SoCal Cryptids: The Blue Ghoul

     

    Today is the final day of our SoCal Cryptids Week special trip. As we prepare to take the Redline back home tomorrow, there's one more creature we need to look into, and an extremely new one at that. Most legends we've covered this week, like the Dog Woman of Watts or the Riverside Brain Tickler, first started circulating decades ago, long before any of us on the Déjà-Boo crew were even born. What makes today's featured creature so unusual is just how recent the sightings and stories surrounding it are.

    Around late 2023, stories started circulating online about a terrifying "Blue Ghoul". First spotted somewhere around Maine, people all across the country quickly started to claim that they, too, had seen or encountered the Blue Ghoul, with the most recent accounts putting it in the Los Angeles area. Stories vary, as they always do in these sorts of cases. Some say the Blue Ghoul is a slender humanoid with an eerie voice like a skipping record, others say it's as tall as a house and able to phase through solid objects with ease. The thing all stories have in common, however, is the ghoul's haunting bluish tint for which it has been named. 

    Despite the many apparent sightings of this ghoul, so far none have been able to capture it on camera. If this was an urban legend as old as the others we've talked about here before, the lack of photographic proof would not be unusual. But in the modern age? Everyone has a phone right in their pocket with a built in high quality camera. I think it's a little telling that so far, nobody has caught even a single picture of the thing. 

    Well, if the Blue Ghoul really does exist and nobody else has caught it on tape, we might as well try to do it ourselves! Despite my doubts, Francisco, Jess, Grant and I all are going to check out the last place the Blue Ghoul was supposedly seen here in LA, where rumors say that it ripped an up-and-coming musical artist/social media influencer “out of the fabric of reality.” 

    I think it's important to take a moment to talk about how or why this legend might have started. Along with the blue that is the ghoul's namesake, another thing associated with the ghost stories is incredible violence. It would be distasteful and insensitive to go into the details here, especially considering how recent the deaths and disappearances attributed to the Blue Ghoul are. I will go over this more in our upcoming SoCal Cryptids special episode of Déjà-Boo, but I think that mythologizing these real life tragedies as the work of some inhuman ghostly being is... indicative of a bigger problem with the way we treat violence in this country. If you know any information about any of the cases associated, you can call or text this organization to help the search.

    On that kind of bummer note, I'm going to leave this article here for now. If you want to learn more about the Blue Ghoul or any of the six other cryptids of Southern California we've talked about this week, be sure to tune in to our very special extra long episode of DÉJÀ-BOO, set to release next Wednesday! 

- Ethan