Enfield Horror

On the night of Wednesday 25 April 1973, Henry McDaniel, a fifty-year-old antique dealer in the village of Enfield, Illinois, heard something scratching at his front door. Two days later the Associated Press carried his account across the state: "It had three legs on it, a short body, two little short arms, and two pink eyes as big as flashlights. It stood four and a half to five feet tall and was grayish-colored." McDaniel fired four shots at it; state police found tracks in the soft earth, and a trooper reported that the witness was "rational and sober". Within twenty-four hours a radio news director from Indiana was in the village, and within two weeks armed strangers were being arrested in the fields. Everything in this file is a report, not an observation: no animal was ever identified and nothing was ever collected. What did survive is unusually well documented for a cryptid, and unusually early: a wire dispatch written while the tracks were still fresh, a magazine investigation by Loren Coleman published in July 1974, and a 1978 sociological study that turned Enfield into a textbook case of how a small town, a reporter and a rumour amplify one another.

Enfield is a village in White County, in the flat farm country of south-eastern Illinois, about ten miles west of the county seat at Carmi. The 2020 census counted 794 residents. A single railway line runs through it, in front of the houses on the north side of town: it was built by the Louisville & Nashville, and freight still moves over it today under the Evansville Western Railway. That embankment is the stage on which the whole case takes place. On the night of Wednesday 25 April 1973, Henry McDaniel — fifty years old, an antique dealer — had just come home from a meeting when he heard something scratching at his front door. Two days later the Associated Press put his account on the wire, and the Mt. Vernon Register-News ran it on Friday 27 April under the deck "Three Legs, Pink Eyes As Big As Flashlights" and the headline "A 'Monster' At Enfield". The story is by AP writer Dennis Montgomery, and it is the earliest text of the case that can be read today in full. What McDaniel told the AP is the source of every physical detail that has circulated since. "It had three legs on it," he said, "a short body, two little short arms, and two pink eyes as big as flashlights. It stood four and a half to five feet tall and was grayish-colored." He added: "It was trying to get into the house." He said he slammed the door, took a pistol and a flashlight from the dresser in his bedroom, came back, opened the door and saw the thing about twelve feet away. He fired four shots. "When I fired that first shot, I know I hit it," he said. The creature gave a hiss "much like a wildcat's" and went off towards the railway embankment, covering fifty feet in three jumps. State police arrived too late to see anything, but found tracks in the soft earth around the house. McDaniel described them as like a dog's, except with six toe pads. One of the troopers, named in the dispatch as James Masser, said McDaniel appeared "rational and sober". Pressed by the reporter on how he could have registered so much detail in the dark and in a few seconds, McDaniel answered: "I have a photostatic memory." Then he recalled that the body had been "almost like a human body". He ruled out a kangaroo — he had kept one as a pet while serving with the Army in Australia — and he told the AP that some school children had said they saw something similar at the school ball park. His last line to the reporter was: "If they do find it, they will find more than one and they won't be from this planet, I can tell you that." The press timeline is tighter than any account of the case usually admits. The sociologists David L. Miller, Kenneth J. Mietus and Richard A. Mathers, who reconstructed the episode for The Sociological Quarterly in 1978, fix the first publication on Thursday 26 April 1973 in the Carmi Times, the day after the encounter — and record that by that Thursday afternoon the news director of radio station WWKI of Kokomo, Indiana, had already been dispatched to Enfield. The station then broadcast reports that at least three other residents of Enfield had seen the creature. In other words, the out-of-town press was inside the village within twenty-four hours, and was itself producing witnesses. The AP wire followed on the Friday, and by 7 May the story had reached WGN radio in Chicago and the metropolitan papers. On Sunday 6 May, at three in the morning, McDaniel said he was woken by neighbourhood dogs and saw the thing again, out on the tracks. He told the reporters: "I seen 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. It wasn't in a hurry or anything." That was the last time he claimed to see it. That same day WWKI's news director Rick Rainbow and three companions reported a grey, stooped figure about five and a half feet tall beside an abandoned house near McDaniel's, running away from them; Rainbow taped the cry it made. On Tuesday 8 May the affair turned into a public-order problem. Five young men from out of town, who said they had fired at a grey hairy creature in the underbrush, were arrested by Deputy Sheriff Jim Clark on hunting violations. Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman, writing in Fate in July 1974, also record that the White County sheriff — whom they name as Roy Poshard Jr. — had threatened to arrest McDaniel himself for reporting the creature. Coleman is the reason there is a case file at all. In 1973 he was an anthropology student who had studied at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale; he drove down with the Chicago Fortean investigator Richard Crowe. In his own account, published on his site on 6 May 2010: "I did travel to Enfield. I interviewed the witnesses, looked at the siding and air conditioner damage of the house the Enfield Monster had attacked, heard some strange screeching banshee-like sounds, and walked away bewildered." He wrote it up with Jerome Clark as "Swamp Slobs Invade Illinois" in Fate, July 1974, pages 84 to 88, and again in Creatures of the Outer Edge (1978). Enfield was the first of a run of Illinois reports that year, not the tail of one: the Murphysboro creature on the Big Muddy River, seen by Randy Needham and Judy Johnson, begins two months later on 25 June 1973, about 60 miles west-south-west, and the Edwardsville reports about a month after that. The name is later than the events. In 1973 the papers wrote about a "monster" at Enfield; "the Enfield Horror" is the label that the popular literature settled on afterwards, and it is the one this file carries.

There is nothing to visit, and saying so plainly is more useful than a route. Enfield is a working village of a few hundred people in White County, south-eastern Illinois, about ten miles (16 km) west of Carmi on flat farmland at 479 feet (146 m) above sea level. No monument, marker, museum, trail or festival devoted to the 1973 case is documented; the creature exists in print and on souvenir patches, not in the streetscape. The two addresses that matter are private homes and are not published here. The McDaniel house and the Garrett house behind it were, and remain, ordinary family houses in a small town where the events of 1973 are living memory and were not welcome at the time: the local reaction to the publicity, according to the contemporary accounts, ranged from a threat of arrest for the main witness to real fear that armed strangers would shoot a neighbour or a cow. Knocking on doors to ask about the monster is the one thing this file asks readers not to do. The railway is the second reason for caution, and it is a legal one. The line that runs past the north side of the village — the old Louisville & Nashville route, along which McDaniel said the creature bounded away and on whose trestles he said he saw it again on 6 May — is not a heritage line or a rail trail. It is active freight track, mapped in OpenStreetMap as Evansville Western Railway. Walking on it or on its embankment is trespass on private railroad property in Illinois and is dangerous; there is no viewpoint to be gained by doing it, since the track crosses ordinary farmland and back gardens. If you are in the area for other reasons, the useful stop is Carmi, the county seat, which has the courthouse, the county historical collections and the newspaper — the Carmi Times, which printed the first report of the case on 26 April 1973 — and where a library reference desk is a better way into this story than the village itself. Southern Illinois also holds the second act: Murphysboro, on the Big Muddy River about 60 miles (95 km) west-south-west, where the creature reports of June and July 1973 took place, is a considerably larger town and has treated its own monster far more openly than Enfield has.