by Sarah A. Peterson-Camacho
“No torso, no visible head, no arms: just a pair of legs strutting awkwardly across the frame and the lawn. The sentient legs are covered in what appears to be loose white cloth or flesh. Overall, it’s reminiscent of the haunted pants in Dr. Seuss’s What Was I Scared Of? … The only lesson to learn here is that Dr. Seuss was right: sentient pants are terrifying.” –J.W. Ocker, The United States of Cryptids, 2022
Monday, Nov. 5, 2007, 12:41am, 44 F, 68% humidity
And there it was.
Fresno Nightcrawler (digital drawing by Steven Camacho)
Like an emaciated ghost gliding through a neon haze of emerald static, an impossibly slender column of white ectoplasm swept across the frosty front lawn of a suburban residence in Fresno, California, its stick-like shadow knifing along beside it.
Gazing blearily at the grainy CCTV footage flickering before him, the South Fresno property’s owner—a middle-aged man named José—wondered for a moment if he was still dreaming. His dog’s frantic barking still echoed through the silent household, however, and as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he could hardly believe what he now saw.
Could this graceful interloper be a mere trick of the streetlights, or an actual ghost? But no, the mysterious figure was corporeal enough to cast an ebon spear of shadow.
The TV monitor next to his bed glowed an otherworldly green as José swung his feet into their slippers. Still watching the screen intently, he then saw a second, smaller form appear. Its shape was markedly different, though: a pair of billowing white trousers striding with purpose across the icy lawn, their gait slow but steady. It was now 12:46am.
Had José really been staring at this security monitor for over five whole minutes? “Perplexed, he rushed through the house to find his brother sleeping in a nearby room,” writes Adrian Gonzalez in a 2021 Paranorms blog post. “He quickly explained what he saw, and asked his brother to come and check it out.
“José’s brother opened the front curtains and looked outside, but didn’t see anything of note. So they woke up the rest of the family to review the footage. The unfortunate thing about this surveillance system was that if the video [was] rewound, the footage would be overwritten on playback. Knowing this, Jose pulled out his video camera to record the rare footage off the monitor.
“His brother went outside that night, [and] he didn’t see anything, but one part of their yard had tiles—and he saw footprints, small footprints.”
Haunted to the point of despair by the truly freaky surveillance footage, José kept to himself for the next couple of weeks, refusing to even leave his house. Worried for his mental and physical well-being, his concerned family contacted local Spanish television station Univision—and showed the network the grainy video that José had recorded off the security monitor.
Enter Los Angeles paranormal investigator Victor Camacho. The host of Los Desvelados (The Sleepless Ones)—a popular paranormal Spanish-language radio show and later podcast—“he was called by a Univision reporter, saying they had amazing video footage that they wanted him to see,” Gonzalez writes.
“Initially, Univision pushed for a definitive statement of an alien sighting, but Camacho countered, saying he needed to get all the facts…The reporter reached out to José, and asked him to speak with Camacho…
“José was finally convinced to come down to the television station. During the short interview with Camacho, José was visibly shaken and uncomfortable. He refused to show his face on camera…After the interview, Camacho left with little more than the story. He didn’t have access to the original footage, or any contact information for José.”
Several months passed, and in February of 2008, José had a change of heart—he reached out to the puzzled paranormal investigator, inviting him to visit the scene of the bizarre November 2007 sighting. So Victor Camacho came up from Los Angeles, and got the lay of the land. He interviewed José, his brother, and the rest of the man’s family. “…all evidence was gone, but Camacho got a better estimate of the size of the diminutive, but leggy, pair of entities. They ranged in height from only two to four feet tall.
“Later, Camacho and another team tried to recreate the footage using the original surveillance system, thinking perhaps someone was messing with José or his family,” writes Gonzalez. “Camacho says nothing could compare to the original footage. He emphasizes, ‘For me, the video is real. José didn’t make it, neither did his brother.’”
Presenting the surreal surveillance footage at the Mutual UFO Network’s 39th-annual International UFO Symposium in San Jose, California, in July of 2008, Victor Camacho lent credence to the theory that the pair of otherworldly beings were of an extraterrestrial nature. But the paranormal researcher could not say for certain, one way or the other. He stood by his conviction, however, that the footage was absolutely genuine.
And it wasn’t until a couple of years later that a short-lived paranormal reality show would thrust this diminutive Fresno entity onto the national stage—and would bestow upon the peculiar creature a name of its very own.
7-11 employee’s Fresno Nightcrawler tattoos, an employee who wished to remain nameless
Premiering on the SyFy television network in the fall of 2010, Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files featured a team of paranormal investigators—led by former FBI agent Ben Hansen—examining found footage of alleged supernatural phenomena, in order to deem the supposed evidence of the otherworldly as either “fact or faked.” Each of the eventual 36 episodes (spread across two seasons) showcased a pair of visual media of purported paranormal activity.
Appearing on the second episode of Fact or Faked, Season 1—which aired Wednesday, October 6, 2010—in a segment called “Unwanted Visitors,” José’s November 2007 surveillance footage made its debut on national television. Perplexed, the show’s investigators attempted to debunk the video by recreating the supernatural sighting—but failed miserably. The group declared the footage to be genuine, or “fact.”
But perhaps more significantly, the investigators of Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files had christened the leggy little critter with an actual identity: the Fresno Nightcrawler. “And with a national TV show giving it a great bump in the public awareness”—science writer Brian Dunning told listeners on the Tuesday, April 5, 2022 episode of his award-winning, weekly science podcast Skeptoid—“the Fresno Nightcrawler officially became a new face in the annals of cryptozoology.
“Following this publicity is when more videos of Nightcrawlers began to appear. The next popular one was posted to YouTube in April 2011, by UFO and gaming YouTuber Dovus X-Life Operior, who said it was security camera footage recorded the month before by retired friends of his who live inside Yosemite National Park, not far from Fresno. In this footage, a pair of Nightcrawlers—again, one taller and one smaller—walk down a paved pathway.”
Dated Monday, March 28, 2011, at approximately 2:18 a.m., this footage is much clearer, depicting the casual late-night stroll of two unhurried Nightcrawlers—a taller one leading its much-smaller companion—that appear to be composed of the same billowing white trousers, each one topped off by a small white head. Their gait is slow but steady, much like their Fresno brethren, and very careful—almost as if the pair is walking on stilts.
“He [YouTuber Dovus X-Life Operior] said he visited at his friends’ request,” Dunning continued, “and took a daytime photo of the pathway from the vantage point of the security camera—placing a baby stroller on the pathway for scale. He superimposed the video onto it, to show that the taller Nightcrawler is about the height of the stroller, and the smaller one is about half as big…Taking about a minute to traverse the frame, these creatures seem like loose fabric, and may have something like a small head on top.
“One notes the fortuity of Dovus X-Life Operior—an obvious fan of UFOs and the paranormal—happening to be the one to receive the call from the anonymous and apocryphal people who caught incredible unknown creatures on video.”
Fresno Nightcrawler magnet from the Spirit Halloween store, which attempts to make the cryptid way creepier
And from there, the Fresno Nightcrawler shot off into the online stratosphere of the cryptozoology community, inspiring fan art, cryptid think-pieces, and YouTube videos galore, not to mention a vast range of related products: decals, bumper stickers, keychains, jewelry, apparel, pins, plushies, candles, stationery, ornaments, terrariums, stickers, shot glasses, home décor, and even roll-on perfume.
But what about additional sightings? Several grainy night-vision videos have popped up online in the last few years: footage from Poland in 2017, and Montana in 2020. These newer specimens, however, pale in comparison to the 2007 and 2011 iterations, offering up only shadowy blurs of movement.
And then there are the Fresno Nightcrawler’s larger counterparts, seen in a smattering of eyewitness accounts, including one that predates the 2007 footage by three years: a 6’7” Nightcrawler seen loping down a dark, icy Indiana road in January of 2004, witnessed by two late-night drivers.
Another variation—dubbed the Carmel Area Creature—was spotted by a couple out driving late one night in December of 2014, outside the town of Carmel, Ohio. The pair reported seeing a 7’ creature—slender and gray, with no arms, long, muscular legs, and backward-bending knees—dart across the road as their vehicle crested a hill on Carmel Road.
But closer to the Nightcrawler’s original stomping grounds, came a creepy 2015 account from a Reddit user, who described a Nightcrawler encounter late one foggy night in Lompoc, California: “…on the hill overlooking the town [of Lompoc], I saw a tall black figure walking alongside the hill. It was about a quarter the size of a telephone pole, and was relatively skinny. It had no arms, and appeared to walk…hunched over slightly, as if looking for something.
“…I dismissed the [creature] as a hallucination, a trick of the night, until I saw photos and videos of the nightcrawler—and I went pale. The pictures and the videos were exactly what I saw that night, all except for the fact that it was black, not white.”
So just what is the Fresno Nightcrawler? Theories abound; the most popular surmise is that it is either an extraterrestrial, a ghost, or a cryptid of some kind. But given that the creature in the 2007 footage casts a clearly defined shadow—and allegedly left behind “small footprints”—it is most likely not an incorporeal entity like a ghost or spirit.
Paranormal investigator Victor Camacho “left things open-ended” at the conclusion of his July 2008 presentation at the 39th annual International UFO Symposium. “‘Could be extraterrestrial, could be elves, I don’t know,’ he said at the end of his presentation. ‘Whatever you want to think.’”
But by 2018, he had given it a lot more thought. “Camacho speculates nightcrawlers could be an ‘extraterrestrial insectoid,’” reported Carmen George in The Fresno Bee on Friday, October 19, 2018, “approximately three feet tall and resembling a praying mantis.”
Michael Banti, founder of local paranormal blog Weird Fresno, was equally perplexed. “There’s like a dictionary of different cryptids, or strange creatures,” he told George in that 2018 Fresno Bee piece, but “there’s never been this before … And no one has really been able to determine what it is.” The Nightcrawlers reminded him, however of “fairy people.”
Whatever the Fresno Nightcrawler actually is, its power over the public imagination is simply undeniable.
“The cryptid…has gained so much popularity, that it’s joined the ranks of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Mothman,” wrote Frank Perez for The Fresno Business Journal in 2022. “While not as famous as the others, the Nightcrawler has captured the imagination of online pop culture…Though it’s taken more than a decade for the Fresno Nightcrawler to become known even in the area where the tale was born, the local community has come to embrace the mythical resident.”
“It’s up there with Chupacabra, the Mothman, and Bigfoot,” Banti told The Fresno Bee’s Carmen Kohlruss in 2021, echoing Perez’s assessment. But “it’s very niche. It seems to be bigger outside of Fresno than inside.”
“Banti said Fresno Nightcrawler merchandise has gotten bigger than sighting stories,” Kohlruss wrote. “‘It’s cute…I think that’s why it’s kind of flourished…’
“Banti said the Fresno Nightcrawler is a unique cryptid in that where it was first spotted is in its name. It’s helped bring Fresno a special kind of freaky fame.”
“These types of videos are intriguing because we want to believe that something’s out there,” wrote Adrian Gonzalez of Paranorms in 2021. “And there probably is something out there. Does the Nightcrawler video offer proof? Not definitively. The quality of the original video makes that impossible…
“Victor Camacho sums it up succinctly, saying, ‘The Fresno Nightcrawler is an original case. The family lived something strange. I can’t explain it, but something happened that night.’”
He had always believed that very first video to be the real deal. “Camacho said the man who shared the video [José]…was initially filmed talking about it without showing his face because he was so scared,” Carmen George reported for The Fresno Bee back in 2018. “‘He didn’t even want to go out of the house,’ Camacho said. ‘He stayed home for a couple weeks…it wasn’t possible that someone tried to make this video just to fool you or the TV station.”
One wonders what Jose would have thought of the fame that followed the cryptid he had inadvertently discovered on his security camera in November of 2007. Unfortunately, he would never get the chance to find out.
For when Camacho called the South Fresno man in the years since he’d last seen him in 2008, a member of Jose’s family answered the phone. They informed the paranormal investigator that tragically, Jose had been killed in a car accident several years following that first Nightcrawler sighting.
We will never truly know just exactly what the Fresno Nightcrawler is, but it sure did put Fresno on the map—and to think it all started with a diminutive apparition’s midnight stroll through the emerald static of a night-vision security screen.
Works Cited
Seuss, Dr. What Was I Scared Of? New York: Random House, 1961, p. 2.
Weatherly, David. “Nightcrawlers in Indiana.” Paranormal Forum, Thursday, January 4, 2018. https://paranormalforum.net/threads/nightcrawlers-in-indiana.13434/
George, Carmen. “Bigfoot, Chupacabra, and…Fresno Nightcrawler? Walking Pants Bring Fresno Freaky Fame.” The Fresno Bee, Friday, October 19, 2018.
The Indelible Life of Me. “Does the Nightcrawler Exist?” To Contrive and Jive, Sunday, April 28, 2019. https://tocontriveandjive.wordpress.com/2019/04/28/does-the-nightcrawler-exist/
Cayla. “Fresno Nightcrawlers.” The Human Exception, Wednesday, April 14, 2021. https://www.thehumanexception.com/1/fresno-nightcrawlers/
Gonzalez, Adrian. “Fresno Nightcrawler: Real-Life Alien or Hoax?” August-October 2021. https://paranorms.com/fresno-nightcrawler /
Kohlruss, Carmen. “Fresno Nightcrawler: A Paranormal Darling with Cryptid Fandom.” The Fresno Bee, Friday, October 29, 2021, p. A3.
Dunning, Brian. “Why the Fresno Nightcrawler is So Popular.” Skeptoid Podcast, Episode #826, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4826/
Perez, Frank. “More Than Fresno Famous: How the Nightcrawler Captured the World’s Imagination.” The Fresno Business Journal, Thursday, September 15, 2022. https://thebusinessjournal.com/more-than-fresno=famous-how-the-nightcrawler-captured-the-worlds-imagination/
Ocker, J.W. The United States of Cryptids: A Tour of American Myths and Monsters. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Quirk Books, 2022, pp. 226-228.
Helton, Kellie. “Fresno Nightcrawler: Hoax or Real? Mystery Remains Years Later.” Your Central Valley, Tuesday, December 27, 2022. https://www.yourcentralvalley.com/digital-exclusives/fresno-nightcrawler-hoax-or-real-mystery-remains-years-later/
Fraga, Kaleena. “The Curious Story of the Fresno Nightcrawler: The California Cryptid That’s Charmed the Internet.” All That’s Interesting, Thursday, May 25, 2023. https://www.allthatsinteresting.com/fresno-nightcrawler/
Allan, Laura. “Fresno Nightcrawlers are Terrorizing the Dark, and They’re Spreading Far from California.” Ranker, Wednesday, September 13, 2023. https://www.ranker.com/list/fresno-nightcrawler-facts/laura-allan/
Bowie, Desiree. “Origins of the Fresno Nightcrawler, a Pants-Shaped Cryptid.” How Stuff Works, Thursday, May 16, 2024. https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/strange-creatures/fresno-nightcrawler.htm/
All photos provided by the author.
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