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early June 1988

The legend

Within the wilderness of the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois,  near the sleepy little town of Murphysboro, lies the legend of The Big Muddy Monster.

A distant relative of Big Foot and the Yeti, the Big Muddy Monster is a shy, furry, man-like creature – a declining survivor of a time before modern man evolved.

For as long as the folks have gathered on the front porch in nice weather to discuss the going’s on around town, the legend of the Big Muddy Monster’s has weaved its way in and out of the folk stories of Southern Illinois.

For reasons that aren’t quite clear, a lot of things grow over-sized near the Big Muddy River in Jackson County. There are the dense growths of poison ivy vines that snared the pioneers’ wagon wheels, the 200-year-old black oaks at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, 170-pound snapping turtle which was pulled from the river, not to mention the enormous fish pulled out of Carbon Lake and the five-foot-long rattlesnake with a girth the size of a man’s hip that the farmer killed with a farm implement and a club.

These abnormalities are simply accepted as a way of life around these parts. Everything that is, except the monster.

The first sighting

Shortly before midnight, June 25, 1973, a man and woman parked in a lovers’ lane at the edge of the Big Muddy River were startled to hear a high-pitched screen [sp] coming from the river’s edge. The, something standing sever or eight feet tall and smelling extremely foul approached the open window of the car. The creature was described as hairy and covered with mud.

When the two people showed up at the Murphysboro police station a few minutes later, police were inclined to believe their monster story: the two were married, but not to each other, and nobody in their position (as the thinking went) would come forward with such a story unless it were true.

Officer Jimmie Nash and two other policemen wend down to the river to investigate. It was a little after midnight, and while Nash was shining his flashlight at some strange footprints, he was startled by what he described as “the most incredible shriek I’ve ever heard.”

The scream sent all three men hightailing it back to their vehicles, in the course of which one of the three dropped his pistol which he later retrieved.

A second search along the river bank in the early hours of June 26 yielded nothing substantive, only a sloshing sound, as if something were moving clumsily but slowly ahead of them in the shallows at the river’s edge. Nothing else came of the search, and at dawn they all went home.

Within a few hours, however at dusk on June 26, things began again. A four-year-old not otherwise known for story-telling claimed he’d seen a “big ghost” while chasing fireflies in the twilight. A housewife heard a high-pitched scream outside her house, and a 17-year-old boy went to investigate; the girl turned on a light.

Then IT stepped into view.

For a period of thirty seconds and at a distance of 15 to 30 feet, the boy and girl and a creature seven or eight feet tall confronted each other. Then it turned slowly back into the bush and walked away upright, snapping branches and ripping out small trees and bushes as it went. It had gray-white matted hair and smelled extremely foul.

Officer Nash, chief of police Tony Berger, and a dozen reinforcements  with a German Shepherd named Reb converged on the house where they were confonted with two pieces of physical evidence: one was a slimy substance which shone brightly when they turned to 12 individuals. The result – he began to attract attention from outside the area. The New York Times ran a story about Big Muddy on October, 31.

He also ceased being an “it.” He had achieved an identity all his own – the Big Muddy Monster, and he was the attempted subject of scientific scrutiny; monster authorities from across the nation converged on Murphysboro.

Armed with bait (chocolate and bananas), a stun gun and shotguns, they tromped the bottoms in late 1973, but they came up with nothing but large footprints, a howl or two, and disturbed samplings.

Additional searchings in 1974 yielded nothing, although sightings continued throughout the Murphysboro area.

The second sighting.

Then in February, 1975, two truckers spotted a “bear-like animal” beside the highway just west of Murphysboro. In July, residents north of town reported a “white and shaggy-haired creature about seven feet tall.”

Numerous other sighting were reported in 1975 and 1976.

Murphysboro officer Nash, for one, believed there was something to the rumors.

“Bears were more or less killed out,” said Robert Vanhamme, Jackson County Conservation Department officer. “There have been no reports for years. It’s possible but it is very unlikely.”

Nash doesn’t buy the bear theory. “For one thing,” he said, “the tracks and sounds are not bear-like. And a bear usually really tears up things.”

Similarities have between “Big Muddy” and “Sasquatch” or “Big Foot”, the mysterious creature of the Cascade mountain ranges of Washington, Oregon and northern California.

As in virtually all “Sasquatch” reports, “Big Muddy” does not change or act ferocious in any way. The animal simply walks along or watches people until it senses it has been seen, then walks away.

Besides “Sasquatch,” a menagerie of monsters has been reported stomping and swooping across the U.S. in recent years. There’s “Momo” in Missouri, a bird with a ten-foot wing span in West Virginia and a one-horned sea monster the size of a boxcar allegedly spotted thrashing its way down the White River of Arkansas.

There is even speculation these seven-foot creatures are descendants of a presumable extinct form of giant ape known as Gigantopithecus. Fossils of this animal have been found in Asia. The theory goes that ancestors of “Biog [sp] Muddy” may have migrated across the Bering bridge from Asia to North America long before true man evolved.

Skeptics want to know why no carcasses, ore even a single bone, of these monsters have ever been discovered. Investigators say bones of any species do not last long on the forest floor. Scavengers quickly break tehm up and the acidic soil of the forest is not conducive to fossilization. They point out that even bones of deer, commonly seen in the area around Murphysboro, are seldom found.

Other missing bits of evidence are nests or signs of a home base.

For ten years, from 1976 when three individuals reported spotting the creature, there was no sign of him. Big Muddy enthusiasts insisted that the monster shows up in flood years. They claim that the monster lives in a cave somewhere downstream. When high water comes, he is forced out of his cave and instinctively turns upstream and comes to town.

Just when the legend was dying down.

Just when you thought it was safe the monster returns.

The Latest Sighting

“What was surprising to me was that it came right up behind the garage,” said Bob Reiman the witness to the latest sighting of the Big Muddy Monster on Friday, June 3, of this year.

The legendary monster reportedly made an appearance in his salvage yard on the north side of Murphysboro near the Missouri Pacific tracks just off Business Route 13.

Reiman had been called to the scene by security guard Charles Straub, who though [sp] there might be a prowler in the salvage yard. Reiman and Straub searched the yard for a
while, then came upon whatever they said was an 8 to 10-foot tall creature covered with fur.

“Its eyes were red in the beam of the flashlight,” said Reiman. “And it had lots of teeth. They weren’t like fangs, they were just teeth. You could sure tell it hadn’t been
using Polident.”

Reiman said the first thing he and Straub noticed was a strong odor. Then they heard a rustling in the treeline on the edge of the lot and saw the creature.

“When they called us about it, we thought they were joking,” said Joyce Tindall of Royalton. Joyce, Reiman’s sister said she had loaded up some toilet paper to pull a prank
on Reiman if it turned out to be a joke.

“When we saw Bob and Charlie’s faces, we knew it wasn’t any joke.” Joyce said she, Cheryl Reiman, and the rest of the group encountered the creature in the south portion
of the salvage yard.

“When it stood up, I just couldn’t speak. Then it ducked back down and all these words just came out of my mouth.”

“It seemed to be making semi-circles around us like it was stalking us or checking us out. It seemed to be just as curious about us as we were about it.”

The night before, Mrs. Tindall said they had heard a loud slurping noise coming from the vicinity of the pan of water which the dog normally drank out of. The next morning,
the pan was dry.

Tuesday, Reiman was spending all of his time on the phone in his garage, talking to reporters and other interested people.

“We didn’t want to report it to the police, because we thought we’d be ridiculed. Folks from the newspapers haven’t been like that, though. They seem to be genuinely
interested in this thing.”

The weeds in the area show signs of being trodden down and a path leads to the low area next to the railroad embankment where what was claimed to be a footprint of the
monster has now seeped full of water.

There have been a total of 12 sightings of the monster to date, most of them near Murphysboro – all of them near the Big Muddy River.

Sunday, September 24, 1978

Have you seen Muddy ‘monster’?

By Dan Hubble
Southern Illinoisan

In the 1970’s, the Big Muddy River seeped into Southern Illinois folklore when it provided a home for a mysterious creature now dubbed ‘The Big Muddy Monster”

The monster was first reported in June of 1972 by a couple living on a farm in Pike County, Mo., about 75 miles north of St.Louis.

The couple reported seeing a flashing circle of light that hovered over the ground for five minutes before it landed. Later, that night, a woman reported seeing something pass her window, but when she went outside, whatever it was had disappeared, leaving a rank smell behind it.

Other person nearby told the county sheriff they heard strange growls “that couldn’t have come from animals.

Deputy sheriffs later found tracks along a cow path but the sheriff said they wre too unrecognizable and could have come from any kind of animal.

The same night, a large, white-haired animal was reported in Cairo, but authorities the dismissed the report.

A year later, the first close-up look at the monster was reported by a Murphsyboro couple, who said they saw the monster near Riverside Park.

Police found tracks leading to the river near the scene and reported hearing strange screams in the distance.

The couple described the monster as being seven feet tall with light, mud-covered hair.

It was reported again the next night by two teen-agers in the Westwood Hill Subdivision near the river. They added that the monster weighed between 300 and 350 pounds and had a distinct odor of river mud about it.

Again, tracks were found and police, with a tracking dog, followed the trail. After losing it briefly the dog picked up the  scent and led police to a barn, but refused to enter. Police found nothing inside the barn.

A young married couple later reported that their 5-year-old son had come into the house and said a ghost was outside. At the time, they dismissed the idea, but said later it may have been the monster.

A year slipped by before the monster was reported again, this time by three youths in Union County. In September of 1974, they reported seeing the  monster while driving on a lonely road. They stopped their car and followed it to a hedge before it disappeared.

They were close enough to report it had blue eyes and its head was about a foot and a half in width.

In February of 1975, the monster was reported seen at the junction of Illinois 3 and 149 by four truck drivers, who described it as looking like a bear or gorilla.

In July of that year, two youths in Harrison reported seeing a strange animal, but the light was too dim to determine exactly what it looked like.

Since then, the monster has apparently vanished.

June 1988

Muddy Monster Returns

Group reports Murphysboro encounter

By Norm Heikens
Southern Illinoisan

Several people are claiming to have seen something near Murphysboro that resembles the Big Muddy Monster, the stinking, dirty hulk with matted hair that shrieks and leaves large footprints.

The latest sightings are said to have taken place early Friday morning at Reiman Auto Service & Salvage north of Murphysboro on business Illinois 13, close to the WINI radio station.

“We weren’t crazy that night,” said Bob Reiman, who claims he first came upon it with his security guard Charles Straub. “We were scared.

“There isn’t any man who could stand that tall. There’s no man that can travel that fast on all fours. And I don’t know a man who can make that noise.”

Reiman said he and Straub first stumbled onto it at about 1:30 a.m. when they were searching for what they thought might be someone stealing parts.

Straub, a part-time policeman for the village of Ava, had heard a commotion toward the back of the salvage yard, and being under instructions not to act before contacting Reiman, called him at home.

Reiman arrived and they split up for the search, rendezvousing near the back corner under moonlight.

Suddenly, they noticed a terrible stench. It was then that they turned on their flashlights and pointed them toward some brush about 30 feet away.

“All we could see was red eyes and yellow teeth,” Reiman said.

It screamed at a high pitch and stood erect. Straub wanted to open fire with the .357 magnum Smith & Wesson handgun he was carrying, but Reiman thought otherwise.

“I told him, “You don’t shoot Mongo. You make Mongo mad.”

They turned and ran from the 10-foot-tall beast and called several others to come witness it.

The group, consisting of Straub, Reiman, his brother Ronnie, his sister Joyce Tindall, his wife Cheryl, his 15-year-old son Bobby, his mother Irma, Charles Tindall and Straub’s 12-year-old son, Shawn, returned to the area looking for the monster.

Irma remembers thinking it was a hoax.

“We were going to tease them and say we were going to call the men in the white coats,” she said, but, “when we got there, we weren’t so sure.”

Upon arriving in the area, she also caught a whiff of the smell that resembled something like “a skunk that fell in a sewer.”

Joyce Tindall also thought it was a joke until her sighting.

“We knew it wasn’t a person from its size and height,” she said. “It stood up and I was in total shock. I couldn’t get anything out of my mouth. You’d think you were looking at a gigantic bear.”

Then she said she recalled that the same obnoxious smell had wafted in her window not far from the garage the night before.

“Living out in the country, you can smell anything.” Tindall said, “Then we heard it drinking (from the dog’s pan).

“It was slurping, like a person.”

Fear kept her from getting up to investigate, claimed Tindall, although she thinks now it isn’t dangerous.

Reiman said they watched if for several intervals of about 30 seconds each as it reappeared from among salvaged cars or tall grass.

Since the monster was working its way closer each time in reappeared, they began making their way back to the garage in an effort to draw it into range of a security light.

It never went under the light, but instead went around the back and banged on the side of the garage.

“The only thing I could figure was he was as curious as we were of him,” Reiman said.

It finally disappeared into the night, but Reman claims to have found a footprint near the Missouri-Pacific Railroad tracks behind the salvage yard that is about 14 inches long about 4 inches wide. It since has filled with water.

Reiman wanted to call authorites, but Straub, who has gone on a camping trip and couldn’t be contacted, advised him otherwise for fear of ridicule.

At least 21 people reported seeing what has been called the Big Muddy Monster in 12 separate incidents between July 1972 and June 1976. Seven came from in or near Murphysboro, one came from Cairo and one from near Wolf Lake.

Reiman is convinced he’s seen something like a Sasquatch of the Northwest or a Yeti of the Himalayas. And with fumors of the sighting floating around Jackson County, he has received calls from others who claim similar encounters.

Irma has become a believer too.

“Let’s just say I don’t care to hang out alone in the back junk-yard,” she said.

Thursday, November 8, 1973

Big Muddy Monster makes the big (New York) time

About the article

Murphysboro’s Big Muddy Monster of last summer has attracted nationwide attention. Radio stations in New York and Massachusetts and a national magazine have made recent inquiries about the monster. New York Times News Service reporter Andrew H. Malcom visited Murphysboro in October and filed this story on the national wire of the Times’ news service on Oct. 30.

By Andrew Malcolm
New York Times
News service

Mrs. Nedra Green was preparing for bed in her isolated farmhouse near here the other night when a shrill, piercing scream came from out by the shed.

“It’s it again,” she said.

Four-year old Christian Baril was in his back yard chasing fireflies with a glass jar. He ran in the house. “Daddy, Daddy,” he said “there’s a big ghost out back.”

Randy Creath and Cheryl Ray were talking on her darkened porch when something moved in the brush near by. Cheryl went to turn on a light; Randy went to investigate.

At that moment it stepped from the bushes.

Towering over the wide-eyed, teen-age couple was a creature resembling a gorilla. It was eight feet tall. It had long shaggy matted hair colored a dirty white. It smelled foul like river slime.

Silently, the couple stared at the creature and the creature stared back at the couple, 15 feet apart. Then, after an eternity of perhaps 30 seconds, the creature turned slowly and crashed off through the brush back toward the river.

It was the Murphysboro Monster, a strange creature that has baffled and frightened the police and residents for weeks now in this southern Illinois town on the sluggish Big Muddy River.

It is a creature that has brought a real kind of Halloween to Murphysboro’s 10,000 citizens. And although the hobgoblin is so far benevolent, no one here is taking any chances. Many have armed themselves and a good number of God-fearing families decided to curtail traditional Halloween trick-or-treat rounds.

Such monster sightings are bizarre indeed for an old farm county seat where brightly colored leaves fall on brick streets and high school majorettes practice baton twirling for the Red Devils’ upcoming football game with Jonesboro’s Wildcats.

“A lot of things in life are unexpected, said Toby Berger, the police chief, ” and this is another one. We don’t know what the creature is. But we do believe what these people saw was real. We have tracked it. And the dogs got a definite scent.”

It all began shortly before midnight June 25. Randy Needham and Judy Johnson were conferring in a parked car on the town’s boat ramp down by the Big Muddy.

At one point the couple heard a loud cry from the woods next to the car. Many were to describe the sound as that of a greatly amplified eagle shriek.

Mr. Needham looked out from the front seat. There lumbering toward the open window was a light-colored, hairy, eight-foot creature matted with mud.

At that point, the police report calmly notes, “complainant left the area.” He proceeded to the police station and filed an “unknown creature” report.

Judy Johnson was married at the time, according to the police, but not to Mr. Needham. So when the two reported the monster, the authorities took it seriously. “They wouldn’t risk all that if they weren’t really scared,” said one.

Later, as Officer Jimmie Nash inspected some peculiar footprints fast disappearing in the oozing mud left by the receding river, he became a firm believer.

“I was leaning over when there was the most incredible shriek I’ve ever heard,” he said. “It was in those bushes. That was no bobcat or screech owl and we hightailed it out of there.”

Officers searched the riverbank for hours, following an elusive splashing around like something floundering through knee-deep water. They found nothing.

Plains folks hereabouts do not excite easily. So the next day on page three The Southern Illinoisan published a 200-word account of the “critter,” omitting the embarrassed couple’s names. That presumably was the end of the case.

But the next night came young Christian Baril’s encounter and the experience of Cheryl Ray and Randy Creath, the 17-year-old son of a state trooper, who drew a picture of the creature.

That did it for Chief Berger. He ordered his entire 14-man force out for a night-long search. And Jerry Nellis, a dog trainer, brought Reb, an 80-pound German Shepherd renowned for his zealous tracking.

With floodlights officers discovered a rough trail in the brush. Grass was crushed. Broken branches were snapped. On the grass Reb found gobs of black slime, much like that of sewage sludge in settling tanks on a direct line between the river and the Ray house.

Red led Mr. Nellis and Officer Nash to an abandoned barn on the old Bullar farm. Then, at the door, the dog yelped and backed off in panic. Mr. Nellis threw it into the doorway. The dog crawled out whining. The men radioed for help. Fourteen area police cars responded, but the barn, it turned out, was empty.

Officer Jimmie Nash searching an area at Murphysboro, Ill., near a parking lot where a monster was reported.

Ten days later the Miller Carnival was set up in the town’s Riverside Park, not far from the boat ramp. At 2 a.m. July 7 the day’s activities had stopped and the ponies that walk around in circles with youngsters on their backs were tied to bushes.

Suddenly they shied. They rolled their eyes. They raised their heads. They tried to pull free. Attracted to the commotion, three carnival workers – Otis Norris, Ray Adkerson and Wesley Lavander – walked around the truck and there, standing up right in the darkness was a 300 to 400 pound creature, hairy and light colored and about eight feet tall.

With no menace, but intense curiosity, the creature was watching the animals.

The men ran for help. The creature left. But an hour later Charles Kimbel saw it again peering over bushes, its head cocked, watching the ponies.

The creature report, which carnival operators delayed filing to avoid hurting business, was the last official note of the Murphysboro Monster. However, there have been many incidents that have not been reported for fear, not of the monster, but of the hundreds of humans who flock to each sighting with rifles and shotguns.

Somehow, no one has shot anyone else yet, but the police had to close the park one night. It was crammed full of hunters and curious campers.

“This is no hoax,” said Tony Stevens, the newspaper editor, “this is hunting country, you know, and anyone who goes around in an animal costume is going to get his butt shot off.”

Local officials are not really sure what to do. They invited Harlan Sorkin, a St. Louis expert on such creatures down for a spell.

Mr. Sorkin said the descriptions matched those of over 300 similar sightings in North America in the last decade, one of them on an Ohio River levee not far from here. There has even been a movie, “The Legend of Boggy Creek,” made about a similar creature in Arkansas.

Mr. Sorkin says the creature is probably a Sasquatch, believed to be a gene deviation in a large ape that has produced a creature that Tibetans call the Abominable Snowman or Yeti and Rocky Mountain Indians call Big Foot.

Typically, he said, these creatures are very shy and favor riverbottoms for their ample vegetation. Even in winter here in Southern Illinois, which is further south than almost all of Virginia, plenty of plant life is available, especially in the vast Shawnee National Forest that straddles the state 400 miles south of Chicago.

Mr. Sorkin speculates that this year’s flooding forced the creature from its natural home, perhaps a cave down river.

Genetically placid creatures, the Sasquatch is said to have killed some hunting dogs during chases. And there are stories of wilderness loggers in the northwest found crushed next to their emptied rifles.

“These creatures have the strength of five men,” Mr. Sorkin said, “and when frightened they take five-foot strides.” To skeptics Mr. Sorkin replies, “you know the gorilla as we know it today was not discovered until the early 1800’s. Can you imagine what people thought when they first saw it?”

Whatever, it is called, the exotic new inhabitant here is real to residents of Murphysboro, a “hospitable” town which, the Chamber of Commerce, says “welcomes newcomers in a way that makes them happy to be living here.”

“These are good honest people,” said young Randy Creath, “it would be fascinating to see it again and study it. But you know, I kinda hope he doesn’t come back. With everyone running around with guns and sticks, he really wouldn’t have much of a chance, would he?”

Tuesday, July 8, 1975

Is Big Muddy Monster back?

Is the Big Muddy monster active again in the Murphysboro area?

It’s that time of the year, and reports indicate another unexplained sighting Sunday night in the Harrison area, north of Murphysboro.

Jackson County authorities and Murphysboro Police checked the area near the Pentecostal Church grounds about 1 a.m. Monday, after two Harrison area residents reported seeing a “white and shaggy haired creature about seven feet tall.”

Police identified the two as Donnie O’Guinn and Marty Rogers. The two told police they were gigging frogs in a pond near the church when they saw the animal.

They said the animal made no threat to harm them before turning and walking away. The two told police the animal broke a tree limb near the scene, and police later found the broken tree limb.

Police reported they were unable to find tracks or any other trace of whatever it was the two saw.

Previous sightings of unexplained events, including the Big Muddy Monster, date back to 1973, and almost all sightings occurred around the Fourth of July.

The first sighting was in June 1973, when two different sightings were reported in the Riverside Park area in Murphysboro. A couple parked near the boat ramp on South 24th Street reported seeing a “white and shaggy haired creature about seven feet tall” approach their car.

Police checked the parking lot and found footprints in a muddy area near the lot. Police also reported hearing “unusual screams” in the parking lot area.

The next night two 17-year-old Murphysboro youths were sitting on the back porch of a home in Westwood Hills Subdivision, just northwest of Riverside Park, when a creature of similar description approached the rear yard of the home.

The following week workers at a carnival in Murphysboro’s Fourth of July celebration in Riverside Park, on the banks of the Big Muddy River, heard what they reported as “unusual screams.”

Not much more was heard from the monster until the first part of this year, when four truckers driving on Illinois 3 near the Illinois 149 junction west of Murphysboro reported to authorities they had seen a “bearlike animal,” on the highway near the Illinois 3-149 junction.

The sightings occurred near the United States Forest Service rest area, in a thickly wooded area.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Letters from all over sent after sighting

Southern Illinoisan

Shortly after the Big Muddy Monster made its supposed appearance in Murphysboro, newspapers and other media started covering the strange sightings.

News reports appeared in papers like the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Omaha World-Herald and more; which prompted a flood of letters set to either Murphysboro city hall or then police chief Tobias Berger.

Following are a few excerpts from the letters sent from across the country:

“Dear Sir…”wrote one admirer in November of 1973. “My mom can catch it. she is good, too. Please let her try…Where there is terror she love to solve. She is good with guns. And knifes allso.”

The city received advice from one young Kansas man in 1975.

“I think next time you get a call about the monster you should take a tranquilizer gun. A powerful drug that makes him sleep and just in case it take a little work put a little signal senter and you can watch it on an electric chart…”

Others begged for police to be kind to the creature. One North Carolina woman wrote in November of 1973, “It distresses me very much that whenever people are confused and frightened they get out their guns. etc…”

She suggested, “Surely a little kindness and feeling for this ‘monster’ would go a lot farther in really finding out what is going on…”

In the Big Muddy Monster file is still held under lock and key at the Murphysboro Police Department there are nearly 40 letters that contain such opinion and musings.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Renowned cryptozoologist got his start at SIUC

By Marleen Shepherd
Southern Illinoisan

Loren Coleman has the Abominable Snowman to thank for his SIUC degree and successful career. In 1960, the Decatur youth caught a campy movie featuring the legendary Himalayan hominid and came back to school the next day with a lot of questions for his teachers.

“They said, ‘Don’t waste your time. It’s not true,’ which of course prompted me into reading everything I could about them,” said Coleman, now considered one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists – scientists who study rumored, mythological or extinct animals that are presumed to exist but for which there is no conclusive proof.

At only 12 years old, Coleman began absorbing every book he could on the subject, attending academic conferences and corresponding with more than 400 scientists, authors and amateur monster-hunters.

His journey of discovery led him to SIUC folklorist John W. Allen, whose 1963 book “Legends & Lore of Southern Illinois,” is now considered the Bible for the area’s celebrated storytelling.

Allen recounted descriptions by Southern Illinoisans and Kentuckians of the “little red men of the woods.”

The creatures are described as 4-feet-tall and hairy with human-like faces. They stand upright but are also able go to all fours like an ape. They are commonly reported throughout the American South in swampy areas and are known as swamp apes, skunk apes or napes, and monkey men.

A Mount Vernon resident told Allen he struck one of these mini-Bigfoots, known to Southern Illinoisans as Boogers, over the head with a rifle.

“(Allen) collected them as folklore,” Coleman said. “I was interested in them as actual cases of cryptozoology.”

Coleman arrived at SIUC in 1965 as an anthropology major and zoology minor to study Boogers as well as other mysterious animals of the area.

“I found SIU extremely open-minded about this,” Coleman said. “There was a lively intellectual atmosphere there that let me do what I needed to do.”

Coleman documented sightings and conducted field work knee-deep in Southern Illinois swamps. He went on to travel the world doing the same.

The result is more than 30 books, many of which make mention of central and Southern Illinois, including the classic 1983 “Mysterious America.” Coleman is a frequent guest of radio programs such as the paranormally friendly “Coast to Coast AM,” and has also appeared on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

Coleman is a consultant on several television shows including “In Search Of,” “Ancient Mysteries” and “Unsolved Mysteries.” During 2002, he was featured in “Search for the Mothman,” available on the DVD of the movie “The Mothman Prophecies.” He also served as the Screen Gems’ national and international publicity spokesperson for the movie.

This week Coleman is celebrating the first-ever Creature Appreciation Week, sponsored by the Wizards of the Coast’s Duel Masters trading card game, for which Coleman is also a consultant. Coleman says children’s interest in these creatures is often a gateway to education in the sciences.

“I get 500 e-mails a day from kids 7 and 8 and up through college who are interested in monsters. I tell them to stay in school and follow their passions.”

Coleman, now a film professor at the University of Southern Maine, encourages those hot and bothered by Bigfoot to study zoology and those loony for Loch Ness Monster to pursue marine biology.

He hears from parents who are thrilled that their reading-resistant kids are willing to sound out the names of the monsters on trading cards and in Coleman’s “Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature.”

Coleman now lives in Portland, Maine, where he created the International Cryptozoology Museum in 2003.

Creatures he has chased in Southern Illinois include the Murphysboro Mud Monster and black panthers, which have been sighted since the turn of the last century in the Shawnee National Forest and Crab Orchard areas.

Other animals in regional folklore include giant snakes and turtles, sea serpents of the Mississippi River and thunderbirds, flying mammals as large small airplanes. Illinois is considered a hotspot for cryptids, or the hypothetical critters Coleman chases.

“In the mid ’70s, Illinois had the most creature reports east of the Rockies,” Coleman said. He believes this is because SIUC professors and students, and area residents, actively related sightings. In addition, the long state of Illinois stretches from a dense urban area in the north to the plains in the middle to the swamps and forest of the south.

“There’s a wide variety of biohabitat,” he said.

While Coleman said he does not have a reason to believe in all of the creatures about which he compiles evidence, he does expect Bigfoot to be confirmed as reality.

“I think it’s pretty credible. I’ve talked to police officers in Alabama who found prints that matched those found by conservationists in Florida and game wardens in Illinois,” he said of a type of footprint that indicates a large side-attached big toe. “Most people who put fake Bigfoot prints make it look like a giant human foot. All these people finding the same large footprint tells me there’s something going on there that’s beyond fakery.”

For those skeptical of cryptozoology, Coleman points to the many animal discoveries once rumored to be myth. Among these are mountain gorillas, the megamouth shark, the coelacanth (a six-foot-long, walking fish), and most recently, the ivory-billed woodpecker.

“In Brazil, they’ve found a new monkey every year during the last decade,” Coleman said. Once a discovery is made, traditional science takes over and cryptozoology moves on to the next mystery. Coleman believes about 80 percent of the reports he investigates are fraudulent or the result of human error or imagination.

“That left me with 20 percent of the cases that were unknown and that’s what’s exciting.”

Thursday, October 30, 2003

A Monster of an Idea to Boost Tourism

By Jeff Smyth
Southern Illinoisan

If Southern Illinois is to become the tourism hot spot many desire, it needs a gimmick. We need something out of the ordinary. Something so unique that it will make people want to drive here from hundreds of miles away to buy our T-shirts.

We’ve tried touting the region’s natural beauty, its rich history, mild weather, wine trail, golf trail, orchard trail, Trail of Tears and trailer parks, but we’ve been unable to find the hook to distinguish ourselves from other tourist traps.

If what already exists here isn’t enough of a draw it’s time to make up something that will bring in visitors. In short, we need a monster.

Other towns and regions around the world have them and it has proven lucrative, so why not Southern Illinois?

Roswell, N.M., has the UFO and the body of an alien no one has seen. The Pacific Northwest has bigfoot tramping through its forests and only a snippet of celluloid of a guy in an ape suit to prove it. There is a dinosaur that has been swimming in Scotland’s Loch Ness the past 65 million years and captured only once by a photographer using grainy black and white film.

Still, for all the skepticism that these creatures exist or have existed, people like to investigate and hunt them and see for themselves if they are real. In doing so they spend lots of money.

“Nessie,” the dinosaur with the snake head, has been a cash cow for the towns around Loch Ness. Roswell survives off the curious who travel to this town off the beaten path in New Mexico’s upland desert in hopes that, just because they’ve arrived, the U.S. government will fess up to hiding the ET.

Southern Illinois can take a cue from these communities and begin hyping legend and lore of a beast of some kind like no other seen on earth.

There was an effort years ago to create monster lore in Southern Illinois. Sightings of what was dubbed the “Big Muddy Monster” surfaced in 1973. “Mongo,” as it was also called, was described as being between 7 and 10 feet tall with light colored hair, red eyes and yellow teeth and smelling like a skunk that had rolled in a deer carcass. The problem is that described any of a number of bubbas and bikers who used to roll out of Midland Inn into the night back when it was a true roadhouse.

The Big Muddy Monster created quite a stir in these parts even gaining Southern Illinois publicity in The New York Times. Alas, the hullabaloo subsided after only a few years. My theory is that Mongo was too similar to Big Foot – a copycat monster – and people wised up to the hoax.

We need an original ogre if we are to dupe unsuspecting tourists to come here and join the hunt. What form it will take is the biggest question.

I queried a few people on the subject and they conjured some interesting monsters, but their ideas need to be fleshed out.

With the raising of freshwater prawns becoming more popular in Southern Illinois, one suggestion was that we create a myth about a local fish farmer who used hormone drugs to grow super-sized crustaceans. His experiment got out of hand and some of the prawns grew to be as large as the fabled giant squid, escaped from their holding pens and are now terrorizing fisherman on the region’s ponds, strip pits, lakes, rivers and streams.

A variation of this would be to use mutated catfish that “walk” like fish found in Florida and eat small cattle and family pets.

Since many believe there is a government conspiracy to reintroduce mountain lions in these parts, we can springboard from here. Pumas themselves wouldn’t be much of a draw, but what if we circulated rumors that saber-toothed tigers are prowling our forests?

This has the right mix of which great myths are made. A prehistoric creature, a government cover-up and danger.

A final suggestion I heard was of an apeman who lives in our underground coal mines and terrorizes miners. I’m told a mythical subterranean creature already exists in the minds of some coal miners. The “Gob Monster” is a creature that attacks miners when their cap lamps go out.

I like the idea of resurrecting the Gob Monster, but there is a downside. The mines are off limits to the public so few would have a chance to hunt for the creature. On the other hand, Area 51 in Nevada isn’t open to the public and it still draws scores of the curious.

The experts I assembled on the subject had some good ideas, but the possibilities are endless. I’m certain there are many pranksters out there creative enough to come up with their own beast. The best way for such a creature to “grow legs” and become local lore is to just launch it with no fanfare. A few chance sightings, some media coverage and we are on our way.

We’ll have a great opportunity tomorrow night to get inspiration for a Southern Illinois monster. The streets will be filled with ghouls, goblins and unworldly things that go bump in the night. They may come to your door, but don’t be afraid. Just feed them some sweets and they will go on their way. Happy Halloween.

Thursday, November 6, 2003

Time for the Big Muddy Monster to come home

By Jeff Smyth
Southern Illinoisan

Mongo phone home. Better yet, come home. Southern Illinois needs you.

Mongo, a.k.a. the Big Muddy Monster or Murphysboro Mud Monster, hasn’t been seen in these parts since the 1970s when sightings of the 7- to 10-foot ape-man that smelled like muck were rampant.

Those who fear for the beast’s demise need not, though. He’s still with us, although he’s relocated farther south.

Last week I referenced the Big Muddy Monster in the context of how Southern Illinois should create its own mythical creature as a tourist draw la the Loch Ness Monster. As a result, Loren Coleman contacted me.

Coleman is an author, filmmaker and professor at the University of Southern Maine. He is also a cryptozoologist. In short, it means he studies creatures whose existence is unproved.

Coleman knows all about the Big Muddy Monster and other strange denizens of this region. He was drawn to Southern Illinois from his hometown of Decatur in the 1960s because he heard about strange beasts prowling our swamps and woodlands.

Coleman earned a degree in anthropology with a minor in zoology from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Those “accepted” sciences aside, Coleman was more interested in chasing the unknown.

He carved his niche as a cryptozoologist and is now considered the world’s leading expert in the field. When “Mothman,” a movie about a flying beast terrorizing West Virginia, was made, Coleman was a senior consultant. He wore the same hat for the producers of the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries.”

He also has written nine books on the subject, the most recent published this year titled “BIGFOOT! The True Story of Apes in America.” In it, Jackson County and Murphysboro are listed 10th among his top 20 places to see Bigfoot.

Coleman was unruffled by my skepticism about his life’s calling.

“Cryptozoology is not evangelical. Belief is the providence of religion. I’m not here to convince you these things exist,” he said. “You’ll have to come to that conclusion yourself. I think it is important, though, to keep an open mind.”

So convince me that the Big Muddy Monster and the estimated 500 other reported sightings of ape-men should be taken seriously.

“Eighty percent of the reports need to be thrown out. A few are hoaxes but most are a mistake in identity,” he said. “That leaves 20 percent to investigate.”

Coleman is certain there are creatures in this world, even in our own backyards, that have yet to be discovered – some as grand as a Big Muddy Monster. He points to the mountain gorilla that was finally discovered in eastern Africa in 1902 after decades of searching. More recent was the discovery of the megamouth shark in 1976. It was captured accidently by researchers working off the Hawaiian Islands.

Discoveries such as these fuel Coleman’s desire to find more. Proving the Big Muddy Monster, Bigfoot, Sasquatch or whatever they are called by local residents exists is akin to finding the Holy Grail, he said.

What we call monsters, Coleman calls North American apes. He is certain they exist living in small bands. He believes their intelligence is little higher than a chimpanzee’s, they don’t use simple tools and they live amidst a primate social structure. They are nocturnal and emit a screeching, yet guttural, sound. He estimates the population to be between 2,000-4,000 on this continent.

That the body of one has yet to be displayed leaves him unfazed, “Have you ever seen a dead bear or mountain lion in the woods?’ he asks.

Coleman accepts the skepticism, even ridicule, bestowed on him by many regarding his belief in ape-men, but he is troubled that others in academia shun cryptozoology as a pseudo-science.

“There should be graduate studies with researchers in the field six months at a time, not two or three days when a sighting is reported,” he said.

That many refer to these creatures as monsters doesn’t trouble Coleman even though he doesn’t believe they are. It is a psychological response to the unknown, he said.

As for the Big Muddy Monster, it, or at least one of its kinfolk, has been seen in both Tennessee and northwest Arkansas as recently as last week.

“(Bigfoot) are fascinating species,” Jacqlin Castillo, a Bigfoot tracker, told the Siloam Springs (Ark.) Herald-Leader. “They are absolutely out there, but they’re so elusive… I think people need to be educated about them.”

So, my invitation stands. Big Muddy Monster, Mongo, Murphysboro Mud Monster, whatever you want to be called, come home to Southern Illinois. I’ll meet you at Mungo Jerry’s Fat Cat Cafe and you can tell me what it’s like to be so misunderstood, what you thought of the movie “Planet of the Apes” and if you think King Kong is a prima donna.

Before we get together, though, would it be too much to ask that you bathe?

Saturday,  October 30, 2004

Haunted Southern Illinois: Region full of the scary, bizarre, and freaky phenomena

By Marleen Shepherd
Southern Illinoisan

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS – The ghost stories of a region are the remnants of an oral tradition, a chronicle of persons and events that are chillingly recounted for generations.

Our history books only tell part of the story; our wild imaginations fill in the blanks. Or is it imagination? Humanity has been wrestling with that question for centuries.

What we do know is that our own tales of rattling chains, of strange forest creatures, of visitors from beyond the grave, are as deeply ingrained in Southern Illinois culture as the historic sites from which many of the tales emanate. The sheer expanse of Southern Illinois’ phantasmic folklore has been the subject of several books such as “Haunted Illinois,” “Weird Illinois” and “Weird Egypt: History, Haunts & Lore of Southern Illinois.”

Several ghost stories from Southern Illinois reach back to and beyond the area’s settlement. The region’s eerie tales – like those of the Old Slave House in Equality – are still used by native Southern Illinoisans to spook their children on stormy Halloween nights, some 150 years after the first ghost story about the plantation appeared.

Others, like the spirits at Carbondale’s DCI Biologicals, are newly told here and will likely be added to the campfire compendium entertaining the next generation.

Here are some of the area’s finest, sure to send the proverbial chills up your spine and leave you to wonder, “Was that knock just now really the house settling?” Maybe it is a new tale to add to the repertoire of spirited stories that tell us as much about our history as they do of the paranormal.

DCI Biologicals, Carbondale

This historic building that once served as Carbondale’s stately cement post office is a place where “weird things happen all the time,” according to Michelle Kell, the center manager who did not believe in ghosts before working at the building on Main Street.

Now Kell admits she’s afraid to be alone there at night, and she recently lost the employ of a night janitor who could not handle the intensity and frequency of poltergeist activity.

According to Kell, one of the janitor’s scarier nights on the job included becoming locked in a closet when the door shut behind him and a chair flew behind the door. This has been known to happen to other employees, sometimes in broad daylight.

Kell has been alone in the building when doors of the nearly century-old edifice open and shut by themselves.

“I’ve heard a phone ringing downstairs. We don’t have any phones downstairs,” said Kell, who also reports the radio routinely turns on and off by itself at night. “That’s the reason I don’t want be here by myself.”

The huge chandelier in the lobby also takes to swinging back and forth of its own volition and a recent photograph snapped in the lobby revealed a ghostly figure posing for the camera behind an employee.

“It looked like somebody white standing behind her. You could see it perfectly, like a white form,” Kell said.

The white feminine outline, wearing a long dress, has been spotted at other times floating through the lobby.

Kell said the old post office, where a postmaster reportedly died, was also used to house other government offices like that of the FBI.

Old Slave House, rural Equality

This home, originally named Hickory Hill, is considered not only one of the most haunted places in Southern Illinois, but in the nation.

It was once used in the reverse underground railroad to capture free blacks and sell them into slavery for hefty profits. Some slaves were kept in Illinois for the excruciating work in the salt tracts owned by the home’s owner, John Hart Crenshaw.

The attic of the beautiful white home was fashioned into a torture chamber where the blacks were shackled to small make-shift cells. The whipping post, bars on the two tiny windows that allowed practically no airflow into the slave holding cells, a ball and chain and the secret passage leading directly from the attic to a carriage door are grim reminders of the horrors endured here.

Jon Musgrave, a researcher of the home’s history, says rumors of ghosts in the attic actually started appearing in the 1800s when townspeople weren’t hearing Hickory Hill ghosts. They were hearing the all-too-real moans of live people.

When the house re-opened for tourism in the 1920s under new ownership, the ghost story revived as inhabitants and visitors alike told of strange noises throughout the house, most noticeably from the attic where, reportedly, blood stains appear on the walls and where chains still rattle and cries still echo at night.

The building, which closed to tourism eight years ago on Halloween, has hosted some 150 ghost hunters who tried to spend the night in the home. Only one made it through an entire night, departing with tales of ghostly sounds, according to “Haunted Illinois” author Troy Taylor, as recounted on his Web site www.prairieghosts.com.

Reports of ghostly shapes and areas of extreme cold in the house, even on the hottest August days, continue through this day.

The Murphysboro Mud Monster

He has been called Bigfoot in the United States, the Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas, Mapinguari in the Amazon, Sasquatch in Canada, Yowie in Australia and Yeti in Asia.

In Jackson County, where a string of sightings occurred in the late ’70s and early ’80s, he’s known as the Big Muddy Monster, named after the river he reportedly used as a main thoroughfare.

According to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Association, which has an extensive on line database of all sightings in the United States, the Murphysboro Mud Monster earns a class C in credibility, the lowest ranking.

However, many of the people reportedly saw the beast (often smelling a foul odor beforehand) still talk of the rare sightings of a creature most often described as looking like a big-boned and hair-covered 7-foot-tall biped. The hair was usually matted with mud and plant material, and recounts of the color vary from white to brown with silver streaks.

The monster never hurt anybody but spooked local hunters, children, lovebirds and once a troupe of carnies that said the beast stopped in to inspect the Shetland ponies one night while the group was setting up for a Riverside Park carnival.

The slew of sightings drew headlines from newspapers across the United States, including The New York Times.

It has been a decade since the last sighting of the mud monster, or Mongo as he is sometimes dubbed. But locals in the community still trade stories of the piercing cries made by the creature and large footprints left in the mud.

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Association reports a dozen other Bigfoot sightings in Southern Illinois over the last 50 years. The agency contends that Native Americans in the area first documented “non-human peoples of the wild,” and for 400 years the wilderness of North America has been entertaining similar tales.

Devil’s Bake Oven, Grand Tower

Historians surmise that places with names like Devil’s Bake Oven often earn such monikers because of a belief by early inhabitants that such lands are cursed or somehow connected to the paranormal.

The once-booming iron town of Grand Tower, along the Mississippi River on Illinois 3, is no exception.

According to Taylor, legends of ghostly activity were first circulated by the Native Americans who called this area home. Powerful rapids slap the base of the rock, which caused numerous deaths at nearby Devil’s Backbone, a rocky ridge about a mile-and-a-half long at Grand Tower’s northern edge. Devil’s Backbone continued to thwart the most experienced riverboat captains, resulting in many tragedies.

Ghost stories continued throughout the ages, including the story of a drowned wedding party that resurfaced from the river and foretold the coming of the Civil War to their descendants.

The most famous spirit in Grand Tower is that of Esmerelda, the daughter of a prominent citizen in the mid-1800s who lived atop Devil’s Bake Oven. Esmerelda was said to have fallen in love with the handsome rogue pilot of a riverboat appropriately named “Spectre.”

After a boiler explosion claimed her lover’s life, according to legend Esmerelda leaped to her death from the high cliff. While her home that sat above the cliff is long gone, some believe Esmerelda remains.

Locals have said the dead girl appears as a fine mist. According to Taylor, she walks along the pathway and vanishes among rocks near the old house. The moaning and wailing that still echo from the area are said to be most acute during thunderstorms.

The Hundley House, Carbondale

This historic brick home on Main Street with accents such as an original Art Nouveau stained-glass window was the site of an unsolved murder in 1928 of the former mayor J. Chas Hundley and his philanthropist wife, Luella.

Speculation on the killing abounds with tales of shady connections the family may have had in the heyday of prohibition and mobsters. The only suspect was Hundley’s son, who was allegedly involved in a bootlegging ring. He was never charged.

The hole from the 45-caliber bullet that ended Luella’s life still remains by the private back staircase leading up from the kitchen of the current gift and wine shop to private rental quarters.

Guests and residents have reported ghostly activity continuously for the last seven decades. The porch swing starts swinging by itself on windless nights, pots and pans bang in the kitchen, doors open and close, and lights turn on and off by themselves.

Tenants who live in the upper level of the house also have reported creaking on the steps where Luella was slain.