If it’s August, there must be something hideous and dead by the side of a road somewhere.

Or maybe a massive spacecraft rising up to flee the planet, its extraterrestrial occupants having sipped of the Androscoggin River and having found it terrible.

Or maybe this will be the year that vampires float out of their graves to overrun the town of Greene like so many black flies in dark suits and red bow ties.

Don’t ask me why August is Freak Month in our circle of the globe. Maybe it’s the tilt of the planet as it hangs between summer and fall. Maybe it’s that after long days of heat followed by spells of rain, a large segment of the population has started drinking in earnest.

All I know is that each August, I get a break from the petty dramas of the street to take on matters of higher importance. For at least a week each August, I get to be Kolchak from the old “Night Stalker” series (he’s dead now, you know) or perhaps a chain-smoking version of Fox Mulder of “The X-Files.”

A few years ago, it was “LIGHTS, SOUNDS IN THE SKY STARTLE REGION!”

Yes, the mother ship had come to Androscoggin County and it was a 10-day wonder. The close encounter brought scientists from as far away as Russia and every beer-soaked soul stumbling from a bar had an opinion on what it was.

Me, I figured it was a bona fide visitor from the planet Gork, because it is always my stance to accept the most outlandish possibility until somebody proves otherwise.

One August later, a horned beast, possibly breathing fire, crept from the woods of Wales to eat a Doberman. Not a Shih Tzu, not a dachshund, but a fearsome Doberman, which was chewed, tossed about and left dead in a yard.

I don’t remember the headline from that one. All I remember is my phone jumping up off the desk as new calls came in, new sightings of the creature were reported. Old women trembled as they recalled hearing the creature growl outside bedroom windows. Manly men with years of hunting experience hung up their rifles and took up Sudoku. Wildlife officials stepped out of their tree stands to mumble the lines they were taught in wildlife school: “’Twas a fisher,” they said. “That is all.”

The creature was back a year later but he/she/it remained as elusive as a sneeze that just won’t come. And then, in 2006, the headline that launched August was simply: “MYSTERIOUS BEAST!”

Oh, was it ever. Hockey-style fistfights broke out among those who believed the carcass found in Turner was a dog and those who believed it was the spawn of Satan, a prehistoric creature further mutated by its proximity to powerlines, or a soul-eating, child-snatching bugaboo whose carcass could be auctioned off on eBay for a few million.

At once, the humble creature (with the lower case C) of Androscoggin County became known worldwide as THE TURNER BEAST (all caps) or the MAINE MUTANT (exclamation points optional).

The press came from everywhere. The world learned just what the hell a cryptozoologist does for a living. I kept portions of the dead animal in a refrigerator until I was told to huck it to make room for Tater Tots. Wildlife experts were roused from naps to utter the line: “It’s a fisher. Nothing to see here; move along.”

The beast made my August and my summer. I rode that wave into the following year awaiting the next big thing.

But you know what happened? Russ Dillingham happened. The snarling photographer with the tree-stump arms and fists like jackhammers wrestled, pummeled and ate whatever August phenomenon was heading my way.

The “CAUGHT IN A FLASH” story, in which the hulking Dillingham went all Dog the Bounty Hunter on the runaway suspect, eclipsed the beast stories from the previous year. More Web hits, more papers sold, more Maury Povich types calling for interviews. State wildlife officials quickly distributed a press release stating it was a fisher that corralled the leaping fugitive.

Russ, Russ, Russ, that’s all anybody wanted to talk about. Never mind that Dillingham doesn’t have a truncated snout and didn’t have the decency to curl up next to Route 4 to be photographed. Russ was last year’s sensation and, though I had fun with his muscle-bulging heroics, I feel I got cheated out my creaturific seasonal delight.

And so the very minute the calendar flipped from July to August this year, I began to brace for the August buzz to fall all hairy and snarling into my lap. Instead, such a thing fell into the lap of the Hamptons in the form of the Montauk Monster that washed up on a beach.

Have you seen that thing? It looks like one of the beasties from “Where the Wild Things Are” caught fire and died in the sand. And yet there are still those who assert that it is a mere dog, like that one-time horror from Turner, Maine. A dog! The only time I saw a dog with a beak was that night I accidentally took a triple dose of Nyquil.

And so August is upon us again, all hot and troubling. Back to school fliers appear in the papers. The summertime to-do lists don’t have enough check marks upon them. You really need to start thinking about how you will heat your home this year.

And right now, zombies or aliens, swamp monsters or cannibal clowns are waiting to descend into a new August. They will pass through the portal of my notebook and into your world through newspaper headlines. Wait for it. Rumblings in my bones tell me it will be big this year.

Because all the forces in the universe are aligned just so. Because the hellish string of heat and rain have riled things that live in the dark corners of our region.

Because I’ve been hitting the Nyquil particularly hard since the middle of July.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].