Sam Grant is looking to compile Maine creature sightings. But not of moose. Not of surly bears.
Think Bigfoot. Sea monsters. Really, any monster will do.
Timothy Sheehan wants tens of thousands of sea lamprey for scientific research. (Spoiler alert: It’s not going to end well for the fish.) He’s paying $2 apiece, if you have them.
And a Westbrook artist is looking to unload a 5-foot-tall, handmade walking stick whose troll-ish face is topped with “dripping real sharks’ teeth, Maine black bear hair and authentic Russian boar horns coming from his head.”
Amid the offers of free scrap metal, used cars for sale and unusual-but-not-outright weird (see the person in York offering up a cache of empty Tidy Cat buckets and pics of how to turn 20 into a personal storage center), Craigslist in Maine has some intriguing and unexplained stuff going on.
There’s a 4-foot-tall “Wizard of Oz”-style flying monkey for sale down in Saco that used to be a regular at a national “Wizard of Oz” convention. (Oh, the stories it could tell, my pretty.)
Or there’s the artist’s self-described “Bizarre Handmade Walking Stick,” No. 64 in a series of sticks.
“You will gather a crowd wherever you take him, scare the kids or just perfect for a display,” promises the listing.
It’s green with glass eyes and aforementioned animal extras — no question it’ll draw a crowd.
Also found on Craigslist this week: a buyer on the hunt for your weird — specifically, “the most obscure, bizarre and unique collectibles that are in Maine.”
It’s signed vaguely, intriguingly, “The Addams Family.”
No family member returned an email asking about the weirdest thing ever offered.
Sheehan, on the hunt for sea lampreys, co-founded the company Gulf of Maine in 2002 with his wife. It’s part seafood business, part educational specimen supplier. He turned to Craigslist after his regular sea lamprey connections in Michigan dried up when officials started sterilizing males to reduce the population.
“The past couple years we’ve only been able to get 1,000 or 500 as opposed to 10,000 or 20,000, so it doesn’t make sense for a little Maine company to travel all the way to Michigan to get 500 eels,” said Sheehan, a former high school biology teacher. “That’s why I was trying to find them here, on the East Coast.”
The Craigslist ad has gotten responses, but no eels as yet.
Gulf of Maine sells hundreds of live and preserved specimens. The sea lamprey go to a wholesale supplier who ships them to classrooms for dissection.
“I’m not going to whitewash it: We catch stuff and kill it. We do it for science,” said Sheehan, who holds several state licenses for the work. “This winter I bought 50,000 starfish from guys who run scallop boats. We were able to pay 25 cents apiece for something they were just going to pitch back in.”
The Washington County company used to sell 300,000 fetal pigs a year for dissection. They were stillborn, collected from major farms in Canada.
“They’d wash them up and freeze them in bags and once a month my kids and I would drive around like the garbage man, but we’d pick up 5,000 or 10,000 fetal pigs, frozen, and bring them back to our shop,” Sheehan said.
Then, that business went to China. No more frozen field trips.
Grant, who lives in Plymouth, near Pittsfield, is hoping to learn what’s out in the Maine woods. That’s why he headed to Craigslist to ask for creature-sighting stories or photos.
“The only response I have had so far is someone making fun,” Grant said. “He says that Bigfoot is renting his house and has not paid rent. I’m a Bigfoot hunter. I like to gather as much info as possible to help understand these creatures.”
He may want to connect with John Raffensperger.
The Keene, N.H., man put an ad up looking for people to head out into the woods with him to look for Bigfoot around New England and included: “P.S. I know some crazy stuff goes on here on Craigslist but I’m NOT looking for ‘a friend’ to ‘play’ in the woods.”
Raffensperger said he’s been razzed plenty by his wife and friends about the ad. He’s gotten a single response so far, from another New Hampshire man headed up to look in Northern Maine.
Raffensperger is planning a search near here when he visits a friend in Poland this summer.
“The person I’m going up there with is a doctor and he’s harassed me mercilessly about this,” Raffensperger said, laughing. “Any time I’m out in the woods, I really enjoy looking around and seeing what I can see. I’m going to drag him out in the woods and I’ll go look for Bigfoot.”
Weird, Wicked Weird is a monthly feature on the strange, unexplained and intriguing in Maine. Send ideas, photos and the most obscure, bizarre thing you’ve ever found to kskelton@sunjournal.com.
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