The Enfield Horror

A midwestern monstrosity or mere make believe?

Aug 13, 2024

A whimsical artist’s rendition of the Enfield Horror — Image credit: Evansville Press

Small towns posses a dreadful kind of omniscience. Often steeped in backbiting and hearsay, their rumor mills are rarely kind. I would know, I grew up in one. So take it from me, that cliché about “everybody knows everybody” exists for a reason. Beneath the Hallmarkian exoskeleton of every small town lies the beating heart of a monster.

In April 1973, that heart was exposed in Enfield, IL, the sight of one of the most bizarre monster encounters ever recorded — and a furious backlash against it.

The Sightings

In late spring, 1973, fifty-year-old Henry McDaniel was alerted to a scratching sound at his front door. McDaniel had only just returned home from a meeting, and opened the door expecting to see an animal. What stood there was unlike anything he’d ever seen before.

“I quickly closed the door and went for a gun,” McDaniel told the Evansville Press.

After retrieving a .22 pistol and a flashlight, he went back to confront the creature. Shining his light over it gave him his first good look at the would be home invader. He described the creature as being four-to-five feet tall and covered in gray fur with a round head, glowing pink eyes, and three legs. It sported short, forward-facing arms a bit like a T-Rex.

McDaniel fired four times at near point blank range. But, instead of keeling over, the creature let out a horrible hiss and took three great leaps away from him. Fearing for the safety of his family, he reached out to the authorities. State police troopers arrived on scene quickly, but found nothing but a few odd footprints…each sporting six toes. Short of elephants and some polydactyl cats, most land animals have five toes.

One responding officer, James Masser, described McDaniel as “rational and sober,” at the time of the incident.

Henry McDaniel, 50, shows reporters the screen of his door which was ripped open by the creature — Image Credit: The Reading Eagle

The first news reports started to appear just 48 hours later, citing McDaniel’s description of the creature. When questioned about his ability to recall the creature in such vivid detail, McDaniel claimed to have a “photostatic” memory. I assumed this to be a misspelling at first, McDaniel must have said “photographic”. But I can’t find any evidence to the contrary. And it would seem that perhaps photostatic was in use at some point mid-century as a way to describe “very good” memory recall.

That might have been all she wrote for the Enfield Horror, but less than two weeks later, McDaniel spotted the creature again. He was woken up around 3 a.m. by the sound of barking dogs. Stepping outside, he spotted the creature walking along the railroad tracks outside his home. But he didn’t chase the monster down with a gun this time, opting instead to retreat back inside. Most researchers agree that the second sighting is the one that brought the media — and the monster hunters — to town.

The Hunting Party

Michael Mogle, Clifton Walden, Roger Tappy, Randall Austin, and Roger Patterson, inspired by reports of the monster, took to the rural countryside of Enfield with guns to hunt the horror. And much to the burgeoning young monster hunters’ chagrin, they found it.

In a May 9 report from the Evansville Courier and Press, the men gave an account of their sighting. Tappy, a Navy seaman on leave, was the first to spot it. The group was about three miles from the McDaniel residence, walking along the same railroad tracks the creature had last been spotted at, when they encountered it.

“I was scared. It was maybe fifty yards away and covered in brush. I figured the thing to do was shoot it in the foot,” Tappy told the paper. “I fired off a shot but I don’t think I hit it. Nothing could move that fast with a bullet in it.”

His fellow monster hunters backed up his claim.

“It was maybe five feet tall and kinda darkish-grey and hairy with a flat face, running like crazy — and ugly, ” Mogle said.

The creature “wasn’t human” Patterson added.

The War Against Henry McDaniel

White County Sheriff Roy Poshard Jr. agreed with Patterson’s assessment.

“Of course it wasn’t, they were shooting at bushes,” he told reporters. “Ever since this creature business got started we’ve had people milling around here with guns and drinking and if I don’t put a stop to it somebody’s gonna get killed”.

By all accounts, Sheriff Poshard was a solid non-believer when it came to the Enfield Horror. After his office received a call about gunshots in the area, he and his deputies arrested the monster hunters on several charges, including hunting without a license.

“Nothing I know of is in season now, especially monsters. Anybody we know of out hunting monsters, especially with guns, will be put in jail. We’re afraid they’ll kill somebody,” White County Deputy Sheriff Jim Clark told reporters.

White County Sheriff Roy Poshard Jr arrests the party of monster hunters — Image Credit: Evansville Courier and Press

A follow-up story in the Evansville Press from June 10 quoted an unnamed deputy as stating: “I’ve done my best to get him (McDaniel) locked up.”

As for McDaniel, various articles from the time quote him as being frustrated by the Sherriff’s department and its cavalier attitude. Though to be fair, I totally understand why they wouldn’t want a bunch of folks running around the woods with guns. That’s just common sense.

“The sheriff threatened to arrest me if I said anything more about it,” McDaniel told reporters. “What I can’t understand, is why they want to keep it so hush-hush.”

It wasn’t just the authorities in Enfield who turned against McDaniel, as reporters swarmed the small town many locals came out of the woodwork to paint a picture of the disabled World War II veteran turned antique dealer as an “eccentric” with a “wild imagination”.

“I hate to dispute somebody’s word on something like that…but I doubt it,” one local waitress was quoted as saying in a particularly meanspirited report from the Reading Eagle in early June. The same waitress remarked that the authorities had threated to haul McDaniel off “to the funny farm”.

According to the same report, a “derogatory poem” was circulating around town about McDaniel and his monster. Sadly, I couldn’t find any further evidence of the poem, but what a piece of monster history that would be. If anyone out there happens to have a copy, or know it by heart for some reason, please feel free to reach out.

A Cryptozoologist Comes to Town

Reading through the earliest reports of the Enfield Horror (alternatively called McDaniel’s Monster and the Enfield Monster) I saw several passing references to a “young anthropology student” who had come to investigate the sighting. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled on this article, from the Evansville Press, that named the student as none other than Loren Coleman. Yes, that Loren Coleman. Famed field researcher, author, and founder of the International Museum of Cryptozoology. Of course, at the time, he was none of these. He was simply Loren Coleman, twenty five-year-old anthropology student.

You can learn more about Coleman over in the Dover Demon episode of Monster of the Week, where he showed up to investigate a similar sighting of an unknown creature. Though in that case, Coleman had more luck when speaking with the locals.

“People won’t talk about it. It’s like the Twilight Zone. There’s a sinister conspiracy of silence here," Coleman said about his time in Enfield.

Part of me wonders if this was due to the threats from the Sherriff’s office, but that’s just conjecture.

Coleman believed McDaniel had seen something, but was working under the theory that it could have been a chimpanzee or another type of ape loose in the area. And in 1974, he published an article in FATE magazine, alongside fellow researcher Richard Crowe, that linked the Enfield Horror to other eyewitness accounts of strange, hairy creatures spotted in the same area that summer.

“You can’t rule out anything when you’re tracking down monsters,” Coleman said.

Do I Believe?

If you take some time to read through the reports of the time, you’ll find two other popular accounts of the Enfield Horror. One, from a radio DJ whose name is either Rick Rainbow or Rick Rainbolt — depending on the newspaper reporting his story. I left Rick’s investigation out because it doesn’t add much to the story for me. For what it’s worth, he claimed to discover tracks and capture a recorded screech on tape.

The other report was from a boy named Greg Garrett, who later claimed he saw the creature the same day as McDaniel, his nearby neighbor, and that it had “torn up his shoes” when it jumped on him. However, I’ve seen various reports that claim Garrett and his father later admitted they made the story up to mess with McDaniel and the out of state press. So I’m discounting the Greg Garrett sighting, too.

Which brings me to the dark heart of this story. McDaniel is a case study on why folks often worry about coming forward with these kinds of tales. His sighting only led to ridicule, distrust, and threats from law enforcement. As recorded by reporters, researchers, and McDaniel himself, the town found McDaniel’s monster to be a nuisance at best, and the ravings of a mad man at worst.

But regardless of the hate he received from locals, McDaniel stuck to his story. In every recounting he gave, his story never changed. The details were always the same. Perhaps he really did posses a “photostatic” memory. But in my book, it lends credence to his tale.

The sightings ended as abruptly as they began. And some apocryphal stories claimed that McDaniel moved — or perhaps was chased — out of Enfield.

In one of his final interview, he let folks know he wasn’t changing his story.

“They think I’m crazy. I can’t help what I saw,” McDaniel said.

It’s a simple but affirming truth. None of us can predict what will cross our paths. If I spotted a wolf in my backyard, or a mountain lion, or bear I might not want to see it, but you could hardly blame me for its appearance, right? Why then would I extend such distrust to a man who seemed to only want answers? Like Coleman, I trust McDaniel. I can’t say what it was, but I believe the Enfield Horror was real.

So What do you think? Was the Enfield Horror real? And if so, what do you think it was? Let me know in the comments!