About
the Guide

Who is behind the guide, how the guide is made, and how to argue with it.

Who Is Zazu?

Zazu is the byline this guide runs under. The home page says the name is unimportant for now, and that's still mostly true — what's important is what the byline does. Zazu researches things that should not exist, verifies what can be verified, is honest about what cannot be, and writes it down so that the next person who needs it doesn't have to assemble the field manual from scratch.

The guide is independent. There is no media company behind it, no sponsor pressure, no editor pushing toward the spookier framing because it gets more clicks. That independence is the whole point. It is also why we can be honest when a record is thin, when a tradition isn't ours to retell, or when the right answer to "is this real" is "we don't know, and here is what the evidence does and doesn't support."

Editorial Standards

Every entry in this guide goes through the same checks before it ships. Not because we are perfect at running them — we aren't — but because knowing the checks exist tells you what to look for when you find one we missed.

01 Two cited cases per entry. Every monster page ends with two documented encounters. Each has its own Sources & References block linking to primary documents where we can: court records, police reports, contemporaneous press, academic papers. Not every account is verifiable, and we say so explicitly when an account is folklore rather than fact.
02 Verdict labels on every encounter. Each encounter carries one of: verified, firsthand, documented, folklore, lore, or cultural. The label is the single most important piece of metadata on the page — it tells you how much weight to put on what follows.
03 Cultural sources lead, not follow. Where an entity is part of a living tradition, we centre that tradition's voices first. The Wendigo entry leans on Algonquian primary scholarship. The Skinwalker entry is written carefully and conservatively because the Diné themselves have asked outsiders to be careful. When a tradition asks us to do less, we do less.
04 Honesty about thin records. Some of the survival rules in this guide are derived from one or two accounts. We say when that's the case. We do not invent corroboration. The accumulated witness record is the record we have; the record we want is irrelevant.
05 The Six Rules earn their place. Each entry ends with six specific, actionable survival rules derived from the encounter record. Not folklore for folklore's sake, not generic common sense — the specific things the evidence says have increased survival in documented cases. Where the evidence is thin, the rules are conservative.
06 Corrections welcomed and visible. When we are wrong, we update the entry, note what changed, and credit the person who told us. If the correction is from a member of the community whose tradition the entry covers, their voice replaces ours rather than supplements it.

What This Guide Is Not

⚠ Disclaimer

This guide is research and education. It is not survival advice for emergencies, not a substitute for professional medical or psychological care, and not a substitute for safe behaviour in the actual wilderness. If you are experiencing recurrent sleep paralysis or distressing intrusive imagery, talk to a sleep clinic or a clinician — those things are treatable. If you are lost in the boreal forest in February, please follow actual search-and-rescue guidance, not the rules at the bottom of our Wendigo entry.

Contact & Corrections

The fastest way to reach us is email. If you've spotted a factual error, a misattribution, or a culturally insensitive framing, please tell us — we'd rather get a correction than be right by accident.

General: hello@monstersurvivalguide.show
Corrections: corrections@monstersurvivalguide.show
Repository: github.com/shezazoed-creator/monster-survival-guide

Pull requests with citations are welcome. So are emails that just say "this is wrong, here is why." Please attach a source if you have one.

A Note on Tone

This guide is written in the voice of a field manual because that's the voice the material asked for — not because the editor thinks the world is ending. Fear and information are opposites. Our intention is, always, to leave you more capable at the end of an entry than you were at the beginning. If we ever stop doing that — if an entry is scarier than it is useful — please tell us.