The South Pittsburg Killer Kangaroo

South Pittsburg sits in the southwestern Sequatchie Valley, about 25 miles west of Chattanooga. The Cumberland Plateau rises to the west, and the Tennessee River runs to the east. Mid-January 1934. Over five days, reports came out of the Hamburg community near the town. Something was killing animals, including several German police dogs, geese and ducks.

The Rev. W. J. Hancock, a local minister, saw the animal. His words would follow the case from then on. "It was as fast as lightning and looked like a giant kangaroo running and leaping across the field."

The animal had just killed a large police dog. It left nothing but the head and shoulders of the victim in the owner's yard. In Loren Coleman's retelling, Frank Cobb found what remained: the head and shoulders of a large German shepherd, and nothing more. Several witnesses came forward during the run of reports. One later account, from the Strange Animals Podcast, adds that the animal allegedly carried away a sheep.

A search party set out. They tracked the animal up a mountainside. Near a cave, the trail disappeared. The animal was never found.

A wire story carried the account to Public Opinion in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, on 16 January 1934. It reached the New York Times and other New York dailies. National coverage drew widespread ridicule.

In 1983, in The Book of Lists 3, Loren Coleman placed the case among the "8 Worst Monster Hoaxes." He wrote that Horace N. Minnis of South Pittsburg, a stringer for the Chattanooga Times, later admitted perpetrating the hoax. For a while, that seemed to settle it.

In 2010, Karl Shuker asked why a case listed as a hoax was now being discussed "as a still-unresolved mystery." He added, "I am naturally somewhat baffled."

Coleman answered. His 1983 entry, he explained, rested on limited information from the 1970s. "Local rival newspaper writers" had pinned the story on Minnis. But "Minnis was not a newspaper correspondent for the area in 1934." Coleman now called himself "openmindedly skeptical" of both the kangaroo and the hoax.

Sceptics point to the obvious problem. Kangaroos are typically unaggressive and herbivorous. Kate Shaw of the Strange Animals Podcast argued it "probably wasn't a kangaroo", because kangaroos do not eat dogs, live in caves or behave aggressively. No one has formally named another culprit.

The case is counted among the earliest phantom kangaroo sightings in the United States. Coleman covered it in Mysterious America. Jerome Clark included it in Unexplained! About forty years later, the 1974 Chicago phantom kangaroo sightings brought the pattern back.