March, 1946

Hoosier Folklore

Vol. 5, p. 19

Another type of story that is of much more concern to us here in Southern Illinois nowadays is the “strange beast” legend.… Every few years some community reports the presence of a mysterious beast over in the local creek bottom.

Although it is difficult to determine just where a story of this sort has its beginning, this one seems to have originated in the Gum Creek bottom near Mt. Vernon. During the summer of 1941, a preacher was hunting squirrels in the woods along the creek when a large animal that looked something like a baboon jumped out of a tree near him. The preacher struck at the beast with his gun barrel when it walked toward him in an upright position. He finally frightened it away by firing a couple of shots into the air.

Later the beast began to alarm rural people by uttering terrorizing screams mostly at night in the wooded bottom lands along the creeks. School children in the rural districts sometimes heard it, too, and hunters saw its tracks.… By early spring of 1942, the animal had local people aroused to a fighting pitch. About that time, a farmer near Bonnie reported that the beast had killed his dog. A call went out for volunteers to join a mass hunt to round up the animal.

The beast must have got news of the big hunt, for reports started coming in of its appearance in other creek bottoms, some as much as 40 or 50 miles from the original site. A man driving near the Big Muddy River, in Jackson County, one night saw the beast bound across the road. Some hunters saw evidence of its presence away over in Okaw. Its rapid changing from place to place must have been aided considerably by its ability to jump, for, by this time, reports had it jumping along at from 20 to 40 feet per leap.

It is impossible to say how many hunters and parties of hunters, armed with everything from shotguns to ropes and nets, went out to look for the strange beast in the various creek bottoms where it had been seen, or its tracks had been seen, or its piercing screams had been heard. Those taking nets and ropes were intent on bringing the creature back alive.

Usually this strange beast can’t be found, and interest in it dies as mysteriously as it arose in the beginning.… About 25 years ago, a ‘coon hunter from Hecker one night heard a strange beast screaming up ahead on Prairie du Long Creek. Hunters chased this phantom from time to time all one winter. Their dogs would get the trail, then lose it, and they would hear it screaming down the creek in the opposite direction. It was that kind of creature: you’d hear it up creek, but when you set out in that direction you’d hear it a mile down creek.

Monday, March 30, 1942

Mass Hunt For Animal Fails To Solve Mystery

Carbondale Free Press

The mystery of Gun Creek bottoms still is a mystery.

Not even 1,500 Southern Illinois hunters could flush the mysterious animal with a ‘wildcat’s scream’ and “paws like a hugh raccoon” yesterday, although they combed the bottoms with shotguns and rifles on the ready.

The object of the mass hunt was blamed last October for an attack on a squirrel-hunting Mt. Vernon minister. Screams like those of wildcats have been reported heard frequently at night. The animal was declared responsible for the death of a dog and was said to make tracks similar to a raccoon “but four times as large.”

The affair wasn’t without results, however. Merchant J. R. Reed, who organized the hunt, sold out his candy bar, soda water and lunch meat stocks. Some hunters shot a large hoot owl and several crows.

There was considerable others sharpshooting – of the political variety. Practically every Jefferson County office seeker was on hand.

Saturday, December 07, 1985

Reliving the tale of the Big Muddy Monster

By Ann Schottman Knol

The huge creature was the stuff of nightmares.

Monster sightings

—————————————————————————————

July 16, 1972: A jogger reported seeing something like the Big Muddy Monstrer near the Ohio River levee at Cairo. (Alexander County)

June 26 – July 1973: Nine people reported seeing it in four separate incidents in Murphysboro. (Jackson County).

Sept. 2, 1974: Three Anna youths reported seeing it in the Beach Grove area near Wolf Lake. (Union County).

Jan. 26 1975: Four truckers, traveling separately, radioed in reports of seeing a “bear-like” creature along Illinois 3, near the Illinois 149 junction west of Murphysboro. (Jackson County)

July 7, 1975: Two Murphysboro men reported something they thought my have been the Big Muddy Monster near a pond in the Harrison community, north of Murphysboro. (Jackson County)

June 19, 1976: Three youths said they saw “something” near the Westwood Hills Subdivision – the area of two previous sightings. (Jackson County)

————————————————————————————–

They said it came walking out of the shadows and muck around the Big Muddy, stinking of the dank river. The massive bulk of its eight-foot frame struck terror in those who reported it.

But, like a curious child, it only stared at the people who came across its path. Or, sometimes, it screamed – a shrill, unearthly cry.

At least 21 people reported seeing what was called the Big Muddy Monster in 12 separate incidents between Jul 26, 1972 and June 19, 1976. Seven reports came from in or near Murphysboro, one from Cairo and one from near Wolf Lake.

There have been no reported sightings in the past nine years. But the people who saw it still swear by their sightings.

Randy Creath is now a minister at the First Baptish Church in Sheffield, Iowa. He was a 17-year-old out on a date with Murphysboro Township High School classmate Cheryl Ray when the couple spotted the Big Muddy Monster in the Westwood Hills subdivision of Murphysboro.

It was about 10 p.m. on June 26, 1973. Ray, now Cheryl Rath, a Coco Beach, Fla. housewife and mother of two, remembers the scene vividly.

“Randy and I were sitting in my parents’ breezeway when we heard something in the woods,” Mrs. Rath said. “We both went down, but Randy was walking a little bit ahead. Then he said ‘Come here,’ and there it was. We stood there looking
at it.”

Creath said “The thing I remember was the bulk of it, the shape, the human form, and the stench of the river slime it apparently had on it. It was about eight feet tall, and at least as stocky as ny football player.

“We were within 15 feet of it, close enough to see the body, the texture of the fur, long and hairy, like an English sheepdog,” Creath continued.

Monster? Sketch from description by Creath.

Its eyes reflected red from the glow of a distant streetlight. It stood more erect than an ape but didn’t have human features.

“It was real tall, hairy,” Mrs. Rath said, “I think it was white, but it was dirty, matted. It had a real bad odor. It was really rank. I never smelled anything like it. It seemed like an
eternity we stood there, and then it just turned around and walked off into the woods. We could hear it trampling through the woods.”

Murphysboro Police Officer Ron Manwaring investigated.

“I heard some unusual shrieks, smelled the foul smell, and saw the ground trampled down in the area, where they said this thing was standing,” he recalled.

Another investigator, Jerry Nellis, brought in his dog, trained as both an attack and tracking dog. The dog took a path down the hill, stopping periodically to sniff at a slimy substance on the weeds. At an abandoned barn,
the dog refused to enter. It ran back outside when pushed inside. Nellis said his dog never had backed down from anything. Officers searched the barn but found nothing.

Minutes before the sighting at the Rays’ house, 4-year-old Chrisian Baril, who lived nearby, told his partents he saw a large ghost in his back yard.

The night before, another couple had reported seeing the monster at the Big Muddy River boat ramp at Lindell street in Murphysboro.

According to the police report, they heard a loud screaming sound and saw a seven-foot-tall creature with light colored, mud-matted hair walking on two legs toward the car.

When police investigated, they found erratic footprints in the mud and then heard a “loud shrill scream” from a wooded area about 100 feet away, the police report stated. The officers quickly left the area – one of the officers droppping his gun in the haste.

Eleven days later, four workers from a carnival that had been set up at Riverside Park in Murphysboro told police they had twice seen a 300-pound, eight-foot-tall creature covered with light-brown hair. Both times the creature approached carnival
ponies. The creature seemed curious about the ponies, but not belligerent, the carnival workers said.

A crowd of local residents, many toting guns, gathered in Riverside Park the night after the carnies sighted the monster, current Police Chief Larry Tincher said.

Mrs. Rath remembers they had to close off the park and send people home for fear “there would be a big riot if somebody said ‘Boo!'”

A group of five men – reporters from the Kansas City Star, a lawyer, and an insurance man – camping out near Murphysboro in the fall of 1973 in an effort to find the Big
Muddy Monster. One of them, Harlan Sorkin, an insurance agent, has made a hobby of studying creatures commonly called Sasquatch, Big Foot, or Yeti.

Sorkin said they came armed with a stun gun for a 500-pound animal, and chocolate and banana to pacify the creature while the stun gun worked. They also had
loaded shotguns, to be used only if their safety was threatened. They had made arrangements for a cage to be flown in by helicopter and they had zoos standing by on
alert.

Private groups had offered as much as $2.5 million for the creature’s capture, Sorkin said.

The five didn’t see the creature, but they heard “a very loud yell or gutteral sound, between a roar and a bellow, saw huge footprints and found two-inch saplings pulled out of the ground, Sorken said.

Many experts – like mammologist George Feldhamer of the Southern Illinois University-Carbondale zoology department and archeologist John Muller – said it’s likely that people mistook a wild animal or a dressed-up prankster for a monster.

Tincher, the police chief, isn’t so sure.

“I’m confident these people saw something,” he said. “These people were too frightened. What makes it hard to believe it was some man in costume is knowing about all the hunters around here with rifles. It would really be taking a big chance.”

Those who say they saw the Big Muddy Monster are stubborn in their belief.

“I wasn’t going to make up anything like that,” Mrs. Rath said. “I got a lot of kidding, but I know what I saw.”

Some who saw it flinch from the memory, particularly from the ridicule that followed it. One man, who said he doesn’t want his children mocked in school as he was mocked, refused to talk about what he saw. But the creature still haunts him in his dreamss, his wife said.

Another man, Eddie Pitts, who reported seeing the thing near Wolf Lake (Jackson County), also declined to be iinterviewed.

“It was there, but nobody believed us then and nobody will believe us now. We were made out at the time to be fools,” he said.

Others said they fell peculiarly blessed. They occasionally tell their friends, their spouses and their children about their adventure. Some kept scrapbooks.

“Right afterwards it gave me a funny feeling, but now I don’t feel bad about it,” Mrs. Rath said.

Creath said he hardly ever talks about the monster, but he feels his life was changed by what he saw.

“It reinforced my belief that humanity is not nearly as intelligent as we think,” Creath said. “Our system of natural laws is not really as fixed as we would like to believe. We don’t know nearly as much about the world as we pretend.”

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.