Cryptid Chemistry: The Squonk!

Introducing the squonk

0:00Could be a very ugly wild pig, could be somebody's pug who has had a little bit too much to eat, and maybe also has mange.

0:14I'm Paige. And I'm Megan. And this is Spooky Science Sisters. Hello, you're listening to Spooky Science Sisters, a podcast where we present to you a science-based and probably very giggly, discussion on all things strange and unusual. In this episode, we'll be telling you all about America's saddest cryptid, the squonk. Yeah, which is appropriate because as you can tell from that one line that Paige said,

0:44Paige has the saddest voice today. So mostly it's going to be me telling you all about the squonk and a little bit of Paige, but that's okay. But first we have to do something spooky. So, Paige, before I do mine, which I think sort of applies to both of us, do you have anything spooky that you wanted to share in particular? I don't have anything spooky, but I feel like we should be asking for other people's something spookies, right?

1:16For Halloween listener stories. Oh, you're totally right. Yeah, this will come out just in time, like very beginning of October, that we are going to need your stories for our annual Halloween listener stories episode that we do. So if you have a ghost encounter or cryptid encounter or some other strange happening that you would like to tell us about and that you would like us to take a stab at debunking,

1:49or maybe you debunked it and you want to tell us about how it turned out for you, that is also great as well. You should send us those stories. You can either DM them on social media. You can send them to our email, which is thesisters at spookysciencesisters.com. There are many ways to get in touch with us, and I will see them, and I will respond and let you know that I've gotten it. Yay. Yay. So that aside, my something spooky for this week, and like I said, I think this one really goes for both Paige and I,

2:23because we were both so excited that just this past week, a new species of cat was identified in Bolivia. And it sounds like they sort of caught one, and then we're like, oh, man, this is something totally different. It's a little tiny baby that doesn't look that different from a house cat. I think they thought that it was a house cat and then realized that it was a very small wild cat that only weighs around three pounds. But I think that things like that sort of make doing a cryptid episode sort of perfect,

2:56because it goes to show that there are still animals out there in the world, and we're not just talking about tiny bugs or fish or, you know, weird sponges sitting at the bottom of the ocean. We're talking about, like, a mammal that weighs a few pounds wandering around the jungle of Bolivia that science did not know about. So there's hope for the cryptid people yet. There is hope that the squonk could be out there. Yeah. If you've not looked at this cat yet, you must do it.

3:28Pause the episode. Do what you got to do to go look up the cat, because I would die. I've never seen this cat in real life, and I would die for this cat. I love it so much.

The legend of Pennsylvania

3:40Yeah.

The legend of Pennsylvania

3:41It's so good. Okay. So I am going to be telling you guys about a cryptid called the squonk. And the squonk is just about as ridiculous as its name sounds. It is a creature that makes its home in the hemlock forest of Pennsylvania. It has this loose, wrinkly skin that is covered in warts and moles. And largely because it is so ugly and it is aware of the fact that it is very ugly, it is very sad and it cries all the time.

4:18And hunters can apparently track it by the trail of tears it leaves behind. And I will say that to me, most of the drawings basically just look like a very ugly wild pig. And we will get back to that in a little bit. I think I agree, but there are like two or three drawings out there that look a lot like Jimothy to me. And it's not wrinkly, but it's just sort of like short and squatty and it looks like a Jimothy. Yeah.

4:48Yeah, but I think the squonk is supposed to be basically hairless, right? Well, yeah, I just mean like body shape. Yeah. Okay. I got you. But Jimothy is beautiful. And I think a lot of people would argue that the squonk is sort of ugly, cute as well. Yeah, like a pug. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, could be a very ugly wild pig. Could be somebody's pug who has had a little bit too much to eat and maybe also has mange.

5:21Okay, so the squonk is crepuscular, which means that it is active at dawn or dusk. And this is specifically because it doesn't want to be in too bright of light, again, in case others are able to observe its ugliness. It wants to hide away and the best time to try and see one is apparently on a night where the moon is bright because the squonk will be out and about, but it will be moving very slowly because it wants to be very aware of its surroundings and try to avoid seeing its reflection in any like puddles or bodies of water that might be around that it might pass.

6:06I mean, basically, I am the squonk.

6:11Just trying to avoid your reflection at all times. I'm trying to avoid my ugliness.

6:19We've all felt like the squonk at one point. For sure.

6:24Everybody's had those days. Everyone's had squonk days. So I'm going to text you, when I'm not sure about like my outfit or something. It's like I'm having a real squonk moment right now. Um, okay. So the other thing about the squonk is that if it is cornered or it gets particularly frightened, it can actually dissolve in a puddle of its own tears. And sort of one of the famous stories is that someone caught one once, was able to like trick it into climbing into a bag and was on his way home with the squonk in the bag.

7:01And then all of a sudden the bag got way lighter and he opened it up and all that was left was like some tears and some bubbles. So obviously this is not, like this is just mostly a silly cryptid and you can tell that from the description going in. But the squonk comes from and first appears in a 1910 book called Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods with a few desert and mountain beasts. And that was written by William T. Cox and illustrated by Court Dubois.

7:35And that book is a compilation of stories or tall tales that were told by lumberjacks to pass the time sitting around the fire at the lumber camp. And this is a job that, you know, you're working in pretty remote areas. It could be pretty lonely. It could also be a very dangerous job. So these are people who had to find ways to make it fun, take the pressure off, find ways to entertain themselves. The book also includes equally silly creatures like the hoedag and the slide rock bolter.

8:10The hoedag is a famous Wisconsin cryptid. The slide rock bolter is like a whale-like creature that lives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Colorado and, you know, slides down hills and eats people at the bottom. So, yeah, they're pretty silly animals. And I think the author is pretty clear that he is compiling stories of creatures that were made up for fun and entertainment. I did want to read a short passage from the introduction that I thought was nice.

8:41He says, Much has been written concerning the lumberjack and his life. But so far as I know, very few of the strange creatures of his imagination have ever been described by the naturalist or sketched by the artist. The lumber regions are contracting.

9:13Stretches of forests that once seemed boundless are all but gone. And many a stream is quiet that once ran full of logs and echoed to the song of the river driver. Some say that the old type of logger himself is becoming extinct. It is my purpose in this little book to preserve at least a description and sketch of some of the interesting animals which he has originated. So, yeah, I just like that little passage because they're silly, but they're things that are worth preserving and sort of this reminder that the world is shrinking and we're losing some of that whimsy.

9:47So, that's where this guant comes from. Very sad little dude might cry himself to death. You could say, again, the same thing about me sometimes.

Pigs and chemistry

9:58There's not really a ton of debunking to do here because this is very clearly just a made-up fun creature by some guys working out in the woods. But as we know with these things, a lot of times people take them very seriously and go on to, you know, have sightings of them and it turns into this whole thing. So, I first asked, you know, have there actually been any sightings of this guant? And as far as I can tell, like, no one's actually seen one.

10:31Everybody knows this is just a silly thing that they say lives in the Pennsylvania woods. And I was sort of surprised because I really expected there to be at least, like, one or two people out there claiming that they saw one of these things. Like, even, like, the Loveland Frogman, like, people see that and, like, that's a pretty silly cryptid out in the world. So, I thought somebody has to have thought they've seen it. Yeah, I'm really surprised. I was also looking and... Yeah, I couldn't really find anything. So, this is just a frenzies one.

11:03But I sort of went into this thinking, like, well, if there had been any sightings, then probably I would guess that someone has seen a wild pig. Or I guess, like we mentioned earlier, they're seeing someone's mangy, overweight pug. We don't know. But the next question that I asked myself, we're going to be scientific about this. We're going to, you know, we're going to dig in a little bit to see what's plausible. I asked myself, okay, well, does Pennsylvania even have wild pigs?

11:33Because that would shoot a hole in my theory. And they do. They are invasive Eurasian boars that were introduced to North America in the 1500s. The Pennsylvania Game Commission does say that they are destructive and dangerous. And there's no limit on hunting or killing them because they are invasive. However, it sounds like there have only been sightings of these wild boars in Pennsylvania since the early 2000s. So the squonk, if it's rooted in any sort of truth, and we think it might have been some sort of weird pig that somebody saw,

12:10must have been an escaped, like, domesticated barnyard pig, not like a wild boar. The other question that we can ask ourselves is, do pigs cry? And I can tell you that I think crying tears, like emotional tears, is a distinctly human characteristic. But pigs obviously do produce tears. They have tear ducts.

12:40But they don't cry like we would. Like, you know, they just have tears that flush things out of their eyes and keep their eyeballs moist. They don't look at themselves and cry because of their ugliness. No, they do not stare at themselves in the mirror and cry. Honestly, I don't really know what would happen if you showed a pig a mirror. That's another good question that I could have asked myself. I assume it would be sort of similar to, like, a smarter dog seeing itself in the mirror. Like, it would maybe have some awareness that it was looking at itself. I don't know. Can dot? Well, we don't know.

13:11We're going down a whole rabbit hole here. All right.

13:15So, you know, pigs can't. They can't cry. They can't produce tears emotionally like we can. There are also other animals out there in the woods that I thought, well, maybe if somebody heard crying, you know, they thought that it was some weird creature out there. Pennsylvania does have ravens that are remarkably good at mimicking human speech and sounds. I don't really know why they would mimic a crying person or a crying creature, but you never

13:45know. They make a lot of weird noises. I thought maybe there were, like, certain vocalizations of a red fox that could sound like someone who was really upset. Although I think more often red foxes, people mistake for a woman screaming bloody murder out in the woods. So it seems a little less likely. So that was a little bit of a dead end. But, you know, we had to look into it. My next question was circling back to the crying and, okay, let's say that we have this creature and it can cry so hard that it dissolves itself.

14:20So I said, okay, well, what would the chemistry of tears need to be to dissolve something akin to a wild pig? And we've actually talked about this before. I can't remember what episode we did that, like, certainly put us on some sort of watch list in the past. And I had to Google again, you know, how do you dissolve a body in order to look into or remind myself of some stuff for this episode? And just thought, man, my NSA agent is having a bad night right now.

14:56But anyway, to dissolve tissue and bone, you need either a concentrated acid or a very strong basic solution. And human tears tend to be slightly basic. They have a pH of around 7.4 to 7.5. And since we've decided our closest non-cryptid animal for the squonk is probably a wild pig, and pigs are actually used in place of humans sometimes because we have, like, similar anatomy

15:30in terms of size and function of various organs in scientific studies, it seems like the squonk would need to have alkaline tears or would probably have alkaline tears like we do. So when bodies or human bodies are purposefully dissolved in a basic solution for the purposes of cremation, it's known as alkaline hydrolysis or water cremation, another thing that we have talked about before on this podcast.

16:02And that requires a solution that has a pH of about 14. So the pH scale goes from 0 to 14, where 0 is very acidic, 7 is neutral, so just, you know, pure water. And 14 is as basic as you can get. So it's a very basic solution that this squonk would need to cry to dissolve itself. And yeah, it would have to cry a lot of it very fast in order to do this.

16:38And it would probably not be a super pleasant way to go. So if we're talking literally, hopefully this is just more of a magical transformation into tears. The alkaline hydrolysis requires you to be, like, in a pressure vessel and heated. So, like, it wouldn't just be, there would be a lot that would have to happen. Overall, in the name of debunking things, this is not a super plausible thing for a living creature to be able to do on its own. You require some very specialized equipment.

17:11But yeah, importantly, probably it's some sort of basic alkaline dissolution happening here. Okay. I went on a side quest. Okay. About the pigs and the mirror. So apparently, Cambridge did a study and they put pigs in front of a mirror. After five hours spent with that mirror, they then put a food bowl, like, visible in the mirror.

17:42Mm-hmm. But hidden from, like, the pig. Okay. You know, so, like, you could see it in the mirror, but you couldn't, like, look to your right or whatever and see it. Seven out of the eight pigs could find the food bowl by looking at the mirror, knowing that the mirror showed them an image of its surroundings. Like, it looked at the mirror and knew that, like, the bowl was over here and went and could find the food bowl based off of the image in the mirror. So, like, I feel like if they can find a food bowl in the mirror and they can recognize their

18:14surroundings in a mirror, they'd probably be able to recognize themselves. Yeah, because they can recognize that the mirror is showing them, like, reflecting back something about their environment. That is clever. You know, science man, it's out there asking, answering the weird questions about pigs and knowing stuff about their reflection and how it relates to cryptids for you. So, amazing. It, like, loosely relates to cryptids.

18:46Hey, we made the connection.

18:52It counts. I think that's awesome.

18:56So, my final thing here, because I feel like that's about as far as you can go with debunking and relating it to real science with something silly like the squonk, which is very clearly just a fun campfire story. But I was tickled to find that in 2000, a chemist named TJ Sommer published a paper called Chemical Squonks in the journal Chemical Innovation.

19:27And the paper is not actually about the cryptid, but it's rather about chemical substances that are stable in some solution or, like, their quote-unquote wild form. But when scientists attempt to isolate or capture them, they polymerize or decompose so they can't be isolated to either, like, concentrate them or use them for other purposes. But just like the squonk who will just dissolve into a puddle of useless tears if you capture

19:58it, there are chemical squonks out there as well. I love that. Yeah. So, for a cryptid episode, there was a lot more chemistry than you ever might have imagined. You nailed it. Squonk confirms. Oh, yes. And at the bottom of the notes, just for Paige, I included a picture of a pug standing in front of a mirror that someone shared, and he's just facing away from the mirror, sort of looking distressed. And it says he keeps looking at himself in the mirror and crying, and the title is Squonk

20:31Confirmed.

20:34Because I think you're right. Like, mangy pug is another good option if we were thinking of a real animal that somebody might have seen and mistaken for, you know, some sort of weird creature in the woods.

20:48I mean, yeah, I love pugs. But if I saw one of those things looking back at me in the middle of the night and wasn't expecting it.

20:56I might freak out a little bit. You might be freaking out. What's going on over there? Yeah. But to be clear, I would be the one crying, not the animal. Okay.

Episode wrap up

21:07All right.

Episode wrap up

21:08Well, that was fun. Mm-hmm. That wraps up our 108th episode. If you liked this episode, hit subscribe and share with a friend. Check the show notes for links to all of our social media accounts, our Discord server, and Patreon. If you have any questions about previous topics or ideas for future episodes, email us at thesistersatspookysciencesisters.com. As always, thank you for listening and stay spooky.