Creature record / 1963
August 1963. Night in Tuttle Bottoms, a swampy stretch of wooded bottomland outside Harrisburg, Illinois. At about 11 p.m., Saline County Sheriff James L. Thompson came across a young man with a rifle. The youth had a warning. There was a monster loose in the bottoms. He described it plainly. Eight feet long. Four feet high. A nose like an anteater. Then he put his rifle in his car and left. The sheriff's night was only beginning. Later he found about a dozen boys with shotguns, all hunting the "monster" in the dark. It was the first known report of the Tuttle Bottoms Monster. It would not be the last.
Tuttle Bottoms lies just outside Harrisburg, in Saline County, Illinois. It is swampy, wooded bottomland in the Saline River watershed. Writer R.K. Cunningham called it "a swampy area on the north side of town." After dark it drew teenagers. They came, as Cunningham put it, "to commiserate and make out, to drink beer and disappoint their parents."