This week's installment is the second in a two part series from the article "Swamp Slobs Invade Illinois" by legendary researchers Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman. The piece was published by FATE in the July 1974 edition of the magazine (Vol. 27, #7). It is being reprinted with permission from FATE Magazine and all reproductions rights remain with them.
And now, journey back into the FATE Magazine archives and learn more about the strange series of creature sightings which stumped Illinois residents in the early 1970's...
Swamp Slobs of Illinois
By: Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman
FATE Magazine, July 1974 (Vol. 27, #7)
Part one of this piece can be found here.
Unfortunately, not all law enforcement officers share Chief Berger's enlightened attitude. Earlier in the year Sheriff Roy Poshard, Jr., of White County in southeastern Illinois, threatened to arrest a man who reported such a creature. But the witness, Henry McDaniel of Enfield, sticks to his story.
He says that late in the evening of April 25, 1973, he heard something scratching on his door. Upon opening the door he did a double take, for the "something" looked as if it might have stepped out of a nightmare.
"It had three legs on it," he said, "a short body, two little short arms coming out of its breast area and two pink eyes as big as flashlights. It stood four and a half to five feet tall and was grayish-colored. It was trying to get into the house."
McDaniel, in no mood to entertain the visitor, grabbed a pistol and opened fire.
"When I fired that first shot" he said, "I know I hit it." The creature hissed like a wildcat and bounded away, covering 75 feet in three jumps, and disappeared into the brush along a railroad embankment that runs near the McDaniel home.
State police, summoned to the McDaniel's home soon afterward, found tracks "like a dog's except that (they) had six toe pads." McDaniel told FATE that two of the prints measured four inches around while the other measured three and one quarter inches.
Investigators subsequently discovered that 10-year-old Greg Garrett, who lives just behind McDaniel, had been playing in his backyard half an hour before when the creature approached him and stepped on his feet, tearing his tennis shoes to shreds. The boy had run inside crying hysterically.
"On May 6 at 3:00 A.M. McDaniel was awakened by the howling of neighborhood dogs. Looking out his front door he saw the monster again.
"I seen something moving out on the railroad track and there it stood," he told a reporter. "I didn't shoot at it or anything. It started on down the railroad track. It wasn't in a hurry or anything."
Referring to one of the explanations offered for his sightings, McDaniel told us, "I've been all around this world. I've been through Africa and I've had a pet kangaroo. This was not a kangaroo. I've never seen this type of creature or track before."
The publicity McDaniel's report received brought hordes of curiosity seekers, newsman and serious researchers to Enfield. Among them were five young men whom Deputy Sherriff Jim Clark arrested for hunting violations after they said they had seen and shot at a gray hairy creature in some underbrush. Two of the men thought they had hit it but the thing had sped off, running faster than a man. This incident is supposed to have occurred on May 8.
Another witness is Rick Rainbow, news director of Radio Station WWKI, Kokomo, Ind. On May 6 he and three other persons saw the thing beside an old abandoned house near McDaniel's place. They didn't get a good look at it because its back was to them and it was running in the shadows but they later described it as about five and a half feet tall, grayish and stooped. Rainbow taped the cry it made.
Investigators Loren Coleman and Richard Crowe did not see the creature by the did hear a high-pitched screech while they were searching around McDaniel's home.
About a month later in Edwardsville, Ill., police received and checked three reports of a musty-smelling, red-eyed, human-sized being said to be lurking in the woods on the eastern edge of town. The creature reportedly was more than five and a half feet tall and broad-shouldered, with eyes that apparently were sensitive to light. It made no sound when it walked. The witnesses said the thing chased them and one man told police the creature ripped his shirt and clawed his chest.
In many ways these events of 1973 were a replay of similar incidents from the summer before. The Peoria Journal-Star for July 26, 1972, printed the claims of Randy Emert, aged 18, who purportedly saw an unusual creature on two occasions in the preceding two months. Emert said it was bipedal, hairy and between eight and 12 feet tall. It was "kind of white and moves quick." It brought with it a rancid odor and seemed to scare the animals in the woods near Cole Hollow Road. Emert said, "It lets out a long screech—like an old steam engine whistle only more human."
Emert asserted that a number of his friends had seen either the creature or its footprints. "I'm kind of a spokesman for the group," he said. "The only one who has guts, I guess."
Mrs. Ann Kammerer of Peoria corroborated Emert's story, saying that all of the children, friends of Emert, had seen the thing. "It sounds kind of weird," she admitted. "At first I didn't believe it but then my daughter-in-law saw it."
According to Emert an old abandoned house in the nearby woods had large footprints all around it and a hole dug under the basement.
The Pekin Daily Times for July 27, 1972, announced that two days previously "Creve Coeur authorities said a witness reported seeing ‘something big' swimming in the Illinois River." (The Illinois River flows through Peoria.) On the night of the 27th "two reliable citizens" told police they had seen a 10-foot-tall figure that "looked like a cross between an ape and a caveman." A United Press International account described it as having "a face with long gray U-shaped ears, a red mouth with sharp teeth (and) thumbs with long second joints." One witness said it smelled like a "musky wet-down dog." The East Peoria Police Department reported receiving more than 200 calls about the monster.
Leroy Summers of Cairo saw a 10-foot-tall, white, hairy creature standing erect near the Ohio River levee during the evening hours of July 25, 1972. When the Cairo police came to investigate they found nothing and Police Commissioner James Dale warned that henceforth anyone who made a monster report would have his breath tested for alcohol content.
The rash of sightings in 1973, however, continued on into the fall. On the night of October 16 four St. Joseph youths—Bill Duncan, Bob Summers, Daryl Mowry and Craig Flenniken—encountered a hairy "gorilla-like" creature on a road south of town. They had stopped their car to investigate what they thought was a campfire near the bridge on the Salt Fork. One of them lit a match and they all saw the creature, standing five feet tall, about 15 feet away. They did not linger.
Duncan told the Champaign-Urbana Courier, "I wondered if I was nuts or something. I thought it was a bear at first but I really couldn't say."
This account raises two very obvious questions: What was the nature of the mysterious light the boys took to be a campfire? And how could a match struck in an outdoor setting generate enough light to reveal a presumably dark object 15 feet away? Unfortunately we have no answers because our efforts to contact the witnesses have been unsuccessful.
It is worth noting, however, that in recent years there has been a series of sightings of "gorillas" in the area. In 1970, for example, witnesses reported such creatures at Rantoul, Farmer City, Heyworth, Weldon and Decatur, all of these places within 50 miles of St. Joseph. In nearly every case the creaturewas seen in the woods near a river or a creek and in one instance observers spotted it standing near a bridge on Salt Creek. (See Loren Coleman's Mystery Animals in Illinois" March 1971 FATE.)
AS FANTASTIC as these stories seem they do form a certain pattern. Several features consistently appear.
To start with, the Illinois incidents are clearly related to a growing body of reports that come primarily from the south-central United States—Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas (although parallel tales have been recorded from time to time as far south as Florida and as far north as Pennsylvania). The creatures reported are almost always bipedal, hairy and sub-hominid in general appearance. Their color is variously described as white, gray or dark brown. Their eyes are usually pink or red and glow in the dark. The creatures emit an extremely unpleasant odor often compared to the smell of garbage or sewage. They run fast and leap enormous distances—even from a sitting position, according to one report.
Estimates of height range from four and a half to 12 feet. The creature is nocturnal in its habits and lives in wooded areas bordering streams. It emits an earsplitting, nerve-shattering shriek. It apparently is not afraid of human beings and has been known to chase and attack. Seldo is it see in the company of another of its kind.
The one inconsistency concerns its tracks. They come in all sizes, some have four toe prints, others have five or six. (All primates and hominids are five-toed.) A weird inconsistency in the reports hints that on occasion our abominable swamp slobs are not quite "real"—for at times they walk through underbrush without breaking twigs or branches, leaving tracks or making noise. On other occasions, as we have seen, they are noisy and destructive.
Another disturbing feature is that the creatures occasionally appear in the company of that other uninvited visitor, the UFO. So far as we know, no one actually has seen such a creature enter or emerge from a flying saucer but some kind of relationship is implied when strange flying objects are seen landing in the area where a creature has been sighted.
So it goes with our abominable swamp slobs. What they really are is anyone's guess. As Chief Berger said, "A lot of things in life are unexplained." For now we'll have to leave it at that.