Almas

Did you know that many cultures around the world have a legend of a wild, hairy hominid, like the infamous Bigfoot?

This is the story of just one of them: the Almas, from the folklore of Central Asia and Mongolia.

While the legends date back centuries locally, written accounts of Almases in Western culture begin somewhere in the late 19th century, when Russian explorers and scholars dutifully translated details of the beasts, as described by their guides.

The creature described to them may sound familiar:

A flat, humanoid face. A pointed head. An upright stance. A creature that often walked on two legs. A half-animal, half-human body covered in fur, with enough strength to frighten them.

However, unlike North America’s Bigfoot, Almases are armed with enormous claws.

That alone was allegedly enough to frighten people so badly that, according to Nikolay Przhevalsky in 1876, they refused to live anywhere that almases were found.

Yet other accounts said they were very shy creatures, who would only attack if provoked.

The scholar Damdinzhavyn Maidar had a chat with people claiming to have seen the creatures in the Caucasus mountains in 1981. According to his witnesses, the creatures were only of average height and walked with half-bent knees and pigeon toes.

Like a gorilla, in other words. Or a bear, perhaps?

And, in fact, that’s what many sceptics of the almas claim these creatures are: misidentified bears.

But... how unusual that people who have lived for generations in a specific environment should so readily misidentify what ought to be a familiar animal.

A few sceptics are willing to allow that maybe - just maybe - they’re a residual population of an ancient human species, perhaps something like the Neanderthals. Locals do claim (allegedly!) that almas encounters are becoming rarer every year.

It still seems pretty out there.

But if not a bear, and if not a relict population - then what are people seeing?

And why do so many people around the world have similar stories?

And why have these stories been around long before the internet? Before telephones. Before there was any means to share ideas quickly on a large scale?

I don’t have any answers for you.

All I can tell you is that it’s stories like this, and the echoes of them I found all around the world, that inspired me to create the Slipworld.

And that’s why there’s rarely one kind of anything in the Slipworld.

It always depends on where in the world you are. Who lives there. Whether there’s a reasonable explanation for a creature from one culture being present in another.

Because if the natural world can contain dozens of cultures and races and species and sub-species, why can’t the supernatural world do that, too?