20 Medieval 'Monsters' That Give A Whole New Meaning To Folklore

Though the Hircocervus was certainly part of the lore of the Middle Ages, its origins lie much further back in time. In fact, the creature’s mentioned in Plato’s great ancient Greek work of philosophy, Republic. That takes us back more than 2,500 years to the 5th century B.C. The first mention of the Hircocervus in English came in 1398. So, what was this Hircocervus like?

Initially, it was a beast combining elements of a goat and a stag. But there were later variations. In his 1856 book Impressions of England, Arthur Cleveland Coxe described a painting from 1579 of the Hircocervus that he’d seen in the old country. The creature, the American cleric wrote, was “part man, part porker, part deer, and part donkey; with a padlock on his mouth.” But perhaps the most surprising characteristic of Hircocervus was its total lack of ferocity. It was actually dubbed the “trusty servant.”

Next we look at the monopod — a human-like figure with a very distinctive quirk: just one leg and one foot. These creatures were also part of Roman mythology, described by Pliny the Elder, who died in 79 A.D due to the Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption. The Romans knew monopods by the name skiapodes. And given that the monopods were hampered by only having the one lower limb, they had some unexpected qualities.

Said to be native to Ethiopia, the monopods were apparently fleet of foot and formidable adversaries on the battlefield. That was despite the fact that they were also only little. But perhaps their most bizarre feature was that, according to Pliny, “they are in the habit of lying on their backs, during the time of the extreme heat, and protect themselves from the sun by the shade of their feet.”

They might like to chow down on pasture, but we’re happy to state categorically that lambs are definitely not vegetables. That’s unless you’re talking about the weird medieval monster called the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. A 14th-century book titled The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight offered the first description of this grotesque animal-vegetable concoction.

The true identity of the author of the Mandeville travel book’s still shrouded in mystery. But whoever wrote it certainly had a keen eye for the weird and the wonderful. This Vegetable Lamb, said to exist in Central Asia where it had the Tartar name Borametz, looked just like a young sheep. But it was attached by its umbilical cord to a plant and couldn’t roam further than the extent of that connection. Detach the lamb from the plant and it would perish — time for lamb chops.

Here we see a truly outlandish medieval monster: the Blemmyae. The origins of the beast date back to ancient Greece, but we have the untrustworthy narrator we’ve already met — Sir John Mandeville — to thank for the Middle Ages’ version of the Blemmyae. And what he wrote about them made them sound like creatures you definitely wouldn’t want to meet.

According to Mandeville, the Blemmyae were “ugly folk without heads, who have eyes in each shoulder; their mouths are round, like a horseshoe, in the middle of their chest.” Some even had their facial features on their backs rather than their chests. And others had heads with flat fronts lacking any features except two holes and a “flat lipless mouth.”

This ferocious beast was said to combine the physical qualities of dogs, hyenas, and wolves. Some accounts gave its stomping ground as the East African nation of Ethiopia, while others claimed that it lived in India. But the main things to know about the crocotta were that it was a fierce predator — and its preferred prey was human beings.

It also seems that these beasts weren’t just mindless killing machines — they had a low cunning that made them even more lethal. Porphyry of Tyre, a Roman-era philosopher, wrote that the crocotta “speaks in a manner so human, and this without a teacher, as to go to houses, and call that person whom he knows he can easily vanquish.” Alarming.

In the Middle Ages the Japanese had a whole category of strange mythical monsters: the yokai. One of those was the nue, sometimes called the Japanese chimera. Mentions of the nue date as far back as the 8th century B.C., and the myths about them persisted through to the medieval era. This was another monster of the Middle Ages that combined the attributes of a number of different real animals.

A nue had a tiger’s legs, a snake’s tail, a monkey’s head, and the body of a tanuki. The latter’s also known as the Japanese raccoon dog. The mythical nues flew through the night skies, often surrounded by ominous black clouds, and they had a bird-like call. The appearance of a nue was regarded with dismay, as the creatures were said to bring ill-fortune.

During medieval times, when the Aztecs ruled a large section of modern-day South America, the monster to be scared of in that part of the world was the ahuizotl. Sometimes known as the water dog, this aquatic creature was said to resemble a smooth-skinned dog with an elongated tail. Spookily, the beast had five human hands, four on its limbs and another attached to the tail.

By all accounts, the ahuizotls were thoroughly unpleasant beasts. Their trick was to lure humans to streams where they lay ready to pounce. Alternatively, they might simply grab anyone who strayed too near to a lake’s edge. Once their prey was close enough, they’d strike, dragging their victims into the water. Drowning was the inevitable consequence of an ahuizotl attack.

If you’re cynocephalic, then you’re entirely human in form except for one rather key feature. Instead of having the normal head of a Homo sapiens specimen, you’ll have the head of a dog. The cynocephali lived, it was claimed, either in Africa or India. Or China or Egypt. It’s notable that many mythical beasts of the Middle Ages lived in distant lands. That, of course, would explain why nobody saw them in their medieval European villages.

So we have a medieval creature that combined a human body with a canine head. But were these monsters dangerous? In The Travels of Marco Polo, the great 13th-century explorer claimed that dog-headed folks lived on the Andaman Islands. They apparently resembled “big mastiff dogs” and were ruthless by nature. Clearly worth avoiding.

It was a French naturalist called Pierre Belon who first put pen to paper to describe this bizarre marine creature. In his 1553 work De Aquatilibus, he recounted a strange tale. “In Norway, near the city of Den Elepoch in the region of Diezunt, was found another monster or ocean fish,” Belon wrote. “This monster, according to many who saw it, did not live more than three days, did not speak nor emitted any sound but great, plaintive signs.”

So far, so weird. The creature described by Belon was actually what was known as a sea monk. Another story tells how one was captured and presented to a Polish king. But using gestures — sea monks were always silent — the creature begged to be released. The monarch, apparently a man with a good heart, granted the sea monk its wish. That’s one monster story with a happy ending.

Folks who lived in the part of the world that’s now encompassed by Turkey had their own weird creature during the Middles Ages. These were the gelins, the ghosts of women who’d died in tragic ways. Gelin is actually the Turkish word for bride, and these ghostly women had often perished in circumstances related to marriage or childbirth.

Often a gelin would’ve been murdered by a cruel husband. Alternatively, they might’ve died during childbirth, an all too common fate in medieval times. Some had taken their own lives after betrayal by a faithless husband. These unfortunate spirits then roamed the Earth and terrified those that saw them. This fear came from the belief that sighting a gelin meant that death was close.

The Japanese monster futakuchi-onna takes us into the realm of the truly weird. To all appearances, these strange creatures look like perfectly normal women. But if you were to lift the hair on the back of their heads, you’d find something calculated to totally freak you out. For they had a terrible secret hidden away at the rear of their skulls.

Yes, the futakuchi-onna had a second mouth concealed at the rear of their heads. And this wasn’t just any old mouth — it was one with an appetite that was never satisfied. Special locks of hair grabbed food from wherever they found it and stuffed it into the bizarre second mouth. Japanese legend has it that a futakuchi-onna appeared in a household as retribution for some kind of transgression.

For Muslims, djinns are a range of different types of ghosts and apparitions, sometimes benign but more often evil. One of the most feared of djinns during the Middle Ages was the ifrit. These shape-shifting creatures were formed from blazing fire or sometimes smoke. Of either gender, they were equipped with wings but lived underground

Though like other djinns they could be a force for good, usually they were anything but that. Indeed, they were often associated with impending death and couldn’t be vanquished with ordinary weapons. They only way to overcome them was with magic or by invoking prayers from the Islamic holy book, the Koran.

We have a 16th-century Swedish chronicler to thank for what we know about the gulon. Olaus Magnus described this fantastic beast in his 1555 work A Description of the Northern People. According to Magnus, the gulon was a creature that sported a lion’s body, the tail of a fox, and the head and ears of a cat.

The gulon’s habits, particularly when it came to dining, left much to be desired. They’d feast on animal remains up to the point that they could eat no more. Yet their hunger still wasn’t satisfied, so they’d compress themselves between two close-standing trees to make more room in their bellies. Then they’d carry on with their revolting buffet.

The rompo’s a beast that was supposedly resident in India and Africa during the medieval period. It’s another one of those monsters that’s a mishmash of several different animals that do actually exist. The rompo combined a hare’s head with human ears and a flowing horse’s main, a badger’s front limbs, and finally the rear legs and hindquarters of a badger. And it had one very unattractive characteristic.

When it came to diet, the rompo was an undeniably hideous monster. Because its favored food was the cadavers of humans. So though it wasn’t actually that large, just around 3 feet from the tip of its hare’s nose to its badger’s behind, it was a thoroughly unsavory creature. And if in dire need of a meal, it had the unpleasant habit of digging up human burials.

Mimick dogs, sometimes known as getulian dogs, were said to be found in parts of North Africa and Europe. Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner even dignified this mythical creature with a Latin name — Canis getulus — in his Historia Animalium, published in 1551. And the name of these beasts offers a strong clue about their special powers.

To all intents and purposes, mimick dogs looked very similar to your everyday canine. But the monsters had an extraordinary ability to mimic humans. They could talk just as people did, and were even capable of moving and acting as if they were members of the human race. A sight to behold, surely.

The remote Orkney Islands only became part of Scotland in 1472, previously having come under the rule of Norway and Denmark. Lying some 20 miles north of the mainland, the archipelago of more than 70 islands had its own monsters during the Middle Ages: the Finfolk. They were a race of shape-shifters with other supernatural powers.

Finfolk were monsters of the waters that surround the Orkneys, and were also adept sailors who could even force the sea to do their bidding. While their home was a fabled underwater city, Finfolkaheem, they were capable of surviving above the waves as well. These creatures were feared because it was said that they kidnapped and imprisoned innocent islanders, holding them captive for the rest of their lives.

This horrifying monster’s name derives from the word tanggal, which in the Tagalog language of the Philippines means “to split.” And that’s exactly what the manananggal could do. These fearsome beasts were predators — and the animal they preyed on was us. Plus, when it came to hunting they had a truly hideous ability.

The manananggals would sprout wings before they started hunting and would cleave their own bodies in two, so that the upper part of their torsos flew through the air. When they then came across a human, they’d suck blood from the victim with their elongated tongues. Certainly one to watch out for if you were a medieval traveler who’d reached the Philippines.

Found in Europe and North Africa, the basilisk had an exceptionally bizarre lifecycle. It started in a rooster’s egg. Yes, we know, roosters obviously can’t lay eggs, but bear with us. The egg was then tended by a toad, until a snake with a crest hatched from it. And though the beast tormented medieval folk, it’d earlier been described by Pliny the Elder in 79 A.D.

According to Pliny, the basilisk didn’t slither across the ground like other snakes, but instead moved with its body upright. Later, during the Middle Ages, the basilisk myth evolved so that the creature was actually an unlikely hybrid of a snake and a rooster. And this was a very deadly beast — its breath could devastate a landscape, and its mere glance could kill a human.

The Odal Pass is a roadway that runs across the Isle of Skye, which lies off the west coast of Scotland. This route’s haunted by a spirit — the Beast of Odal — that was said to have the power of changing its very shape. When a road was first being built through the pass, the laborers were apparently frightened out of their skins by the screeching calls of the monster that echoed around the hills.

Travelers along the Odal Pass were often mysteriously injured, and the blame was placed on the Beast of Odal. The monster was sighted in different forms, sometimes as a one-legged man, sometimes as a dog. Eventually, the haunting came to an end after the grisly demise of an unfortunate traveler. He was found dead with two puncture marks which, it was said, couldn’t have been caused by human hand. And the Beast of Odal was heard of no more.

The preta was a product of reincarnation, the belief that after death people come back to inhabit another body. But those who’d acted in evil ways during their human existence could be punished in a horrible manner. When they were re-born, according to the lore of various Asian traditions, they’d be condemned to live as pretas, a thoroughly unenviable fate.

A preta was a kind of spirit with one very distinctive characteristic. No matter how much they ate or drank, they’d always be left with an acute hunger and thirst that couldn’t be satisfied. So as they roamed the Earth, they were forced to consume all kinds of revolting matter, including everything from putrid meat to human waste.