A view of cryptozoology that might be a bit different.
Wednesday 2 December 2009
Did a hairy monster stalk Tazewell County?
I came across this on my daily meander through the internet. So what do you think- was it collective hysteria or did people really see something? Anyone knows anything about this please post a comment. It takes a lot to get 100 armed men together and into the woods to search , if that is true!
| 06 Nov 2006 | AP Posted on 07 November 2006 02:47:56 by FLOutdoorsman
Thirty-four years ago in TazewellCounty, 100 armed men walked the woods around East Peoria's Cole Hollow Road in search of a monster. The search was called off about 7:45 p.m. when one of the men accidentally shot himself in the foot. The creature was never found. The monster hunters were looking for was dubbed the Cohomo Monster, a beast thought to be lurking in TazewellCounty in the summer of 1972. James Donahue, Tazewell County Sheriff in 1972, still remembers the infectious hysteria of that summer." At the time it was a very big deal," Donahue recently told the Pekin Daily Times. "Several people indicated they'd seen a monster up in that area. It was described as something like Bigfoot. All the neighbors showed up. We spent a lot of time up there. We never found anything to substantiate the claims. We were up there for a week or two weeks. A lot of volunteer people came out looking for this monster." On Tuesday, July 25, 1972, Creve Coeur authorities reported that a witness saw something big swimming in the Illinois River. The following evening, the Tazewell County Sheriffs Department received a call from a Eureka man who said he and his family were having a birthday party in FondulacPark in East Peoria. The witness said he and his party saw strange lights come in a vertical position and go down behind some trees. The light allegedly left a vapor or smoke trail. That same night, more than 200 phone calls about monster sightings jammed the switchboard at the East Peoria Police Department. On July 28, a rural Pekin woman reported that she saw Cohomo while picking berries by an old coal mine. The woman told the Tazewell County Sheriff's office she was so scared she ran off, leaving her purse behind. That same night, East Peoria Police said two reliable citizens claimed they saw Cohomo. It was described as 10 feet tall. The creature's face had long, gray U-shaped ears and a red mouth with sharp teeth. The reliable citizens said the creature possessed thumbs with long second joints and looked like a cross between an ape and a cave man. Newspaper articles of the time suggest that Cohomo had a horrible smell, sometimes compared to that of a wet dog, rotten eggs, or as sulphur-like. The Cohomo craze swept over TazewellCounty. It's hard to pin down exactly when and where all the excitement over the Cohomo monster started. Old articles found in the Daily Times archives blame a monster called Momo who was first spotted in rural northeastern Missouri a year before the TazewellCounty sightings. One of the first Illinois reports came from Randy Emert, then 18, of Peoria, who claimed he spotted some type of hairy creature in the woods near Cole Hollow Road in TazewellCounty. Emert said he didn't report seeing the monster at first because he feared people would think him crazy. In 1991, the Peoria Journal Star received a phone call from Emert, who said that he made the whole thing up. Emert told the newspaper that he and his friends made the story up to scare another friend who worked late nights at a gas station. But one remains. If Cohomo was the product of mass hallucination, caused by the sightings of a Missouri monster called Momo, why did only the citizens of TazewellCounty invent the elusive beast? And although he has no idea what it may have been, Donahue says he thinks somebody may have seen something.
source: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1733712/post
New book on kindle- myths, murder, monsters and magic in modern day Loch Ness
New Cryptofiction book out
mysterious creatures roam the countryside,what is the secret of the horror tunnel and what are the modern day witches up to with the fifth reich? our Friends from the book Dark Ness once again meet cryptids and danger . s
Mother, author, cat lover, amateur cryptozoologist, cook and bottle washer, some times lover, single parent,middle aged,a mad woman without an attic, red wine and chocolate lover.Now housebound due to ill health so an armchair researcher.Too wheezy to sit in a hide and watch for cryptids anymore lol.Have now taken up crafting when I feel able.I now have a Fiction book out on amazon Kindle Dark Ness by Tabitca Cope set in, you guessed it, Loch Ness with monsters , murder , myth and magic.
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