#weird ohio

[bek-a-la]

[whitepolaris]

Loveland’s Frogman

In March 1972, on two separate occasions, two Ohio policemen saw what had become known as the Loveland Frogman. Ron Schaffner and fellow cryptozoologist Richard Mackey interviewed the officers and investigated the incidents. 

The first sighting occurred at one a.m. on March 3, 1972, a clear cold night. Officer Ray Shockey was en route to Loveland, via Riverside Road, when he thought he saw a dog lying in a field beside Twightwee Road. Suddenly the “thing” stood up, eyes illuminated by the car lights, looked at him for an instant, turned, and leaped over a guardrail. It went down an embankment and into the Little Miami River. According to Shockey, the thing weighed about sixty pounds and stood about three to four feet tall and had textured, leathery skin and a face like that of a frog or lizard. 

Shockey drove to the police station and returned with Officer Mark Matthews to look for evidence of the creature. They turned up scrape marks leading down the side of the small hill near the river, but no Frogman. 

On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1972, Officer Matthews was driving outside Loveland when he had a similar experience. Seeing an animal lying in the middle of the road, he stopped to remove what he thought was a dead critter. Instead, when he opened his car door, the animal got into a crouched position, like a football player. Stunned, Matthews watched as the creature hobbled to the guardrail and lifted his leg over it, keeping an eye on Matthews the whole time. 

He later said tha the felt the creature stood more upright than Shockey had described. One local farmer told investigators that he had seen a large froglike or lizardlike creature in the same month as the officers had. 

The reports of the 1972 Frogoman had been hard on the witnesses. “Those two officers took a lot of flack about the sightings back then,” said a local businessman, who wished not to be identified, in a 1985 newspaper story about the sightings. “People made fun of them and the city.” Years later, in 1999, during local media interviews, Matthews explained that he was tired of talking about the Frogman and that what he had seen was an iguana. But at the time of the sightings, both witnesses said they saw something resembling an upright manlike lizard about four feet tall. 

And then there is the matter of the sketch. Officer Shockey’s sister had drawn it on Shockey’s and Matthews’s descriptions shortly after their encounters with the creature. A biped creature, it clearly looks like a giant frogman.

In 2001, Weird Ohio did a follow-up investigation, interviewing the principals, including Ron Schaffner. We asked him about Matthews’s attempts to pull back from his original story. Schaffner said, “Why, after all these years, is Matthews debunking the story? I’m not sure.” But four years after the sightings, both officers showed him the sketch and said that was what the creature they had seen looked like. If they’d seen an iguana, “why would they show us a composite drawing back in 1976 and tell us that it looked like the drawing?” asks Schaffner. “Maybe Matthews is just tired of hearing the story and all the variations.” 

[autumns-spirit]

October in Cleveland. Midwest. 2021.

[ki-the-iridescent]

i’m in ohio and unfortunately i haven’t found nightvale yet

[bwayfan25]

If you drive out of Columbus in one direction you see the HELL IS REAL sign and if you drive out a different direction you see a giant wicker basket and that’s just about all you need to know about Ohio

[whitepolaris]

Pancakes from Space

On April 18, 1961, Joe Simonton was having a late breakfast at eleven a.m. when some low jetlike noises disturbed him and he went outside. Joe saw a disk land, a hatch open, and a nonthreatening being get out. There were three humanoids in the silver craft that landed in Eagle River, Wisconsin, that morning. The visitors didn’t speak English, and all communication took place in the form of gestures. But according to Joe, he also telepathically picked up a message to get some water in a jug for the entity. Then, according to the Air Force report: “Looking into the [saucer] he saw a man ‘cooking’ on some kind of flawless cooking appliance.” They were fixing what Joe took to be pancakes. 

Apparently in trade for the water, they gave Joe four pancakes. Each one was about three inches in diameter and had little holes throughout its surface. Joe ate one. “It tasted like cardboard,” he told the Associated Press. Fortunately for future alien investigation, he restrained himself from eating the other three. Astronomer J. Allen Hynek was dispatched by the U.S. Air Force to investigate. He took one of the pancakes for government analysis at the Air Force Technical Intelligence Center. They found it to be made form flour, sugar, and grease. One writer, Jay Ruth, says it was rumored that the wheat in the pancake was “of an unknown type.” 

In his High Strangeness: UFOs From 1960 through 1979: The UFO Encyclopedia, Volume 3, (1996), Jerome Clark gives more detailed rundown of the Joe Simonton case under “Eagle River CE3,” on pages 168-175. Clark’s report focuses on the pancakes. He notes that the “pancakes” were “still hot” when Simonton took a bite out of one of them. 

The official Air Force verdict for the Simonton Pancake Incident: “Unexplained.” Clark basically concurred: “There was, and is no evidence to suggest that Joe Simonton cooked up-in the literal sense-a bogus UFO story.” 

Fortean investigator George Wagner tells Weird Ohio that he actually saw the famed Simonton “space pancakes.” Guess where? That’s right, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. In the 1970s, Wagner wrote: “My younger brother and I drove up to the United States Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson to see Glenn Miller’s trombone. Not far away from the Miller’s exhibit was another devoted to 1950s flying saucer contactees. Here was the ‘pancake’ fragment, behind plate glass, stapled (single stapled) to a piece of white cardboard. The piece had a strikingly ‘honeycombed’ appearance, nearly as much air-holes as substance, but this may have been due to the ‘outer space’ food item experience at studying 15-year-pancakes!” 

So if you’re ever at Wright-Patterson on your tour of weird Ohio, stop by. Ask if you can see the aliens, but be happy if they at least show you the “space pancakes.” 

[whitepolaris]

Lions and Panthers on the Ohio Border

Sometimes these giant cats are seen in the weirdest combos. Take the story that began when a giant animal rushed a fishing party of four adults and two children the Elkhorn Falls, located on the Indiana-Ohio border. This sighting greatly informs other encounters that came afterwards in Ohio, since the creatures appear to have been traveling back and forth across the state line. The Elkhorn Falls incident occurred during the early evening hours of August 5, 1948.

According to Ivan Toney, who lived nearby, “about seven thirty p.m. a man came to the house and wanted to use the phone to call the sheriff. He said he and another man, along with their wives and two children, were fishing along the banks of the pool at the foot of the Elkhorn Falls. He said the animal came up the stream from the south. When they sighted it, they started running for the car. They reached it, but the animal lunged at the cat, then plowed through the fence into the sandy car along the stream’s edge.” 

The creature “looked like a lion with a long tail,” the witnesses asserted, with a bushy hair around the neck-the well-known trait of the male of African lion. Deputy Sheriff Jack Witherby examined the tracks and said they were like “nothing I have ever seen before.” After completing his investigations, he issued a warning to those who fished along streams at night. 

Two days after the Elkhorn Falls incident, two of the cats were seen together. On August 7, two teenage farm boys, Arthur and Howard Turner, saw a strange beast near a plum tree not far from the gate leading into their Richmond, Indiana, barnyard. On a rise of ground to their right, another animals stood two hundred feet away. Arthur raised his rifle to his shoulder and blasted away. Both animals wheeled around, jumped a gate, and disappeared down a lane. The Turner boys described one of the animals as “having the appearance of a lion.” It was large-headed, shaggy, and brown in color. The other looked like a black panther. Tracks were found, and with the aid of their dog, Shep, the Turners and the authorities searched for the mysterious cats, but to no avail.

The following afternoon, farmers northwest of Abington, Indiana, spotted two animals to those the Turner boys had seen. And the morning after that, others sighted the two beasts in Wayne County, Indiana. Additional sightings suggested, as Mark A. Hall-a cryptozoologist, one of those people who study unexplained animals in an attempt to either prove or disprove the existence of such creatures-would write later in the journal Wonders that “the movement of the pair [was] from the south around the Ohio River to the north along the Whitewater River. Their path was a U-shaped journey, returning them southward toward the Ohio River.” Hall had experience tracking strange beasts. 

In June 1992, several reports were phoned in to the Mentor Police Department in Ohio. They described a maned feline that was seven feet long, crouching low to the ground on a number of occasions. Witnessed were quoted as saying that the animal was definitely a lion. One individual, who would allow the press to use only his first name, David, said the lion had big shoulders and a mane like you would see on the animal programs on television. David confessed that he was genuinely afraid of it and wondered how it got to where it was now. The police decided that David and other witnesses had seen nothing but a “large golden retriever.” 

More often than  not, as with the law-enforcement officers in Mentor, the urban-oriented police in America try to explain away the sightings of maned lions as being those of dogs. This was the case in Miami Township, Montgomery County, when police took a call on May 26, 1994, about a tiger on the loose. The call came from Galen Emery, of Centerville, who had seen a large animal on the prowl in a field near Washington Church Road and Spring Valley Pike at around nine twenty-five a.m. Despite the fact that the police said the cat, which Emery had videotaped, was domestic, Emery remained adamant about what he had seen. He worked in an office facing an empty field off Spring Valley Road and had often seen and taped coyotes, deer, and groundhogs from only a few hundred yards away. And he knew a thing or two about the size of objects in videos, since he is a professional video producer. 

Then on June 1, 1994, the Clearcreek and Springboro police in Warren County responded to a call of a possible tiger on the loose. The call, received at 14:16, was from Debbie Couch, a resident on North Ohio 741 near Pennyroyal Road. Couch claimed that she had seen a large orange animal run from Ohio 741 into the wooded area behind the Dayton General South Airport, located just north of Springsboro city limits. As she described what she had seen, the police began to believe that there might be truth to the “rumor” (as the press was not calling Emery’s May sighting) of a Bengal tiger. 

Early in November 1994, three Hillsboro residents saw a lion running through Highland and Clinton counties. It was last reported on Turner Road in Clinton County, where police said they had found footprints. “We haven’t got anything that’s substantiated,” Sheriff Tom Horst said. “We’re still looking.” However, Horst had a plaster cast of the paw print that was four inches wide, and the print showed no trace of claws. 

The most vivid account of these sightings comes from Clara Stroop, who said she had seen an animal sniffing around her mobile home on Turner Road, in Clinton County, the same night as the other sightings. “It looked like a cougar or a female lion,” she said. She showed a visitor a small shrub at the corner of her home where the animal had stood. “It let out a great big roar and then it went off running into the woods.” She watched the animal demolish her plastic trash cans and pointed out their neatly sliced remnants. A few days later, the creature came calling against, and again “it let out a great big roar.”  Stroop said. “I don’t let my kids go out at night.” 

Many mystery cats, usually describe as being black panthers or unknown felids with manes, remain active in Ohio to this day. But none has gotten as much press time as the lion in Columbus, Ohio, suburb of Gahanna, first reported in the spring of 2004. A small safari, including a helicopter, was organized to track the monster cat but was never able to catch up with it. “I’m convinced it’s a three-hundred-pound to four-hundred-pound African lion,” Deputy Police Chief Larry Rinehart said at the start of the search. “We’re scurrying. It’s a heck of a day.” Though the Gahanna lion continued to be seen throughout the summer of 2004, it was never captured. 

[whitepolaris]

Bigfoot in Ohio

The granddaddy of American monsters is Bigfoot. And of course, there are many reports of the large hairy and stinky bipeds in Ohio.

During the late 1700s, native Americans-the Delaware of Ohio-described to the new settlers their frequent encounters with the strange hominids. As record in the History of Newcomerstown, the Delaware said that “They had to leave out foods for the wild ones of the woods to keep the peace.” 

The more modern history of Bigfoot in Ohio begins, so far as written accounts go, in 1869 with a news article uncovered by cryptozoologist Mark A. Hall. Dated January 23 of that year, the article was headlined “A Gorilla in Ohio” and told of a hairy creature haunting the woods near the town of Gallipolis. The creature had jumped on a man riding in a carriage, and the man’s daughter, who was also in the carriage, threw a stone at the animal as it struggled with her father. The rock hit the animal’s ear, and the “gorilla” departed. 

In recent years, Ohio has been one of the most active areas for Bigfoot sightings. The creature has even been given a number of local names, such as Orange Eyes and Grassman. The sightings may be the result of the large number of searchers involved in Bigfoot investigations in the state. As far as we can tell, Ohio ranks second in the country after California, in the number of “Bigfooters”-committed hairy hominid seekers. The Weird Ohio team itself has investigated sightings in the state many times. Read on.