The Loveland Frog: two police officers meet a frog-faced creature by the Little Miami River

Loveland, Ohio, sits on the Little Miami River. In 1972 Riverside Drive and Kemper Road ran past the Totes boot factory there, a guardrail separating them from ground that slopes down to the water.

March 3, 1972. About 1:00 a.m. The road was icy. Officer Ray Shockey of the Loveland police was driving carefully into town when something crossed in front of his car. He took it for a dog.

It was 3 to 4 feet long or tall, about 50 to 75 pounds, with leathery skin and "a face like a frog or lizard." It crouched like a frog. Then it stood erect and stared in his direction, its eyes reflecting his headlights. It climbed the guardrail and was gone toward the river.

Fellow officers came out afterwards. There was talk of scratch marks on the guardrail. No photograph of them has ever been found.

About two weeks later, St Patrick's Day in several retellings, Officer Mark Mathews stopped on Kemper Road to clear what he took for a carcass. The lump stood up from a crouched stance. He fired his gun, and the animal, seemingly injured, climbed out of sight over the guardrail. At first he said he had missed. On March 27, Si Cornell's "Loveland monster" ran in The Cincinnati Post.

In 1976 the Ohio investigator Ron Schaffner interviewed both officers, and both said the creature looked like a composite sketch. Schaffner's illustration, published by Bord & Bord in 1989, became the Frog's face. A pencil sketch credited to Shockey or to his sister also circulates. No scientist ever examined the animal.

In 2016 Mathews told WCPO another story. The animal ran across the road. It was not walking upright, and it crawled under the guardrail, not over it. "I know no one would believe me, so I shot it."

He showed the body to Shockey, who said it was the creature he had seen. It was a large iguana, about 3 to 3.5 feet long and missing its tail, probably a pet that got loose, surviving near pipes that carried water to cool the boot factory's ovens. "It's a big hoax," he said. "I don't believe in Bigfoot either."

Schaffner was unconvinced. "Why, after all these years is Mathews debunking the story?" Palaeozoologist Darren Naish pointed to the upright postures, and noted that a big lizard in icy March weather "would be hiding away somewhere." He suggested brief glimpses of a lizard had merged with 1950s frog-man lore and the Lizardman reports. Skeptoid's Ryan Haupt could not find the source of an often quoted 2001 recantation.

The older lore came from May 1955, when a Loveland businessman reported three grey, frog-faced figures, a case chronicled by Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher for the Center for UFO Studies beside Kelly-Hopkinsville. Since then the Frog has inspired a musical, the horror film Frogman and the documentary Finding Frogman. It became the city mascot in 2023. In April 2026, Reps. Tristan Rader and Jean Schmidt introduced Ohio House Bill 821 to make it Ohio's official state cryptid.