Short Stuff: The Enfield Monster

Did a strange cryptid show up in Enfield, Illinois in 1973? Some people think so. DO YOU? See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:12Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. Jerry's here sitting in for Dave and Dave didn't want to come because he gets spooked easily. And this is a spooky one, Chuck.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  A spooky one.

• 1:25Josh Clark?

  Exactly. I can't do that as well as you, so I just kind of left it for you. Oh, how about Sammy Davis Jr. Going saying spooky like that?

• 1:34Speaker 02

  I don't think that's possible. Herman, a spooky one.

• 1:39Josh Clark?

  Perfect.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all right.

• 1:42Josh Clark?

  Man, I'm going to get you a crown. It's a Sammy Davis champ.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  You ready to dive into this mystery of the Enfield monster?

• 1:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Had you heard of this before? I had not.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  I don't think so. We need to think, uh, thank, man, thank about Medium, the website, and Dread Central and all that's interesting for their reporting on this, I mean, supposedly true thing that happened in 1973.

• 2:12Josh Clark?

  We should say that there are a lot of skeptics out there about this, this story, but it is a really big deal in the cryptic community and there is a cryptic community out there, people who are like, yes, there's, um, there are animals out there that we don't understand. This is one of their big examples that they throw to.

• 2:31Josh Clark?

  But we're not going to look too deep into it because this is Halloween and it's a fun story, don't you think?

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. The skeptics are calling from inside the podcast.

• 2:42Josh Clark?

  So, um, this was one of those seventies things along the lines of like, um, the Amityville horror where there was a decade where people were willing to be like, hey, this insane supernatural thing happened to me and I want to be on the news about it. And they would get on the news. And the guy who got on the news the most from this whole thing was a guy named Henry McDaniel. He lived in, uh, the village of Enfield, Illinois. And he got on the news because he said that there is a very strange creature that he not only saw, but shot at. And, uh, the creature behaved quite strangely and looked so strange that he was quite sure it was not of this planet.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  That's right. I guess we can kick it off though with their neighbors, uh, the Garrets, because the Garrett boy, young Greg Garrett, apparently is around nine o'clock at night was catching lightning bugs. And all of a sudden, you know, comes storming back into the house. His parents are watching TV and he's hysterical. He's crying, he's upset and he said he saw a monster, uh, described it as four or five feet tall, tiny little arms with claws, uh, slimy gray skin and three legs with claws and big red eyes about the size of flashlights and presented physical evidence in the form

• 4:07Speaker 02

  of his tennis shoes that were shredded up that he said the monster, you know, kind of stepped on his feet, I guess, and ran past him. And his parents were like, oh, what?

• 4:18Josh Clark?

  Pretty much. Apparently Greg wasn't known as much of a trickster or a liar, or even a fibber, from what I understand. So his parents were just kind of like, I'm not quite sure what to make of this. What, what happened, Greg? And they yelled at him for like a half hour until he cracked. Or they tried to make him crack and he never cracked. So, um, as this was happening, and so we should say this, Chuck, the accounts of this are so muddy by this time that it's not entirely clear, the order of events and everything. So we're just going to kind of go with the general flow, but just take this with a grain of salt because it's just, it's a muddy story, essentially. It's a muddy supernatural story, if you can believe that.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think it's one of those deals where over the years it's been retold so many times. It's probably been added to and, and changed about, like, things like this are done. Does that make sense?

• 5:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah, no, totally. And not only retold, retold by people too lazy to go look up facts that they just assume instead, and then that becomes fact kind of thing. So, uh, I, at least we're not writing about it. We just read about it and we're too lazy to go look up the facts.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  That's right. Cause this is just a fun, silly spooky shorty. So the McDaniel kids are out that night as well. And, uh, Mr. McDaniel hears this story. He's also in disbelief, obviously, because he doesn't believe something like that could happen to his kids. And hears some scratching at the door, opens the door, sees this monster, uh, evidently slams the door and goes and grabs a 22 pistol and a flashlight, opens the door back up and shoots at this thing.

• 6:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  As you do.

• 6:07Josh Clark?

  I just have in my mind, like, uh, like him closing his eyes and turning his head and just firing wildly out the door.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:14Josh Clark?

  So, um, that's when he got the description that you gave. And like, he said also that he hit it. He knows that he hit it because he said it hissed like a wildcat, which is, I believe, a quote.

• 6:28Josh Clark?

  And that it just bounded away and bounded away, meaning like it covered tens of feet with each bounce, which with each hop, thanks to that third leg, apparently.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, apparently 75 feet in about three hops.

• 6:43Josh Clark?

  That's impressive.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, and it went over the railroad tracks, calls the cops and the Illinois state, it calls like the local police and the Illinois state troopers show up instead. And maybe that's a good time for a break.

• 6:57Josh Clark?

  I agree.

• 7:15Josh Clark?

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• 7:24Speaker 02

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• 7:37Josh Clark?

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• 7:53Speaker 02

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• 8:17Speaker 02

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• 8:20Josh Clark?

  Sure.

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• 8:31Josh Clark?

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• 8:50Josh Clark?

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• 9:10Speaker 03

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• 9:27Josh Clark?

  Okay Chuck, where we last left off, McDaniel's, Henry McDaniel's gun is smoking. The Enfield Monster has bounded off out of sight. And of course, the first thing he does is call the police. Like, his children have just been terrified. He's just fired on some unknown monster. God knows that he was concerned about Greg Garrett's tennis shoes.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 9:50Josh Clark?

  So he called the police. The Illinois State Troopers show up to conduct a search. And they search and they-

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Quite a recap, by the way.

• 9:58Josh Clark?

  Thank you very much. You know, I live to do recaps.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Man, you just retold the whole thing.

• 10:03Josh Clark?

  So the Illinois State Troopers show up and they search the area. And they don't, they don't find the monster, but they do find some suspicious evidence. I found it suspicious, didn't you?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  I think so. They found scratch marks on the siding of the house. Fresh scratch marks. They found footprints, three footprints with claw marks on them. Two of them were about four inches wide, apparently. The third one was a little bit smaller. And then, apparently, you know, McDaniel starts telling the story all around town. And people start retelling the story. I think a kid, some other kid, maybe a neighbor faked, or said he had faked the eyewitness account.

• 10:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that doesn't really help your case. But it was enough for Henry McDaniel to kind of get into the paper. I think he was in the, would you say, it's gotta be the Reading Eagle, right?

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Hmm, it's not Reading, though. The Reading Eagle.

• 11:02Josh Clark?

  I mean, yeah, it could be referring to the eagle reading the newspaper. I don't know.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Sure, why not?

• 11:07Josh Clark?

  At any rate, it wasn't the Sun-Times or anything like that. But they did run a story. And like, the story very quickly started to get picked up through other news outlets, including the news, like TV news, in Illinois, in the surrounding area. And so this was, it had become a thing, right? But that was the first sighting. About 10 days later, Henry McDaniel comes into play again. When he wakes up to the sound of the neighborhood dogs going crazy. And he grabs his gun again and goes down to the front door, opens it up as he does, and there's the monster again.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  That's right. But not at the door this time. This time it was over on those railroad tracks that had disappeared over on the previous siding. And he said it wasn't in a hurry. It was just kind of ambling down the tracks. He has a great quote in an interview. If they do find it, they'll find more than one, and they won't be from this planet, I can tell you that. So he thought it was otherworldly, extraterrestrial, perhaps.

• 12:13Josh Clark?

  I've spent a lot of time with Henry McDaniel to prep for this short stuff, and he sounds exactly like that.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Oh, good. All right, good.

• 12:20Josh Clark?

  So yeah, a bunch of people started to show up, monster hunters, which are basically bushbeard drunk hunters with rifles and shotguns.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:31Josh Clark?

  They showed up, obviously. Like I said, the news showed up. There were cryptid investigators. People who are like, I'm not, I'm not a fool, but I also believe that there's animals out there that we can't explain. So like, I guess quasi-scientific investigators showed up as well. The whole, the upshot is the whole town, this small town, just became like a hotbed of activity. So much so that the sheriff was like, hey, McDaniel, if you keep telling this story, I'm gonna arrest you for basically disturbing the peace. And I, I mean, I believe that's unconstitutional. So he never made good on that threat. But the point is, the town was in uproar over all this.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they arrested some of these hunters because they're just out there drinking beer and firing into the night. You can't do that either. Not even in 1973. And then, a guy whose name is too great to be disbelieved, named Rick Rainbow. He's the news director for WWKI in Kokomo, Indiana.

• 13:38Josh Clark?

  The place where you get there fast and then you take it slow.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  That's right. And he was a, another eyewitness, supposedly. He and three other guys saw this, this monster near a abandoned house not too far from the original sightings. It was in the shadows, though, with its back turned, so he couldn't like verify the description. But he said it was grayish and about five feet tall and stooped over. And reportedly, recorded audio of this thing screaming, even though it was never released to the public, which makes it very sketchy to me.

• 14:10Josh Clark?

  For sure. There's a, there's a few things that are kind of sketchy about this story, but-

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Like all of it?

• 14:16Josh Clark?

  So that was, I think, so McDaniel's, or no, sorry, Rick Rainbow's sighting was the last sighting of the Enfield Monster, I believe?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 14:29Josh Clark?

  But some other people heard it over the course of the next few days. Some weird cries coming from the woods, and then it just stopped. As quickly as the Enfield Monster showed up, it just went away. And I think those crypto, cryptid investigators opened a case study in 1978, where they really investigated this. And they found, I saw that the guy who was the lead investigator was like, I'm baffled by this, but it's also, essentially like, most of the story is basically the locals wanting to get in on it and embellishing sightings, or just completely making some stuff up.

• 15:13Josh Clark?

  But he seemed to really be intrigued by Henry McDaniel's accounts, in particular, at least.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, and some of that, you know, alleged actual evidence, like the footprints and the scratched up shoes and the scratched up siding. A lot of people were like, you know, this is a big hoax. They were trying to, you know, just dust up some, some, some news about their town. So maybe people would come by and give them some tourist money. But, you know, no one really knows what happened. I think it's interesting that a guy in Ohio later on said, you know what, I have a pet kangaroo.

• 15:49Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Named Macy, who kind of fits that description, and had gotten away and was missing. So this thing bounding around, the hopping, the three, I suppose the tail, if it had a funky tail, could have been a third leg. I don't know, maybe it was just this guy Macy the Kangaroo.

• 16:08Josh Clark?

  It being Macy the Kangaroo is almost as astounding as it being like a cryptid that has never been discovered before, if you ask me.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Like a guy just having a random kangaroo that happened to escape?

• 16:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah. That's what people were shooting at, too.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:26Josh Clark?

  I think that's it for short stuff, the spooky short stuff, huh?

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, except it's actually not that spooky. I think we were more laughing at it. But hey, if you're from the surrounding area, I am curious if that legend still survives around the campfire. So let us know.

• 16:42Josh Clark?

  That means short stuff's out, right?

• 16:44Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 16:48Speaker 04

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