Alternate Perceptions Magazine, October 2025
The Danse Macabre
By Dennis Stamey
The other night we decided to watch the movie A Quiet Place: Day One on Prime. For those not familiar with this film franchise, they are science-fiction thrillers about an alien invasion. Although in our view alien invasion movies are overdone, this one has a twist. The creatures hunt by sound and kill humans who make any noise because they hate the slightest commotion. They prefer silence. These aliens have no agenda, and they are not that intelligent, they are merely an invasive species like the Burmese pythons who were introduced into the Everglades from Southeast Asia, damaging the ecosystem by preying on native wildlife, in this case humans.
These creatures are known as Death Angels, and they resemble humanoids that are half-spider and half-mantis. Four years after the first A Quiet Place premiered, The Tomorrow War came out. This again involved an alien onslaught, but these creatures, called Whitespikes, are highly evolved and are deliberately trying to conquer the Earth. The Whitespikes and the Death Angels look similar, ugly humanoids with long spindly limbs. There’s no evidence that this was intentional, but both aliens were Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) and the creators said they were trying to convey a feeling of dread and suspense. After all, what is ickier than a spindle-shanked extraterrestrial?
That got us to thinking. We’ve come across a few reports of nasty-looking cryptids with long appendages that look like these aliens. Is it all mere happenstance? The following two reports are from Albert Rosales’ Humanoid Encounters book series (he records many others).
One evening in July of 2011, a man was driving near Bujaraloz, Zaragoza, Spain, when he passed an individual who was very tall, thin, and wearing out-of-date clothing. The stranger had a rigid stance and seemed to move in a “robotic” fashion. Although the witness thought it was strange, he continued driving. A few miles down the road, he began having a pounding headache and felt sick. He pulled over to the side of the road and to rest for a few minutes. Feeling a little better, he continued his trip but was stunned to see the same rigid-looking individual walking ahead of him. The tall humanoid should have been far down the highway.
Around 8:45 p.m. on July 4, 2005, near Humacao, Puerto Rico, Samuel Delgado and four friends were pulling out roots and weeds from a field located behind the security fence of Buena Vista Airport. Suddenly they heard what they thought was a dog growling and at the same time smelled an odor like “rotten meat”. Whatever was making the noise was moving around in a field on the other side of the fence. They continued working but soon heard the sound again and this time seemed to be closer. The men peered over the fence and soon noticed a long thin greenish-gray creature about four-and-a-half feet height, with long thin extremities, its arms almost reaching the knees. Its eyes were completely black and did not blink. one of the men screamed in fright and the humanoid turned, stared at them, and pointed towards the moon before hiding in the brush. The men then decided to jump over the fence and search for the creature, but after nearly two hours of combing the grounds, they decided to quit.
Some of these lanky cryptids have names like the rakes or the pale crawlers and have become part of the urban myth landscape. Pale crawlers are supposed to be between five and seven feet tall, with elongated torsos and limbs that move in an arachnid-like gait. Their skin is pale and hairless, although other stories say it is leathery or translucent with veins or bones visible beneath the surface. They also have oversized heads and mouths full of needle-like teeth. Despite their sickly and skeletal appearance, witnesses often report that pale crawlers have amazing speed and dexterity, able to traverse rough terrain and squeeze into tiny spaces with ease.
The rake is a creature said to be about six feet tall, with pale, smooth, hairless skin, and long sharp claws. Individual eye-witness accounts describe it as having a humanoid shape, with a hunched back, dagger-like teeth, and glowing eyes. Some versions of the legend also suggest that the rake can shape-shift. Others attest that it can read people’s thoughts and communicate with them telepathically.
Encounters with both pale crawlers and rakes can naturally be found scattered across social media, the breeding ground for most cryptid yarns. Podcasts and YouTube channels devote considerable airtime to these stories, but as expected most are second or third hand. On the other hand, paranormal phenomena, as we explained in our essay “Perchance to Dream,” can shift in and of consciousness. There’s a photo that has been passed around the internet showing a pale crawler staring into the camera with glowing eyes and a sinister expression. It was supposedly taken in Mississippi a few years ago; however, it looks contrived.
There were two stories from the Rusty West channel about spidery critters that we analyzed (see our essay “Analyzing Strange Online Stories”), but we concluded that the first was caused by the mind playing tricks and the second by an animal, possibly a bear.
Let’s include a couple of tales simply for the record. As always, we can’t guarantee their factuality. This was a reply by someone named Dwayne to a 2024 blog article by Clara Bush entitled “The Rake Urban Legend: “I encountered the rake at 1:30 a.m. while smoking a cigarette it literally hid behind a tree and watched me for a sec then made a loud screech like nothing I’ve ever heard before in my life definitely not a fox nor anything else that describes an animal whatsoever I thought my eyes were messing with me but I took my headphones off and heard the creature and instantly ran back inside i was shaking scared as hell and definitely not going back outside at night ever.” Dwayne never said where he was from nor when it happened. If the story is genuine, is it another case of the brain receiving a false input?
In Lon Strickler’s Phantoms and Monsters website, an anonymous woman reported that she and her boyfriend were walking through the French Quarter of New Orleans where they saw what resembled a “dingy pale, ‘spider man’ going up the side of a building” “Time seemed to stand eerily still,” the witness recounted, “as if time had stopped except for us and it. I looked about two blocks later and it was on the roof – clearly tracking something that I prayed was not us. The silence was truly deafening….”
Strickler also posted this story from a contributor living in Sacramento, California. There’s no date, but we assume it happened recently: “As I was sitting there, I saw a figure come out of the neighborhood a little less than a fourth-of-a-mile ahead of where I was parked, approximately where the neighborhood park (Roseview Park) is. It was hard to see from that distance, but it appeared tall (7 to 8 feet), super skinny and bony, hunched over, with long arms. It sprinted across the road at a speed faster than I’ve ever seen a human go (I couldn’t guess the speed, but it was fast enough to concern me). If it wasn’t for its speed.”
Pale crawlers and rakes made their debut in the early 2000s with the advent of creepypasta or online horror stories. It’s likely that the rakes are a derivative of the pale crawlers since both are practically identical in appearance and share the same attributes. There’s speculation that the pale crawlers are inspired by the 2005 The Descent about a group of spelunkers who are terrorized by monsters called “Crawlers.” The Crawlers are leftovers from the prehistoric era, humans who chose to live underground and mutated into hairless creatures who are blind yet make up for it with extreme agility, crawling around the cave walls like spiders, and an acute sense of smell and hearing. While the Crawlers don’t have long extremities, not extremely long anyway, it’s conceivable that they inspired the pale crawlers. These predators are supposed to symbolize human nature’s evil side.
Closely related to pale crawlers and rakes are the Black Stick Men. These are two-dimensional silhouettes resembling children’s drawings of stick men. According to Stick Man lore, their height ranges between average and extremely tall. They are featureless and have circular heads. Some even don top hats. Black Stick Men are usually spotted during transitional times like at twilight or just before dawn, sauntering leisurely along less-traveled roads and byways. Witnesses have often noticed that these figures have a peculiar "lolloping" gait.
Believers into these creatures like to point out their counterparts in folklore. There’s the Gashadokuro, a Japanese spirit that takes the form of a giant skeleton made of the skulls of people who died in the battlefield or of starvation.
Zherdyay (or Zherdiay) is a night spirit of Slavic myth described as thin as the tree branches and so long in stature that he can warm his hands inside a chimney. He walked aimlessly through the streets and investigated the windows of houses, sometimes knocking on them. In Russia, tall and very thin men were offensively called by the name of this spirit.
In the Russian Republic of Dagestan there are tales about a graveyard demon, usually the restless spirit of a deceased person who wasn’t given enough funeral offerings. The demon is said to be extremely tall, its form sometimes stretching into the sky. They are considered dangerous.
Then we have the wendigo, the feared monstrosity of Algonquin myth. The wendigo is pictured as an extremely tall creature with rotten skin pulled tight over its bones. It is ashen gray in color and the eyes are pushed back into the sockets. Basically, it looks like a recently deceased corpse disinterred from the grave. Some portrayals have it either wearing antlers or having the skull of a deer, but this is considered a contemporary addition. The wendigo is mostly associated with greed, starvation, and winter storms.
With the public’s fascination with cryptids, it’s hardly surprising to hear about wendigo sightings. Most originate in the northern United States and Canada, often in wooded areas and near lakes.
In his blog Wisconsin Frights, Charlie Hintz discusses “a distressed email” he received from a man named David W. who, along with his wife, witnessed something bizarre while hunting in Point Beach State Forest near Two Rivers in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. The incident most likely happened in 2024.
“Me and my wife were walking a bridle trail bow hunting in Nipissing Swamp State Natural Area,” David wrote, “when I started to feel like we were being watched.” Ignoring the sensation, they continued along the trail until they spotted what at first appeared to be a bear standing on its back legs scratching its back against a tree trunk.
David explained: “Then it did something funny, almost like it got down on all fours, and I thought I saw what would be its head. But it was very oddly shaped, almost like a football but horizontal with very long ears pointing up into the back, and I thought what I believe to be very long almost grayish hair.”
David estimated the creature was almost eight to ten feet tall, with long, thin, gangly arms. As he and wife watched, the critter took three large strides and disappeared into the underbrush. They gingerly walked toward the tree where the creature had been standing and discovered large impressions in the ground.
The couple decided to leave and made their way back toward the road when they detected a strong odor. “I smelled the most horrible smell I’ve ever smelled my life, like rot and mud and sulfur,” David wrote. “A nasty smell that just was right in my face.” His wife said that to her it had “a very strong metallic odor of metal.”
The men who saw the long-limbed humanoid in Puerto Rico also noticed a horrid stink. Rank smells as well as a metallic odor sometime accompanies humanoid and monster sightings. Usually when there is intense radiation, the air can smell like ozone, which is a pungent, “electrical” odor, the same smell that David’s wife detected. But the sulphureous stench indicates organic matter is being broken down. Maybe these manifestations can become biological for a short time before they begin to dissipate, the complex organic matter being broken down into simpler substances.
A reader named Pete Wade replied to Hintz’s article saying that during the previous autumn (he didn’t specify where), he glimpsed a creature running from the road and into a corn field and that he had it in sight for about two seconds. At first, he thought it was a large dog or maybe a wolf. “It had grey fur, was on all fours, but had super long limbs, especially in the front,” he said. But after deliberating for a moment, he realized that the creature was too tall and long limbed to be a canine.
Analogous to these legends as well as modern-day accounts of Death Angels, be it a pale crawler, Slender Man, or wendigo, are the images of death in medieval art. In the years following The Black Death, which occurred between 1346 and 1353, killing approximately one-third of Europe’s population, there was a trend in art that emphasized looking death in the face instead of shying away from it. Many artists created images and sculptures that ask the living to “remember death” or memento mori, the theme being that death was always waiting, and that it spared no one. Some memento mori images showed death or its minions coming for an unwilling victim or distracting a dying person from the angel around their bed, hoping to drag them down to hell. But more popular was the Danse Macabre or “Dance of Death” where dancing skeletal figures are shown trying to pull people into their dance.
Europe following the plague became a civilization obsessed with death. But now we too are living in a culture of death. Millennials and Generation Z are perhaps more worried about mortality than any other generation in recent memory. There’s the fear of global warming, mass shootings in schools and malls, and World War III. Adding to this malaise is the gratuitous bloodletting in video games and slasher films. Young people nowadays have a heightened sense of their own end. Dark fantasies about their own funerals and the preparations often cross their mind.
It's relevant that Slender Man and the varieties of Death Angels whether found in cinema or in urban folklore exploded not long after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Wholesale slaughter was rubbed in the faces of the American public and the world for that matter. It’s a catastrophe that those who lived through it are still trying to process. We certainly are. Videos of the two jetliners plunging into the buildings and obliterating hundreds instantaneously or the office workers jumping to their horrific deaths from almost a hundred stories will forever be burnt into our collective memories. In this maelstrom of death and chaos we now live in, the skeletal humanoids of the Danse Macabre have been replaced by skeletal long-limbed cryptids.
Humanity has always divided the universe into good and evil, good identified with life and evil with death. Gods were usually either benevolent or malicious. Admittedly, a few were neutral, being both creators and destroyers. This dichotomy of light and darkness is best illustrated by the story of Horus and Set. Horus is one of the most important deities of ancient Egypt. He was the god of kingship, healing, protection, the sun, and the sky. Set was Horus’ counterpart, a god of deserts, storms, disorder, violence, and foreign oppressors. He was sexually promiscuous even indulging in homosexuality. Some Egyptian texts suggest that Set took the form of a dangerous animal, such as a bull or crocodile. Horus, on the other hand, was most often depicted as a falcon, most likely a lanner falcon or peregrine falcon, or as a man with a falcon’s head.
Set murdered and mutilated his own brother, Osiris. But Osiris's sister and wife, Isis, reassembled his corpse and resurrected him with the help of the goddess Nephthys. The resurrection lasted long enough for the couple to conceive his son and heir, Horus. Horus sought revenge upon Set and defeated him after a series of violent confrontations known as the “contendings.” Horus was crowned king and became the sole God responsible for restoring cosmic order in the land of Egypt.
This story is akin to the battle between Indra, the god of rain and thunder, and Vritra, the personification of droughts, told in the Vedic texts. After a long struggle, Indra was eventually victorious and the rivers which Vritra had imprisoned were released, ending humanity’s suffering. The balance of life was restored.
But in the real world, cosmic disorder continues, the balance of the world is askew, and the skeletons are dancing wildly.
