Crybaby Monster

It was a cool October night back in 1966 when static cut through the evening radio programming in the South Valley in Albuquerque. There had been quite a bit of that over the past few weeks, but on this night, it seemed more consistently static than programming. After a few whacks and an adjustment or two of the antennas with no results, most folk in the area turned their radios off and began to enjoy a crisp quiet of early Autumn. That’s when they first heard it, distant at first but then nearer and quite loud, it was the sound of a crying baby. A few people came out of their homes to search, thinking it must be an infant in distress.

The first person who saw it described it as a black shape, a hole cut in the darkness of night. It looked like a man crouching close to the ground, facing the opposite direction. Thinking it might be one of their neighbors, they cried out to see who it was, but when the creature stood and turned to face them, they knew instantly it was no one they had seen before. It was the shape of a man, about five feet tall, entirely black except for its face, which stared back at them, completely white and with no features.

They yelled again and the creature turned and ran off on all fours more like an animal than a man. Its escape took it in the direction of a father and his 18-year-old son who were also looking for the crying baby. In a hurried fury, it hit the son, hard in the chest knocking him to the ground before running off into the dark.

Over the next few nights, the creature was seen lurking as far north as Old Town bridge, and although it was wasn’t seen again in South Valley, it was heard almost nightly for nearly a full month, the sound described as “the most horrible cry, like a baby.” Not only did radios cut out but some said while the creature was around cats wouldn’t meow, and dogs would cower behind furniture, refusing to move. The boy who was struck by the creature claimed anytime it was near his chest would throb with pain. One resident recalled a similar creature making the rounds back in the 40s, wondering out loud “how does it cry without a face?”