Missouri's Bigfoot (Not the Monster Truck)

Part 2: Mysterious and Weird Missouri

Since last week’s story was about giants found in Missouri, I thought it would be fitting to share more recent stories of giants roaming the Show Me state. Perhaps those eight-foot human-like bones found in Missouri’s Ozarks are ancestors of the tall, hairy, bipedal creature, that has also been stinking up the eastern half of the state since the 1970s. From St. Louis, follow the Mississippi River north via Hwy 79 to the historic town of Louisiana and you might just hear rumors of Missouri’s first sensational bigfoot sighting.

Today, the Louisiana Historic Preservation Society boasts two walking tours that will guide visitors through the streets to see antebellum homes, old commercial buildings, and beautiful views of the Mississippi River.  Surprisingly, no tourist map lists the exact route the townspeople took to hunt the hairy creature that scared residents one July week in 1972. Louisianans aptly named the beast that roamed Marzolf Hill, Momo, short for Missouri Monster.

Despite multiple credible reports, many Missourians still profess it was all a hoax, perpetrated by a few teenagers. After all, forty-armed locals supposedly searched the forested area of Marzolf Hill and found nothing. The sightings ended a week after they started and by then, the creature had grown five feet taller in eyewitness accounts. Momo’s brief stint in Louisiana lent credence to a hoax that may have gone awry, forcing pranksters to ditch the costume in the Mississippi before an angry Frankenstein-ish mob could hunt them down.

But those who directly saw Momo up close described an experience consistent with most bigfoot sightings. Eyewitnesses were also visibly shaken by the experience, prompting some to abandon their homestead until they felt safe enough to return. The early news reports from Pike County residents said the man-like creature was black, hairy, bipedal, seven feet tall, and featured howls, growls, and a stench equally foul.

Making the Louisiana incident plausible is this surprising fact—Missouri is in the top ten states for bigfoot sightings reported to the Bigfoot Field Researcher Organization (BRFO). The organization is a reporting center for US witnesses, listing encounters by state and county. Missouri’s 166 unexplained BFRO recorded sightings rank it ninth among all BFRO reports.

The oldest incident of a hairy man running around Missouri was in 1925, but that turned out to be an unkempt, mentally ill man roaming Oregon County. The local sheriff promptly escorted the wild man out of town. The next oldest report was from 1967, only five years before Momo became the media sensation of the Midwest. In 1967 and 1971, two similar reports occurred on Missouri’s southern border in adjacent counties. Since the late 1960s, 65% of the Missouri sightings were in the heavily forested towns across Missouri’s Ozark region, which is most of the land south of the Missouri River.

A consistent trend of BFRO reports can also be found in Missouri’s eight bordering states. Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee each had at least a hundred reports, ranking these states in the top twenty. Like Missouri, these states offer plenty of rivers, lakes, forested elevations, and extensive cave systems that perhaps a large, intelligent primate might travel indiscreetly.

But the most reported activity in a bordering state is across the Mississippi River, placing Illinois fifth among all US sightings, with 303 reports. Seventy-eight percent of bigfoot sightings are in central and southern Illinois regions. Oddly, the most frequently reported sightings occurred in Madison County (24 as of this writing).

Madison County is just across the river from St. Louis. The county features both flat farm fields and stretches of wooded terrain. Yet, I wouldn’t describe the environment to be as “Squatchy” as the Mark Twain and Shawnee National Forests of Missouri and Illinois. It should also be noted those sightings occurred long before Illinois voters legalized pot, so residents had not hallucinated those encounters—at least that we know of.

One anthropology student at SIU Carbondale gathered a large collection of stories from the Midwest as a research project in 1969, which meant the Momo incident was not an isolated sighting 50 years ago. Apparently, people living in the central part of the States have experienced sightings for quite some time. Even the BRFO database has multiple Missouri and Illinois reports of bigfoot encounters from the early 1970s.

An hour south of Louisiana, in the town of Harvester, a report of a very tall, black, hairy creature that ran upright on two legs scared the wits out of a few teenagers. After being chased on foot around the vicinity of Tower Hill Road, the teens hopped in a car and were so scared they headed across town to the sheriff’s office to report the incident at 1:30 a.m. on June 26, 1973.

The following day, authorities staked out the road to see if they could get a glimpse of the creature that scared the youths. Investigators reported hearing a few kids drive by the area, screaming through a bullhorn. They concluded the Harvester incident was likely a prank. Still, yells through a bullhorn are not quite the same as being chased by a seven-foot growling ape-like hairy man.

Maybe the sheriff didn’t experience a sighting of his own because the creature headed south, in search of a better hiding place. A day after the Harvester sighting, possibly during the stake-out near Tower Hill, at least five witnesses reported seeing a similar creature that left 12-inch footprints in Murphysboro. The small town is not too far from Carbondale in Jackson County. Jackson County is also home to the second most BFRO reports in Illinois.

The Murphysboro residents aptly named it Big Muddy because it was spotted near the Big Muddy River. Big Muddy witnesses reported the ape-like creature as having long dark hair, red eyes, standing seven feet tall, and reeking of a rancid body odor, consistent with Momo encounters.

Murphysboro is about 1 ½ hours south of St. Louis City. Louisiana is an equal distance north, while Harvester is just half of that distance west of St. Louis. This concentrated area of weirdness (a 90-mile radius around St. Louis) marked the beginning of strange activity in Missouri that continued into the decade.

In March 1973, Southeast Missouri experienced strange lights in the sky launching an explosion of UFO sightings (Unidentified Flying Objects), that will require further discussion next week. Like the Momo event, reporters, scientists, and UFO researchers flocked to Missouri, but this time they were hoping to see little green men.

It seems odd that Jackson County had its Big Muddy sightings, while across the Mississippi River, the Missouri UFO flap was brewing. But, then again, maybe it is not really that odd at all.

During the Momo incident, two families living between Louisiana and Bowling Green reported a UFO with circulating lights, hovering, and landing, adding to the high strangeness in Pike County, MO.

Perhaps Momo took an intergalactic redeye to Louisiana in 1972. A long trip without a shower could explain the foul smell and crankiness. And maybe that is how the creature disappeared so quickly. It sounds crazy, but hey, I’m talking about a Missouri sasquatch, so no hypothesis is off the table.  Imagine for a moment, that Momo returns a year later, but this time, it settles in Murphysboro, a new location, and given a new name. I am sure it was not the first time an alien arrived in Missouri and was deported only to return to the area with a new identification. (Except those aliens usually work as golf course groundkeepers, not creepers.)

And unlike Big Muddy, which is still reported in Southern Illinois, the nickname Momo is rarely muttered in recent bigfoot sightings across Missouri. Instead, Momo has reemerged as the Ozark Mountain Sasquatch. The title of Missouri Bigfoot had already been taken by a monster truck known for ramping fake mud hills inside the Edward Jones Dome on a “Sunday!….Sunday!…Sunday!” If the voice in your head read that last sentence in a deep, manly, echoing tone, congrats, you have had a Bigfoot Monster Truck sighting.

But, if you want to hear more about the real Missouri bigfoot, than check out these sources:

Sasquatch Theory, YouTube/Podcast of Missouri Bigfoot Eyewitness accounts, 2023

Into the 400, Documentary of an investigation into the Ozark Mountain Sasquatch, 2020

Terror in the Woods: The Ozark Bigfoot, Season 2, Episode 1, 2020

Bigfoot Odyssey:  Finding Sasquatch in Missouri, Episode 1, 2018.

Finding Bigfoot: A Squat in the Ozarks Season 7, Episode 5, 2015

Bigfoot Field Research Organization (Sightings database)