The Loveland Frog Police Sightings

Loveland is a small suburb north-east of Cincinnati, on the Little Miami River. It already had a strange story. In May 1955, the tale goes, a travelling businessman near Branch Hill saw three leathery, frog-faced figures standing upright. One held "a wand overhead that fired a spray of sparks."

March 3, 1972. About 1:00 a.m. The road was icy. Officer Ray Shockey of the Loveland Police Department was driving on Riverside Drive, near the Totes boot factory. He saw something at the roadside and took it for a dog.

It was not a dog. In his headlights, it "crouched like a frog," then stood erect and stared in his direction. It was three or four feet tall, with leathery skin, a face like a frog or a lizard, and eyes that reflected his headlights. It climbed the guardrail and went down toward the Little Miami River. Shockey and Mathews later found scrape marks leading down the embankment, and a sketch made from his description, credited to his sister, showed "cranial horns, rows of parasagittal spines and oval eyes."

About two weeks later, some say on St Patrick's Day, Officer Mark Mathews met a creature on Kemper Road near the same factory. In the older retellings it stood upright, apparently stunned, and kept its eye on him the whole time. He drew his sidearm and fired.

In 2016 Mathews told WCPO his own version. He "saw something run across the road." It "crawled under a guardrail." "I know no one would believe me, so I shot it." He put the body in his trunk and showed it to Shockey, who said it was the animal he had seen.

In 1976 Fortean investigators Ron Schaffner and Richard Mackey interviewed both officers. Both said the creature resembled the composite sketch. That interview reached the public through Weird U.S. and is cited in Loren Coleman's Mysterious America. The only contemporaneous press anyone cites is Si Cornell's "Loveland monster" in The Cincinnati Post, March 27, 1972. Skeptoid's Ryan Haupt searched local newspaper and police archives and found nothing.

Mathews is blunt. The animal was "a large iguana about 3 or 3.5 feet long," missing its tail. He believed it was a released or escaped pet that survived the March cold beside the warm cooling-system pipes of the boot factory. "It's a big hoax," he said. "There's a logical explanation for everything."

Schaffner pushed back. If it was only an iguana, why did the officers show him the sketch in 1976 and say it matched? He suggested Mathews was tired of the story. Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology takes the lizard idea seriously but notes it fits poorly with an upright posture and freezing weather. Skeptoid raised a mangy coyote, and noted that Creature from the Black Lagoon came out a year before the 1955 tale.

In 2016 Sam Jacobs, out playing Pokémon Go near Lake Isabella, said a frog "stood up and walked on its hind legs." His dark photo and video were widely called a hoax, but they also prompted Mathews to speak out. Since 2023 the Loveland Frog has been the city's official mascot, and a "Return of the Frogman" festival runs every leap year. There is a novel, a musical, a found-footage film and a documentary. In April 2026 Ohio House Bill 821 proposed making it the state's official cryptid.