Louis Staub's Phantom Kangaroo, Grove City, Ohio (1949)

Kangaroos do not live in Ohio. Yet Americans have reported animals that look like them, hopping across roads far from any zoo. Researchers call them phantom kangaroos. One of the most retold cases comes from Franklin County, southwest of Columbus, in the winter of 1949.

The original report appeared in the Cincinnati Post on 10 January 1949. No copy of that article has yet been traced. What survives comes through the writers who repeated it, and they give Staub's words in nearly identical form.

January 1949. One night, a Greyhound bus was travelling a highway just outside Grove City, Ohio. Karl Shuker places the spot about 2 miles south of town. The headlights picked up a strange form crossing the road. It was not walking, it was bounding.

Louis Staub described it as "about five and a half feet high, hairy, and brownish in color." Then: "It has a long pointed head. It leaped a barbed-wire fence and disappeared. It resembled a kangaroo, but it appeared to jump on all fours. I'm certain it wasn't a deer."

One account says the bus nearly ran it down. Another says the fence was tall, on the far side of the road. The animal cleared it. Then it was gone.

Most writers, Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman among them, put Staub at the wheel. Shuker, drawing on Ron Schaffner's Creature Chronicles newsletter, says he was riding the bus, which reads like a passenger. Shuker also places the bus on a run between Columbus and Akron, yet Akron lies northeast of Columbus and Grove City to the southwest. The route remains unresolved. No source records Staub's age, his home, or any other passenger who saw the animal.

No one has accused Staub of a hoax. No police, game warden or company inquiry is on record, and no tracks, hair or photographs were reported. In 2016, Mark Matzke of Into the Fray Radio wondered whether this was a misidentification, given how common deer are in Ohio. A deer glimpsed briefly in headlights could show a long head, a brown coat and a bounding leap over a fence. Staub had rejected the idea at the time, and he was certain.

Phantom kangaroos in general have drawn other suggestions: escaped zoo, circus or pet animals, especially wallabies, misidentification, publicity stunts. No escaped animal near Grove City in 1949 is recorded.

Loren Coleman's Mysterious America says that in 1949 the area surrounding Grove City experienced a monster flap, and presents the kangaroo as part of it. What the other reports were remains an open lead. Shuker files the case among his quadrupedal kangaroos, beside Sheridan, Indiana, in 1974 and Decatur, Illinois, in 1975. His article, written in 1987 for The Unknown, finally appeared in the Centre for Fortean Zoology's CFZ Yearbook 2020.

Adam Benedict's Pine Barrens Institute profiled the case in 2018. Daniel Cohen, Michael Newton and the editors of FATE have all retold it. One witness. A few seconds in the headlights. A fence, and then the dark.