The Proctor Valley monster

San Diego County urban legend; the footprint cast is kept at the Bonita Museum

The Proctor Valley Monster belongs to Proctor Valley Road, a dirt road through the secluded hills and fields northeast of Otay Lakes that links Jamul in the northeast with the Eastlake neighbourhood of Chula Vista in the southwest. La Jolla has its Munchkins and Old Town its ghosts, as the San Diego Reader put it in 2001, and East County has the Proctor Valley Monster, a textbook rural legend with teenagers, a lovers' lane, mysterious deaths and a witness who is always somebody's neighbour's babysitter's sister.

The stories go back at least to the 1960s. The classic version has two teenagers get a flat tyre late at night. The boy pulls over under a tree to look at the damage, his girlfriend locks the doors, and she hears a scraping on the roof all night. In the morning police find her date hanging by his feet from a branch, his fingernails having made the sound, with huge animal footprints around the car: the old hook-on-the-door-handle tale in local dress.

Nobody agrees on what the monster looks like. Some describe a tall, hairy, Bigfoot-type creature about seven feet tall that walks with long strides; others a disarranged cow; others a silent female apparition or a ghostly light, and one person claims a huge flying beast. In the 1970s a local radio DJ organised a nighttime monster hunt that drew thousands of teenagers, who later reported something like an oddly built bovine, and the publicity probably keeps the cow story alive. The Bigfoot version may have borrowed from Alpine's Zoobies, a legend that also began in the early 1970s.

The Bonita Museum & Cultural Center displays a concrete cast of a strange, apparently inhuman footprint, which some residents call concrete evidence. The museum has also hosted film festivals in the monster's honour and keeps a copy of Proctor Valley Road, a Boom! Studios comic in which the creature is blamed when a group of students on a ghost tour of the road disappear. The road itself is real and drivable, and this is folklore told for fun.