Okay, so these aren’t really about mythical creatures—after all, they’re mythical. These are stories about human beings dressed up like mythical creatures.

Unicorn!

In May 2013, teachers at North Pole Elementary in Fairbanks, Alaska, set a goal for its students: Over the course of the 2013-14 school year, it challenged its students to amass 24,000 points in “Accelerated Reader” points, a national reading program that assigns points to children’s books based on their level and difficulty. By Memorial Day weekend 2014, North Pole students had earned 24,793 points, or about 35,000 short books. Principal Mark Winford had to make good on the promise he’d made the student body a year earlier, and at a school assembly he did. Winford belly-flopped into a swimming pool filled with more than 140 gallons of Jell-O…dressed in a pink, one-piece unicorn costume. As a bonus, the school district’s central cafeteria was able to use up a huge stock of blue Jell-O mix that had been banned by recent nutritional guidelines.

Elf!

Last May, a woman was driving her BMW through a southeast Portland, Oregon at a slow pace. Suddenly, a man darted into traffic and began attacking her car…with a sword. Startled, the woman (unnamed in news reports) called 911 on her cell phone, and police arrived. They arrested a man clad in a helmet and shield named Konrad Bass. At least that’s what his ID said—he claimed he was actually “a high-elf engaged in battle with the evil Morgoth.” Morgoth is a villain mentioned in J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Simarillion, and Bass believed that the BMW was a tool of destruction sent by Morgoth. Bass may also have been the other kind of “high-elf”—he told police he was under the influence of LSD. (He was cited for criminal mischief.)

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