The Loveland Frogman Returns: the Pokémon Go Sighting at Lake Isabella

The Loveland Frogman is older than any phone. May 1955. A businessman reportedly saw three figures, 3 to 4 feet tall, with leathery skin and frog-like faces near Branch Hill. In some versions one of them held a wand that gave off sparks.

March 3, 1972. About 1 a.m. Officer Ray Shockey saw an animal 3 to 4 feet long cross the road near the Little Miami River. It crouched like a frog, then climbed a guardrail toward the water. About two weeks later, his fellow officer Mark Matthews had an encounter of his own.

Forty-four years on. A Wednesday night at Lake Isabella, a 77-acre park on the Little Miami River run by Great Parks of Hamilton County. Sam Jacobs and his girlfriend were playing Pokémon Go between Loveland Madeira Road and the lake. One later account says they crossed the train tracks behind Congregation Beth Adam synagogue to reach the bank.

"We saw a huge frog near the water," Jacobs said. "Not in the game, this was an actual giant frog." "I took a couple of pictures and a video 'cause I'd never seen one that big." "Then the thing stood up and walked on its hind legs." Upright, it stood about 4 feet tall, he said.

"I swear on my grandmother's grave this is the truth," he wrote to WCPO. "I'm not sure whether it was a Frogman or just a giant frog. Either way, I've never seen anything like it." The couple seemed not to know the legend. It was the girlfriend's parents who told them about the Frogman afterwards.

The pictures were dark. They showed a pair of shining eyes above an indistinct shape, apparently standing in shallow water. Fox19 brightened one frame for a better view of the figure. The short phone video was dark and grainy, and today it is treated as lost media. A retelling from 2020 adds that the creature vanished under the water, a detail not in Jacobs's own words from 2016.

The story reached Mark Matthews, retired from the Loveland police. He contacted reporter James Leggate with a confession about 1972. He said he had shot the animal, which was "half dead anyway." "I know no one would believe me, so I shot it." He showed it to Ray Shockey, who confirmed it was what he had seen.

Matthews described "a large iguana about 3 or 3.5 feet long", missing its tail, probably an escaped or released pet. He called the legend "a big hoax" and added, "I don't believe in Bigfoot either." His answer covered 1972. It said nothing about what Jacobs filmed.

Snopes wrote that Pokémon Go had indirectly resurrected, and inadvertently debunked, an old urban legend. Skeptics turned to the 2016 images. On the podcast MonsterTalk, Ryan Haupt's best guess was a person in a dry suit with headlamps. The blog Cryptopia weighed a non-human entity with glowing eyes against a poorly constructed suit with twin flashlights. Others suggested a lawn ornament fitted with lights. Yet no one has confessed, and no staging has ever been shown. By a 2020 account, Jacobs still said he really did see something in the lake.

The sighting gave the Loveland Frogman a second life. In 2023 came the found-footage horror film Frogman, the documentary Finding Frogman and a frog prince mascot for the city. April 13, 2026. Ohio House Bill 821 was introduced to make the Loveland Frogman the official state cryptid.