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Lair of the Beasts: A Spectral Beast

The Ghost of a Mammoth

By Nick Redfern July 10, 2010

The Ghost of a Mammoth roams Lair of the Beasts
© Nick Redfern

On October 4, 2008, I wrote a Lair of the Beasts column titled Do Mammoths Still Roam? The article looked at claims that, in some of the more remote parts of our world, mammoths just might still exist. Controversial, yes; but it’s a subject that fascinates many.

After the relevant piece was published, various people contacted me with their own views, thoughts, ideas and theories about the issue of whether or not the mammoth is still amongst us. One of those was a woman named Jill O’Brien, who contacted me on January 2, 2010. Six months later, I still don’t know what to make of it; but without doubt it’s one of the oddest tales to ever cross my path. And, believe me: my path has crossed with that of many a weird thing in its time!

According to Jill, on September 18, 2008, she came face-to-face with a baby mammoth in Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Well, this was not a case I could afford to ignore – particularly as a result of the fact that, at the time, Jill was living in Oklahoma City, which is only a couple of hours’ drive from my Arlington, Texas home. That’s right: it was road-trip time.

And so, while my wife Dana was working for a few days in Littlerock, Arkansas, I headed northwards in search of perhaps one of the few people to claim a very recent sighting of a still-living mammoth. But, as will shortly become clear, things weren’t quite so clear. In fact, they never are!

I set off early on the cold morning of January 9, and by lunchtime was sitting opposite Jill, in the small, rented apartment that was to be her home before moving on to pastures new in February. Despite the fact that the skeptics and the naysayers love to portray those who claim encounters of the truly unusual kind to be slightly off-kilter, such a claim could not be made about Jill: very down-to-earth, lucid and intelligent, she worked for a well-known bookstore chain and related her remarkable story in a coherent and clear fashion.

Established in 1980 by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is the largest U.S. national park, and covers no less than 20,587 square-miles – which, trivia fans may be interested to know, is greater than the land mass of no less than nine of the American states. It was very near to the base of the 18,009-foot-tall Mount St. Elias - which can be found in the park and which borders the Yukon-Alaskan border – that Jill’s encounter took place.

Jill told me that she had a particular passion for photographing mountains and mountain-ranges; and Mount St. Elias was most certainly one that she wished to preserve for posterity in her ever-growing collection. She was all set up to take a “great shot” of the mountain, when to her left she heard “a funny crunching and thudding on the ground.” She turned her head to where the sound was coming from, and was “totally freaked” to see a small mammoth – “maybe four feet [in height]” – race past her, glance quickly in her direction as it did so, and then vanish into what resembled a “small, black cloud of smoke that kind of sucked into itself and was gone.”

Jill fully conceded that the event – which lasted perhaps no more than seven seconds – stretched credulity to its absolute limit; but, as she told me in tones that came across as being wholly earnest in nature:

“It was a mammoth, a baby mammoth. It was there one second; it looked at me, and it was gone: like it went invisible or just vanished. But that is what happened. Sorry, I know it’s probably not going to interest you.” Needless to say, it most assuredly did interest me, and still does.

In this case, there really are only two possibilities: the whole thing was a hoax from start to finish. Or that Jill really did encounter some form of spectral mammoth. For the skeptically-minded, the former scenario, of course, is most likely. However, I have heard and seen enough high-strangeness in my time to know that the world around us is not always what it seems. Mammoths may well be gone, but it’s thought-provoking indeed to think that, in ghostly form, they just might still live on. If you believe in the existence ghosts, of course!

Nick Redfern is the author of many books on unsolved mysteries. His latest – co-written with Ken Gerhard – is Monsters of Texas.