The United States of Cryptids by J. W. Ocker

Author:J. W. Ocker [Ocker, J. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quirk Books
Published: 2022-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

TYPE:

Mammalian

LOCATION:

Enfield, Illinois

EARLIEST SIGHTING:

1973

SIZE:

4–5 feet tall

You’re a kid. It’s nighttime. Mom and Dad are out. Suddenly, you hear a scratching outside your house. It stops. You hear it at a different part of the house. It stops again. Then it scratches on your front door. It’s an absolute nightmare straight out of an Alvin Schwartz book. But that’s how the tale of the Enfield Monster begins, a creature that terrorized the town of Enfield, Illinois, for two weeks in the spring of 1973. Well, that’s not quite true. It terrorized one family. The rest of the town was generally amused by it.

When Henry McDaniel, a fifty-year-old World War II veteran, returned home with his wife on April 25 at around 9:30 p.m., they found their children terrified. Something had been scratching around the house. Turns out, it wasn’t done, either. Soon, McDaniel heard it too, at the front door. It was trying to get inside. Thinking it might be a bear, McDaniel grabbed his .22 and a flashlight and opened the door. The scratcher was about a dozen feet away and like nothing he’d ever seen.

He described it as four or five feet tall, with an almost humanoid body covered in grayish fur. It had stubby arms, large pink eyes the size of flashlight lenses, and three legs. It would come to be called the Enfield Monster (or, alternately, the Enfield Horror). The creature hissed and took off in fast, giant leaps on those three legs across McDaniel’s lawn and the train tracks beyond and into the darkness. McDaniel squeezed off four shots. “When I fired that first shot, I know I hit it,” he later told the Associated Press.

I know what you’re thinking: kangaroo. Kangaroos are also gray and bouncy with small arms, and the third “leg” is its tail, right? Not so fast. That’s exactly what everybody else thought, too. But McDaniel claimed that he knew very well what a kangaroo looked like (and what it didn’t look like). He’d kept one as a pet during his Army days while stationed in Australia.

McDaniel called the police, but by the time they arrived, the only evidence of the bizarre visitor was a scratched-up screen window, some hair in the bushes, and pawprints that would later be described as either five- or six-toed. A pet store owner named Ed Phillips came out and verified the tracks, as well. “It couldn’t be a hoax,” he told the United Press International, noting how some tracks were hidden in dense brush.

As newspapers got ahold of the story, the world seemed to descend on the tiny town of Enfield, much to the chagrin of White County Sheriff Roy Poshard Jr. He was the one who had to deal with the crowds; he even had to throw a few people in jail. He incarcerated five men who were wandering the woods carting rifles. They claimed to have shot at something they described as grayish and running faster than a person could.

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