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Meet The Cryptids Haunting Ohio’s Imagination

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Meet the Cryptids Haunting Ohio’s Imagination
A new exhibition pays homage to some of the Buckeye State’s beloved—and infamous—legends.
BY JESSICA LEIGH HESTERMARCH 11, 2020

ONE EVENING IN AUGUST 2016, Sam Jacobs and his girlfriend were playing Pokemon Go near the inky shore of Lake Isabella, in Loveland, Ohio. The lake is regularly stocked with catfish, bluegill, trout, and perch (to the delight of local fishers). But the couple saw something that struck them as more than a little odd—and it wasn’t a creature roaming their phone screens.

“We saw a huge frog near the water,” Jacobs told Cincinnati’s WCPO television station. “Not in the game,” he added. “This was an actual giant frog.”

Jacobs paused his play and snapped some grainy photos. They’re tricky to decipher, but appear to show a dark figure standing in the gently rippling water, light bouncing off its enormous, saucer-shaped eyes. Jacobs was convinced he was seeing a frog rearing up on its hind legs.


“I realize this sounds crazy,” he told WCPO. “But I swear on my grandmother’s grave this is the truth: The frog stood about four feet tall.”

Jacobs wasn’t the first person to claim to see a monstrous amphibian roving Loveland. In 1972, a local police officer named Ray Shockey said he crossed paths with an enormous frog near the Little Miami River. Shockey kept it pretty quiet, Dayton’s Journal Herald newspaper reported that year; he didn’t want to spook anyone.

Soon after, however, his partner, Mark Matthews, was scouting the same spot when he encountered a creature that fit Shockey’s puzzling description. It hopped toward him, he told the Journal Herald—and while it wasn’t aggressive, exactly, it was unusually, almost unbelievably, large. Keen to get a closer look and preserve the evidence, he landed four shots with his .357 magnum. He told the Journal Herald that he suspected the thing was a hefty iguana that had lost its tail—but that it was hard to say for sure, the paper noted, because “the animal gave one last hop, fell into the river and was washed away.”

There’s no reason to suspect that Rutherford B. Hayes, America’s bookish and extravagantly bearded 19th president, ever laid eyes on the giant, bipedal Loveland Frog (or Frogman), as it’s come to be known. Or that he was scared by an unsettlingly oversized iguana. He probably never made the acquaintance of the Mothman either. Or the Grassman (Ohio’s answer to Bigfoot). Or South Bay Bessie, the Loch Ness–style monster said to patrol the waters of Lake Erie.

But Hayes’s presidential library and museum, in Fremont, Ohio, has recently mounted a show called “Ohio: An Unnatural History,” about the legendary creatures that go bump in the Midwestern night.

The museum, which normally traffics in tangible objects and measurable facts, doesn’t view its dalliance with the paranormal as anything unusual. “Not only do we cover presidential history, but also local history,” says Kevin Moore, associate curator of artifacts. “And we view local folklore as part of Ohio’s local history.”

Hayes had a personal library of thousands of books, Moore says, and was a history buff to boot, with an interest in the legends of local Native American cultures. “We want to appreciate the folklore just being part of Ohio culture—not get into any effort to validate or disprove it,” Moore says.

Tall tales, however dubious, don’t spring from nothing—and that makes folklore a useful window into local history, says Esther Clinton, a folklorist at Bowling Green State University, in a video accompanying the exhibition.

“The stories that become folklore are the stories that are repeated often, and not just by the same person,” Clinton says in the video. “What that means is that these are stories that make emotional and intellectual sense to people. If we look at folklore, that tells us a lot about what are people thinking about, what are they worried about?”




https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ohio-cryptids
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articl...-69607997&mc_cid=5ae93b7c5e&mc_eid=0c7850e0b4
 
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