Saturday, 12 May 1973

Wabash “monster” being sought

Robinson Daily News

Enfield, Ill. (UPI) –

An anthropology student who has made a study of sightings of ape-like creatures plans to hunt the , “Enfield monster” with a camera and a tape recorder today.

Loren Coleman, 25, who is studying at the University of Illinois at Urbana after putting in three years at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, said he and two friends will attempt to locate a creature reported sighted during the last week around this White County community.

Coleman, who said he has been collecting data on such sightings for 10 years, said he believes the creature may be a type of anthropoid ape. “These are not the first such monster reports and they won’t be the last,” he said Friday.

Coleman said he decided to look for the creature today after talking with Rick Rainbow, news director at radio station WWKI, Kokomo, Ind., who with three companions said he saw an ape-like creature near Enfield last Sunday. Rainbow tape recorded sounds he said were made by the creature.

The sound on Rainbow’s tape is similar to an elephant call, Coleman siad. He added he has hear the Saimang ape give such a call.

Rainbow said he and his group saw a 5 to t 1/2 foot tall creature, grey-black [sp] in color, in the open end of an abandoned barn about half a mile north of Enfield. The creature let out a shriek and fled, he said.

First reports of the “Enfield monster” came from Henry McDaniel, a disable war veteran, who said a hair creature scratched on his door about 9:30 p.m. April 25. He said he saw it again on a railroad track near his home last Sunday.

Coleman said reports of an ape-like creature came from Canton, Ala., in 1960 and casts were made of tracks found in the area.

There was a report of a creature near Bridgeport in Lawrence County in 1962 and another report from Jackson County in 1942 of an ape-like creature that leaped 20 to 40 feet across highways, Coleman said.

Then in 1971 there was some flack about a “skunk ape” in Florida because the creature gave off some sort of odor,” he said.

In 1941, Coleman said, a Reverend Harpole was hunting in the woods near Bonnie, south of Mount Vernon when a creature jumped out of the trees, knocked off the minister’s hat and dislodged a pipe in his mouth.   The startled clergyman whacked the creature on the head with his shot gun barrel and it fled, Coleman said.