The Giant Shrimp in the Laundry Room was a bizarre cryptid sighted in 1948 by a Bremerton, Washington native named Virginia Staples. The personal account was originally published in issue 6 of Strange Magazine. The entity was seen standing inside a large hole in the wall of the basement laundry room of Virginia's run-down apartment building.

Appearance

The witness described the creature as standing approximately five feet in height, exactly as tall as her. It had a bright orange colored body and little spidery thin legs and antennae on its head that kept moving back and in and out.

Transcription of tape recorded phone message:

Hi. My name is Virginia Staples and in 1948 I lived in Bremerton, Washington. The apartment where I lived had a gigantically huge basement. There were huge holes in the walls and the apartment house manager used to tell me that it was rumored there was a passage to the water. The huge apartment houses were so close together and they all had basements and they were old buildings. There was a washer and a washtub and a clothesline. And on this particular day I had gotten my clothes all hung up but I kept feeling someone was staring at me or looking at me. And it was such a creepy feeling I finally turned around and looked towards the back of the basement and froze. I was so scared I can still feel it. I couldn't move. In one of the huge holes in the basement there stood this thing. [She breaks down here.] Oh, it was horrible! I stand five foot tall and this creature was as tall as I was. It had a bright orange colored body and little spidery thin legs and antennae on its head that kept moving back and in and out. [Crying now.] That thing started towards me. I backed out of the basement and got up to my apartment and I packed all my things and moved. I was so scared. I moved over to Seattle to my cousin's. I went to an aquarium to see if I could see anything that looked like what it was, and the only thing that I could find that looked anything like it was this little tiny shrimp. But it just doesn't make sense. I had horrible nightmares for years. I finally got up enough nerve a couple of years ago to go back to revisit Bremerton. But the Navy has enlarged so much and the apartment house on Denny Street has been torn down. Really nobody would really believe this, but as God is my witness it really happened.

Originally published in Strange 6.

Possible Explanations

There are several explanations as to what the creature could be. Theories include:

• An undiscovered species (a Cryptid)
• A hoax

Trivia

• After working up the nerve to revisit Bremerton soon after, Staples arrived to discover that the apartment house on Denny Street had been torn down.