The Enfield Horror

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Each year, people around the world report having encounters with bizarre animals that seem not to be of this earth.

It occurs so frequently that an entire scientific discipline, Cryptozoology, was established to study the phenomenon.

For a brief period during the early 1970s, one small town in rural Illinois would briefly play host to an entity so mysterious that neither the residents themselves nor anyone else has ever encountered it again.

Just what exactly was the Enfield horror?

The U.S.

state of Illinois spans a vast geographic area, with its borders extending from the shores of the Great Lakes to the banks of the Ohio River basin.

Though it is home to one of the largest cities in the country, Chicago, the rest of the state is far more rural, with woodlands covering some 4.8 million acres.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that a region capable of generating multiple different climate zones possesses more than its fair share of terrifying cryptid encounters.

As is common in the Americas, some of these stories go back centuries, long before the first Europeans set foot on the continent.

Perhaps the best example is the giant piazza bird, which is said to haunt the skies above the Mississippi River, descending as if from nowhere to attack unwary travelers.

Its name, which means the bird that devours man, has been traced to Illini tribal folklore and one Father Jack Marquette who wrote of seeing murals depicting the beast back in 1673.

Though referred to as a bird, the beast in these images possesses horns, red eyes, a beard and a serpent-like tail.

which historians agree seems much more indicative of a dragon.

Then there is the big muddy monster, a Sasquatch-like being that has menaced the inhabitants of the southern city of Murfreesboro since the early 70s.

As with similar creatures seen in the Pacific Northwest and the American South, witnesses describe getting quick, often terrifying glimpses of a large hairy biped emerging from the woods or a pond.

Over the years, local police have collected sketches, witness letters, and even filed a case that, officially, still remains open.

Curiously, a similar creature has been seen just 50 miles away in Saline County, where it's known as the Tuttle Bottoms monster.

Again, witnesses describe an ape-like beast often travelling on two legs, but this time possessing a long snout.

Further south, the creature is known as Momo, a 7-foot-tall, foul-smelling humanoid that has been seen around the Missouri border since the 1940s.

Cryptozoologists point to the fact that numerous people in various regions reporting seeing the same creature as evidence that something lives in the woods in North America.

Other scientists aren't so sure.

They believe that Bigfoot is a cultural template, meaning it is so deeply ingrained in human consciousness that virtually everyone has been exposed to the concept.

As for mass sighting events like those in Illinois, the argument centers around a form of collective behavior, often described as mass hysteria or social contagion.

Which brings us to the Enfield horror.

Though many agree that the entity at the center of this event is not a Sasquatch, the Bigfoot phenomenon provides the best template for understanding what actually happened during that spring of 1973.

Described by witnesses as being three-legged and capable of jumping significant distances, this enigmatic trespasser spent several weeks stalking a small town.

During this period, it interacted with multiple residents, leaving behind physical evidence of its presence and even allowing its distinctive call to be recorded by one witness.

Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, this inexplicable creature was gone, leaving behind nothing but questions, theories, and uncertainties.

On the evening of April the 25th, 1973, a local Enfield resident by the name of Henry McDaniel had just returned home with his wife.

According to the man's report, it was just after 9pm.

The couple lived in a relatively isolated area on the outskirts of town, which provided them and their two children, Lil and Henry Jr., with endless opportunities to enjoy southern Illinois' abundant natural beauty.

But upon entering their home that evening, McDaniel and his wife would find that nature had turned against them.

The parents found their two children in a highly emotional state.

Through floods of tears, the two related to their parents that an hour or so prior, they had both heard a series of strange noises coming from behind the front door to the house.

They described it as an unnerving scratching sound.

almost as if some sort of animal was trying to get through.

Curious, the two children hurried to open the door and catch the animal in the act.

But what they saw was something far stranger than any raccoon or possum, and far more terrifying.

According to Henry, the creature they saw had three legs, a short squat body and two big eyes which he described as being as big as torches.

Still in shock from the sight, Henry Jr.

was slow to react when the wicked-looking creature extended its arms out towards them, them, huge claws stretching just inches from his face.

Fortunately, his survival instincts kicked in and he was able to slam the door shut before grabbing his sister and running off to his bedroom to hide.

They'd remain there until the moment they heard their parents return.

As he listened to his children's account, Henry Sr.

became acutely aware of a persistent scratching noise coming from the exterior of the door he and his wife had just closed.

At this point he was convinced that what the kids had seen was just a wild animal of some kind, and imagination had simply filled in the gaps.

Hoping to teach them a lesson, he strode purposefully towards the door and threw it wide open.

But instead of a forest creature, what he saw was a vision of hell itself.

With the porch light on, Henry was able to get an even better look at the creature than the children.

It stood roughly 4.5 feet tall and was covered in a short layer of light grey fur.

Its face was almost unidentifiable due to its oversized, pink-coloured eyes.

The long claws on each of its hands were located at the end of two short arms connected to a squat torso, with the rest of its body made up of three long and powerful legs.

Just like his son had done, Henry slammed the door hard in the face of the interloper.

After shouting at his wife to take the children to their room, he equipped himself with a.22 caliber rifle and torch.

When he then kicked the front door back open, he saw that the creature was slowly retreating away from the house towards the fence line of his backyard.

Without hesitation, he raised his rifle and fired four rounds into the intruder.

To his shock, the act produced no effect, other than eliciting an angry hiss from the beast.

For a moment, Henry was convinced it would return to attack him.

Instead, he watched in utter bewilderment as it bent its long legs backwards and then launched itself, clearing his yard in a series of leaps before disappearing into some nearby trees.

Without thinking, Henry reloaded the rifle he was holding and went to give chase, before realizing that to do so would leave his family undefended at the house.

Convinced that the creature would have already entered the home if able, he decided to play it safe and go back inside, where he promptly called the police.

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Shortly after, two state troopers arrived to find the entire family in an extremely agitated state.

For his part, Henry was sure that he'd hit the creature with at least one of his shots.

He also said that the noise the creature had made sounded almost like a wildcat and that he'd never seen anything move quite so fast, referring to its ability to cover 50 feet in just a few bounds.

Hesitant as the troopers were to believe such a fantastic story, It was clear that something had happened at the property.

For starters, there were footprints and long scratches on the doors and siding of the home.

The following morning, crime scene examiners took photographs of the claw marks, which they reported as being deeply embedded into the wood.

Alongside this evidence, a series of plaster casts were also made of the footprints leading away from the premises, which were unlike anything the investigator had ever seen before.

They were described as being similar to a dog's paw, only with six toes as opposed to four.

Curiously, there was also some variance in the size of the prints.

One examiner said that they seemed to indicate that the owner possessed two dominant feet, with a smaller one set slightly further back than the others.

Even with this evidence, the authorities doubted virtually everything that the McDaniel family had reported.

But when they returned to the station later that morning, they were shocked to find out that all hell had broken loose in their absence.

That same morning, a totally different group of officers had been dispatched to another address to speak to a 10-year-old boy named Greg Garrett.

Garrett informed the troopers that roughly half an hour before the events that had taken place at the McDaniel household, he had been involved in a similar incident.

At the time, he had been hurrying to get home and had cut through a couple of alleyways to save time.

As he rounded one corner, something heavy and squat had emerged from the darkness, colliding with him and knocking him to the ground.

He then described a brief struggle in which the unseen attacker hissed like a snake before slashing at his shoes with its claws.

After finally managing to free himself, Garrett immediately ran home.

Upon arriving, he told his mother what had happened and even showed her the deep gouge marks in the fabric of his footwear.

With two separate but similar cases on their hands, local sheriff Roy Poshard had no choice but to reach out to both witnesses.

After conducting brief interviews, he ultimately advised them not to share their stories with the rest of the town, fearing that their tales might lead to widespread panic.

Deep down, Poshard likely didn't believe what he was hearing.

and was hoping that Garrett and the McDaniels would eventually come to their senses.

Unfortunately for the sheriff, on May the 7th, Henry McDaniel decided to take things into his own hands, but only after he experienced a second sighting.

Frustrated by the lack of police response, he related this new encounter to the local radio station.

At 3am the previous morning, McDaniel had been roused from a fitful sleep by the sound of loud barking coming from the dogs that belonged to a neighbouring household.

Still unsettled by the events of the previous month, he had again reached for his rifle and torch and then gone out to check the perimeter of his property.

McDaniel had not travelled far when the dim light from the torch picked out a familiar shape lurking in the trees near some train tracks.

Again he raised his rifle and aimed it at the mysterious creature, but this time he held his fire.

Realizing that the beast had yet to notice him, he instead took the opportunity to study it.

As he would later state,

I saw something moving out on the railroad track, and there it stood.

I didn't shoot at it or anything.

It started on down the railroad track, and it wasn't in a hurry or nothing.

After several minutes had passed, the creature bounced away, again using a series of powerful leaps to disappear into the brush.

As one might expect, the resultant broadcasts and newspaper articles sent the town's residents into a frenzy.

However, it also had the effect of drawing large crowds of visitors and onlookers from the surrounding settlements, many of whom were eager to catch a glimpse of the mysterious entity or even be the one to kill it.

It didn't take long for the disruptive activities of these newcomers to push Sheriff Poshard to the limit.

However, any restraint he may have felt dissolved the moment he received reports of shots being fired.

Driving out to the location of this latest incident, Poshard and his deputies located a group of five hunters, yelling excitedly and pointing off into a patch of undergrowth.

Gesturing wildly at the trees, The men informed the sceptical officers that they had caught sight of a monster making its way towards them.

They described it as a monkey-like creature covered in grey fur.

As it slowly approached, several members of the group opened fire, only to learn that their bullets apparently had no effect on the creature, which again fled via a series of powerful leaps and bounds.

Searching the location and finding no evidence that any animals had been present, Poshard promptly decided to arrest all five men for weapons violations.

But when this account was also published by the local newspapers, it had the opposite effect of the previous story.

Rather than a surge in visitors, people began staying away, much to the sheriff's relief.

But just as the controversy finally seemed to be reaching a point where it had begun to die away, the town's unearthly visitor would make one final, bizarre appearance.

One of the many people who elected to ignore the official advice not to search for the creature was a Midwest radio personality named Rick Rick Rainbow.

As the director of WWKI in Kacomo, Indiana, he had heard McDaniels' reports firsthand and decided to visit the area with several companions.

Not long into his trek, the group stumbled across an abandoned and decaying property about a mile from the McDaniels home.

As they analysed the ruins, a squat grey figure unexpectedly emerged.

Upon catching sight of the assembled hunting party, the fur-covered creature instantly emitted a haunting cry before leaping vertically into the air and disappearing into the surrounding forest.

Rainbow later described how it had made off from the group using a series of similarly spectacular leaps, travelling so far and so fast that he and the other hunters had to quickly abandon their pursuit.

It was at this point in the retelling of his story that Rainbow had produced a tape recorder, upon which he claimed to have captured the creature's cries as it fled.

He then decided to take these tapes to renowned cryptozoologist Lauren Coleman, who listened to them and agreed they were like no creature he had ever investigated.

Coleman would later travel to Enfield to interview the witnesses firsthand, even photographing some of the damage that had been done to the McDaniels residence.

Whilst he was there, he recalled hearing some strange, banshee-like sounds in the woods, but never had an actual sighting.

Though one might assume that this is where the Enfield horror phenomenon blew up into a national sensation, the opposite actually happened.

Following the Rick Rainbow encounter, the story seemed to come to an end.

There were no further sightings that year or in the year that followed.

With nothing to renew interest, the creature faded into obscurity.

Though it managed to leave behind a dossier full of evidence pertaining to its existence, there were never any answers as to how it had come to haunt the streets and forests of this small Illinois town.

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As with many of the more obscure cryptid sightings reported in North America, the passage of time has not been kind to the Enfield horror.

or to those who encountered it.

In the years that followed the initial sightings, an all-too-familiar set of accusations have been levelled at the town's civic leaders and newspaper reporters alleging the tale was falsified or exaggerated.

The likely motive for such a conspiracy between the two groups would be simple enough, to promote interest in the town and hopefully generate an increase in visitors.

Alongside that allegation, there are those who believe that, like many similar sightings of that particular era in American history, the Enfield horror is a classic case of mass hysteria.

In fact, in 1978, the incident became the subject of a study on social contagion at Western Illinois University.

The researchers eventually concluded that only a few of the sightings, notably those involving the McDaniels, could be considered even remotely credible.

The rest had derived from media-fueled rumor chains and suggestibility.

As for the initial events, they argued that witnesses misidentified a common farm or wild animal due to the unnaturally tense or adverse nature of the encounter.

This in turn generated a whole series of further mistaken sightings where the testimony of the new witnesses was tainted by the words of those who had gone before.

That said, mass hysteria can't manufacture tracks or scratches.

Even if we argue that the McDaniels family did not see a three-legged hairy creature with large claws, it seems clear that was there that night.

The officers and crime scene investigators who saw the tracks had zero reason to lie, let alone actively fabricate evidence.

This brings us to the second common argument, that the entire thing was a hoax.

Indeed, there have been suggestions that the story was a direct byproduct of tensions between Sheriff Poshard and a number of local residents, including Henry McDaniel.

According to some Enfield residents, McDaniel had a reputation for being eccentric and outspoken and may have had previous run-ins with the Sheriff's Office.

It's not beyond possibility that he may have embellished his encounters as a means of frustrating the lawmen, knowing full well how disruptive a monster panic could become.

These arguments appear to be reinforced by the fact that young Greg Garrett later admitted to fabricating his encounter when his account was placed under scrutiny.

Some sources claim he said it was a joke, one that could have been inspired or encouraged by adults in town.

But could Garrett have heard about the monster sighting so quickly?

Even considering how fast news travels in a small town, it seems unlikely, especially since he recounted the tale to his mother before the McDaniels encounter.

Might he have been pressured into saying he made the whole thing up?

Also, the sheer number of witnesses and the abundance of alleged evidence provided to the authorities seem to fly in the face of these assertions.

In addition to the McDaniel children, there were numerous sightings from people unconnected to the local community, who would have no knowledge of any existing tensions in the town.

If it was a hoax, the only way to adequately explain the scratches found on exposed surfaces near the sightings, the bizarre footprints, and the audio recordings of strange animal cries would be to assume that McDaniels faked them.

Eccentric or not, would he be the kind to damage his own home or run into the woods making animal noises whilst men with guns were on patrol?

It seems unlikely.

If the Enfield horror wasn't a hoax and it wasn't a case of mass hysteria, What was it?

If we are to accept the testimony of those involved at Face value, we have a mysterious jumping creature with grey fur, big eyes and potentially three legs.

Over the decades, some commentators have theorised that the creature was likely a kangaroo that had managed to escape from a private collector residing somewhere in the surrounding area.

This would explain the strange tracks and the third leg, which could easily have been the animal's tail.

Although their hind legs have only four toes whereas the tracks had six, six, the front paws do have claws, which can be quite terrifying.

Then there's the description of how it moved.

Kangaroos are fantastic jumpers, known to leap up to 25 feet in a single bound.

They can also jump up to 10 feet in the air, especially when startled.

Finally, whilst they are often rather quiet, These animals have been known to hiss and sometimes bark in a cough-like manner.

Despite the fact that Rick Rainbow claimed to have recorded the creature, any reproduction seemed to be long gone.

What can be said is that the high-pitched banshee-like screams that were described by him and Coleman do not match the familiar sounds produced by a kangaroo, nor are kangaroos bulletproof.

Others who believe in the misidentified animal theory suggest that what the McDaniels might have seen was a large ape or monkey.

Interestingly, Interestingly, there is a precedent for this type of encounter in Illinois.

During the 1940s, the town of Mount Vernon was plagued by a series of grizzly cattle mutilations, which locals attributed to a pack of wild apes living in the surrounding foothills.

According to witnesses, these leaping beasts were baboon-like in appearance and could jump 20 feet or more in a single bound.

With the towns only separated by a mere 40 miles, it would easily be possible for the creatures responsible for those deaths to travel the short distance between the two locations.

Unfortunately, that still doesn't give us any indication as to what they were.

To be open-minded, we have to agree that it's possible the mysterious monster is just what people assumed it was, a creature completely unknown to science.

Unless it is a mutated or disfigured form of an existing animal, texts can confirm that no known vertebrate animal has evolved with three legs as a natural biological trait.

Like the Bigfoot phenomenon, we would have to assume that there is a long hidden breeding population of these animals somewhere in the forests of the Midwest.

Still, how they have managed to stay undetected before and after the Enfield incident further complicates this theory.

Given these facts, some feel that the Enfield horror is something not of this Earth at all.

They argue that it could either be an extraterrestrial or some form of interdimensional entity.

This would explain its science-defying biology and the fact that it was seen so frequently for a single month only to disappear forever, having returned to its own world.

The Enfield Horror joins a far wider gallery of strange and unnatural creatures to have traversed the United States throughout the mid-20th century.

It remains to be seen whether these entities have always resided within the wilderness of North America or if they perhaps come from somewhere much further afield, such as an astral plane, a neighboring dimension, or even another planet.

Whatever the truth behind the Enfield horror, one fact remains undeniable.

Something strange happened in that small Illinois town in the spring of 1973.

Whatever it was, its brief and chilling presence left a scar on the community, and a question that half a century later still awaits an answer.

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