It’s been said that in the suburban city of Chambers, Ohio there’s an 8-legged hippo-like creature roaming the grounds of the local wastewater treatment plant…Except we, Cryptid Campfire, are the only ones that have said that. Because, spoiler alert, we made it all up.

In the three years that Cryptid Campfire has been on the air, we have always been tempted to see if we could trick our listeners for April Fool’s Day. Could we take everything we’ve learned from our podcast experience and create an entirely new somewhat believable cryptid of our own? This year, we made the attempt.

Eli, Alex, and Jasmine (that’s me) each separately brainstormed their own ideas from scratch. Where did we want this creature to be seen? What would it look like? Who would be the main characters in the story of its existence? We then came together to combine all of our favorite bits and pieces from each other’s minds to create the Chambers Creature.

Eli, Alex, and Jasmine of Cryptid Campfire

With myself being from the state of Ohio, and Ohio showing up in our research time and time again, I felt very strongly that our new creation should be based in Ohio. Placing our creature in The Buckeye State gave us a bit of a home field advantage when coming up with the fictional town of Chambers, as we were able to base it off of a real place I’m familiar with.

It was also my idea to have our cryptid be spotted at a wastewater treatment plant. My Dad actually works at a wastewater treatment plant in real life, and he was a primary source of information to help our story make sense. He was the one who pitched the idea that the creature would be a mutated/evolved tardigrade.

Jasmine's Dad, Jay, repping the Cryptid Campfire merch.

The true science of tardigrades is almost more intriguing than any science fiction we could’ve written ourselves. Learning about these real micro animals in preparing for this charade was mind-boggling. I’ve included a list of links below that contain the sources I gathered research from. The list includes information on tardigrades, the process of wastewater treatment, and the real dam explosion that our Chambers one was modeled after.

Tardigrade image credit: Live Science/Shutterstock

A photoshopped image created by Jay for the Chambers Creature.

It had been Alex’s idea for the creature to appear hippo-like. It just so happens that tardigrades are already chonky little creatures. The creation of the characters Lance Pickering and Miles Sultan were born from the mind of Eli Watson. The details of Pickering’s first sighting came into existence over a Zoom call where the three of us just rattled off what we thought should happen next. We also utilized a shared Google Document that we could refer back to in order to edit and add new ideas.

We did our best to mirror actual cryptid accounts and our already existing library of podcast episodes. We didn’t want it to be too perfect or make too much sense. We had to include the typical Native American tie-ins, dubious accounts that contradict, questionable sources, missing evidence, and the possibility of supernatural or paranormal connections.

We weren’t quite sure how we wanted to deliver the punchline. There was even a small moment where we considered not admitting that it was all fake on the air and instead relying on people to look at the blog post, but we didn’t want to contribute to the spread of misinformation. Therefore, we came clean at the end of the episode and have provided more details about our process here in this blog post.

The Chambers, Ohio Creature was an experimental, collaborative, creative exercise amongst the hosts of Cryptid Campfire. *Though the Tuscarawas River does actually exist and elements of this story were inspired by real life, The Chambers Creature itself is a work of fiction. Any names portrayed that are similar to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.*

Note from Eli:

I would also like to add in one more piece of information that I think bears including here, it is also something that I forgot to tell the rest of the crew. Our good friend Karac St. Laurent of Crash Course Cryptozoology, added a little bit to the mythos of the Chambers Creature by also creating a supposed “eye witness” photograph. He photoshopped an image of a tardigrade into the woods and made it glow. I think its very cool and should be included in this blog post!

Sources:

https://dpw.lacounty.gov/landing/wr/sewer/wwTreatment.cfm#:~:text=Sewage%20that%20begins%20in%20your,suitable%20for%20disposal%20or%20reuse
https://www.britannica.com/animal/tardigrade
https://clearwaterind.com/polymer-water-treatment-how-coagulants-and-flocculants-clean-wastewater/
https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/visit-wastewater-treatment-plant?qt-science_center_objects=0
https://www3.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/bastre.pdf
https://earthsky.org/space/water-bears-tardigrades-into-space-iss-experiment
https://www.tpomag.com/online_exclusives/2020/10/bug-of-the-month-tardigrades-smaller-than-the-average bear#:~:text=As%20a%20metazoan%2C%20water%20bears,preying%20on%20nematodes%20and%20rotifers.
https://modestfish.com/tardigrade/#:~:text=Tardigrades%20have%20incredibly%20sharp%2C%20knife,they%20feed%20on%20bacteria%20cells.
https://massillonmuseum.org/328

The Chambers Creature

Note from Eli:

Sources:

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