Traverspine Gorilla (crypto-hominid)

Traverspine Gorilla is an appellation for a crypto-hominid reported in the Labrador interior region of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, so-named for the Traverspine River, a tributary of Churchill River (Grand River), near where it was claimed to have been active in the early twentieth century.

In Elliott Merrick's relation of the account of the Michelin family, first published in True North (1933), the "gorilla" was described as a "huge hairy thing with low-hanging arms" and a distinctive white mane, its face having expressive features, such that it could be said to have a grin; and it was supposed that, when standing erect, the creature was seven-feet tall, and the Michelin's took paper measurements of its twelve-inch long footprints, "narrow at the heel and forking at the front into two broad, round-ended toes," found deep enough in the snow that they estimated it might weigh five hundred pounds. In one notable encounter, the gorilla was said to have used a club to attack the Michelin home, hitting "a corner of the house with such force it made the beams tremble."

In the journals of Harry Paddon, a British physician, dated the winter of 1913, we find another relation of the Michelin family's encounters,[P] recounting an incident where the children were scared by "a strange, barely human face" in the willows and that the creature was driven away by their mother, who fired at it with a shotgun, as well as further incidents where tracks were found and sounds of the creature (and a mate) were heard, but that the creature was neither captured nor killed after several hunts for it. Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, another British physician and missionary, in his 1919 autobiography, likewise related the stories told to him by the Michelin family, adding the detail that "the French agent of Révillon Frères" was involved in the search for the creature, and that the "stride was about eight feet, the marks as of the cloven hoofs of an ox."[G]