For Indigenous Peoples' Day weekend (and Halloween at the same time), I have started to research terrifying monsters from Native American mythology for upload onto Mythology Worlds.
I have an interesting theory on one monster in particular...
Many Native American peoples have legends of terrible people-eating beasts who were turned into mosquitoes.
The Pacific Northwest peoples have an especially gruesome variant on the theme.
Here, the original monster (Mosquito Man) zips into people's ears and sucks out their brains with its snout.
I first encountered this creature in a book about mythical monsters from around the world called The Gruesome Guide to World Monsters (by Judy Sierra).
In the book, the creature is referred to as "Alkuntane".
Later, I would stumble upon the Nuxalk sun deity Alkuntam...whose mother was one of those brain-draining mosquito creatures.
The deity's name sounds almost exactly like "Alkuntane".
I would then learn about the monster more in-depth through a website called Native-Languages.org, where it was simply referred to as "Mosquito Man".
Although this website is designed to preserve America's first languages, it also contains webpages about Native American myths and cultures.
From this information, I believe that Judy Sierra may have confused the deity's name with this brain-sucking mosquito critter.
The Gruesome Guide to World Monsters makes other misidentifications too, such as placing the Chonchon (a monstrous flying head in Mapuche mythology) in Peru.
However, considering that creature's cultural origin, its habitat would more likely be Chile or Argentina.
This post is really meant to show how we human beings are inherently flawed, and even experts make mistakes.
Even I write typos (or "writos"?) into the descriptions in my Mythology Worlds cartoons.
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