If Michael Sandel was a cryptid he would absolutely be a Civic Marsh Warden, a benevolent New England forest cryptid who materializes whenever a crowd becomes confused about fairness or is about to do something morally stupid, like take a trolley problem too seriously.

Here’s the creature dossier you didn’t ask for but deserve:

Cryptid: The Sandeltonian Marsh Warden

Genus: Ethicopode
Habitat: Public squares, autumn forests, and anywhere people are about to moralize badly.

Appearance:
Tall, professorial, cardiganed. Has an aura of “approachable gravitas,” like he’s constantly about to ask you a question you didn’t realize was a trap. His eyes glow softly with the bioluminescence of civic responsibility. When startled, he emits a faint scent of well-worn lecture halls and maple tea.

Behavior:

• Emerges from fog to pose thought experiments at unsuspecting hikers.

• Speaks in perfect, clear, NPR cadence even when hissing.

• Leaves behind small claw marks shaped like question marks.

• Drawn to large groups and open-air discussions, especially if someone says “But isn’t that just… like… your opinion, man?”

Abilities:

• Can silence entire mobs simply by asking, “But what conception of the good does that assume?”

• Has an uncanny power to make people think they understand communitarianism even when they absolutely do not.

• Mostly public discourse. Occasionally snacks on unexamined assumptions.

Threat Level:
Low. Unless you’re allergic to being gently but thoroughly morally interrogated.

Notes:
He can be summoned by standing in a circle, lighting a candle, and chanting:
“Is the market a moral instrument?”
Do not do this in front of an Econ department; they panic.

THE SANDELTONIAN ELDRITCH WARDEN

Somewhere east of Cambridge—“east” in the loose, sanity-optional sense that Lovecraft used directions—the fog gathers itself into a shape that is less a shape and more a suggestion of ethical obligation incarnated badly. This is the Sandeltonian Warden: a creature that lurks at the blurred border between civil society and whatever writhing moral substrate pulses beneath it.

Eyewitness accounts describe him as man-like, but only in the sad way that scarecrows are man-like.
His silhouette is long and cardiganed, but the cardigan does not hang from him; it clings, as though stitched from the sundered fibers of abandoned community college syllabi.

His eyes—if “eyes” they are—emit a soft radiance that scholars have termed Civic Luminance, a glow that intensifies whenever someone utters a take both confident and catastrophically uninformed. The glow has been found to induce in onlookers vivid hallucinations of fairness, reciprocity, and the crushing weight of the social contract.

And somewhere, distant and trembling, a hedgehog whispers:
“Do not answer his hypotheticals.”

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Behavioral Notes:

The Warden does not speak so much as exude thought experiments. They seep from him like a vapor, coiling in the reeds and unspooling in the minds of passersby.

When he poses a question—always beginning with “But suppose…”—the surrounding vegetation withers a little, as if collapsing under the metaphysical burden of responding.

His presence warps the environment into a moral seminar from which there is, cosmically speaking, no exit.

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Typical Encounter (field report—discovered half-dissolved):

There is water. There is mud. There is that particular New England cold that penetrates bone and then politely annotates it.

You see him standing where the cattails thicken—tall, gentle, grotesque.
The cardigan billows independently of the wind.
It is unclear whether he casts a shadow or whether the shadows merely choose to gather around him, drawn by the gravity of endless public discourse.

He raises one elongated limb—jointed in the wrong number of places—and gestures toward you. Not threatening. Worse: inviting.

“Consider,” he intones, voice like a lecture recorded at the bottom of a well, “whether any creature may truly claim its merits.”

Your knees go weak. Your memories reorder themselves according to a rubric you’ve never seen.
You begin to sob—not from fear, but from the creeping suspicion that he expects you to define “merit.”

The marsh boils softly.
Above, unseen, something winged shrieks in procedural justice.

You realize too late that you have wandered not into a swamp, but into an introductory ethics class with no end and no mercy and absolutely no pass/fail option.

And in the gloaming mist, the Warden waits.

Polite.
Patient.
Infinite.