The Dogtown Green-Clawed Beast: the Ohio River clawed hand attack near Evansville (1955)

Dogtown is the old name for Cypress, a riverside community in West Evansville, Vanderburgh County, Indiana. Its landmark is the Dogtown Tavern on Old Henderson Road. The ferry to Kentucky once landed nearby. In the summer of 1955, people swam off this stretch of the Ohio River.

The date is disputed. The best evidence points to Sunday, August 14, 1955. Mrs. Darwin Johnson, 35, of 1304 Fountain, was in the water with Mrs. Chris Lamble. Later accounts give their first names as Naomi and Louise. Johnson was "15 or 16 feet from the shore," swimming in waves created by a towboat and barges.

"Suddenly something came up behind her and grabbed her left leg. She felt large claws and a furry palm gripping her knee." She screamed. It pulled her under once. She began kicking and fighting. It pulled her under again.

She lunged for Mrs. Lamble's innertube and struck it with "a loud hollow thump." At that, "whatever was around my leg loosened its grip." Her son watched from the shore. The two women hurried out and put alcohol on the scratches and blue marks on her leg.

"Whatever this thing was, it had a strong grip," she said. "And it was very furry." Then: "I will never go swimming in the river again."

A week later the Kelly-Hopkinsville case broke in Kentucky, about 70 miles south. A wire story ran on August 23 and 24. One version read: "Mrs. Darwin Johnson got into the act Tuesday by deciding that the something-or-other which grabbed her leg while she was in swimming was 'one of those little green men from a space ship.'" Papers in Indiana, California, Montana, Pennsylvania and Louisiana carried it. Later retellings merged the two dates.

The legend kept growing. A palm-shaped green stain that lasted for days, a hospital visit and a silver disc crossing the river. A man said to be an Air Force colonel, who took notes and, in Jon Webb's words, "subtly implied that ridicule would result from too much printed exposure." Patrick Gross, who catalogued the case, lists the disc and the colonel among the details invented later.

No official investigation is on record. No Project Blue Book file has surfaced. In 2007, T. Peter Park wrote to the Vanderburgh County Historical Society. The Evansville Courier for August 22 to 27, 1955 had nothing, and nobody there remembered the event. That search missed the rival Evansville Press, which had carried the story on August 15.

Gross concluded "Possible confusion, fish," pointing to the alligator gar, which lives in the Ohio and grows to about 8 feet. Radio retellings added giant catfish. Sceptics quoted by Webb proposed driftwood churned up by the towboat's wake, or an otter. Critics answer that neither fish is furry or has anything like a hand. Indianapolis Monthly noted that Creature from the Black Lagoon, released the year before, contained "a remarkably similar scene."

Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher included Johnson's account in Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955, published by the Center for UFO Studies in 1978. It also appears in the HUMCAT catalogue, in Albert Rosales' humanoid catalogue and in the work of Jerome Clark. In 2014, Monsters and Mysteries in America retold it, with interviews with Johnson's son. Evansville still tells the story. It calls the creature the Green-Clawed Beast.