The Crawfordsville Monster

September 1891. Crawfordsville, Indiana. The town had electric lights, and its boys had a "balloon parachute craze." Both would matter later. First came the sighting.

Shortly after midnight, Rev. G. W. Switzer, pastor of the First Methodist Church, went out to the well for water. He woke his wife so she could watch what he had seen. He later described it as "about 16 feet long and eight feet wide, resembling a mass of floating drapery," and "like a demon in a shroud." It swam through the air "in a writhing, twisting manner similar to the glide of some serpents." At one point it nearly came down on the lawn of Lane Place, the Henry S. Lane house, before rising again.

Around 2 a.m., two ice delivery men, Marshall McIntyre and Bill Gray, were harnessing their wagon when they looked up. The thing hung three or four hundred feet above them. "It was pure white and had no definite shape or form, resembling somewhat a great white shroud fitted with propelling fins," the Crawfordsville Daily Journal reported. It was about eighteen feet long and eight feet wide. "There was no tail or head visible but there was one great flaming eye, and a sort of a wheezing plaintive sound was emitted from a mouth which was invisible."

A feeling of "awe and dread" came over them. They called it a "horrible apparition." By one account it hovered nearly an hour. The men retreated to the safety of the barn, quickly finished harnessing their horses and left the vicinity.

The Journal ran the icemen's story on 5 September and Switzer's account on 7 September. The Indianapolis Journal picked it up, describing a thing that "squirmed like a serpent." Then, on 8 September, came a new headline. "The Spook Explained."

Two local men, John Hornbeck and Abe Hernley, had "followed the wraith about town and finally discovered it to be a flock of many hundred killdeers." The birds, the paper said, had been passing over the city and were bewildered by the electric lights. "Their white breasts and wings gave the flock their ghostly appearance and the sound of agony was their plaintive dismal cry." Another theory blamed the boys and their balloons. The Journal itself admitted it "fails to account for the 'wheezing plaintive sound'."

The story reached the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on 10 September, where Charles Fort found it. Fort suspected Switzer had been invented, so he tracked the pastor to Michigan and wrote to him. Switzer promised a full account, but it never arrived. In Lo! (1931), Fort published the results of his research: "Yes, a Rev. G. W. Switzer did live in Crawfordsville, at the time."

In 1946, Vincent Gaddis, a Crawfordsville reporter and Fortean Society member, wrote "Indiana's Sky Monster" for Doubt. His version added a second night. Several hundred residents watched the thing turn slowly over the business district for two hours, and some felt its "hot breath" as it swooped over them. On a third night, he wrote, almost every adult in town waited. It never came. No 1891 newspaper confirming these later nights has been found.

Jerome Clark later called the case "among the most fantastic of all UFO reports." It became a founding example for the idea of atmospheric beasts, UFOs as living airborne creatures. Modern writers mostly favour the killdeer, while accepting that the witnesses really did see something.