While the Skinned Demons would make a great college football mascot, finding something in your backyard that’s not a devil-costumed freshman but a dead creature that defies identification can cause a homeowner to let their imagination run wild … even in Florida. That was the case this week in Titusville, where a woman discovered something in her garden that might even cause a Chupacabra to think twice before sucking its blood.

“I found this in my yard…has anyone seen this thing before or know what it could be?”

Thus began Kelly Garrahan’s fifteen minutes of weird creature fame as she posted pictures on Facebook of a strange carcass (see the photos here) her boyfriend discovered last week on her five-acre property in Titusville, Florida – a popular tourist destination due to its close proximity to the Kennedy Space Center. It’s also home to a heavy concentration of space-related industries. Could the creature be an escaped space alien?

“I just want to know what it was, I’m new around her and I was like I don’t know what kind of animals Titusville has.”

Fortunately, Titusville has plenty of residents with plenty of opinions about what the three-foot-long beast with a toothy snout and a thick tail could have been when it was alive. Guesses included Komodo dragon (Florida has a growing population of these lizards – most likely escaped pets), dog, alligator, kangaroo, coyote, Chupacabra (the Texas doggish kind, not the Puerto Rican lizardish kind) and extraterrestrial. The whiskers had many people suggesting opossum but the lack of hair or fur had at least one person seeing it as a ‘skinned demon’.

What the creature definitely is is popular. Within hours, local news reporters showed up to interview Garrahan and photograph the decaying corpse, which was by now beginning to smell. Kelly did the right thing and sent the photos to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which responded with a wildlife biologist’s opinion that the corpse was a dead

opossum. That opinion was, of course, completely ignored since that wouldn’t be very interesting to put on the 11 o’clock news. Besides, while the feet and teeth look opossumish, the snout seems too broad, the length too long and the skin too hairless.

Swamp ape

Clearly a dinosaur

100% an alien

That is the molted skin of a demon

That’s better … and who knew demons molted? Those suggestions are pretty unlikely, and the prevailing opinion is opossum – the only North American marsupial which is most commonly seen dead and flat in the middle of the road, making it hard for non-experts to identify them. Is what is (or most likely was – she did say it stunk, even though she lives on five acres) in Kelly Garrahan’s Titusville yard an opossum, a Komodo dragon, a skinned demon or something else? Local news reporters are standing by with nothing better to cover (yes, it’s sad) waiting for further developments.

Go Skinned Demons! Beat the Flaming Swamp Monsters!