EDITORIAL:

Fortean Maine provides much to inspire fans of the weird

Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

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Stinging ocean blobs, sharks and, of course, the mutant Beast of Turner.

It's been a good month for Maine among America's fans of the weird. Maine's weirdness potential is high to begin with, jammed, as we are, like a thumb into Canada - itself an inscrutable bastion of weirdness in the eyes of many Americans.

Then, there's author Stephen King, who's made millions burnishing Maine's image as a place far-flung and anachronistic enough to harbor all manner of anomalies and plain strangeness.

The jellyfish and sharks recently seen along Maine's southern coast fall into the anomaly category: well-known ocean critters, just out of place.

But the weirdometer was pegged by the Beast of Turner, a doglike creature whose presumptive depredations and nocturnal vocalizations spawned little interest until an untimely encounter with a car bumper turned it into vulture bait. And a posthumous celebrity.

DNA tests have since proved it to be a dog, but this anticlimactic result came after eyewitness Michelle O'Donnell's description of a "hybrid mutant of something" galloped around the Internet for more than a week.

The news erupted in the crypto-sphere with a prominent Maine dateline. Notwithstanding cryptozooloist Loren Coleman's immediate dismissal of the beast as a dog, a spicy Web bouillabaisse of speculation and pronouncement was served up to all who Googled.

And despite its reduction to Canis, the Beast will take its place among Maine things Fortean, a word that describes followers of researcher and writer Charles Hoy Fort. Fort felt that people with a need to believe in the marvelous were no more prejudiced or gullible than those who need to deny that marvels exist.

So the Beast of Turner's hold on us may be less, it turns out, about Maine's being a repository for the unexplained as it is about our timeless appetite for things that howl in the night.