Excerpted from: Bizarre Modern Encounters with Real Gargoyles | Brent SwancerJune 19, 2019 | Mysterious Universe
All across the world sit stone demons perched atop dizzying heights to stare out across the countryside below in silent, frozen stares of contemplation, and which are collectively known as gargoyles. The term “gargoyle” is thought to come from the name of a monster in the 7th century called La Gargouille, which was said to terrorize the country of France in the region of the Seine River before being righteously slain by St Romanus, the Archbishop of Rouen. Upon the mighty beast’s death the lore has it that its head was supposedly mounted on a church to keep other monsters at bay, and from here grew the tradition of crafting the likenesses of grotesque demons out of stone in order to serve as protectors or guardians of important places. It turned into quite an architectural phenomenon, and gargoyles sprouted up all over on churches, cathedrals, or anything else that needed protection from demons and evil spirits. Gargoyles can be seen all over the world, including famously the Notre Dame in Paris and the 112 gargoyles of the Washington National Cathedral in Washington D.C. But are these creatures merely confined to these stone apparitions eternally looking upon their domain?
In more modern times there have been sightings of what are often compared by witnesses as being distinctively like the stone gargoyles of centuries past, only living, and they seem to come from out past the fringe of the bizarre, mostly described as winged, hunched-over gruesome abominations that are hard to really categorize. One report from 2004 comes from the site Phantoms and Monsters, and concerns a witness in Bluefield, West Virginia, who had an encounter with just such a monstrosity when he was a child. He describes the area as being mostly quaint, rural farmland, and he says one day he had a very frightening experience when he was playing near a hedge separating his house and the neighbors’. He says of what happened:
I was sitting there in broad sunny daylight when all of a sudden I saw rustling in the hedges. I looked over and out popped out what I can only put into words as a gargoyle! It looked at me with solid, pointed black eyes. It had frog-green skin. Its face looked like a frog except it had teeth and ears that I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. Its ears flexed outward like two big green gloves on the side of its head – like the king that the gargoyles in statues has. Its body was shaped like a bull dog and its webbed feet turned inward as it walked.
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