The Ohio River Monster, later called Octo-Man (Cincinnati area, 1959)

Thursday, January 29, 1959. Before dawn. High winds were driving waves of 6 to 8 feet down the Ohio River near Cincinnati. Along Kellogg Avenue, the street lights went out.

Then the calls began. They reached the Cincinnati police, the Clermont County dispatcher and the New Richmond police. The callers said something had come out of the river.

The first caller said he saw the object about four miles from New Richmond. He could not describe it. "We didn't do anything after the first call," police said. Then a truck driver bound for Indianapolis phoned from a service station on Kellogg Avenue near the Little Miami river bridge. He had been driving through Mt. Washington toward Cincinnati. "It came up out of the water… I can't describe it and I have never seen anything like it before. All I want to do is get out of here." Clermont County dispatcher Frank Heisler said the callers sounded shaken. But sober.

Friday morning brought a stranger report. A motorist crossing the Licking River, described by the Cincinnati Post and Times-Star as "a fellow who says he's a scientist working on things out of this world," said something leaped on the bridge. "It was large, not a dog or a cat. It leaped in front of my car on two legs and was taller than the auto." Three or four times the size of a man, he said. Much bulkier. "I have an eye and mind for dimensions and I know it was huge."

A young woman added one more image. She said she spotted the thing in a creek near the Fort Thomas pumping station. "It was like an octopus. It came up and then moved down."

Two departments sent cars out after 4 a.m. Hamilton County officers spent two hours chasing ghosts. Nothing was found. By Saturday, January 31, the calls had stopped. "The monster has left town," said Station X.

Heisler suggested the men had seen a tree bobbing up and down in the water. William Sprague, a lockman at Dam 37 at Fernbank, agreed that "trees floating by in a dim light look spooky." Cincinnati Gas and Electric Co. put the dark street lights down to a power failure caused by high winds. Researcher Patrick Gross, who preserved the newspaper text in his URECAT catalogue, rated the case a possible confusion with an animal, debris or wood. He noted that the trucker did not know the area.

In 1978 Dennis Pilchis's booklet Bigfoot: Tales of Unexplained Creatures added tentacles, a lopsided chest and rolls of fat over a bald head, credited to a woman from Covington. None of it appears in the 1959 articles. Janet and Colin Bord's The Bigfoot Casebook (1982) listed a February 1959 Covington motorist, "reported by George Wagner." Albert Rosales later placed the creature crossing the road ahead of the truck. Every later source moved the first report to January 30. Gross was blunt: "The only big mystery in this case is how this came to be called a 'Bigfoot sighting.'"

Loren Coleman revisited the case on Cryptomundo in 2007. In 2015 Rob Morphy wrote it up for Cryptopia as the "Indescribable Octo-Man," with stills from the unrelated 1971 film Octaman. Today Octoman is a featured cryptid at the Covington Cryptid Block Party on Pike Street. A thing no witness could describe now has a mask, a festival and a name.