Sometimes the real world hands you a story at exactly the right time.
A little over a week ago, ABC7 Chicago reported multiple mountain lion sightings in southern Illinois. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources received reports from both Union and Jackson counties and believes they are likely sightings of the same animal.
Mountain lions are rare in Illinois. According to the report, this is only the twelfth confirmed mountain lion sighting in the state since 2002. But we (Illinoisans) have always known about cougars, mountain lions, and even panthers in Illinois.
Naturally, one particular detail caught my attention.
Jackson County.
Sometimes the universe really isn't particularly subtle.
There is another connection here too. Carbondale, Illinois, the real-world inspiration for my fictional Carbon Vale, is in Jackson County. Official Jackson County sources identify Carbondale as one of the county's two largest cities. But I don't need the news to tell me this. I lived in Carbondale and Jackson County for seven years.
So we have Jackson County, Carbon Vale, and my fictional Jackson, Illinois, all suddenly connected by a mountain lion wandering into an area where mountain lions are not particularly common.
That immediately got me thinking about monsters. Especially with October on the very near horizon and my desire to get back to Monstrous Mondays.
More specifically, it got me thinking about why local legends make better monsters.
There's Something Out There
There is something wonderfully useful about a monster that occupies the space between "that doesn't live here" and "except sometimes it actually does."
That is where stories grow. There aren't mountain lions around here. Except my uncle saw one. Or my cousin's friend said his dad did.
There aren't supposed to be any. Then what did he see?
And now we have a local legend, or at the very least a fun rumor.
For Jackson, this gets even better because I am increasingly trying to look at the setting through the eyes of 1986.
Today, when someone sees an unusual animal, everybody immediately reaches for their phone. There are photographs. Video. Social media. Trail cameras. GPS locations. Within hours, people are arguing online over whether the thing in the picture is a cougar, a bobcat, somebody's dog, or three blurry pixels and wishful thinking.
In 1986?
Your friend tells you that her older brother saw something behind the school.
That's it.
That's your evidence.
And tomorrow? The story will be even better.
The Crimson Cougar
The mascot of Jackson Public High School is the Crimson Cougar.
When I first came up with that, it was mostly because it sounded right. Plenty of high schools use big cats for mascots. Plus, there are the whole courgar/moutain lion/panther rumors I grew up hearing.
But once I started developing Jackson's local folklore, the Crimson Cougar became something else.
In Jackson, stories of the animal go back long before the high school adopted the name. Farmers and hunters told stories about a great red cat seen near fence lines, creeks, and fields. Some claimed it appeared before disasters. There were stories connecting it to a train wreck, a cholera outbreak, and the burning of Holmwood Hall at MacAlister College.
Eventually the town did what towns sometimes do. It took something people once feared and made it a mascot. Now it is painted on the gym walls. It is on football and marching band uniforms. It's on the cover of the yearbook.
That history was already part of my Crimson Cougar write-up earlier this year. The actual mountain lion sightings this month make me like the idea even more.
- Was the thing somebody saw outside Jackson really the Crimson Cougar?
- Was it just a mountain lion passing through?
- Was it a big bobcat seen under bad lighting?
- Was it something else?
- It was seen when the old High School bell rang.
Excellent. I don't want to answer that question too quickly. Uncertainty is doing most of the work for me.
This Is Where 1986 Becomes My Mirror
One of the things I keep coming back to with Jackson is that 1986 can't simply be decoration. It can't just mean cassette tapes, Members Only jackets, malls, Reagan on TV, Duran Duran, and cars with terrible gas mileage.
The year has to affect how the characters experience the world.
Information moved differently.
If someone tells Larina there is a cougar behind the football field, she can't pull up the Illinois Department of Natural Resources website. Stephanie can't check Facebook to see if anyone else reported it. Faye can't search Reddit. Vera can't ask whether somebody's Ring camera caught it.
They have to talk to people.
- Who saw it?
- Who told you?
- Do you trust them?
- Who did *they* hear it from?
- Why is their version different from the version we heard yesterday?
Rumors have geography. They have social groups. The cheerleaders know one version. The football team knows another. The teachers have heard something else. The police aren't saying anything. Some old guy at Jones' Diner on Morgan remembers somebody seeing the same thing in 1956. The college kids hanging out at Big John's say it was just some bad LSD going around.
And Larina is suddenly asking questions. That is how I want mysteries in Jackson to develop.
Before there is a monster, there is a story.
The Monster Before the Monster
If I were running a Crimson Cougar adventure, I would resist showing the creature for as long as possible. First there are stories. Somebody sees eyes reflecting in their headlights. A dog refuses to go outside. Someone finds scratches on a tree. A freshman swears something followed him home. A mutilated deer or cow carcass turns up. Then someone says his grandfather saw the Crimson Cougar forty years ago.
Now we've moved beyond zoology.
Maybe there really is a mountain lion around Jackson. In fact, I think that makes the whole thing better. Every piece of evidence now has two explanations.
- Those look like cougar tracks. Probably.
- That sound could have been a cougar. Sure.
- Something killed that deer. Cougars do that.
- But why did it leave the heart behind? ...
Ah, now we have something. That little mystery that pushes Jackson out of the pages of National Geographic and into the pages of the National Inquirer. Or Weirdly World News, to be more specific.
Jackson Has Its Own Monsters
The Crimson Cougar also helped me understand something about Jackson itself. Jackson already has monsters. More importantly, they are Jackson's monsters.
That does not mean every one of them comes from documented Jacksonville folklore. They don't. What they have in common is that they grow out of the place. The Crimson Cougar begins with real Illinois wildlife and the uncertainty surrounding big-cat sightings.
Then there is MoChem.
MoChem goes back much farther for me.
I created the original version when I was ten years old, after reading Daniel Cohen's monster books and deciding that my hometown needed a monster of its own. The Jackson version connects childhood campfire stories from my time in the Boy Scouts to the real chemical plant outside of town. That became the fictional Morgan Chemical. Yes, the same Morgan Chemical where Candy's mom worked, and the same Morgan as Roderick Morgan.
Nobody agrees on what MoChem is.
- Maybe it was created by chemical waste.
- Maybe it was once a worker.
- Maybe it was a deformed child.
- Maybe it was a reporter who came to investigate Morgan Chemical and discovered something he wasn't supposed to know.
Those contradictory stories are important. In fact, they are vital.
MoChem isn't just a monster living in an abandoned chemical plant. MoChem is what happens when generations of kids are told not to go near the abandoned chemical plant.
Then there is Old Annie.
Old Annie is entirely my invention. I created her whole cloth, but she is built out of things that belong to Jackson and things I remember from Jacksonville.
Part of the inspiration comes from Jacksonville's inordinately large homeless population. Part comes from the old state hospital. Part comes from the waterways and low ground around the Mauvaisterre, the "bad land" that has become increasingly important to my fictional Jackson.
So everyone knows an Old Annie story.
- She was a homeless woman.
- She escaped from the state hospital.
- She drowned her children.
- She drowned herself.
- College kids made her up as a prank.
- There never was an "Annie."
Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who saw her.
The truth, at least in my game, is stranger. Old Annie is the Mauvaisterre Hag, an ancient corrupted spirit associated with the land and water around Jackson.
Three monsters. Three different origins.
One begins with real wildlife.
One begins with childhood campfire stories and industrial anxiety.
One I invented completely.
But all three belong to Jackson. That distinction is becoming increasingly important to me. A local monster does not have to be an authentic piece of documented folklore. It needs **roots**. It should feel like something people in this particular place would tell stories about.
No Sasquatches in Jackson
This brings me to something else. I would love to put Sasquatches in the woods outside Jackson. Seriously.
Small Illinois town. Wooded roads. Cornfields. Creeks. Something large moving between the trees. Honestly, it practically writes itself.
But there is only one problem. They don't seem to belong there. I went looking.
The North American Wood Ape Conservancy maintains a searchable database of reported Bigfoot, Sasquatch, or "wood ape" encounters. It even classifies reports based on factors such as corroboration, physical evidence, and witness reliability.
I checked the years that matter most to my Jackson. 1980 through 1987. I could not find anything in that database that gives me an Illinois Bigfoot tradition during those Jackson years. In fact, it is not until the 2000s that there is even one sighting in Peoria.
That doesn't mean nobody in Illinois ever told a Bigfoot story, and it certainly doesn't prove anything one way or another about Bigfoot.
It just means I went looking for a local tradition I could use, and I didn't find one where I needed it.
So, there are no Sasquatches in Jackson.
In fact, that has become something of a running joke among the kids who know about the supernatural.
Val: "My dad used to be a big-time Bigfoot hunter in the 1970s."
Larina: "There has never been a credible Bigfoot sighting in Illinois."
Val, smiling: "Yeah. My dad did a great job."
Candy: "Gods, Val, you are an idiot."
Honestly, I like the joke much better than simply putting Bigfoot in the woods. It tells me something important about Val. That he is not just the dumb jock of the group, despite Candy's assurances. It tells me something alittle about his dad. Does the senior Moreno know about the supernatural or was he just amused by the bigfoot craze of the late 1970? It tells me something about Larina. Because of course she already looked it up in newspaper archives. It definitely tells me something about Candy.
But most of all, it tells me something about Jackson. Jackson has its own monsters.
Not Every Monster Belongs Everywhere
That might be the larger lesson. If local legends make better monsters, then the monsters a place doesn't have are important too.
It would be very easy to turn Jackson into Cryptid Disneyland. Bigfoot in the woods. Mothman on the bridge. Chupacabra eating livestock. UFOs overhead. Jersey Devil flying over the football field.
Eventually the setting stops feeling like Illinois and starts feeling like somebody dumped a cryptozoology encyclopedia onto the map. I know. I guilty of that exact problem.
I don't want that again.
That doesn't mean I can't invent monsters. Old Annie proves that. MoChem proves it too. The difference is that when I invent something, I want it to grow out of the setting. Why is this monster here?
- What does it have to do with this road, this river, this factory, this cemetery, this school, or this town?
- Who has been telling stories about it?
- Who doesn't believe those stories?
- Who remembers an older version?
If I can't answer those questions, maybe the monster belongs somewhere else. And maybe I should go there instead.
Go to Where the Monsters Are
I think I finally have an axiom for this.
Go to where the monsters are. Don't bring them to you.
Jackson already has enough problems. I don't need to import any. If I want a different sort of monster, I can go to Carbon Vale or Sunny Valley. For example, I have also decided that while there are not a lot of vampires in Jackson, both Carbon Vale and Sunny Valley are sick with them. I actually can't wait to show my new Sunny Valley vampires, but they will need to wait for another post.
This lesson has also been following me through another project.
When I started working seriously on my new Advanced Witches & Warlocks, I naturally began adding monsters. It made sense. A book about witches and warlocks is going to have creatures associated with witchcraft and the occult. Familiars. Spirits. Demons. Hags. Things summoned in rituals. Things witches bargain with. Things witches fight. Things witches accidentally wake up.
So I added monsters. Then I added more monsters. And then some more.
Eventually something became obvious. The monsters didn't belong in Advanced Witches & Warlocks.
Not because they were bad material. Quite the opposite. There were enough of them, with enough ideas attached to them, that treating them as supporting material for the Witch and Warlock classes was making them smaller than they should be.
They needed their own place. That realization eventually helped push those ideas toward Codex Qliphothica and my other monster work.
The monsters stopped being accessories for witches. They became inhabitants of their world.
That feels like the same lesson I am learning from Jackson.
A Witch book should tell me how witches work. A monster book should tell me about the monsters. And a setting should tell me **where those monsters belong**.
Then the characters can go find them.
Let the Place Tell You What Lives There
Maybe that is the real trick. Start with the place. Look at its history. Look at its geography. Look at its animals. Look at its abandoned buildings. Look at its industries. Look at the stories people actually tell. Look at the stories they *could* have told.
Then listen.
Maybe you find a real local legend. Great.
Maybe you find a mountain lion wandering through a part of Illinois where mountain lions are rare. Even better.
Maybe you remember an old Boy Scout campfire story and realize it belongs beside an abandoned chemical plant.
Maybe you look at a river, an old hospital, and people living at the margins of town, and eventually Old Annie crawls out of the mud.
The monster doesn't need to be real. The folklore doesn't even need to be real. But the connection to the place should feel real.
That is what makes the monster feel like it was there before the player characters arrived.
And that matters. Because the Crimson Cougar isn't waiting around for Larina Nichols to have an adventure. People were seeing it before Larina was born. MoChem doesn't exist because the kids need something to fight. People were warning children away from Morgan Chemical before they started asking questions. Old Annie doesn't haunt the Mauvaisterre because I needed a hag encounter. People have been telling each other not to go down by the water after dark for longer than anyone remembers.
The characters didn't bring the monsters with them. The monsters were already there.They just made the mistake of going looking.
And really, isn't that how the best horror stories begin?
It is 1986. Someone saw something in the woods. There aren't supposed to be cougars in Illinois. There definitely aren't any Sasquatches around Jackson. And somewhere, Larina Nichols just heard a story she absolutely should leave alone.
So naturally, she is going to investigate. So will the PCs.
Now, get out there and go where the monsters are.
