My parents often told people that I was so plump as a baby, I literally rolled everywhere rather than crawled, making a sort of "Waaugh -- waaugh -- waaugh" as I went. I grew out of that peculiarity, however. Living creatures on this earth tend to walk, crawl, slither, fly, swim, or "bellow" (like jellyfish). Few things besides fat babies are in the habit of rolling from place to place.
We know of Rolling Things mainly from science fiction stories like "The Thing in the Woods" by Fletcher Pratt and B. F. Ruby, "Dune Roller" by Julian May, and especially the spherical Outsider from Frederic Brown's classic "Arena". There are rare reports, however, of creatures or entities that pass through the world like it was one big bowling alley.
The White Hart pub in London Road, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK, is haunted by a strange Rolling Thing -- or, at least, by the noise of something rolling over gravel. British ghost hunter Peter Underwood writes: "The wife of a former licensee has described the noise as a sound that seemed to roll towards the hearer, then when it appeared to be about three feet away it would stop and roll back towards the next room; but it was never heard there. Then it would start again and repeat the performance all over again. On occasions the sound would be very loud and make sleep quite impossible. When that happened the occupants of the room would get up, put on the light and try to sleep in a chair. This happened many times to different people."
The rolling noise was once heard outside, behind the inn, early in the morning. "One of the inn staff reported hearing the sound of something heavy being dragged or rolled over gravel and at the same time he sensed rather than saw a presence without any definite shape or form." [1]
It is difficult to judge a haunting sound, however. Folklorist William A. Craigie, in his 1896 book Scandinavian Folk-Lore, mentions a more visible roller, an odd legend of the Faeroe Islands called the Nidagrisur. "The Nidagrisur is little, thick and rounded, like a little child in swaddling clothes or a big ball of yarn, and of a dark reddish-brown colour. . . It lies and rolls about before men's feet to lead them astray from the road, and if it gets between any one's legs, he will not see another year." [2]
A modern tale of visible -- if scarcely more "solid" -- Rolling Things can be found in the "True Stories" section of GHOSTS.ORG:
The Jell-O Globs: "She said that they appeared to be surrounding her house, rolling around on her lawn like big beach balls."
If creatures as bizarre as Rolling Things were seen thousands of years ago, they might have had quite an impact on the minds of earlier civilizations. I can't think of any better explanation for the stone spheres of Costa Rica, which are themselves pretty anomalous: "Why should hundreds of these perfectly shaped spheres, ranging in diameter from a few inches to eight feet, be scattered through the jungles of southwestern Costa Rica?" asks Eleanor Lothrop in Natural History Magazine. "How could prehistoric people have shaped them with only the crudest of tools? And how could they have moved them over hill and dale from the distant sources of stone?" [3] Maybe something like a horde of Rolling Things impressed or frightened the hell out of the early Costa Ricans, and they decided to record the event in stone. Who knows? Their multi-ton bowling balls, already centuries old, might yet outlast the ephemeral images of cyberspace.
1. Underwood, Peter. Ghosts of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. (Farnborough, Hampshire: Saint Michael's Abbey Press, 1983), p. 9.
2. Craigie, William A. Scandinavian Folk-Lore. (Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1970 [1896]), p. 266-267.
3. Lothrop, Eleanor. "Mystery of the Prehistoric Stone Balls." Natural History Magazine (September 1955), p. 372.