v5 source

Lancet Case WD (Wilfred D.): the young man kept chained to a log at his father's house, diagnosed with organic brain syndrome and epilepsy — was the Wilfred who died and was buried 19 months before

MISIDENTIFIED

DNA fingerprinting: Wilfred was not the son of his putative parents. The buried man's identity and the returned man's identity cannot both be true, and the genetic test — the only item in the entire zombie file that is a test rather than a testimony — settles which one fails. (His uncle's conviction for zombifying him, C2, stands as a court fact even so: the law punished a zombification of a man who was, genetically, somebody else's son)

T10 #C10 · Grade Register v5 source

Lancet Case MM (Marie M.): the woman received in Les Cayes as a sister dead 13 years, found to have a learning disability (the authors suggest possible fetal alcohol syndrome) — was the Marie who died

MISIDENTIFIED

FABRICATED

YIVO, in so many words: the book "purported to be based on a manuscript… In fact, the text was a fabrication produced by Rosenberg himself. The narrative is laced with historical inaccuracies, improbabilities, and terms and concepts that make sense only in a Polish context." The "Imperial Library of Metz" never existed — Rosenberg reused the same fictitious archive as the provenance for several of his "discovered" works. Per T10's caution, the grade is aimed precisely: what is FABRICATED is the provenance presented as history — a 1909 invention wearing a 1624 byline. The stories themselves, as literature, are graded at D8

T10 #D6 · Grade Register v5 source

The golem's defining modern mission — defending the ghetto against blood-libel accusations — belongs to the Maharal's story

FABRICATED (as history — it is Rosenberg's 1909 invention, presented inside the fabricated frame of D6)

YIVO: the ritual-murder theme "was completely absent from the Prague version before 1900," and the irony is structural — Rudolf II's Prague, the Maharal's actual Prague, never faced blood-libel accusations of the kind Rosenberg's golem fights; the theme answers the dangers of Rosenberg's Poland, c. 1909, not Loew's Bohemia. As with T3's lessons: the fabrication dates itself by the anxieties it serves

T10 #D7 · Grade Register v5 source

Survey (ghouls, trolls, ogres, giants)

The ghūl of Arabic tradition: a class of jinn of the desert and waste places, predominantly female in the early material, a shapeshifter who lures travellers from the road and devours them; attested in pre-Islamic poetry — Ta'abbata Sharran's famous boast of fighting one — and carried through al-Jahiz and the story-collections

DOCUMENTED (as a tradition)

Al-Rawi, "The Arabic Ghoul and its Western Transformation," Folklore 120(3), 2009: the ghoul "was a perceived reality for most people living in Arabia" and its character — desert, deception, living prey — is stable across Arabic sources from the eighth century onward. Al-Rawi read at abstract/review level in T10's pass (HELD #124)

T10 #E1 · Grade Register v5 source

The Arabic tradition contained its own skeptics from the start: al-Jahiz (9th c.) denounced Ta'abbata Sharran for boasting of his ghoul victory, and the Mu'tazilite theologians denied ghouls existed

DOCUMENTED

Carried in the Arabic-literature record as summarised in the reference literature. Graded because "the medievals all believed" is itself a modern fable; disbelief is as old as the documents

T10 #E2 · Grade Register v5 source

Trolls in the Old Norse record: the word appears from the ninth century (the skald Bragi Boddason's verse, preserved in Snorri's Skáldskaparmál, in which a trollkona names herself "Troll… Gnawer of the Moon, Giant of the Gale-blasts… Swallower of the loaf of heaven"), and across the Eddas and sagas troll functions as an unstable category — overlapping jötunn, risi, witch, and revenant — for beings of the wild, the dead, and the Other

DOCUMENTED (as literature — the manuscripts are the record)

John Lindow, Trolls: An Unnatural History (Reaktion, 2014), the standard scholarly survey: in the earliest sources trolls "are defined by their indefinability," closer to forces of nature and death than to the big-nosed ogre of later folklore. The saga record documents what Icelanders wrote, in Christian centuries, about a pre-Christian imaginative world. Lindow read at review level in T10's pass (HELD #124)

T10 #E4 · Grade Register v5 source

The word ogre: first appearance in its modern sense in Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697) — Puss in Boots' ogre, the ogresse of Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb's child-eater — with d'Aulnoy's use following in 1698; Perrault glossed his own coinage in a note: "a wild man who eats little children"

DOCUMENTED

The print record is the document: 1697, named books, named authors. Whatever oral prehistory the word may have had, the ogre as Christendom's child-eating wild man is a datable literary launch

T10 #E7 · Grade Register v5 source

Giants in the ancient texts — Nephilim, Anakim, Og of Bashan, the Greek Gigantes — as textual traditions

DOCUMENTED (as texts: the manuscripts, canon histories, and translation traditions are all recoverable; nothing in this grade touches the beings)

The standard textual record; included to fix the lab's boundary — a scripture is a document of a tradition, graded like the Jesuit Relations at B1, neither as zoology nor as fraud

T10 #E9 · Grade Register v5 source

Nineteenth-century American newspapers printed hundreds of reports of giant human skeletons exhumed from mounds and graves, typically 7–9 feet, often with details like "double rows of teeth," and typically noting the bones were crumbling, lost, or shipped away

DOCUMENTED (as press artifacts — the clippings are real, datable, and voluminous; they are documents of a newspaper culture, not of osteology)

Andy White's case-by-case database of the reports; Archaeology magazine's 2005 survey (Mark Rose) tracing the genre to 1705. The reports' own conventions are the tell: the specimen is always already gone. (The economy's manufactured specimens are T3 #7; the Cardiff Giant is T3 #6 — R20)

T10 #E10 · Grade Register v5 source

The institutional debunk: the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology mound survey (Cyrus Thomas, Report on the Mound Explorations, 1894, 700+ pages) concluded the mounds were built by the ancestors of living Native peoples, dissolving the "lost giant race" the newspapers needed; Aleš Hrdlička, the Smithsonian's curator of anthropology, publicly debunked the giant reports in 1934 ("No More Giants") — while the Bureau's own reports had printed, openly, individual skeletons measured at up to ~7½ feet

DOCUMENTED

The reports are public documents, in print for 130 years; the 7½-foot figure matters and is printed here because the cover-up claim (E15) requires the institution to have hidden exactly the class of fact it was publishing

T10 #E14 · Grade Register v5 source

Trolls as a zoological claim

UNPROVEN — with a note: unlike every cryptid in T1/T6, the troll never acquired a specimen tradition at all

No body, bone, photograph, or footprint cast was ever produced for a troll by anyone; the claim never left the story-form. Its file is empty in a different way from Bigfoot's — not tested-and-failed, never tested (on the total absence of a physical-evidence literature across nine centuries, against the sagas' own literary framing at E4)

T10 #E6 · Grade Register v5

The ogre derives from Orcus, the Roman/Etruscan death-god — via Italian orco (Tolomei, 1290; Ariosto's blind orco, 1516; Basile's Neapolitan uerco) and cognate with Old English orcneas in Beowulf

UNPROVEN (the scholarly favourite — but the competing derivation from Hongrois, "Hungarian," has never been excluded, and the intermediate French steps are undocumented)

The etymological literature itself, which presents Orcus as "much the more likely" while conceding the case is inferential. Graded as what it is: a strong hypothesis wearing neither a document nor a confession

T10 #E8 · Grade Register v5 source

The general claim behind E15: the Smithsonian (or museums generally) destroyed or suppressed giant skeletons that were genuinely recovered

UNPROVEN

Strip the satire away and the claim still has no specimen, no accession record, no deaccession record, no whistleblower document — nothing but the newspaper clippings of E10, whose specimens were never in any museum to destroy. And the museum record cuts the other way: no collection on earth holds a human skeleton of a giant race, while genuine pathological giants are documented, preserved, and displayed as individuals (Robert Wadlow, 8 ft 11 in, d. 1940, medical record complete)

T10 #E16 · Grade Register v5 source

The Western ghoul — a male graveyard-haunter who digs up and eats corpses — is the authentic Arabian ghoul

MISIDENTIFIED

Al-Rawi's central finding: when Antoine Galland translated the Thousand and One Nights (1704–1717), he added the grave-digging and corpse-eating "in order to intensify its fearful characteristics — an idea that was never mentioned in any of the Arabic sources." The corpse-eating revenant is a French editorial invention of the 1700s that then colonised the creature worldwide. The English word's own debut is literary and datable: Beckford's Vathek (1786)

T10 #E3 · Grade Register v5 source

The familiar troll — huge, stupid, treasure-hoarding, and turned to stone by sunrise — is the saga troll

MISIDENTIFIED

The sunrise-petrification and the fairy-tale character belong to the later Scandinavian folklore layer, codified in the nineteenth-century collections (Asbjørnsen & Moe) and fixed visually by Werenskiold and Kittelsen; Lindow's periodisation separates the strata explicitly. Projecting the folktale troll backwards into the sagas misidentifies both

T10 #E5 · Grade Register v5 source

The giant skeletons, where specimens were actually examined by a competent observer at the time, were mastodon and other megafauna bones

MISIDENTIFIED

The 1845–46 test case is complete on paper: two 1845 newspaper accounts of giant human remains, followed by physician-naturalist William M. Carpenter's firsthand evaluation in the American Journal of Science (1846) of one such set — mastodon. Cotton Mather had made the same identification in reverse in 1705, taking Hudson Valley mastodon teeth for the bones of antediluvian giants — the genre's founding error, in print (E10). A juvenile mastodon's skull, White notes, is still exhibited in the claim-literature as a giant's

T10 #E11 · Grade Register v5 source

"Double rows of teeth" as the marker of a giant race

MISIDENTIFIED

White's case analyses show the phrase, in nineteenth-century usage, describes a wear pattern — teeth worn flat presenting a doubled appearance — not concentric anatomical rows; the claim-literature's genetic-marker reading imports a modern meaning into period prose

T10 #E12 · Grade Register v5 source

The Smithsonian Institution admitted, under a US Supreme Court order obtained by the "American Institution of Alternative Archaeology," that it destroyed thousands of giant human skeletons in the early 1900s

FABRICATED

Robert Bigelow bought the ranch in 1996 and his National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS, founded 1995) ran it as a monitored field station until c. 2004

DOCUMENTED

A matter of property, corporate, and publishing record (Kelleher & Knapp, Hunt for the Skinwalker, 2005, is the investigation's own book). The existence and conduct of the investigation is documented; its findings are graded at G6

T10 #G5 · Grade Register v5 source

The NIDS era's physical return

DOCUMENTED — as a documented near-null, in the investigators' own words

Kelleher, as quoted in the critical literature: "After several years of [Sherman] family trauma and of focused NIDS investigation, we managed to obtain very little physical evidence of anomalous phenomena, at least no physical evidence that could be considered as conclusive proof of anything." The NIDS team reported experiences; experiences are testimony (G4's grade); the instrumented, staffed, multi-year watch is the best-resourced attempt in T10 to catch a phenomenon in the act, and its own director's summary of its evidence is the sentence above

T10 #G6 · Grade Register v5 source

The ranch's name: "Skinwalker Ranch" attaches a Diné witchcraft category to a property in the Uintah Basin — Ute country, bordering the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, well outside the Navajo Nation — with which traditional Diné accounts have nothing to do

DOCUMENTED

Geography and naming history: the name arrived with the 1996 publicity, not with the land. The mismatch is itself a datum about how monster-names now travel — a Navajo term, a Ute landscape, a Utah ranch, a Las Vegas funder, and a television franchise, none of the joints in that chain being traditional

T10 #G7 · Grade Register v5 source

Everything else at the ranch — the AAWSAP-era and television-era material — belongs to the UAP lane and is graded there; the sole cross-reference this file makes is the official one: AARO's 2024 historical review of the AAWSAP programme reported no verified evidence of extraordinary phenomena from it

DOCUMENTED (as an official statement, cross-referred; the UAP lane owns the item)

AARO, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, vol. 1 (2024), as summarised in the reference record. Per the labs doctrine, an official statement is evidence, not a verdict — and it is filed here as a cross-reference only, because the monster-side published record of the ranch is G4–G6 and ends there

T10 #G8 · Grade Register v5 source

The Sherman family's account (ranch near Ballard, Uintah County, Utah, 1994–96): cattle found dead, mutilated, or vanished; lights and objects in the sky; a huge wolf-like animal that took three pistol rounds at close range without reacting, then loped off leaving tracks that ended mid-field

UNPROVEN

Testimony — a family's, given to a reporter in June 1996 (Deseret News, George Knapp's reporting) and never since supported by a producible artifact. The family's sincerity is not the grade's subject; the absence of physical return is. The prior-occupancy counter-testimony is also in the record: the family that held the ranch for some sixty years before the Shermans reported experiencing nothing of the kind. (A separate file from T5's Bray Road record — different state, different record; see R23)

T10 #G4 · Grade Register v5 source

Kluckhohn's fourfold scheme of Navajo witchcraft (Witchery, Sorcery, Wizardry, Frenzy Witchcraft) is a native taxonomy

MISIDENTIFIED

Kluckhohn himself flagged it: he found no single Navajo word gathering the four, and wrote that the classification "was probably the observer's and not a native category." The scheme is a scholar's filing system that later retellings re-badged as the tradition's own structure — the same emic/etic confusion Marano indicted at B3, caught here in the act by the author's own footnote. (A finer split of a caveat already carried inside T5 #H5's basis — R21)

T10 #G2 · Grade Register v5 source

The skin-walker's internet form — an elongated, antlered, skull-faced predator — represents the Navajo tradition

MISIDENTIFIED

The published record contains no attested fixed anatomy at all: the figure is defined by the hide worn, not by a body (G1); the elongated/antlered form has, in the words of the published synthesis, "no basis in the ethnographic record." It is twenty-first-century horror illustration retro-fitted onto a witchcraft category — and the retro-fit is graded, not the community, many of whose members have asked in print that outsiders stop circulating the subject at all (recorded here because that request is itself published)

T10 #G3 · Grade Register v5 source

Slender Man

The mythos's growth is a documented publishing history: Marble Hornets launched on YouTube on 20 June 2009, ten days after the creation posts; the figure spread through creepypasta archives into games, film, and a moral panic

DOCUMENTED

Dates, platforms, and creators are all on the public record — the first monster whose entire transmission chain, author to audience, survives for inspection

T10 #H3 · Grade Register v5 source

Waukesha, Wisconsin, 31 May 2014: two twelve-year-old girls lured their classmate Payton Leutner into woods at a park and stabbed her nineteen times; she crawled to a path, was found by a cyclist, and survived. In police interviews and court proceedings the two stated they acted to serve and appease Slender Man, whom they had encountered in online fiction and believed to be real. Weier pleaded to a lesser charge and was sentenced (2017) to 25 years in a psychiatric institution; Geyser pleaded guilty and was sentenced (2018) to 40 years; Geyser's diagnosis of early-onset schizophrenia is part of the court record

DOCUMENTED

Court proceedings and the reporting of them; kept brief and factual in T10, because the case is in the file for one analytical reason (H5), not for its horror. The victim survived; that sentence is printed first among the outcomes because it is the one that matters most

T10 #H4 · Grade Register v5 source

Slender Man, as an entity, exists

UNPROVEN

Nothing physical has ever been produced — no more than for the troll (E6). Filed separately from H5 because they are different claims: antiquity is disproven by document; existence is merely carried by nothing. The lab's discipline is to keep those two sentences apart even when — especially when — the subject invites merging them

T10 #H6 · Grade Register v5

The mythos's documentary furniture — the "historical" photographs, the 1549 woodcut, the centuries of sightings backfilled by forum posters and creepypasta authors in the months after 10 June 2009

FABRICATED

Every piece of it postdates the creation it claims to precede, and its authors were doing openly, as fiction, what Rosenberg did under a false byline (D6): inventing a past for a new monster. The difference is disclosure — the forum's frame was a fiction contest, and the furniture was never offered to a court, a museum, or a congregation as fact. Graded FABRICATED as documents (they are forged "evidence" in form) with the disclosure distinction printed, because the distinction is the whole difference between a hoax and a genre

T10 #H2 · Grade Register v5 source

Slender Man is an ancient or pre-internet being

FABRICATED

Foreclosed by A3/H1: a creation documented to the day cannot have an antiquity. Every claim of pre-2009 existence produced since has dissolved into the backfilled furniture of H2 or into photographs independently datable to after the creation. This is the bench's contrast standard in its pure form: for Bigfoot, for the windigo, for the golem, the equivalent claim is UNPROVEN, because their paper trails genuinely run out in fog. Slender Man's runs out at a forum post with a timestamp — and the lab notes that the only difference is the timestamp

T10 #H5 · Grade Register v5

Method

Three grades for every subject, never one. The existence claim, each famous evidence item, and the origin story of the claim are graded separately (filing rule L3). Killing an item retires the item; it does not grade the species — and no sighting is presented as proof, no debunk as disproof of anything beyond the item it actually kills.
Primary records first-hand. Grades rest on the documents themselves — papers, reports, registers, court records — read for this lab. Where a primary source could not be opened, the item is held (below), not graded from summaries.
Official statements are evidence, not verdicts. The labs exist to build their own point of view from the exhausted record; a commission, a bureau, or a consensus is material to examine, never a conclusion to copy — in either direction.
Physical evidence outranks testimony. DNA, eDNA, and carcass results outrank sighting counts, always. Sightings databases are testimony — UNPROVEN tier by nature — and are labelled as such.
Reconciliations are printed, not buried. Grade Register v5 carries twenty-five written reconciliations (R1–R25) where tranches diverged — including the Wallace split (R1): his own track-making is FABRICATED; the specific claim that he made the 1958 Crew tracks stands DOCUMENTED, disputed. The register also carries five uncounted pointer rows — T1 #26, superseded by the T6 #34/#35 split (R8); T9 #13, entered once at T1 #1 (R16); T10 #E13, entered once at T3 #6 (R20); T10 #G1, entered once at T5 #H5 (R21); and T10 #H1, entered once at T10 #A3 — which are not reprinted as entries on this page.
Register v5 amendments (R24–R25). The Tranche 8 opened-page verification pass moved one entry on verification evidence — the WCPO "Loveland Frogman" headline (T8 #112), MISIDENTIFIED → UNPROVEN — corrected five bases (items 2, 73, 80, 81, 97 and 105) without changing any grade, and narrowed the Tranche 8 method caveat to its post-verification state (see Flying & Oddities).

The twenty-one filing rules (L1–L21)

Distilled from the proven-hoax file (Tranche 3) and binding on every filing in this lab; the full text, with the case each rule is derived from, stands in the register. L21, the Okapi Rule, was added in Grade Register v3 from the Proven File (Tranche 9).

L1 — A confession is testimony; grade it like testimony.
L2 — FABRICATED is issued by records, not by resemblance.
L3 — Split every case into three grades: item, claim, story.
L4 — Follow the money as a chronology, not an insinuation.
L5 — Chain of custody or it didn't happen.
L6 — Prop provenance cuts both ways.
L7 — Grade the wrapping before the specimen.
L8 — An endorsement issued before examination is worth zero, and is itself a red flag.
L9 — The press-conference-before-examination sequence caps the grade.
L10 — The repeat-claimant rule.
L11 — Ban the Snelling sentence (process authenticity is not subject authenticity).
L12 — Audit the examiner's need before the examiner's verdict.
L13 — Log the lifeboat (the escape claim attached to a confession files separately).
L14 — A confession covers exactly what it confesses. No more.
L15 — The template test.
L16 — Exposure is a phase change, not an ending.
L17 — Watch for the sequel and the revenge vector.
L18 — Grade the claim, not the object; grade the transaction, not the craft.
L19 — Find the test the claim was not built for.
L20 — Grade the distribution before the image (digital-era rule).
L21 — The Okapi Rule.

The held register: 128 items carry no grade. Every item the tranches marked unverified, ungraded, or deliberately excluded stands in the register's held section with what would settle it — among them the Skookum cast and the Memorial Day footage (still no primary analytical source), and the Elizabeth Báthory blood-bathing tradition, which is barred from this site until a first-hand pass over the 1611 trial record is done. An expected grade is not a grade.

Still on the Bench — ungraded

From the lab's bench roster. Every bench family has now been graded and moved into the sections above — the ape, water and flying cryptids, the hoax file, vampires and werewolves, the Proven File, and the folklore bench, whose Tranche 10 research is complete. Two roster names still carry no grade: they have no entry in Grade Register v5, and nothing here grades them by implication.

Spring-heeled Jack (Victorian England) — the one bench name not yet assigned to a tranche; ungraded.
Frankenstein's monster (1818, literary) — on the roster's literary wing; the manufactured-monster file (Tranche 10) closed on Slender Man and did not take it up; ungraded.

Boundary, per charter: ghosts and hauntings belong to the Ghosts lab; aliens and UAP entities to the UAP lab; demons and possession to the Religion lab's territory.