Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: The road into southern Illinois drops off flat and goes
Speaker 1: green in a hurry. You come down out of the
Speaker 1: corn country, up north, and somewhere past Carbondale, the land
Speaker 1: stops behaving like the Midwest you pictured. It buckles, it
Speaker 1: grows timber. The Shawnee National Forest sprawls across the bottom
Speaker 1: of the state like a thumb pressed into wet clay,
Speaker 1: and the rivers down there run slow and brown and old.
Speaker 1: The big Muddy, the Ohio, the Mississippi, folding everything together
Speaker 1: at the southern tip. This is bottomland floodplain, the kind
Speaker 1: of country where the trees come right up to the
Speaker 1: back of a man's house and the dark starts about
Speaker 1: four feet past his porch light. Most of the cryptid
Speaker 1: country we've driven through on this trip has handed us
Speaker 1: the usual goods. A shape in the fog, a track
Speaker 1: that washes out by morning, a sound nobody can place,
Speaker 1: and nobody can prove good campfire material, thin evidence. Illinois
Speaker 1: is going to be different. What happened in this state
Speaker 1: across a few short years at the start of the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies doesn't fit the fog in shadow mold in Illinois,
Speaker 1: the creatures came up onto porches. One of them scratched
Speaker 1: the siding off a man's house out in the river bottoms.
Speaker 1: They left footprints that state troopers and game wardens measured
Speaker 1: and photographed. More than one of them took gunfire from
Speaker 1: more than one shooter and walked off anyway. Armed men
Speaker 1: poured into the woods after them by the hundreds. A
Speaker 1: radio newsman got one on tape, and a trained police
Speaker 1: dog tracked another one to the door of an empty barn,
Speaker 1: and the strangest of the whole bunch came on three legs.
Speaker 1: We've got a lot of ground to cover here, so
Speaker 1: I'll tell you up front where we're going. The headliner
Speaker 1: is the thing that came out of the dark in
Speaker 1: a little farm town called Enfield, a creature so far
Speaker 1: off the map of anything we have a name for
Speaker 1: that the people who saw it could only describe it
Speaker 1: by counting its legs. But Enfield didn't happen in a vacuum.
Speaker 1: For a stretch of about four years, on either side
Speaker 1: of it, this whole state caught a kind of fever,
Speaker 1: and town after town reported a big, hairy, upright thing
Speaker 1: walking out of its river bottoms. After we're done in Enfield,
Speaker 1: we'll back up to where that fever started, in a
Speaker 1: town called Farmer City, and then we'll run the way
Speaker 1: forward through two more panics that wrote themselves into the
Speaker 1: police record while the rest of the country was busy
Speaker 1: losing its mind over Watergate. So pull off the highway
Speaker 1: with me. We're rolling into White County, Illinois in the
Speaker 1: spring of nineteen seventy three, and a man named Henry
Speaker 1: is about to hear something scratching at his front door.
Speaker 1: Enfield sits in White County, down in the southeastern corner
Speaker 1: of the state, close enough to the Indiana line that
Speaker 1: you could throw a rock at it on a clear day.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy three, it was a town of a
Speaker 1: few hundred people, the kind of place built around a
Speaker 1: grain elevator and a couple of churches, and the railroad
Speaker 1: that ran through the middle of it. The Louisville and
Speaker 1: Nashville line cut right past the houses on the edge
Speaker 1: of town, and on the side of those tracks, the
Speaker 1: brush went thick and the timber closed in. People down
Speaker 1: there hunted, they farmed. They knew their woods the way
Speaker 1: you know the layout of your own kitchen in the dark,
Speaker 1: which is to say they didn't spook easy, and they
Speaker 1: didn't generally call the state police on account of a noise.
Speaker 1: The first instinct with the story this strange is to
Speaker 1: assume the witnesses were just excitable or looking for attention.
Speaker 1: But the country they lived in didn't typically grow those
Speaker 1: types of people. The other thing to understand is the
Speaker 1: year nineteen seventy three was a strange season in American life.
Speaker 1: And I don't just mean the long hair and the
Speaker 1: gas lines. The country was coming apart at the seams
Speaker 1: of its own trust. The Watergate hearings were on every
Speaker 1: television in America that summer. People had stopped believing the
Speaker 1: men in charge, and once a population stops believing the
Speaker 1: official version of reality, it gets a lot more willing
Speaker 1: to believe in the unofficial one. Across the River Missouri,
Speaker 1: just the year before, a creature called Momo had panicked
Speaker 1: the little town of Louisiana, Missouri, with a string of
Speaker 1: sightings of a big, foul smelling, hairy thing. A few
Speaker 1: years before that, down the Ohio River in West Virginia,
Speaker 1: there'd been the mothman business. The Midwest in those years
Speaker 1: was primed for a monster. The soil was ready, and
Speaker 1: an infield on the evening of April twenty fifth, it
Speaker 1: grew one. The first person to meet it was a boy.
Speaker 1: His name was Greg Garrett, and he was about ten
Speaker 1: years old, and on that evening he was out in
Speaker 1: his own backyard doing an ordinary chore. Most accounts have
Speaker 1: him out feeding the family dogs as the light went down.
Speaker 1: He was a child finishing a task he'd finished one
Speaker 1: hundred times before. In a yard he could have crossed, blindfolded.
Speaker 1: Something came at him out of the dusk. Greg said
Speaker 1: it stepped on his feet, not pushed him, not grabbed him,
Speaker 1: not bit him. It came up to him and it
Speaker 1: put its weight down on his feet with what he
Speaker 1: described as clawed foot like appendages, and the pressure of
Speaker 1: it tore his tennis shoes apart. He looked down at
Speaker 1: a thing that did not match anything in his ten
Speaker 1: years of being alive. Grayish skin, by his account, slick
Speaker 1: like it had come up out of water, short claws,
Speaker 1: reddish eyes, and legs that didn't add up to a
Speaker 1: number a person expects an animal to have. He got loose.
Speaker 1: He ran for the house, screaming, and he made it inside,
Speaker 1: and his ruined shoes came in with him. A ten
Speaker 1: year old comes through the door with shredded sneakers and
Speaker 1: a story about a three legged thing with red eyes,
Speaker 1: and at first blush, that's not a tale a kid
Speaker 1: tells to get praised. At first blush. It reads like
Speaker 1: a kid who's had something happen to him that he
Speaker 1: can't find better words for. Except here's where I have
Speaker 1: to put both feet on the ground and tell you
Speaker 1: the part. The legend usually skips. Greg Garrett later took
Speaker 1: it back when researchers from Western Illinois University came around
Speaker 1: and talked to him. The boy told them his report
Speaker 1: had been a put on, a way to tease mister
Speaker 1: Daniel and have a little fun at the expense of
Speaker 1: an out of town newsman who'd come sniffing for a story.
Speaker 1: So the first encounter in the most famous monster case
Speaker 1: in Illinois history comes to us from a child who,
Speaker 1: by his own later account, made it up. As a
Speaker 1: man who took statements for a living, I'll tell you,
Speaker 1: a recantation is its own slippery animal. Kids recant true
Speaker 1: things all the time when the attention turns scary, when
Speaker 1: a parent gets angry, when a serious faced adult from
Speaker 1: a university makes it clear there's a right answer and
Speaker 1: a wrong one. I've watched real victims take back real
Speaker 1: accounts just to make the question stop. So a kid
Speaker 1: saying he made it up is not the same as
Speaker 1: proof he made it up. But it's not nothing, and
Speaker 1: an honest man weighs it as what it is. What
Speaker 1: it does, in my book is knock the Garrett encounter
Speaker 1: down from evidence to a question mark. I can't lean
Speaker 1: on those shredded shoes the way I wanted to, which
Speaker 1: is fine, because the case for something real and in
Speaker 1: field doesn't just rest on a ten year old. It
Speaker 1: also rests on the grown man half a mile away
Speaker 1: who half an hour later opened his front door. That's right,
Speaker 1: the thing came back, and this time it picked the
Speaker 1: wrong house. Henry McDaniel was, by every account I've read,
Speaker 1: about the dullest man you could pick for the center
Speaker 1: of a monster story. He was a straight laced, quiet
Speaker 1: fellow who didn't drink and didn't spin yarns and had
Speaker 1: nothing to sell. The police who dealt with him put
Speaker 1: it on the record that they found him rational and
Speaker 1: sober in how he gave his account, which is the
Speaker 1: kind of line a department writes down when they're a
Speaker 1: little surprised that the man telling them about a monster
Speaker 1: seems so ordinary. He and his wife had been out
Speaker 1: that evening, and they came home to find their two kids,
Speaker 1: Lil and the younger Henry, worked up about something that
Speaker 1: had been scratching and clawing at the door while they
Speaker 1: were alone in the house. Kids get worked up. Henry
Speaker 1: probably told them to settle down. Then he heard it himself.
Speaker 1: A scratching at the front door. He figured a stray dog,
Speaker 1: maybe a cat. He went and opened the door the
Speaker 1: way any of us would expecting an animal, expecting to
Speaker 1: show it off and get back to his evening. What
Speaker 1: stood there was about four and a half feet tall,
Speaker 1: grayish and built wrong. Henry counted three legs, a short
Speaker 1: squat body, two stubby little arms held up close the
Speaker 1: way a smaller animal holds its fore paws, and two
Speaker 1: eyes the size of flashlight lenses, glowing a pinkish red
Speaker 1: back at him out of the dark. He had the
Speaker 1: presence of mind to do exactly what you'd hope a
Speaker 1: man would do. With his wife and his children in
Speaker 1: the house behind him. He slammed the door. He didn't
Speaker 1: stand there frozen. He went to the bedroom, came back
Speaker 1: with a flashlight and a twenty two caliber pistol, and
Speaker 1: opened the door again. The thing was still out there,
Speaker 1: maybe twelve feet off the house. Now. Henry raised the
Speaker 1: pistol and fired four times. He said afterward, flat as
Speaker 1: you please, that on the first shot he was sure
Speaker 1: he'd hit it. He'd grown up with guns at twelve
Speaker 1: feet A man like Henry does not miss a target
Speaker 1: the size of a large dog four times running. The
Speaker 1: creature did not fall. It did not bleed that anybody
Speaker 1: could find. What it did was hiss at him, a
Speaker 1: sound he compared to a wildcat. And then it turned
Speaker 1: and left in a way no wildcat moves. Henry watched
Speaker 1: it cover the distance toward the railroad embankment in long
Speaker 1: bounding leaps. By his measurement, it crossed about fifty feet
Speaker 1: in three jumps. Then it was gone into the brush,
Speaker 1: past the L and N tracks, the same line that
Speaker 1: ran behind half the houses on that edge of town.
Speaker 1: Henry called the state police. Here's where the story earns
Speaker 1: its keep, and here's where my old training starts pulling
Speaker 1: at me. The Illinois State Police came out. This is
Speaker 1: not a sheriff's deputy from down the road taking a
Speaker 1: neighbor's word for it. These were troopers, and troopers in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three were not in the habit of riding
Speaker 1: up monster reports for fun. They walked the scene with
Speaker 1: flashlights and they found two things. The first was the sighting.
Speaker 1: There were fresh scratch marks gouged into the outside of
Speaker 1: McDaniel's house, consistent with claws, located where Henry said the
Speaker 1: thing had been working at the wall before he ever
Speaker 1: opened the door. The second was the tracks in the
Speaker 1: soft ground around the house. The troopers found prints. They
Speaker 1: were described as resembling a dog's but wrong in a
Speaker 1: specific way. Where a dog leaves four toes. These prints
Speaker 1: showed six toepads. Two of the prints measured about four
Speaker 1: inches across, and the third print, the one you'd expect
Speaker 1: from that strange third leg, came in smaller than the
Speaker 1: other two. Sit with that detail for a second, because
Speaker 1: it's the kind of thing a liar doesn't think to include.
Speaker 1: A man inventing a monster gives it symmetry, he gives
Speaker 1: it a matched set of feet. He doesn't think to
Speaker 1: make the third footprint a different size from the other two,
Speaker 1: because that's an awkward, specif hard to explain piece of
Speaker 1: evidence that doesn't make the story prettier, It only makes
Speaker 1: it weirder. In my experience, the weird specific detail that
Speaker 1: doesn't help the storyteller is usually the detail that's real.
Speaker 1: I'm not telling you the troopers found bigfoot. I'm telling
Speaker 1: you that trained law enforcement officers documented physical damage to
Speaker 1: a structure and anomaloust tracks in the ground at the
Speaker 1: scene of a reported attack, and that the attack had
Speaker 1: already produced a second piece of physical evidence half an
Speaker 1: hour earlier, in the form of a child's shredded shoes
Speaker 1: a few houses over. As a former officer, I can
Speaker 1: tell you that if you handed me that case file
Speaker 1: with the word monster stripped out of it, I'd still
Speaker 1: have to write down that something physical was present at
Speaker 1: that location that night. The trouble is the word monster
Speaker 1: doesn't strip out, and once it was in the air,
Speaker 1: Infield stopped being a quiet farm town. The thing about
Speaker 1: a small town monster panic is that it runs on
Speaker 1: its own fuel once you light it. Henry McDaniel could
Speaker 1: not keep his mouth shut, and you can't really blame him.
Speaker 1: A man has the strangest night of his life and
Speaker 1: he wants to be believed, so he tells the story.
Speaker 1: He told it to the newspapers, He told it to
Speaker 1: anybody who'd listen. He told one reporter that if anybody
Speaker 1: ever did catch the thing, they'd find more than one
Speaker 1: of them, and they wouldn't turn out to be from
Speaker 1: this planet. And the story traveled because a three legged,
Speaker 1: red eyed thing that shrugs off twenty two rounds is
Speaker 1: exactly the kind of story that travels. The White County
Speaker 1: sheriff at the time was a man named Roy Pochard Junior,
Speaker 1: and he watched his county fill up with strangers, and
Speaker 1: he got fed up fast. At one point, Postchard threatened
Speaker 1: to have McDaniel locked up if he didn't quit telling
Speaker 1: people about the creature. So the official response to a
Speaker 1: citizen who'd been attacked at his own front door was
Speaker 1: a threat of arrest for talking about it. The sheriff
Speaker 1: wasn't accusing Henry of lying exactly. He was trying to
Speaker 1: put the lid back on a town that was boiling over.
Speaker 1: It didn't work. By then, the lid was long gone
Speaker 1: because the creature wasn't done. About two weeks after the
Speaker 1: first encounter, on the night that most accounts place around
Speaker 1: May sixth, Henry was woken up in the small hours
Speaker 1: around three in the morning by every dog in the
Speaker 1: neighborhood going off at once. He got up and looked
Speaker 1: out toward the railroad tracks, and there it was again,
Speaker 1: out in the dark, moving along the rail line. This
Speaker 1: time Henry didn't shoot, He just watched it. In his
Speaker 1: own words, it wasn't in any hurry. It started on
Speaker 1: down the railroad track and walked off unbothered, the way
Speaker 1: you or I might stroll home from a late shift.
Speaker 1: There's something about that image that I find sticks with
Speaker 1: you more than the attack does. The first time it
Speaker 1: came at a man's house and took fire. The second
Speaker 1: time it just walked the tracks in the middle of
Speaker 1: the night like it owned them. By now the town
Speaker 1: was overrun. Reporters, curiosity seekers, and armed men poured into Enfield,
Speaker 1: and on the night of May eighth, the armed men
Speaker 1: became the problem the sheriff had been worried about. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. A group of five young men were out
Speaker 1: hunting the creature in the underbrush when they opened fire
Speaker 1: on something they described as a gray, hairy shape. Two
Speaker 1: of them were sure they hit it. Whatever it was,
Speaker 1: took off faster than a man could run, and got away.
Speaker 1: Deputy Sheriff Jim Clark arrested all five of them, charging
Speaker 1: them as threats to public safety and tacking on hunting
Speaker 1: violations for good measure. The judge who heard it didn't
Speaker 1: mince words. He figured the five of them were mostly
Speaker 1: out to raise hell and maybe they were. But here's
Speaker 1: the part that doesn't get explained away by a couple
Speaker 1: of board kids with rifles. They were the second and
Speaker 1: third shooters in two weeks to claim they'd hit the
Speaker 1: thing and watched it leave under its own power. Anyway,
Speaker 1: out of all the people who chased the Infield horror,
Speaker 1: the one with the most interesting evidence was a radio man.
Speaker 1: His name was Rick Rainbow, and he was the news
Speaker 1: director for a station out of Kocomo, Indiana, a place
Speaker 1: called WWKI. Rainbow drove down into Illinois to cover the story,
Speaker 1: and like a lot of newsmen, he ended up part
Speaker 1: of it. He and three other people went searching the
Speaker 1: area where the creature had been reported, near an abandoned
Speaker 1: house not far from the McDaniel place, and they saw something.
Speaker 1: What Rainbow and his companions described was a gray figure
Speaker 1: stooped over somewhere around five and a half feet tall,
Speaker 1: moving fast through the woods and the brush near that
Speaker 1: empty house. It didn't move like a person caught out
Speaker 1: where he shouldn't be. It moved with a speed that
Speaker 1: put four grown witnesses on edge, and then it was gone.
Speaker 1: But Rainbow had a tape recorder running and he came
Speaker 1: away with audio. The sound he captured has been described
Speaker 1: a few different ways by the people who've heard it,
Speaker 1: and none of the descriptions are comfortable. Some say it
Speaker 1: was like a woman screaming. Some say it sat right
Speaker 1: between a woman's scream and the giggle of an infant,
Speaker 1: which is about as weird a combination of sound as
Speaker 1: you can put together in your head. A wailing, screeching
Speaker 1: cry that didn't have a known animal behind it. Rainbow
Speaker 1: believed he'd recorded the thing itself. Now, I want to
Speaker 1: be honest about what a recording is and isn't. A
Speaker 1: tape doesn't show you a three legged creature. A tape
Speaker 1: shows you a sound. Sounds get misidentified all the time.
Speaker 1: Foxes screamed like murder victims. A screech owl in the
Speaker 1: dark will stand the hair up on your arms. I've
Speaker 1: spent enough nights in the woods to know the forest
Speaker 1: is full of noises that sound impossible until somebody tells
Speaker 1: you what made them. So I'm not going to stand
Speaker 1: here and tell you Rick Rainbow taped to monster. What
Speaker 1: I'll tell you is that a working news professional on
Speaker 1: the record with witnesses, went looking for this thing, saw
Speaker 1: a fast, gray figure near the location and brought back
Speaker 1: audio that nobody since has been able to comfortably file
Speaker 1: under any animal that's supposed to live in southern Illinois.
Speaker 1: That tape is part of why the most credentialed monster
Speaker 1: hunt in America got in his car and drove to Enfield.
Speaker 1: Lauren Coleman is a name you'll hear a lot if
Speaker 1: you spend any time in this field. He spent his
Speaker 1: life cataloging exactly these kinds of reports, and he founded
Speaker 1: the International Cryptozoology Museum up in Maine in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: He was a young researcher, and he took the Enfield
Speaker 1: case seriously enough to travel there himself and work it
Speaker 1: like a case instead of a campfire story. Coleman did
Speaker 1: the legwork. He interviewed the witnesses, He examined the siding
Speaker 1: on McDaniel's house where the claw marks were. He walked
Speaker 1: the ground, and while he was out searching one of
Speaker 1: the areas where the creature had been reported, he heard
Speaker 1: something for himself. He's described hearing strange screeching, banshee like
Speaker 1: sounds out in that country, the same general kind of
Speaker 1: cry Rainbow had taped Coleman's own summary of his investigation
Speaker 1: has stuck with me because it's so honest. He said,
Speaker 1: he traveled to Enfield, interviewed the witnesses, looked at the
Speaker 1: damaged siding, heard the strange sounds, and walked away bewildered.
Speaker 1: That's a man who studies monsters for a living telling
Speaker 1: you he left without an answer. I respect that more
Speaker 1: than i'd respect a confident one. Coleman did flow to theory,
Speaker 1: and it's worth laying out because it's the most grounded
Speaker 1: one on the table. He's talked about a category of
Speaker 1: reports he calls bottom land apes smaller than the eight
Speaker 1: foot big Foot of the Pacific Northwest. These are creatures
Speaker 1: reported again and again out of the river bottom country
Speaker 1: of the American South and lower Midwest. Coleman has been
Speaker 1: careful to point out that Enfield's creature was reported at
Speaker 1: about four and a half feet, not the towering height
Speaker 1: people associate with sasquatch, which is one reason he didn't
Speaker 1: think the Infield horror was a bigfoot at all. He
Speaker 1: suggested it might have been a wild ape, possibly even
Speaker 1: an escape chimpanzee, something flesh and blood and out of place,
Speaker 1: rather than something out of another world. And that brings
Speaker 1: us to the rest of the theories, because Field collected
Speaker 1: them like burrs. One camp said, kangaroo, It sounds like
Speaker 1: a joke until you learn there was a genuine rash
Speaker 1: of out of place kangaroo sightings in the Midwest in
Speaker 1: that era, and a startled person seeing a gray, bounding
Speaker 1: upright animal in the dark could land on the wrong
Speaker 1: identification fast. A kangaroo covers ground and exactly the kind
Speaker 1: of long leaps Henry described. The trouble is a kangaroo
Speaker 1: has two legs and a tail, not three legs, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't scratch claw marks into siding or hiss like
Speaker 1: a wildcat, and it certainly isn't shrugging off pistol fire
Speaker 1: from twelve feet. Another camp said the whole thing was
Speaker 1: mass hysteria, what folkloret call social contagion. The idea is
Speaker 1: that one strange report in a primed community spreads like
Speaker 1: a cold People start interpreting ordinary nighttime sights and sounds
Speaker 1: through the new template, and pretty soon the whole town
Speaker 1: is seeing the monster because the whole town is looking
Speaker 1: for it. I'll give that theory. It's due. It explains
Speaker 1: the flood of reports that came after McDaniel went public.
Speaker 1: It explains the armed men in the brush shooting at shapes.
Speaker 1: What it doesn't explain is the start of it. Greg
Speaker 1: Garrett's shredded shoes and Henry McDaniel's gouged siding came before
Speaker 1: there was any contagion to catch. You can't blame a
Speaker 1: panic for the evidence that existed before the panic began.
Speaker 1: And then there was the camp that went all the
Speaker 1: way out. There were UFO sidings reported in the same region,
Speaker 1: in the same window, strange lights in the sky over
Speaker 1: that part of Illinois, and the people who track such
Speaker 1: things tied the creature to them and called it a
Speaker 1: visitor from somewhere else. Others working in much older tradition
Speaker 1: noticed that the things apparent habit of trying to get
Speaker 1: into people's homes lined up with what they considered the
Speaker 1: behavior of something demonic, and they read the whole affair
Speaker 1: as a spiritual attack. There was even a piece of
Speaker 1: local geography that fed all this. Not far off there's
Speaker 1: a stretch of country some folks called the Devil's Kitchen,
Speaker 1: tied in older tellings to bad ground and evil spirits.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you plainly where I land on that last category,
Speaker 1: because you've ridden with me long enough to know I'm
Speaker 1: an evidence first man, and I don't carry any room
Speaker 1: for the supernatural in my account books. I don't think
Speaker 1: Henry McDaniel met a demon. I don't think he met
Speaker 1: a martian. I've sat across the table from too many
Speaker 1: people who needed the strange thing that happened to them
Speaker 1: to mean something cosmic, and I learned to separate what
Speaker 1: a person experienced from what a person concluded. Henry experienced
Speaker 1: something physical at his door. The troopers documented physical evidence.
Speaker 1: Everything past that point, the demons and the saucers is
Speaker 1: people reaching for a frame big enough to hold a
Speaker 1: thing that scared them. The reach is human, It isn't proof.
Speaker 1: What I can't do is wave the whole thing off,
Speaker 1: because when I strip it down to what's actually on
Speaker 1: the record, I'm left holding a short stack of stubborn facts.
Speaker 1: A child attacked with damaged shoes to show for it,
Speaker 1: a grown man's house clawed up, witnessed and documented by
Speaker 1: state police. Anomalous six toed tracks with a mismatched third print,
Speaker 1: multiple separate shooters who claimed hits with no result, A
Speaker 1: repeat citing two weeks later by the same primary witness,
Speaker 1: who that time had no reason to be primed and
Speaker 1: nothing to gain, and an audio recording that's never been
Speaker 1: cleanly explained. Henry McDaniel never made a dime off any
Speaker 1: of it, never walked his story back, and went to
Speaker 1: his grave with the same account he gave the troopers
Speaker 1: the first night. In sixteen years of taking statements, that profile,
Speaker 1: the consistent, unprofitable, evidence backed witness is the one I
Speaker 1: learned to trust. I don't know what came up onto
Speaker 1: that porch and infield. I just refuse to pretend the
Speaker 1: question has been answered. Before we leave White County, I
Speaker 1: want to give you one more, and I'll tell you
Speaker 1: up front this one isn't in any newspaper. It's the
Speaker 1: kind of story that gets passed hand to hand down there,
Speaker 1: the kind you hear from somebody who heard it from somebody,
Speaker 1: and I can't check it, and neither can you. I'm
Speaker 1: including it because it's the kind of small, quiet account
Speaker 1: that tends to grow up in the long grass around
Speaker 1: a famous case, and because it sounds like a real
Speaker 1: person and not a legend. There's a woman i'll just
Speaker 1: call Carol, who grew up a few miles outside Enfield,
Speaker 1: and would have been a young girl when all this happened.
Speaker 1: Years after the famous spring, Carol was walking a field
Speaker 1: edge near the same rail line at dusk with a bucket,
Speaker 1: headed home when she heard a sound off in the
Speaker 1: tree line that she said put her bucket on the
Speaker 1: ground and her feet moving before she decided to run.
Speaker 1: Not a scream, she'd say, lower than that, a kind
Speaker 1: of cough, like something big clearing its throat. She never
Speaker 1: saw a thing, She just got the strong animal sense
Speaker 1: that she'd been noticed, and she covered the last quarter
Speaker 1: mile to her porch faster than she'd ever covered it
Speaker 1: before or since. Her father, who'd lived through the McDaniel
Speaker 1: business and didn't think much of it, took one look
Speaker 1: at her face and walked the field with a flashlight
Speaker 1: and a rifle and found nothing but her bucket lying
Speaker 1: on its side where she'd dropped it. That's the whole story.
Speaker 1: No tracks, no photo, no creature, just a kid who
Speaker 1: heard something wrong by the tracks and a father who
Speaker 1: went out anyway. I tell it because that's what most
Speaker 1: of these encounters actually are. Not a clear look at
Speaker 1: a monster, a sound, a feeling, a dropped bucket and
Speaker 1: a grown man walking the dark to prove to his
Speaker 1: daughter there's nothing out there, hoping like hell. He's right. Now.
Speaker 1: Let's get back on the road. We're headed north and west,
Speaker 1: up out of the river bottoms. Because Enfield wasn't the
Speaker 1: only thing walking around Illinois in those years. The other
Speaker 1: two come in a shape you'll recognize. People think of
Speaker 1: Bigfoot as a Pacific Northwest animal, all cedar and fog
Speaker 1: and the long, lonely coast, but the reports don't respect
Speaker 1: that map. Some of the most active Sasquatch country in
Speaker 1: North America is right here in the middle of the continent,
Speaker 1: in the river bottoms and the hardwood forests of the
Speaker 1: Central States, and Illinois sits in the thick of it.
Speaker 1: The Shawnee National Forest in the south covers a quarter
Speaker 1: million acres of rugged, broken timbered country that almost nobody walks.
Speaker 1: The heart of the rivers give a big animal a
Speaker 1: highway and a water source and a steady food supply,
Speaker 1: and the farm fields along their edges give it easy
Speaker 1: calories at night. If you wanted to design a corridor
Speaker 1: for a large, shy omnivorous animal to move through the
Speaker 1: Midwest without ever needing to show itself. You draw the
Speaker 1: river systems of Illinois, and the reports have come out
Speaker 1: of this state for as long as people have been
Speaker 1: writing them down. There's a whole catalog of Illinois sasquatch
Speaker 1: sightings sitting in the files of the researchers who track
Speaker 1: such things, scattered across the southern forests and the central
Speaker 1: river valleys. Most of them are the usual quiet stuff.
Speaker 1: A hunter who saw a shape that stood up and
Speaker 1: walked off on two legs. A farmer who found a
Speaker 1: line of big prints in a creek bottom after a rain.
Speaker 1: A family on a back road at night who watched
Speaker 1: something crossing the headlights that didn't move like a deer
Speaker 1: or a man. But several of Illinois harry giants didn't
Speaker 1: stay quiet. A handful of them blew up into full
Speaker 1: town panics across those years, and they left the kind
Speaker 1: of record that makes me, as an old cop, sit
Speaker 1: up straight. One of them came before Enfield and ran
Speaker 1: four young campers out of their tents in the dark.
Speaker 1: Another started as a teenager's prank and somehow pulled a
Speaker 1: hundred armed men into the woods. The last one got
Speaker 1: tracked by a police dog right up to the door
Speaker 1: of an empty barn. We'll take them in the order
Speaker 1: they happened, And the first one came up out of
Speaker 1: a creek bottom. In nineteen seventy Go up to the
Speaker 1: middle of the state, to DeWitt County, to a small
Speaker 1: town with the plain prairie name of Farmer City. There's
Speaker 1: a creek that runs through that country called Salt Creek,
Speaker 1: slow and willow lined, the kind of water where local
Speaker 1: kids have always gone to fish and camp and get
Speaker 1: away from their parents. The year is nineteen seventy, three
Speaker 1: full years before Enfield, and the way some tellings have it,
Speaker 1: the trouble started not with the sighting, but with the slaughter.
Speaker 1: A farmer woke one morning that spring to find three
Speaker 1: of his sheep torn apart in the night, killed and
Speaker 1: ripped up by something he couldn't account for, and he
Speaker 1: called the sheriff's office, and a deputy came out and
Speaker 1: looked at the mess and had no good answer to
Speaker 1: give him. Then on the night of July ninth, the
Speaker 1: thing showed itself. Four young people were camped along Salt Creek,
Speaker 1: just south of town, sitting around a fire. Their names
Speaker 1: were Don, Larry, Bob, and a young woman named gail.
Speaker 1: They heard something coming toward them through the tall grass
Speaker 1: that ringed the camp, something that pushed through the grass
Speaker 1: and then stopped just out past the edge of the firelight,
Speaker 1: where they couldn't see it. They sat there, staring into
Speaker 1: the dark at a thing they could hear breathing and
Speaker 1: couldn't see. Then it rushed the tent. One of the
Speaker 1: boys got a flashlight up and put the beam on it,
Speaker 1: and for one second the whole camp saw the same thing.
Speaker 1: It stood six or seven feet tall, It was covered
Speaker 1: in long, pale, grayish white hair, and its eyes threw
Speaker 1: the flashlight back as a flat, glowing yellow. They screamed,
Speaker 1: all four of them, and the creature wheeled around and
Speaker 1: went back into the dark, faster than a thing that
Speaker 1: size has any business moving. They didn't break camp so
Speaker 1: much as flee it. And here's the detail that tells
Speaker 1: me those four were genuinely scared out of their skins,
Speaker 1: because it's exactly the kind of thing a person doesn't
Speaker 1: invent to make himself look good. Don had broken his
Speaker 1: ankle a few days earlier and was getting around on crutches.
Speaker 1: In his rush to get gone, he left the crutches
Speaker 1: lying in the dirt by the fire and ran for
Speaker 1: the cars on a busted ankle without them. A young
Speaker 1: man does not forget his own crutches because he wants attention.
Speaker 1: A young man forgets his crutches because his body has decided,
Speaker 1: without asking him, that staying alive matters more than his
Speaker 1: ankle does. Stay tuned for more Backwoods big Foot Store.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. What makes Farmer City
Speaker 1: stick the same way Murphy's Bro sticks is that the
Speaker 1: witnesses didn't stay teenagers around a campfire. Over the next
Speaker 1: several nights, the report spread, and they climbed the ladder
Speaker 1: of credibility as they went. Adults in the country around
Speaker 1: the nearby towns of Hayworth, Clinton, and Waynesville started calling
Speaker 1: in their own encounters. A local police officer named Robert
Speaker 1: Hayslip reported that the creature walked directly across the road
Speaker 1: in front of his patrol car in his headlights, close
Speaker 1: enough that there was no mistaking it for a deer
Speaker 1: or a stray cow. About a week on, a pair
Speaker 1: of hikers came on the thing down at Salt Creek
Speaker 1: and said it was bathing in the water. They took
Speaker 1: it for a bear at first, until it noticed them
Speaker 1: watching and stood up to its full height, which they
Speaker 1: put at around eight feet, and then turned and ran.
Speaker 1: The story might have stayed a string of frightened eye
Speaker 1: witnesses if not for what came next. And this is
Speaker 1: the part that earns Farmer City its place on this trip.
Speaker 1: With so many of the reports clustering down at Salt Creek,
Speaker 1: the state conservation officers went out to the creek to
Speaker 1: put the whole business to rest. These were not teenagers
Speaker 1: and not townsfolk caught up in a fright. These were
Speaker 1: game wardens, men who spend their lives reading sign in
Speaker 1: the mud and know the track of every animal that
Speaker 1: lives in Illinois. On site. They went out skeptical, and
Speaker 1: down along the muddy bank of Salt Creek they found
Speaker 1: a line of footprints, large and human shaped, that did
Speaker 1: not belong to any animal on their list. The local
Speaker 1: police chief eventually closed the area off entirely, and within
Speaker 1: a few weeks the sightings tapered away the same way
Speaker 1: they always do. The thing came. It walked through people's
Speaker 1: headlights and frightened their children, and left tracks the game
Speaker 1: wardens couldn't name, and then it moved on out of
Speaker 1: Salt Creek and didn't come back. I want to plan
Speaker 1: a flag on that case before we move on, because
Speaker 1: it sets the pattern for everything that follows in this state.
Speaker 1: A livestock kill. Nobody could explain a clear close, multiple
Speaker 1: witness sighting that ran scared people out of a campsite,
Speaker 1: a police officer who saw it in his own headlights,
Speaker 1: and physical tracks examined by professional outdoorsmen who couldn't write
Speaker 1: them off. That's not a campfire shadow. That's a case file,
Speaker 1: and it opened, not closed the strange few years that
Speaker 1: were coming. It's worth knowing too that southern Illinois carries
Speaker 1: this kind of report the way other country carries ghost stories,
Speaker 1: steady and generational. Down around Harrisburg and the swampy Bottoms
Speaker 1: along the Saline River, there's a thing locals have talked
Speaker 1: about for decades called the Tuttle Bottoms monster, described as
Speaker 1: a hairy ape like creature, sometimes on two legs and
Speaker 1: sometimes on four, often with a strange long snout. A
Speaker 1: former Harrisburg police chief named Gary Crabtree once told a
Speaker 1: reporter that, over roughly twenty eight years on the job,
Speaker 1: his department took in something like fifty reports of an
Speaker 1: unidentified beast out in that area, fifty reports one small
Speaker 1: department across one career. The point isn't that any single
Speaker 1: one of those fifty proves anything. The point is that
Speaker 1: the woods of this state never go quiet for long,
Speaker 1: and the men wearing badges down there have stopped being
Speaker 1: surprised by the calls. So farmer City lit the fuse
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy two. Years later up the road, a
Speaker 1: teenager would light it again on purpose. Go to central Illinois,
Speaker 1: to Tazewell County, to the towns of Pecan and East Peoria,
Speaker 1: sitting along the Illinois River. The year is nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: a year before Enfield, and there's a road there called
Speaker 1: Coal Hollow Road. In early May of that year, an
Speaker 1: eighteen year old named Randy Emmert told people he and
Speaker 1: some friends had seen something big and white haired out
Speaker 1: in the woods near Coal Hollow Road. He described a
Speaker 1: creature standing somewhere between eight and twelve feet tall, covered
Speaker 1: in whitish gray hair, looking like a cross between an
Speaker 1: ape and a caveman. It had long, rounded ears, a
Speaker 1: reddish mouth, and hands that looked too close to human
Speaker 1: for comfort. It left tracks with three toes, and it stank.
Speaker 1: The smell got compared to a wet dog mixed with
Speaker 1: rotten eggs, a sulfur reek that people said hung in
Speaker 1: the air. After the thing had gone, Emmert said it
Speaker 1: made a long, screeching cry, and his description of that
Speaker 1: sound is one I keep coming back to. He said,
Speaker 1: it let out a screech kind of like an old
Speaker 1: steam engine whistle, only more human. Whatever else you make
Speaker 1: of Randy Emmert, that's a good line. That's the kind
Speaker 1: of detail that lodges in your skull. He said. The
Speaker 1: thing seemed to be living in a hole under an
Speaker 1: abandoned house in the area, and he said he'd actually
Speaker 1: first seen it a couple months earlier, but kept quiet because,
Speaker 1: in his words, people would think were crazy. What finally
Speaker 1: got him to come forward was the news out of Missouri.
Speaker 1: The momo panic over in Louisiana, Missouri had hit the papers,
Speaker 1: and once Emmert saw that other people in another state
Speaker 1: were reporting a big, hairy creature and getting taken seriously,
Speaker 1: he figured he'd tell his own. They started calling it Cohomo,
Speaker 1: short for the coal Hollow Road monster, and Cohomo caught fire.
Speaker 1: By May twenty fifth, the East Peoria Police logged more
Speaker 1: than two hundred calls in connection with the creature. People
Speaker 1: reported seeing it walking through the woods, crossing their yards,
Speaker 1: moving along the riverbanks. One caller said it had torn
Speaker 1: down their fence. The police were skeptical from the jump,
Speaker 1: the way any sane department would be, but they kept
Speaker 1: writing the calls down because the calls would not stop coming.
Speaker 1: By July, it had escalated into something that could have
Speaker 1: gotten somebody killed. A search party formed more than one
Speaker 1: hundred people, ordinary citizens grabbing rifles and shotguns and heading
Speaker 1: into the woods around Coal Hollow Road to hunt the
Speaker 1: monster down. The Tazewell County sheriff at the time, a
Speaker 1: man named James Donahue, had one hundred plus armed amateurs
Speaker 1: crashing around the timber in the dark, looking for the
Speaker 1: same target. It ended about the way you'd fear. The
Speaker 1: search got called off after one of the volunteers managed
Speaker 1: to shoot himself in the foot. Nobody found Cohomo. The
Speaker 1: only blood spilled that night belonged to a man who'd
Speaker 1: come to spill the monsters, and there were other reports
Speaker 1: rolling in around the same stretch. A rural woman picking
Speaker 1: berries near an old coal mine said she saw the
Speaker 1: creature and was so scared she ran off and left
Speaker 1: her purse lying in the dirt. A pair of citizens
Speaker 1: that the police considered reliable described a thing ten feet
Speaker 1: tall with long, gray, u shaped ears and a red
Speaker 1: mouthful of sharp teeth, with thumbs that had a strange, long,
Speaker 1: extra joint to them. The descriptions piled up. The county
Speaker 1: lived under the things shadow for a good part of
Speaker 1: that summer. Here's where I have to be the cop
Speaker 1: again and tell you the part that the legend doesn't
Speaker 1: like to lead with. Randy Emmert later admitted he made
Speaker 1: it up. Years on. The man who started the whole
Speaker 1: Cohomo business came clean, by his own account and confirmed
Speaker 1: through his family and conversations with researchers decades later, the
Speaker 1: original sighting was a teenage prank that got away from him.
Speaker 1: He told a story to mess with a friend, and
Speaker 1: the story grew legs, and then it grew one hundred
Speaker 1: armed men and two hundred phone calls and a county
Speaker 1: wide panic, and at that point there was no calling
Speaker 1: it back. A researcher named Stan Courtney spoke with Emmert's
Speaker 1: son about it around two thousand and six, and the
Speaker 1: Sun confirmed it. The founding sighting of the Coal Hollow
Speaker 1: Road monster was a hoax. Now, I could stop there,
Speaker 1: drop the mic and tell you Cohomo's a closed case.
Speaker 1: A lot of people do. But I've worked enough real
Speaker 1: cases to know that a false start doesn't automatically clean
Speaker 1: up everything that came after it. Randy Emmert lied about
Speaker 1: the first sighting. Fine that's documented, and I'm not going
Speaker 1: to defend a hoaxer. But Randy Emmert did not phone
Speaker 1: in two hundred calls himself. He didn't put the woman
Speaker 1: in the patch and scare her out of her purse.
Speaker 1: He didn't stand up in front of the East Peoria
Speaker 1: Police as two reliable citizens describing a ten foot creature
Speaker 1: with extra finger joints. The honest position, the one that
Speaker 1: respects the evidence instead of the headline, is that a
Speaker 1: teenager's prank lit a fuse in a community that was
Speaker 1: already sitting on a powder keg of real or half
Speaker 1: real sightings, and the explosion swept up genuine reports, mistaken reports,
Speaker 1: and copycat nonsense all together in one blaze. The researchers
Speaker 1: who track Illinois sasquatch will tell you that the Pekin
Speaker 1: and Peoria area kept producing quiet sightings for years after
Speaker 1: Cohomo's name faded, long after the prank was over and forgotten.
Speaker 1: A hoax explains how the panic started, It doesn't explain
Speaker 1: why the woods up there never quite went silent. So
Speaker 1: I file Cohomo as a hoax that fell into real water.
Speaker 1: The splash was fake, some of the ripples weren't. That's
Speaker 1: the messy truth, and I'd rather give you the messy
Speaker 1: truth than a clean lie in either. To which brings
Speaker 1: us to the one that I think is the strongest
Speaker 1: Bigfoot case in the state, and one of the better
Speaker 1: documented ones in the whole country, because this is the
Speaker 1: one the police didn't just write down. This is the
Speaker 1: one they tracked. Go back south almost down to where
Speaker 1: we started, to Murphysboro and Jackson County, right on the
Speaker 1: edge of the Big Muddy River and within easy reach
Speaker 1: of the Shawnee the summer of nineteen seventy three, same
Speaker 1: year as Infield, a couple hundred miles west of it.
Speaker 1: It started, the way these things so often do, with
Speaker 1: a young couple where they weren't supposed to be About
Speaker 1: midnight on June twenty fifth, a young man named Randy
Speaker 1: Needham and a young woman named Judy Johnson were parked
Speaker 1: in Needham's car down by the boat launch in Riverside
Speaker 1: Park on the southwest edge of town, where the Big
Speaker 1: Muddy runs past. They were parked there for the obvious reason,
Speaker 1: and they had a private one on top of it.
Speaker 1: Judy was married at the time and not to Randy,
Speaker 1: so a dark boat ramp by the river was about
Speaker 1: the only place two people in their situation could sit
Speaker 1: and talk without the whole town knowing their business. By sunrise,
Speaker 1: they had the radio on. They were trying to decide
Speaker 1: whether to head home or stay Awhile and out of
Speaker 1: the brush along the river bank came a sound that
Speaker 1: Randy later described as an eagle shrieking into a microphone.
Speaker 1: He killed the radio to hear it better. It came again,
Speaker 1: closer with movement in the brush. This time Randy hit
Speaker 1: the headlights. Standing in the beams was a creature he
Speaker 1: put at roughly seven to eight feet tall, covered in
Speaker 1: light colored hair that was matted thick with mud, walking
Speaker 1: upright on two legs and coming toward the car. The
Speaker 1: smell hit them through the vents, a stench like river
Speaker 1: slime and sewage. They did not stay to study it.
Speaker 1: They got out of there as fast as the car
Speaker 1: would carry them, and Randy drove straight to the Murphysboro
Speaker 1: Police Department and filed a report, which took some nerve,
Speaker 1: given that filing it meant admitting where he and a
Speaker 1: married woman had been parked at midnight. The cop who
Speaker 1: caught the call was an officer named Jimmy Nash. Nash
Speaker 1: drove out to the scene, and this is the detail
Speaker 1: that puts iron in the case for me. Nash found
Speaker 1: the footprints already filling and disappearing in the soft river mud,
Speaker 1: and while he was out there he heard it. He
Speaker 1: heard the same kind of shriek the couple had reported
Speaker 1: coming out of the brush. An officer, Nash, a grown
Speaker 1: man with a badge and a gun, by his own admission,
Speaker 1: high tailed it out of there. He said later he'd
Speaker 1: never heard anything like that sound in his life, and
Speaker 1: he was certain it was nothing he knew, not a bobcat,
Speaker 1: not a screech owl, nothing on the list of animals
Speaker 1: that were supposed to be making noise in the woods
Speaker 1: of Jackson County. Illinois, when a responding officer's own report
Speaker 1: includes the line that he ran. You are not dealing
Speaker 1: with the department that's hyping a story. You're dealing with
Speaker 1: a department that got spooped and was honest about it.
Speaker 1: The next night, June twenty sixth, it came back, and
Speaker 1: this time it came up to a house. A woman
Speaker 1: named Henry Ray called the police to report that her daughter, Cheryl,
Speaker 1: and Cheryl's boyfriend, a seventeen year old named Randy Creith,
Speaker 1: had run into the creature on the family's property. The
Speaker 1: two teenagers had been sitting out on the porch in
Speaker 1: the dark, talking when they noticed a movement in a
Speaker 1: patch of small trees at the edge of the yard.
Speaker 1: They watched a massive thing walk out of those trees,
Speaker 1: stand there a moment looking at them, then turn and
Speaker 1: walk back off into the field. Creith got a good
Speaker 1: close look. He was the son of a state trooper,
Speaker 1: which is worth noting because a state trooper's kid grows
Speaker 1: up knowing exactly how much trouble he'll be in for
Speaker 1: crying monster, and grows up knowing how a witness is
Speaker 1: supposed to give an account. The two of them put
Speaker 1: it at around seven feet somewhere around three hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty pounds, with a roundish head and long gorilla like arms.
Speaker 1: There was a disagreement between the two teenagers about the eyes,
Speaker 1: and I love this disagreement because it's the kind of
Speaker 1: honest hairline crack you find in true testimony and almost
Speaker 1: never find in a maze up one. Both of them
Speaker 1: said the creature's eyes glowed red, but Creed thought the
Speaker 1: glow was just the reflection of a nearby street light
Speaker 1: catching the animal's eyes the way a deer's eyes flare
Speaker 1: in your headlights. Cheryl Ray insisted no, the eyes were
Speaker 1: actually glowing lit from inside, not reflecting anything. Two witnesses
Speaker 1: to the same thing, agreeing on what they saw, disagreeing
Speaker 1: on what it meant, each one holding their ground. That's
Speaker 1: what real witnesses do. Coached witnesses match. This time, the
Speaker 1: department threw everything it had at it. Officers Nash and
Speaker 1: Ronald man Wearing worked the scene first and hit the
Speaker 1: same wall of evidence. The couple had run into, a
Speaker 1: powerful odor that faded fast footprints and something new. Man Wearing,
Speaker 1: following the trail through the woods, noticed a slimy black
Speaker 1: film smeared on the tree branches along the path, and
Speaker 1: he said so on the record, I saw this substance
Speaker 1: and smelled the smell myself, is how Man Wearing put it.
Speaker 1: There was a trail of that black slime running from
Speaker 1: near the Ray Place back toward the river. The Murphysborough
Speaker 1: police chief at the time, Toby Berger, did not treat
Speaker 1: it as a prank. He dispatched the rest of his men,
Speaker 1: all fourteen of them, the whole working strength of his department,
Speaker 1: out to the scene. And then he did the thing
Speaker 1: that elevates this case above almost every other bigfoot report
Speaker 1: I know of. He called for a dog. He sent
Speaker 1: to the nearby Carbondale Police Department for an officer and
Speaker 1: trained K nine handler named Jerry Nellis, who ran a
Speaker 1: German shepherd called Reb. Reb was no pet. He was
Speaker 1: a working police dog used for search and rescue, used
Speaker 1: as an attack dog, used to track men who didn't
Speaker 1: want to be found. The officers went into the woods
Speaker 1: armed with rifles, revolvers and flashlights with a train tracking
Speaker 1: dog leading them, and Reb picked up the scent and
Speaker 1: ran with it. The dog led them through the broken
Speaker 1: branches and trampled brush down a hill all the way
Speaker 1: to a small pond. Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. The growth got too
Speaker 1: thick for the dog and his handler to push through,
Speaker 1: and they had to pull Reb off the track there. Then,
Speaker 1: as the officers swept the area with their lights, Reb
Speaker 1: caught a different piece of the trail and took off again,
Speaker 1: and this time he led them to an abandoned barn.
Speaker 1: Some accounts say the dog tracked right to that barn
Speaker 1: and then refused to go in. Think about what that
Speaker 1: is as a piece of evidence in a way that
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with believing in monsters. A trained
Speaker 1: police tracking dog, the kind whose job is to follow
Speaker 1: a scent to its source, locked onto a scent trail
Speaker 1: at the scene of a reported sighting and followed it
Speaker 1: through the woods to a structure. That is exactly the
Speaker 1: behavior that dog was trained to produce. When there's a real,
Speaker 1: fresh scent of a real living thing to follow. The
Speaker 1: dog wasn't caught up in any town hysteria. The dog
Speaker 1: didn't read the newspaper. The dog smelled something and chased it,
Speaker 1: and what it chased was real enough to leave a
Speaker 1: trail through the timber and real enough in some tellings
Speaker 1: to stop a hardened shepherd cold at the door of
Speaker 1: a barn. They didn't catch it, they never did, but
Speaker 1: the physical evidence kept stacking up, the prints, the smell
Speaker 1: that came and went, the slime on the branches that
Speaker 1: an officer touched with his own hand and smelled with
Speaker 1: his own nose, And then a few days later it
Speaker 1: walked into the middle of a carnival. About ten days
Speaker 1: into the panic, a traveling outfit called the Miller Carnival
Speaker 1: set up in Riverside Park in the same general patch
Speaker 1: of ground where the first sighting had happened. They picked
Speaker 1: a pleasant glade near the river to park their trucks
Speaker 1: and stake out their animals for the night. Among those
Speaker 1: animals were a string of shetland ponies that gave rides
Speaker 1: to the local kids during the day and at night
Speaker 1: were tied to the brush at the edge of the lot.
Speaker 1: Around two in the morning on July seventh, long after
Speaker 1: the carnival had shut down and the crowds had gone home,
Speaker 1: the ponies came unglued. They rolled their eyes and through
Speaker 1: their heads and fought their ropes, trying with everything they
Speaker 1: had to break loose and run. Three of the carnival workers,
Speaker 1: men named Otis Norris, Ray Adkerson, and Wesley Lavender, walked
Speaker 1: around the trucks to see what had the animals so
Speaker 1: worked up. Standing in the dark at the edge of
Speaker 1: the lot was the creature. They put it at about
Speaker 1: eight feet tall and three to four hundred pounds, covered
Speaker 1: in light colored hair. And here's the part that gets
Speaker 1: under my skin a little, because it doesn't fit the
Speaker 1: monster movie script at all. The thing wasn't attacking, it
Speaker 1: wasn't roaring. It was just standing there watching the ponies
Speaker 1: with its head cocked to one side, the exact posture
Speaker 1: of an animal that's curious about other animals. Three carnival
Speaker 1: men who traveled the country and have seen every kind
Speaker 1: of trained beast there is, looked at a three hundred
Speaker 1: pound upright thing studying a string of panic ponies in
Speaker 1: the dark. By now, Murphysboro had a population of about
Speaker 1: ten thousand people and what felt like ten thousand guns.
Speaker 1: Armed groups formed up the way they had in Peking
Speaker 1: men taking to the woods to find the thing and
Speaker 1: put it down. Chief Burger has said on the record
Speaker 1: that during those two weeks he lay awake, worried less
Speaker 1: about the monster and more about one of his ten
Speaker 1: thousand citizens shooting another one of them dead in the
Speaker 1: dark by mistake. That's the real danger in these panics,
Speaker 1: and it's the thing the campfire version always leaves out.
Speaker 1: Burger eventually decided his department was out of its depth
Speaker 1: and asked the town to bring in outside help. The
Speaker 1: man they landed on was a fellow out of Saint Louis,
Speaker 1: an insurance agent by trade and a serious student of
Speaker 1: Sasquatch reports by avocation a researcher named Harlan Sorkin. Sorkin
Speaker 1: led a small party of men, including a couple of
Speaker 1: reporters from the Kansas City Star and a lawyer, into
Speaker 1: the woods around Murphy's Boar that fall to try to
Speaker 1: track and possibly capture the thing. He had a theory
Speaker 1: that I think is the most sober one on offer,
Speaker 1: and it ties this whole episode back to the country
Speaker 1: we drove in through. Sorkin pointed out that nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: three was a bad flood year in that region. The
Speaker 1: rivers were high and out of their banks. His idea
Speaker 1: was that the flooding had pushed a large animal normally
Speaker 1: hidden deep in the Shawnee or hold up in some
Speaker 1: cave further down the river system, out of its usual
Speaker 1: range and into contact with people for the first time
Speaker 1: in years. The water rose, the creature moved, and for
Speaker 1: two weeks the town of Murphysboro happened to be in
Speaker 1: its way. Then it stopped. The sightings tapered off the
Speaker 1: same way infields, and cohomos did the same way they
Speaker 1: always seemed to. Whatever it was moved on or went
Speaker 1: back to wherever the high water had flushed it out of,
Speaker 1: and the town went quiet. There were scattered reports for
Speaker 1: years afterward, into nineteen seventy four and beyond, a few
Speaker 1: even claimed into the later seventies, but the two week
Speaker 1: siege of that summer was the peak and the heart
Speaker 1: of it. These days, Murphysborough has made its peace with
Speaker 1: the thing. There's a festival now, the Big Muddy Monster Festival,
Speaker 1: and they put up a statue of the creature near
Speaker 1: nine feet of it, and the local brewery named a
Speaker 1: beer after it. The case file from nineteen seventy three
Speaker 1: is still officially open with the Murphysboro Police Department, and
Speaker 1: they've put scans of the original police reports and the
Speaker 1: witness sketches and the photographs online. For anybody who wants
Speaker 1: to read the primary documents instead of the legend, I'd
Speaker 1: recommend it. There's something steadying about reading the actual reports
Speaker 1: in the actual flat language of the officers who filed them,
Speaker 1: with the word monster nowhere in the cops vocabulary, just
Speaker 1: the facts of an odor and a track and a
Speaker 1: slime and a dog that wouldn't enter a barn. I'll
Speaker 1: close Illinois with one more that I can't prove the
Speaker 1: same way I closed out Infield, because the Shawnee never
Speaker 1: really stopped producing these, and I'd be doing you a
Speaker 1: disservice to pretend it all ended in the seventies. There's
Speaker 1: a man I'll call John, a bow hunter, who I'm
Speaker 1: told had a morning out in the southern Illinois timber
Speaker 1: not too many years back that he doesn't talk about much.
Speaker 1: John was up a tree before first light during deer season,
Speaker 1: settled in and quiet, waiting on the gray dawn to
Speaker 1: come up through the hardwoods. Sometime in that last black
Speaker 1: hour before the light, he heard footfalls coming through the
Speaker 1: leaves below him, heavy and bipedal, two feet falling in
Speaker 1: a slow walking rhythm where four feet ought to fall
Speaker 1: for anything that size. He couldn't see a thing in
Speaker 1: the dark. He just sat there in his harness, listening
Speaker 1: to whatever it was walk a slow circle around the
Speaker 1: base of his tree, close enough that he heard it breathing,
Speaker 1: and then heard it move off the way it had come.
Speaker 1: When the light finally came up, he climbed down on
Speaker 1: stiff legs and found, pressed into the soft black dirt
Speaker 1: at the bottom of his tree, a single track longer
Speaker 1: than his own boot by a good four inches, with
Speaker 1: the toes spread wide. He took a photograph of it
Speaker 1: with the camera on his phone, the way the story goes.
Speaker 1: The photo came out blurred and useless, the way they
Speaker 1: always seemed to, and John walked the two miles back
Speaker 1: to his truck, a good deal faster than he'd walked in.
Speaker 1: He doesn't hunt that stand anymore. That's the whole of it.
Speaker 1: No creature, no clear photo, no proof of anything, but
Speaker 1: a big print and a scared man and a track
Speaker 1: he couldn't account for, vague, uncheckable, exactly like a hundred
Speaker 1: others that come out of that forest, and exactly the
Speaker 1: kind of quiet, ordinary, unprofitable report that I've learned over
Speaker 1: forty years to take more seriously than the loud ones.
Speaker 1: So let me put Illinois on the table the way
Speaker 1: i'd put a case file in front of you, and
Speaker 1: then we'll get back in the truck. In a stretch
Speaker 1: of just a few years, one state produced four separate
Speaker 1: monster panics in four separate corners. Up into Witt County,
Speaker 1: a pale, yellow eyed giant that chased four campers off
Speaker 1: Salt Creek, walked across a police office headlights, and left
Speaker 1: tracks that the state's own game wardens couldn't put a
Speaker 1: name to. Down in the southeast, a three legged thing
Speaker 1: that attacked a man at his door, took gunfire from
Speaker 1: more than one shooter, left documented claw marks and six
Speaker 1: toed tracks, got recorded on tape, and was investigated by
Speaker 1: the state police and the most credentialed cryptozoologist in America,
Speaker 1: who left bewildered. In the center, a white haired giant
Speaker 1: that turned out to be born from a teenager's lie,
Speaker 1: but whose woods kept whispering long after the lire confessed.
Speaker 1: And down on the Big Muddy, a mud caked eight
Speaker 1: foot creature that scared a cop into running, smeared slime
Speaker 1: on the trees that an officer touched and smelled and
Speaker 1: got tracked by a trained police dog to the door
Speaker 1: of an empty barn. I'm not going to stand here
Speaker 1: and tell you what any of it was. I've never
Speaker 1: had much use for a man who's certain about things
Speaker 1: he can't prove, and I'm not about to become one
Speaker 1: for the sake of a tidy ending. What I'll tell
Speaker 1: you is what an old cops says. When he reads
Speaker 1: those three files side by side, he sees hoaxes mixed
Speaker 1: in with sightings that no hoax accounts for. He sees scared, ordinary,
Speaker 1: unprofitable people who described the same kinds of things across
Speaker 1: two hundred miles without comparing notes. He sees physical evidence
Speaker 1: that wasn't much but wasn't nothing, gathered by people whose
Speaker 1: job was to be skeptical. And he sees that strange,
Speaker 1: repeating shape at the end of every one of these stories,
Speaker 1: the place where the creature simply walks off, unhurried, down
Speaker 1: a railroad track, or into a flooded forest, or out
Speaker 1: the far edge of a carnival lot and is never
Speaker 1: seen again. That's the thing about Illinois that I keep
Speaker 1: coming back to. The monsters here, didn't linger over the
Speaker 1: place for decades. They came. They were real enough to
Speaker 1: leave tracks and damage and frightened cops in their wake,
Speaker 1: And then they left the way. Something passes through on
Speaker 1: its way to somewhere else. The whole state starts to
Speaker 1: look like a road when you lay the case is out,
Speaker 1: and we weren't the only ones traveling it. Speaking of which,
Speaker 1: the bucket of fried chickens getting cold, and we've got
Speaker 1: a state line to cross get in. There's more country ahead,
Speaker 1: and something's always walking in the dark at the edge
Speaker 1: of it. Di