One April night in 1973, Mr. and Mrs. Henry McDaniel of Enfield, Illinois, returned home to find their children, Henry and Lil, frightened because something had been scratching at the door, trying to get into the house.
Later that night, the beast returned, and Henry was ready for it, armed with a pistol. When Henry opened the door to the odd animal, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing! He described it as a grayish color, about five feet tall with a short trunk, three legs, two short little arms extending out of its chest, and two huge pink eyes!
McDaniel shot at the creature several times, certain he had hit it at least once, but it bounded away in leaps that cleared 50 to 75 feet each, hissing “like a wildcat.” It disappeared along some railroad tracks.
State troopers called to the McDaniel place found odd-looking tracks “like those of a dog, except they had six toe pads.”
A few days later, Henry McDaniel awakened by howling dogs in the very early morning hours, saw the creature walking along the railroad tracks close to his house.
After hearing the story, Rick Rainbow of WWKI radio station in Kokomo, Indiana, visited Enfield. At one point, he saw the animal by an abandoned house near the McDaniel home. It was running away from them, but they described it as about five feet tall, although hunched over, and gray in color. Mr. Rainbow did get a recording of its cry.
Researcher, author, and Cryptozoologist, Loren Coleman, heard the recording of the high-pitched wailing sound. Coleman heard the same cry when he investigated the creature near the McDaniel place in Enfield.
For months after that, unidentifiable screams were heard in the woods and creek bottoms. When a dog was killed by the creature, the townspeople tried to track it, but the ability of the beast to “leap from 20 to 40 feet in a single bound” enabled it to get away quickly.
The kangaroo-like creature seems to like to travel around quite a bit, especially through the Midwest. After appearing in Enfield in 1973, sightings were reported from the Chicago area.
References:
Coghlan, Ronan. A Dictionary of Cryptozoology. Bangor: Xiphos Books, 2004.
Coleman, Loren. Mysterious America. NY: Pocket Books, 2007.
Blackman, W. Haden - Field Guide to North American Monsters. NY: Three River Press, 1998.
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