The Enfield Monster, Illinois 1973

Enfield is a small village in White County, southern Illinois. In 1973 it was home to about 750 people. One of them was Henry McDaniel, a 50-year-old disabled veteran and antiques dealer.

April 25, 1973. About 10 p.m. McDaniel heard scratching at his door. Thinking it might be a bear, he took a gun and a flashlight and opened the door. "It had three legs on it, a short body, two little short arms, and two pink eyes as big as flashlights," he said. "It stood four and a half feet tall and was grayish-colored."

He fired. "When I fired that first shot, I know I hit it." The creature hissed like a wildcat and fled toward the railway embankment. It covered 50 feet in three jumps. Police found tracks like a dog's footprint, but with six toes.

The screen was torn and the siding scratched. Officers judged McDaniel "rational and sober." A ten-year-old neighbour, Greg Garrett, said the thing had appeared about 30 minutes earlier, stepped on his feet and torn his tennis shoes to shreds. McDaniel had his own theory. "If they do find it, they will find more than one and they won't be from this planet."

May 6. At 3 a.m. McDaniel phoned radio station WWKI. He had seen it again, moving along the railroad trestles. "It wasn't in a hurry or anything."

That day Rick Rainbow, the station's news director, came looking with three companions. Near an abandoned house they saw something about five feet tall, gray and stooped over. They recorded its cry and fired a shot. It fled. The sheriff's office had heard enough.

"Nothing I know of is in season now, especially monsters," one account quotes the sheriff. "Anybody we know of out hunting monsters, especially with guns, will be put in jail." On May 8, five young men from out of town, carrying shotguns and rifles, were arrested and charged with hunting violations. Loren Coleman, then an anthropology student at Southern Illinois University, made the trip too. "I traveled to Enfield, interviewed the witnesses, looked at the siding of the house the Enfield Monster had damaged, heard some strange screeching banshee-like sounds, and walked away bewildered."

Garrett later told researchers from Western Illinois University that he had made up his story "to tease Mr. M and have fun with an out of town newsman." In 1978 David L. Miller, Kenneth J. Mietus and Richard A. Mathers published the case in The Sociological Quarterly as a study in social contagion. Three unverified experiences, they argued, had been amplified by the press and local gossip. Only one person they interviewed shared McDaniel's view of a monster from outer space. Some in the press suggested an escaped kangaroo, its tail mistaken for a third leg, but McDaniel rejected it.

He said he had served in Australia and owned a kangaroo, and the tracks lacked its claw marks. An anthropology student quoted by UPI suggested a wild ape, pointing to similar reports in the Mississippi area going back to 1941. McDaniel held his ground. "They think I'm crazy," he said. "I can't help what I saw."

That summer, more creatures surfaced in southern Illinois, among them the Big Muddy Monster of Murphysboro in June. Coleman and Jerome Clark grouped the reports as "Swamp Slobs" in Fate magazine in July 1974. Enfield logged another sighting in June 1976. No photograph of the creature exists, and the whereabouts of Rainbow's tape are unknown. The three-legged visitor at McDaniel's door has never been identified.