So the rise of science should have pensioned off such beasts, and to some extent that is the case, as Kaplan demonstrates. However, it hasn’t quite dispensed with our propensity to want to believe such tales. Faced, for example, with the horror of Myra Hindley’s crimes, many retreated even in our secular, scientific times into labelling her as the devil incarnate. And even though we may now be able to send cameras down to the floor of the deepest oceans, we still can’t quite banish the notion that there may still be something lurking there.