The Big Muddy Monster of Murphysboro

Murphysboro sits on the Big Muddy River in Jackson County, southern Illinois. In the summer of 1973, over a ten-day period, people there reported something coming out of the river bottoms. It became the Big Muddy Monster. Some call it the Murphysboro Mud Monster.

About midnight. The night of 25 June 1973. Randy Needham, 19, and his girlfriend Judy Johnson were parked by a boat ramp on the Big Muddy River. Johnson heard a piercing roar from the thick underbrush. Needham later compared it to an "eagle shrieking into a microphone."

Then a tall, pale creature with fur caked in mud lumbered towards their car. It stood about 7 feet tall, covered in white hair and mud. Its eyes glowed red. Its teeth were yellow. The smell was foul.

Needham went to the Murphysboro Police Department. Officers Jimmie Nash and Meryl Lindsay met the couple at the ramp and found large footprints in the soft mud. Later retellings say Nash heard a shrill screech nearby, ran, and dropped his revolver.

The following night, Randy Creath, 17, and Cheryl Ray were on the porch at her parents' farm. The creature stood about 15 feet away. They described it as 7 to 8 feet tall and 300 to 350 pounds, upright on two legs, with pale, dirty white or cream-colored hair and a musky smell. Creath is credited with a detailed sketch.

Early July. About 2 am at the Miller Carnival in Riverside Park. Otis Norris, Ray Adkerson and Wesley Lavender sat behind a truck. The show's Shetland ponies began to whinny. The workers saw the creature standing there, looking at the ponies. It was the last reported sighting for many years.

Police Chief Toby Berger ordered a 14-person, nightlong search with dogs. Dog trainer Jerry Nellis brought Reb, an 80-lb German shepherd. Accounts describe black slime, similar to sewage sludge, in a straight line from the river. At an abandoned barn, Reb yelped, backed away in panic and would not go in. Berger chose his words with care. "We don't know what the creature is but we do believe what these people saw was real. We have tracked it." On 1 November 1973, the New York Times ran "Yeti-Like 'Monster' Gives Staid Town in Illinois a Fright." Letters arrived from around the world.

The creature was never found. No hair was recovered, and no casts or slime analysis are documented. Some vivid details, from the footprint size to the dropped revolver, come from later retellings. St Louis researcher Harlan Sorkin thought it was probably a Sasquatch, perhaps flushed from river caves by the 1973 flooding. Loren Coleman compared it with West Coast Bigfoot reports. Just as hairy, he noted, but without distinctive facial features, more aggressive and more frightening. Coleman's name for it was the "Abominable Swamp Slob." No hoax claim or confession appears in the record.

In 1988, a salvage-yard owner, an employee, the owner's wife and the owner's mother reported the creature again. It was shot at. It banged on the metal office walls for more than 30 minutes. Former chief Ron Manwaring called the June reports "the most copied, most looked-at reports in the history of the department." The case remains open.

Today the creature has a downtown mural, a brew fest, comics, a 2021 documentary called Creature from Big Muddy, and a book by Chad Lewis, Kevin Lee Nelson and Noah Voss. Since June 2023 a festival has celebrated it. A statue stands on Muddy Monster Road.