The Mount Vernon "Baboon" of Gum Creek

Gum Creek runs through wooded bottom land near Mount Vernon, in Jefferson County, southern Illinois. In 1941 it became the starting point of one of the state's strangest creature stories. The account most writers rely on appeared in March 1946. Jesse W. Harris told it in "Myths and Legends from Southern Illinois," in the journal Hoosier Folklore.

Summer 1941. A preacher was hunting squirrels along the creek. Then, as Harris put it, "a large animal that looked something like a baboon jumped out of a tree near him." It "walked toward him in an upright position." The preacher struck at the beast with his gun barrel and finally frightened it away by firing a couple of shots into the air.

The 1946 text does not name him, but later writers do. Stan Courtney's Illinois Bigfoot Chronological Index calls him Reverend Lepton Harpole. Loren Coleman, in Mysterious America (1983), is reported to name him Reverend Marsh Harpole. A Harpole family of ministers seems to have lived in Mount Vernon. Which brother, if either, faced the creature remains unconfirmed.

Later, the beast began to alarm rural people. It uttered terrorizing screams, mostly at night, in the wooded bottom lands along the creeks. School children in the rural districts sometimes heard it too. Hunters saw its tracks.

Early spring of 1942. Local people were aroused "to a fighting pitch." A farmer near Bonnie reported that the beast had killed his dog. A call went out for volunteers to join a mass hunt to round up the animal.

Then, in Harris's words, "the beast must have got news of the big hunt." Reports came in from other creek bottoms, some 40 or 50 miles from the original site, including one from a man who saw the beast bound across the road at night near the Big Muddy River in Jackson County. Hunters saw evidence of its presence away over in Okaw, the Kaskaskia River country. By then, reports had it jumping along at from 20 to 40 feet per leap. The surviving accounts do not say how the hunt ended.

Some at the time suspected an escaped zoo animal. Coleman went another way. He filed the case under "Devil Monkeys" and described a giant baboon that moves "by saltation, leaping as do kangaroos." That tied Gum Creek to the phantom kangaroo reports of the Midwest.

There is also the frame in which the story first appeared. It was printed under the title "Myths and Legends," and its writer treated the spreading sightings and the growing leaps as rumor building over time. No hoax claim has surfaced. No photograph is known. No track was cast.

Ivan T. Sanderson included the case in Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life in 1961. Janet and Colin Bord carried it in their Bigfoot Casebook, and Coleman placed it first in his sequence of Devil Monkey cases. In 1973 a leaping creature was reported at Enfield, Illinois, less than 40 miles away, and writers have linked the two. Still, it all comes back to one moment on Gum Creek. A preacher, a gun barrel, and something that stood up and walked toward him.