Penny Hart did not arrive at paranormal journalism through tragedy, obsession, or a formative incident she declines to discuss. She arrived at it because she thought cryptids were genuinely interesting and wanted to write about them, which makes her, by some margin, the most straightforwardly motivated person on the What The Cryptid? team and the one her colleagues find most difficult to fully account for.

She grew up in Portland, Oregon, in a household where the paranormal was treated as a casual conversational topic. Her mother kept a folder of Mothman articles. Her father had opinions about the Skinwalker Ranch that he was always prepared to share at length. Penny absorbed all of this with the easy enthusiasm of someone for whom none of it was ever frightening because all of it was, from the beginning, just interesting.

She joined WTCNN two years ago after submitting an unsolicited pitch for an article titled "Ranking Cryptids By How Much They Seem Like They Just Need A Hug" that Hal Ridgeway read, put down, picked up again, read a second time, and forwarded to the features desk with a note that said only "please evaluate." The article ran. It remains one of the most-read pieces in the network's archive, which is a fact Hal mentions infrequently and with a complicated expression.

She has received, to date, forty-seven emails from individuals claiming to be shapeshifters. She has responded to all forty-seven. She maintains an ongoing correspondence with three of them. She has not ruled any of them out.

She also writes, with complete sincerity, the most genuinely funny paranormal content on the internet, without ever intending to be funny at all, which is the quality that made Hal pick up that first pitch a second time.