Murphysboro, Illinois, is a town of about ten thousand people in the southern part of the state, on the sluggish Big Muddy River. In the summer of 1973, it became the centre of one of the most thoroughly documented cryptid cases in American history — not because anyone caught the creature, but because the people who saw it called the police, the police came, the police saw and heard things themselves, and the police wrote it all down. The creature was seven or eight feet tall, covered in light-coloured hair matted with mud, and it smelled terrible. It was called the Big Muddy Monster, the Murphysboro Monster, and the Murphysboro Mud Monster. The police file on it, local officers later said, was still open more than thirty years later.
The night of 25 June
Shortly before midnight on 25 June 1973, a young couple, nineteen-year-old Randy Needham and Judy Johnson, were sitting in Needham’s car in Riverside Park, on the southwest edge of Murphysboro, beside the Big Muddy River. They heard a cry from the trees along the river’s edge — a shriek, inhuman and loud, that Needham later described as about three times as loud as a bobcat, only deeper. Then they saw a creature, about seven feet tall, covered with light-coloured hair matted with mud, walking upright toward the car.
Needham started the car and drove straight to the Murphysboro Police Department, where he filed a report of an “unknown creature”. The police report calmly notes that the complainant “left the area”. Judy Johnson was married at the time, though not to Needham, a detail the police noted because it meant the couple had every reason not to draw attention to themselves. As one deputy sheriff put it, they were really scared.
Officers Jimmie Nash and Meryl Lindsey responded to the scene with Needham and Johnson. Near the riverbank they found tracks in the mud: footprints ten to twelve inches long, three inches wide, sunk three to four inches into the muck, sometimes three feet apart. While Officer Nash was inspecting the footprints, the shriek sounded again from the bushes, and Nash later said it was “the most incredible shriek” he had ever heard. He added, in words that entered the local legend, that whatever it was, it was no bobcat or screech owl, and that the officers “high-tailed it out of there”. Officers searched the riverbank for hours, following a splashing sound like something floundering through knee-deep water, but found nothing.
The second night
The next night, 26 June, the creature was seen again. Cheryl Ray and Randy Creath, the seventeen-year-old son of a state trooper, were sitting on Cheryl’s front porch when something moved in the brush nearby. Towering over them was a creature resembling a gorilla, eight feet tall, with long, shaggy, matted hair coloured a dirty white. Creath drew a picture of it for the police.
That did it for Police Chief Toby Berger. He ordered his entire fourteen-man force out for a night-long search, and a dog trainer named Jerry Nellis brought his eighty-pound German shepherd, Reb, renowned for his tracking. With floodlights, the officers discovered a rough trail in the brush: grass was crushed, broken tree branches dangled, and small trees were snapped off. The dog picked up a foul-smelling scent and followed it to an abandoned barn in the area. On approaching the barn, the dog backed off, yelped, and refused to enter. Nellis picked the dog up and threw it bodily into the doorway. The dog crawled out immediately, whimpering, and when the police entered the barn it was empty.
The Southern Illinoisan published a two-hundred-word account of the “critter” the next day, omitting the embarrassed couple’s names. The story might have ended there. Instead, it grew.
A summer of sightings
Over the following weeks, reports continued across southern Illinois. Residents in and near Murphysboro, Mount Vernon, and Edwardsville reported sightings of a monster, and locals gave it different names depending on where it was seen: the Big Muddy Monster, the Murphysboro Monster, the Pumphouse Monster. The creature was reported to be eight feet tall, with long, shaggy, matted hair of a dirty white colour, and a smell so foul that the tracking dog refused to follow it into a barn.
The case drew national attention. On 1 November 1973, the New York Times published an article by Andrew Malcolm titled “Yeti-Like ‘Monster’ Gives Staid Town in Illinois a Fright”. Malcolm quoted Chief Berger: “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.” The article described a town that had taken the creature seriously, and a police department that had spent weeks on a case with no suspect and no body.
The sightings were not isolated to Murphysboro. In April 1973, about two months before the Big Muddy reports and some seventy miles to the northeast, a man named Henry McDaniel in Enfield, Illinois, had reported a creature scratching at his front door — a three-legged, pink-eyed being that left tracks like a dog’s footprint with six toes. The Enfield Monster, as it came to be called, was investigated by state troopers, who found scratch marks and strange footprints. The cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, who studied both cases, wrote about them in Fate magazine in an article titled “Swamp Slobs Invade Illinois”. The two cases, taken together, made the summer of 1973 the strangest in southern Illinois history.
The explanations
The most common explanation is that the Big Muddy Monster was a misidentified known animal — a bear, most likely, standing upright in the dark, muddy from the riverbank, and frightening in the headlights. A black bear can stand seven feet tall on its hind legs, and a wet, muddy bear at midnight, seen by frightened teenagers, could look like a monster. The foul smell fits a bear that had been in the river mud. The tracks, ten to twelve inches long, fit a bear’s hind foot.
But the bear explanation has problems. Bears are rare in southern Illinois, and no bear was found despite weeks of searching by police, dogs, and hunters. The creature was described as walking upright for a sustained period, not rearing up briefly, and as having light-coloured, dirty-white hair, which does not match a black bear. The shriek that frightened Officer Nash does not match a bear’s vocalisations. And the second sighting, by two teenagers on a porch in the town itself, described the same creature, in the same terms, on a different night.
Another explanation is that the creature was a hoax — teenagers, or pranksters in a costume, frightening a town. The first witnesses were a young couple in a parked car, and the second were teenagers on a porch. But the police officers who responded heard the shriek themselves, found the tracks, and followed the scent with a trained dog. A hoax would have had to fool the police department as well as the teenagers, and to keep fooling it for weeks, across multiple sightings in different parts of the county.
A third explanation, favoured by Coleman and other cryptozoologists, is that the creature was a Bigfoot-type animal — a large, upright, hair-covered primate, of a kind reported across North America. That explanation fits the descriptions, the tracks, and the smell. It requires accepting the existence of an animal that science has never confirmed, which is why it remains outside the mainstream. But it is the explanation that the witnesses themselves, and the police chief, found most convincing.
The case that stayed open
The sightings faded by the autumn of 1973, though the creature was reported again in 1975 in the Harrison area, immediately north of Murphysboro. No specimen was ever found, no clear photograph was ever taken, and no carcass was ever recovered. But the case did not close. A former patrolman and retired Murphysboro police chief, Ron Manwaring, later said that there were only two cases that remained unsolved in Murphysboro, and that after more than thirty years, the case of the Big Muddy Monster was still open.
The Big Muddy Monster endures because it is a police case as much as a monster story. The first report was filed at a police station. The officers who responded wrote down what they found. The chief ordered his whole force out. A national newspaper reported it. The file stayed open. Whatever walked out of the trees beside the Big Muddy River on the night of 25 June 1973, it left tracks in the mud, a shriek in the night, and a small Illinois town that has never quite stopped looking over its shoulder.
What is documented, and what is not
Documented facts: Shortly before midnight on 25 June 1973, Randy Needham and Judy Johnson reported a seven-foot-tall creature, covered in light-coloured hair matted with mud, walking upright toward their car near the Big Muddy River in Murphysboro, Illinois. Needham filed a report at the Murphysboro Police Department. Officers Jimmie Nash and Meryl Lindsey found footprints ten to twelve inches long, sunk three to four inches into the mud, and Nash heard a loud shriek from the bushes. On 26 June, Cheryl Ray and Randy Creath reported seeing an eight-foot creature on a porch; Creath drew a picture for the police. Police Chief Toby Berger ordered the entire fourteen-man force out for a night-long search; a tracking dog followed a foul scent to an abandoned barn and refused to enter. The New York Times reported the case on 1 November 1973. Further sightings were reported in the area in 1975. A related case, the Enfield Monster, was reported in Enfield, Illinois, on 25 April 1973.
Unverified or disputed claims: The claim that the creature was a Bigfoot-type animal rests on the witnesses’ descriptions, the tracks, and the smell, but no specimen, clear photograph, or carcass has ever been produced. The claim that it was a bear fits the size and the mud, but no bear was found despite weeks of searching, and the light-coloured hair and the shriek do not match a black bear. The claim that it was a hoax does not account for the police officers who heard the shriek and found the tracks themselves. The identity of the creature was never established, and the case remained open in the Murphysboro police files more than thirty years later.
Sources
- https://sasquatchchronicles.com/the-big-muddy-monster/
- https://stancourtney.com/media-article-jackson-county-illinois-6/
- https://unresolved.me/the-enfield-monster
- https://www.ufoinsight.com/cryptozoology/strange-beasts/the-enfield-monster-incident