CENTAURS

Drawing by Chief Dan Leonard

Centaurs in North America
From J.C. Johnson and Phantoms and Monsters blog

When you think of a 'Centaur' the vision is usually of a mythological creature from Greek origin. It's head, arms, and chest are those of a human and the rest of its body, including four legs, hindquarters, and a tail is like that of a horse.

There is the legend of Ixion who was purified by Zeus of a first murder of kin, a horrifying deed. The shameless man repaid this honor by trying to seduce Hera. The goddess told her husband. When Zeus learned about this passion he made a disguised model of Hera, a cloud likeness, to see how obsessed he was with his wife.

Ixion was so deeply in love with Hera that he slept with the disguised model. Zeus punished Ixion by chaining him to a winged and fiery wheel, which revolved forever in Tartarus. The cloud gave birth to a creature named Centaurus. It was Centaurus that descended upon a herd of Magnesian mares and conceived the Centaurs.

There have been stories of similar creatures throughout the ages but in locations that you'd most likely not imagine.

I received the following email from M.B. who is Native American:

Hey Lon...this is a second hand account that I heard from my father's trusted friend. I'm sorry I can't provide any more details than what I was told from the witness.

When my father's friend was younger he was a Deputy for the Apache Reservation Police. I believe it happened in the early 1980s, but not sure. One night he was on patrol in his squad car alone on the reservation. He was driving along the deserted highway that passed through town. When he reached the church he saw something moving back and forth along the church, peering into the windows. He stopped the car on the highway, and observed for a while. It was too dark to make out much at first. Then, the dark shape took notice of him and began moving out of the shadows and into the front of the church.

I forget exactly whether he then moved the police car into the parking lot to intercept the man, or if he stopped the car shortly after making a move but either way the headlights helped illuminate what he saw.

Under the orange light of the street lights was a 8 foot tall Demon-Centaur!!! The bottom half was indeed a dark haired horse, while where the neck and head should have been was the upper torso of a man. The man was staring right at him as it strolled by, all 4 hooves clanking on the pavement. His skin was a dark red and it had horns on either side of his head. He said they were like ram horns, curled around on either side of his skull. He was terrified and while the thought of shooting the beast crossed his mind, he reasoned against it. He didn't want to provoke it and have it attack him. It completed crossing the road, and down a steep slope into a farmland field below. Once it reached this open ground, he watched as it started to run away as fast as possible until it disappeared into the darkness and trees beyond.

He was deeply troubled after the encounter and couldn't reason why a demonic creature would be looking into a building as holy as a church. The way he told the story, you couldn't help but believe it to be true and I'm sure that it actually happened.

I've had weird encounters myself, and lots and lots of 2nd hand stories from friends/family on the Navajo and Apache Reservations. I shouldn't talk about many of those though. Being Native American, talking about these weird things can have negative repercussions to those involved. M.B.

I contacted my friend JC Johnson who confirmed that there have been similar sightings in the Four Corners / Navajo Reservation area for some time. In fact he forwarded a sketch of one of these creatures by Leonard Dan.

I recall a strange sighting in Michigan in 2006:

Location: Between Battle Creek & Bellevue, Michigan - January/February 2006 - night

A woman driving alone on a road between both towns had to slow down for a stop sign. Suddenly a creature of very large size jumped up over a snow bank and ran “10 yards a second”. It was coming towards the car. She further described the creature as “enormous and its body as white as the snow around it”. It had tiny little legs, like animal goat legs but very small. She had the impression that parts of it were like a man and other parts of it were an animal. According to her it either grabbed, or reached for the door handle but her car was locked. She said its fingers were incredibly long, “long, long fingers and nails”. It was so incredibly fast that she did not see a face or anything else. She mentioned that another car of people had also seen it too; they had stopped and looked at it at one point.

Source: unknowncreaturespot “2006 Michigan centaur sighting”

There was another incident in Melbourne, Florida:

"Three friends and I saw an apparition, possibly of a demon, when we were all around 10 years old. Myself, another boy and his two sisters were riding bikes together down a sidewalk that ran along the outskirts of our neighborhood The end of that sidewalk is at a beach-side highway in Melbourne, Florida.

Nearing the highway, with me leading the pack, the boy put his hand on my shoulder and made me stop riding. When I looked back at them, both girls were staring straight ahead with tears in their eyes, and the boy pointed for me to look. Not knowing what they could be pointing at because I had just been looking that direction when they stopped me, I looked and saw what I can only say was a centaur on the sidewalk in between us and the highway. The sun had just risen above the horizon and was at the creature's back, so the whole figure was cast in shadow, but I could make out that it had a very muscular, had a reddish torso, a horse's four legs and was over six feet tall. Next to it was a thicket of palmetto and palm trees from which a person could have jumped out in a clever costume, although the quickness of appearance and the incredible detail of the creature would make me doubt that.

Needless to say, my first move was to turn around and jet, and the others had already done so. Before we pedaled around the corner, I looked and it was still standing there, and I was very relieved that it was not chasing us. After we had reached a safe distance, we celebrated our escape.

Unfortunately, I lost touch with my friends when I moved away that year. When I came back at the age of 15, I lived right by the sidewalk again, and one night from my room, I heard frantic yelling by the road, and came out to discover that a kid had been struck by a car crossing from the beach over to the sidewalk where I had seen the centaur. The family was much too shaken up for me to talk with them, and the boy had been killed instantly, so I won't know if he saw something, but it is a very odd coincidence, if that.

I've just started trying to recontact my friends to see if they saw the same creature as I, or if we all saw our own version of what we thought the devil looked like, as we didn't discuss it in detail at the time." - paranormal.about.com

A few years ago, there were Centaur-like sightings in the Cree Nation of Alberta, Canada:

"There is definitely a growing phenomena up here in Alberta, Canada. Specifically, the location is better known as Hobbema, a place comprised of 4 distinct Cree Indian reservations. These sightings I speak of occur on the Samson Cree reserve, in and around the high school area.

When I first heard about it, I was skeptical and proceeded to tease my friends, thinking they were trying to pull to wool over my eyes. They were neither insulted nor deterred from sharing with me that in conjunction with their own personal experiences, there is an actual video tape of this "centaur" creating violent havoc inside the school in a hallway near a main exit. Other stories they shared have to do with sightings at night, where the centaur actually chases them or appears suddenly out of nowhere.

It is far too easy to pass this off as "something in the water," for the Hobbema Cree peoples of this area have experienced generations of trauma. The brief history of this location has everything to do with the discovery of rich deposits of oil in the middle of the 1900's. Once harvested, the residents of this area became incredibly rich. However, due to the lack of a holistic education, and decades of dysfunction throughout the community wrought by the Canadian government and the Churches, the locals were unable to fathom and properly adjust to their fortune to the fullest extent.

This resulted in various forms of chaos throughout the later part of the century, for the oil royalties were distributed to every reserve member, and their children as well when they turned 18. The mortality rate increased over time in this area, mostly due to suicide and murder. Today, we see an entire generation of youth, that have completely bought into the ghettoization of their communities and are largely atheist.

In regards to the phenomena of the centaur sightings, it is known throughout the remaining Spiritual community of this area that these "beings" are making themselves known because in the eyes of the youth, there is nothing to believe in anymore. Sightings as such are creating panic and fear, and the phenomena has therefore become demonized by word of mouth.

I am not a community member of this area. Nor have I seen or witnessed anything of the like. However, I have heard this from more than one person from that area and at this stage, I cannot write it off to just coincidence. When I heard of this website, and the kind of work being conducted in communities across the United States, I realized I had to submit something herein in the hopes of generating interest, and hopefully to come across someone else that believes in something of this sort." - pennstateprs.com

Then there was this follow-up to the post:

"I have heard of many stories like this in First Nation reserves in Saskatchewan. I actually have heard of one in Cotes FN, Kawcatoose FN, Kamsack area and in 2003 there was the sighting of a Centaur at Standing Buffalo's FN Pow Wow. I think that it appears to people to tell others that there's something wrong. That there is something wrong in the community. Maybe black magic? We all know as native people that there native people who do practice the bad ways. Sure, there are the good ways but on the other hand so is the dark ways. Personally, I think that when native people practice these dark ways that this centaur or thing will appear to help those ones that practice such bad practices. This thing helps them. I have heard so many stories of this centaur. the most famous one is the sighting at Standing Buffalo powwow. I do not know what the Elders did over there. One Elder had to have a special ceremony and singers were requested from far away to help in the ceremony. The singers who were traveling from far away could sense this evil thing and one singer actually turned around and didn't attend the ceremony because he was afraid. The spirits were afraid of the old man conducting the ceremony. But the spirits helped by taking that evil thing centaur and banishing it to the pits of the mountains. I know there are a lot of native people who have heard such stories and I am curious to know what did their Elders do in such circumstances?" - pennstateprs.com