Cryptids and Urban Legends
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98 free Cryptids and Urban Legends trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
43 free Cryptids and Urban Legends trivia questions with answers. Cryptid trivia for anyone who has ever squinted at a blurry photo and wondered. This quiz covers the famous ones and the deep cuts: Bigfoot and the Patterson-Gimlin film, Nessie and the surgeon's photograph, the chupacabra's real explanation, Mothman and the Silver Bridge, the Jersey Devil, the Yeti and how it became the Abominable Snowman, the kraken, the skunk ape, the wendigo, the bunyip, mokele-mbembe, the Flatwoods monster, the Dover Demon and the Fouke Monster. It also asks about cryptozoology itself, its founders and its status as a pseudoscience, and about the 'cryptids' that turned out to be real, such as the coelacanth and the okapi. Easy questions come first; the harder ones will stump the true believers. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the creatures, the hoaxes and the people who chased them, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
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Q 01The Jersey Devil of American folklore is said to haunt which region of New Jersey?
Pine Barrens
Pine Barrens: in one week of January 1909, newspapers printed hundreds of Jersey Devil sightings from across South Jersey, and the scare closed schools and kept workers at home.
Q 02The Goatman urban legend is most associated with which US state, especially Prince George's County?
Maryland
Maryland: one version of the tale makes the Goatman a scientist at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center whose experiment on goats backfired, leaving him half man, half goat.
Q 03The modern jackalope legend, a jackrabbit with antlers, was popularised in which US state?
Wyoming
Wyoming: Douglas Herrick and his brother mounted deer antlers on a jackrabbit in Douglas, Wyoming, and the town's Chamber of Commerce now issues joke jackalope hunting licences good only on June 31.
Q 04Ogopogo, the serpentine lake monster of British Columbia folklore, is said to inhabit which lake?
Okanagan
Okanagan Lake in British Columbia is Ogopogo's reputed home; Syilx elders use an older name for it and describe a sacred being in the water rather than a monster.
Q 05By legend, the Jersey Devil was the cursed 13th child of a woman known by what surname?
Leeds
Leeds: 'Mother Leeds' is said to have cursed her unborn 13th child; historian Brian Regal traces the tale to almanac-maker Daniel Leeds, whom Quaker rivals accused in a 1700 pamphlet of working for the devil.
Q 06The Yeti goes by which other name in Western popular culture?
Abominable Snowman
Abominable Snowman: the name comes from a 1921 newspaper report that mangled the guides' phrase; 'snowman' was right, but the word rendered as 'abominable' meant something closer to 'man-bear'.
Q 07The 1955 'Hopkinsville Goblins' farmhouse encounter took place in which US state?
Kentucky
Kentucky: on 21 August 1955 the Sutton family fled to Hopkinsville police, saying 'little men' had besieged their farmhouse at Kelly; the area now marks the date with a Little Green Men Days festival.
Q 08Old West campfire tall tales credit the jackalope, the horned rabbit of folklore, with what ability?
Mimicking human voices
Mimicking human voices was its party trick: cowboys singing by the fire could hear jackalopes singing along, usually as a tenor.
Q 09La Llorona, the 'Weeping Woman' of Mexican folklore, is said to wander riverbanks crying for whom?
Her lost children
Her lost children: in most tellings La Llorona drowned them herself, and she is condemned to wander the waterways searching for them, weeping as she goes.
Q 10In which region is Bigfoot most often said to roam?
The Pacific Northwest
The Pacific Northwest: reports cluster so thickly in its forests that Skamania County, Washington, passed a 1969 ordinance making it a crime to kill a Bigfoot.
Q 11Who coined the word 'Bigfoot' in 1958?
Logging crew members in Humboldt County
Logging crew members in Humboldt County nicknamed their unseen track-maker 'Big Foot' after bulldozer operator Jerry Crew found giant prints at the work site, and the Humboldt Times put the name in print.
Q 12What did Ray Wallace's family reveal in 2002 about the 1958 Bigfoot tracks?
He had carved wooden feet and faked them
He had carved wooden feet and faked them: after Wallace died in 2002, his children said he had stomped the giant tracks into the mud himself and that it was all just a joke.
Q 13Patterson and Gimlin shot the famous 1967 Bigfoot footage at which Northern California site?
Q 21What have investigators found the 'chupacabras' of the American Southwest to actually be?
Canids with severe mange
Canids with severe mange: DNA tests and necropsies showed the hairless, fanged 'creatures' were coyotes and dogs whose fur had fallen out from sarcoptic mange.
Q 22Mothman, the winged humanoid of American folklore, was reportedly seen around which West Virginia town in 1966 and 1967?
Point Pleasant
Point Pleasant embraced the legend: the sightings ran from November 1966 to December 1967, and the town now has a Mothman statue, a museum and a festival every September.
Q 23Which disaster did John Keel's 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies link to the sightings?
Bluff Creek
Bluff Creek in Northern California drew Patterson and Gimlin in October 1967 because of its track finds; the 1958 prints that gave Bigfoot its name had turned up near the same creek.
Q 14Which 1987 comedy follows a family who take home a Bigfoot after hitting him with their car?
Harry and the Hendersons
Harry and the Hendersons: the family think the creature is dead and drive him home, where 'Harry' wakes up and turns out to be so gentle that hiding him becomes the real problem.
Q 15Loch Ness Monster sightings surged in 1933 after the completion of what?
A road
A road finished along the loch's shore in 1933 gave drivers clear views of the water; that spring a local couple reported an enormous animal rolling in it, and the newspapers took it from there.
Q 16The earliest 'monster' report near Loch Ness appears in a 7th-century life of which Irish-born saint?
Columba
Adomnán's 7th-century Life of St Columba has Columba banishing a water beast in the River Ness in 565; water-beast tales were common in saints' lives.
Q 17Nessie's head in the 1934 'surgeon's photograph' was mounted on what?
A toy submarine
A toy submarine carried the sculpted head and neck: Christian Spurling confessed in the 1990s that big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell staged the picture, which surgeon Robert Kenneth Wilson fronted.
Q 18Believers most often picture the Loch Ness Monster as a surviving member of which group of prehistoric reptiles?
Plesiosaurs
Plesiosaurs, long-necked sea reptiles, became Nessie's popular image through the 1934 photograph and Sir Peter Scott's paintings; the loch froze solid in the ice ages, which sinks the idea.
Q 19What does 'chupacabra' literally mean?
Goat-sucker
'Chupacabra' is Spanish for 'goat-sucker' (chupar, to suck; cabra, goat), named for its supposed habit of draining the blood of goats and other livestock.
Q 20The chupacabra legend began with 1995 reports of drained livestock in which place?
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico: investigator Benjamin Radford found that witness Madelyne Tolentino's influential description of the creature matched the alien in the 1995 film Species, which she had recently seen.
The Silver Bridge collapse
The Silver Bridge collapse killed 46 people on 15 December 1967; Keel's book tied the 13 months of sightings to the disaster, and the idea of Mothman as an omen stuck.
Q 24What does the 'crypto' in cryptozoology mean?
Hidden
Hidden: cryptozoology is the search for 'hidden' animals, a field traced to zoologists Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan T. Sanderson, who argued that creatures known only from rumour deserved a rigorous hunt.
Q 25'Bessie' is the serpent-like monster said to live in which Great Lake?
Lake Erie
Lake Erie: after a burst of 'South Bay Bessie' sightings in 1990, a marina owner offered a $5,000 reward for her live capture and put up a sign naming his marina her future home.
Q 26How is cryptozoology classified by mainstream science?
A pseudoscience
Mainstream science classes cryptozoology as a pseudoscience because it does not follow the scientific method, though its fans like to note that some real animals were once dismissed as rumour.
Q 27A journalist's mistranslated report on a 1921 expedition to which mountain gave the Yeti its lurid Western nickname?
Everest
Everest: guides on the 1921 British reconnaissance blamed large footprints on a 'metoh-kangmi', and journalist Henry Newman, misreading 'metoh' as 'filthy', then swapped in a grander word.
Q 28DNA tests in 2011 showed that a 'Yeti finger' from a Nepalese monastery had come from what?
A human
A human: the finger was taken from the monastery in the 1950s and is said to have been smuggled out of India by film star James Stewart, in his wife's lingerie case.
Q 29The Honey Island Swamp Monster is a legend of which US state?
Louisiana
Louisiana: Harlan Ford said he first met the tall, hairy creature in 1963, and in 1974 he and a friend reported its tracks beside a wild boar with a gashed throat; its nicknames now include the Wookiee.
Q 30The Kraken legend is thought to have originated from sightings of which real animal?
Giant squid
Giant squid, rare deep-sea animals that can grow more than eight metres long, are thought to lie behind the kraken; until specimens were studied, they were known mainly from sailors' monster stories.