The Phantom Horses of the Great Sand Dunes
The Phantom Horses of the Great Sand Dunes
A hitherto unsuspected Colorado cryptid?
If you’ve never visited Colorado’s San Luis Valley, you don’t know what you’re missing.
Located in southern Colorado, right up against the New Mexico border, the San Luis Valley is said to be the world’s largest alpine valley—and that’s not hard to believe, since it has an average elevation of over 7,500 feet and a length of over 120 miles. The beauty of this natural wonder is severe and majestic, with the towering ramparts of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains—which rear over 14,000 feet high—sealing off the valley to the west, and the lesser peaks of the San Juans forming a somewhat gentler bulwark in the east.
But none of this is why the valley’s earned such a distinguished reputation among paranormalists around the world.
For the San Luis Valley, in case you didn’t know, is home to a great deal of high strangeness. Much of it was immortalized in Christopher O’Brien’s book The Mysterious Valley and its sequels; but you don’t have to be familiar with those classics to know all about the almost mythical place the “SLV”—as the valley is affectionately called—holds in the pantheon of paranormal hotspots.
It was in the SLV that the first cattle mutilation was reported; actually, I should say animal mutilation, since the first victim was a horse. And when it comes to UFO sightings…well, the SLV might as well be a spaceport for the damned things, since its night skies are so crowded with unidentified objects that the inhabitants finally decided to build a UFO watchtower just to keep an eye on them all.
So there’s a lot to say about the SLV, and we’ll be returning to it many times in future posts. But we’re not going to talk about UFOs today; instead, we’ll be discussing something much more earthbound but perhaps even stranger.
I want to talk about the phantom web-footed horses of the Great Sand Dunes.
Near the southeast corner of the SLV, tucked up nice and snug against the looming wall of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Blanca Massif—which includes mighty Blanca Peak, at 14,345 feet the fourth highest mountain in all of Colorado—there’s a curious geological formation called the Great Sand Dunes.
It looks like something you’d expect to find in North Africa or Australia—an undulating ocean of sand with the highest dunes in North America. The scientist types say the dunes were formed over hundreds of thousands of years; that the SLV was once home to a vast lake, and after it dried up, the southwesterly winds blew sand and sediment into the elbow of the Sangre de Cristos.
If you visit the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, they’ll tell you all about the history and geology of the place, and they’ll even let you climb some of the nearer dunes and explore for yourself if you’re so inclined.
But what they’ll never tell you about is what happens on the dunes of moonlit nights, when some say you can hear the neighing and whinnying of strange horses borne upon the icy winds that blow out of the mysterious interior of the dune field. That, my friend, would be the phantom horses of the sand dunes…but whether these strange creatures are actual, physical beings—some unknown species of mysterious cryptid—or something altogether more supernatural, is impossible to say.
“About such a setting legends cluster,” writes Virginia McConnell Simmons in The San Luis Valley: Land of the Six-Armed Cross, her definitive history of the region.
“Entire flocks of sheep, together with their shepherds, are said to have been swallowed up in the dunes. Wagons with their mule teams have suffered the same mysterious fate. And horses with webbed feet have been seen racing over the sculptured slopes when the moon is full.”1
Another book, entitled Colorado: A Guide to the Highest State, offers little more to go on.
“One of the strangest legends about the dunes,” the book reads, “is that of the web-footed horses. On bright moonlight nights, or just before sunrise, so it is said, large horses can be seen against the horizon, manes blowing in the wind, heads uplifted in challenge. In place of hoofs, they have great webbed feet that enable them to race over the sands with ease.”2
And that’s it.
That’s about all the information there is on these enigmatic creatures. Are they a type of cryptid—perhaps a group of ancient, prehistoric North American equids that lingered on in the San Luis Valley, and adapted to life on the sand dunes by evolving broad, webbed feet so as to move more easily upon the shifting grains of dust and sediment? Maybe they’re some kind of relict three-toed horse, like Miohippus or Neohipparion; that would explain the ability to evolve “webbed feet” in the first place, which hardly seems plausible for a hoofed animal.
The web-footed horses merited an entry in Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology,3 so maybe they really are some cryptozoological remnant after all.
Maybe.
I’m not so sure though. Any breeding population of cryptid horses still living in the Great Sand Dunes ought to leave some identifiable trace; someone, it’s reasonable to assume, should have discovered them by now.
No, I suspect the web-footed horses of the Great Sand Dunes are something different altogether. I suspect they’re something supernatural, and don’t really belong to our plane of existence at all; in fact, I think they’re rather like the “water horse” of the Scottish Highlands, the each-uisge, a malevolent creature that appears as a magnificent horse in order to lead men to their ruin. For whoever mounts the each-uisge is doomed, as the creature instantly heads for the nearest loch to drown and devour its luckless rider.
Is it so far-fetched to believe that the web-footed horses of the sand dunes are similar beings? That they appear on brightly moonlit nights to waylay the unwary, leading them deeper into the dune field to what unmentionable fate we can only imagine? After all, there are more than a few stories of people disappearing in the dunes…though the friendly folk in the Park and Preserve will hardly admit it.
Perhaps these unfortunates caught a glimpse of the web-footed horses, and unwisely followed them out among the sand, never to be seen again…
Verdict: So what’s my final verdict on the web-footed horses of the Great Sand Dunes? Well, as I see it, they’re unlikely to be an undiscovered species of cryptid, whether a relict prehistoric equid or merely a group of modern horses that lost their way among the dunes and adapted to living there.
Far more likely, in my opinion, is the notion that these horses are phantom beings, supernatural entities like the Celtic “water horse,” which don’t properly belong to our plane at all, but rather belong to that class of subtle or inferior forces that appear at odd whiles to human beings. That’s why they are only seen on moonlit nights, or just before sunrise—and they are likely only perceptible to certain sensitive individuals, who possess the right faculties or mental configuration to catch a glimpse of the unseen world and its denizens.
So by all means, go and visit the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. Enjoy their natural beauty. But if you’re in any way sensitive to paranormal or supernatural phenomena, it’s probably best to stay away on nights when the moon is full.
Virginia McConnell Simmons, The San Luis Valley: Land of the Six-Armed Cross, 2nd Edition (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1999), pp. 6-7.
Harry Hansen, ed., Colorado: A Guide to the Highest State (New York: Hastings House, 1970), pg. 347.
George M. Eberhart, Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002), vol. 2, pg. 583.