I like mothman and I find the killer bunny who tried to attack the president pretty funny, what about you guys?

For a while, I was following the investigation of a creature spotted over in the Netherlands that came to be known as The Holland Creature, or what was supposedly known as Typhon in the lab it was supposedly created in. Mike Soze, the guy who ran the YouTube channel that investigated the creature, has since receded into the shadows because he and his family was facing much scorn and ridicule in real life from naysayers who claimed it was all an elaborate hoax, and he was doing it all for attention and views. Whether or not the create actually existed, and whether or not Mike could prove so, even I was unsure of, but I know he put a lot of effort and passion into his investigation, and he was an awesome guys as well (I spoke with him a few times).

I love them all. But I also respect the hard work and dedication it takes to find out the often deeply buried truth about most cryptids. Highly recommended reading Abominable Science by Donald R. Pothero and Daniel Loxton. You might actually learn something. Tracking the Chupacabra by Benjamin Radford is also an excellent examination of the entire legend of a modern cryptid. Anything by Joe Nickell is also worth a read. These folks dig really deep back to original sources to find out whatever truth and actual evidence there is.

So much in cryptid literature is just regurgitation of previous works to the point of being plagiarism in some cases. Really hard to find decent work on the subject anymore.

I was a huge Bigfoot fan as a kid and even saw the first documentary to feature the film that used to be tauted as best evidence and now known to have been a hoax.

I Also lived through all the hype about Mothman and even had my own encounter. I was in neighboring New Jersey but so I could follow it on local media.
As to my encounter, yes I know exactly how easy it is to mistake something out of the ordinary like being buzzed by an owl for something extraordinary like a human sized moth. Owls are huge. Ever see a turkey buzzard? See one of them and you'll swear a thunderbird cryptid is real. So easy to mistake size. You try to scale it to the tops of the trees and you can easily be off by a factor of ten or twenty.

And of course living in New Jersey, the Jersey Devil is a big thing. There was a whole unit in the state history curriculum about it when I was growing up. The school library must have had a dozen copies of a locally written comprehensive history of the Jersey Devil. My favorite about that is the newspaper account from the 1890s about hunters and state troopers encountering one and chasing it with guns drawn through the Pine Barrens.

I could go on about Spring-heeled Jack where you can actually find the mid nineteenth century newspaper accounts on line in full. There's also a graduate thesis examining the legend and accounts. It's in my “ideas” folder to write a comic about it.

Tsuchinoko.
Described as a fat snake like creature with Doraemon's face, it has been said to spit venom but rather up and run away.
There is a bounty for half a million dollars with a few acres of Tokyo property offered by the Japanese government for a living captured specimen.

How is there not a movie about this thing? Kind of like Mac and Me, only maybe with Burger King or something?

I don't like any of the modern “cryptids” but I love all the mythical folk stuff, especially those I grew up learning about- Unicorns, dragons, mermaids, griffins, fairies, elves, trolls, giants etc.

Centaurs are some of my faves for some reason, just because they're so fun to draw.

The best fantasy art and info on Fairies is obviously Brian Froud.
My fave dragons in fantasy are by Gordon R. Dickson and his Dragon and the George series.
And my fave centaurs in fantasy are by Piers Anthony- my fave depictions are the ancient Greek sculpture versions.

Centaurs and the like were myths from long before I was born. Reason why modern cryptids are so fascinating to me is that I'm seeing the creation of a mythology right before my eyes. I followed Mothman and the Chupacabra during the entire path of sighting to mystery to mythology. That's wild even compared to standing beside the lamassu of the Balawat gate in the British museum, which was wild to experience a supposedly life size lamassu, even if a statue.

Ozoneocean wrote: but I love all the mythical folk stuff, especially those I grew up learning about- Unicorns, dragons, mermaids, griffins, fairies, elves, trolls, giants etc.

A fantastic museum display would be life sized animatronic mythical creatures just like they've done with dinosaurs. I'm pretty sure I saw one with cryptids in a natural history museum.
There have been great “natural history ” exhibits on dragons and I saw a wonderful art exhibit on depictions of dragons in European art with emphasis on the legend of St. George. I love immersion into the whole story of these creatures but I'm partial to the ones I literally lived through.

Dragons, griffins and mermaids are high up on my favourites list, and that is very long indeed. Oh, and don't forget about weird sea monsters, like the ones on Olaus Magnus' sea map Carta Marina from the 16th century. I can just sit back and look at maps like that for long stretches, enjoying all these details. Will-o'-the-wisps and the black dog, too. I've got a very special relation to the latter, in fact. I'll tell you later.

I'd first like to point out two things. To me, much of their fascination is the way nobody really knows what they look like, for obvious reasons. Which is to say, they've got some, let's call them canonical elements like scales and large teeth, an overall serpent-like appearance and being huge for dragons, but once you get to the details, opinions will differ - especially with dragons who are known in so many different cultures.
Or another example: unicorns (which I like, too, I'm not ashamed to say). Are they larger or smaller than horses or the same size. Do they have cloven hoofs (staunch traditionalists will say yes, anything else would mark them as just a horse with a narwhale horn glued to their head)? Are they white or slightly fallow? Is the horn straight or bent? Do they have wings? Do you really need a virgin to tame them, or will any good actress do? Do they shit rainbows? - I'll bet no two people in this thread will be able to agree on any set of answers to this.
But to me that's no drawback, but actually what I most love about them! Within certain ill-defined limits, everyone can be as creative as they like, and that leads to lots of versions unique to the artist who did them. Think Frank Fazetta. I love how this always adds new facets to the fantasy bestiary.
Another example: I'd never really cared for centaurs, until I encountered Piers Anthony's version of them in the Xanth novels.

Now for my personal relation with the black dog. A fittingly Halloweenish story, but a true one.

The black dog is an old English legend with a lot of local variations that all boil down that in certain spooky places you can sometimes see a huge ghost hound with red glowing eyes, which is an omen of death and doom , except when it comes to guide you away from danger - you won't know which of the two until it's too late, I presume.
Now, I'm not from England, and I didn't know much about this when my own encounter happened many years ago. I was in hospital, full to the brim with anaesthetics and painkillers and stuff, and there it was on the foot end of the bed, being a friendly companion. I asked the nurse: “This huge dog on my bed isn't real, is it?” She giggled and said: “Nope!” I said, “Ok.” This is not the strange thing, though. A year before my grandmother had had exactly the same vision, down to the tiniest detail. I could draw that dog from memory even now. I disregarded this before, because we knew she had grown up with a large black dog, a real one, that however none of us others knew.
This wasn't the strangest thing, though. At some other point I talked to a friend of mine who had had a motorbike accident, bringing him to being in hospital, full to the brim with all that stuff that gets used in such situations, and he told me the very same story I've just told you, with the friendly dog looking exactly the same.

All of this can certainly be rationally explained, but I've never cared for finding out. I like leaving some mystery in life. That doesn't mean I believe in spectral black ghost dogs who give comfort to patients in hospitals, I emphatically don't, but I've known ever since why normal, intelligent people could believe such things in times past.
Also, I read about those English black dog legends years later, and the Hound of the Baskervilles for good measure, and these stories have been dear to me ever since.