The Enfield Horror

The Enfield Horror is one of America’s strangest cryptids—a three-legged, red-eyed creature reportedly encountered in Enfield, Illinois, in 1973. Explore the bizarre eyewitness reports, mysterious tracks, and surprisingly plausible theories behind this wonderfully weird Midwestern monster.

CRAZY WEIRD CRYPTIDSHUMANOID CRYPTIDS

losZorros

8/25/20268 min read

The Enfield Horror: Something Was Scratching at the Door

Henry McDaniel heard something scratching at his front door.

It was around 9:30 on the night of April 25, 1973, and a strong wind was blowing through Enfield, Illinois. McDaniel had just returned home and initially assumed an animal was outside. A dog perhaps, or maybe a bear. Whatever it was, it seemed interested in getting into the house. McDaniel looked outside, grabbed a flashlight and gun, and went to investigate.

Between two rosebushes, roughly a dozen feet away, stood something he couldn't identify.

It was only about four and a half feet tall, but almost everything else about it was wrong. McDaniel described a short grayish body, two small arms emerging from around its chest and two enormous pink eyes reflecting brightly in his flashlight.

Then there were the legs... it had three of them!

McDaniel raised his gun and fired several times. He believed the first shot struck the creature, which responded with a hiss he compared to a wildcat. Rather than collapsing, it bounded away toward a nearby railroad embankment, reportedly covering roughly 50 feet in only three jumps.

McDaniel called the police. When officers arrived, the creature was gone. What remained in the soft ground around the house, however, were unusual tracks that McDaniel described as dog-like, except they appeared to have six toe pads.

Buckle up, folks.. we're talking about the Enfield Horror.

A Little Town in Southern Illinois

Enfield is a small community in White County in southeastern Illinois, not far from the Wabash River and the Indiana border. In 1973, its population was only around 700 to 800 people.

This isn't the Illinois of Chicago skyscrapers and crowded expressways. The surrounding region is largely rural, with farmland, patches of woods, creeks and small towns scattered across the landscape. Railroad tracks cut through Enfield, and beyond the houses and streets there are plenty of places where an animal could disappear quickly into brush or open country.

There is another geographical detail worth mentioning. Southern Illinois sits within a much larger region that has produced a surprising collection of monster stories. The best known from the same period is probably the Big Muddy Monster, a large hairy creature reported around Murphysboro, roughly 60 miles west of Enfield, beginning only a few months after McDaniel's encounter.

That doesn't mean southern Illinois was crawling with undiscovered creatures in 1973. It does mean that Enfield's monster arrived in a place where rural landscapes, isolated roads and nighttime wildlife could provide plenty of raw material for unusual encounters.

And once word got around that something with three legs was prowling around town, people started paying considerably more attention to what was moving in the darkness.

What Is the Enfield Horror?

The Enfield Horror, also commonly called the Enfield Monster, is difficult to fit into any normal cryptid category.

Based primarily on McDaniel's description, the creature was said to have:

A height of approximately four and a half feet
A short, grayish body
Two unusually short arms
Three legs
Two enormous pink or reddish reflective eyes
Dog-like footprints with six toe pads
The ability to make enormous leaps
A loud hiss or cry compared to a wildcat

McDaniel also described the creature as having something almost human about its body despite its bizarre proportions. Later newspaper accounts described it as gray and hairy, although descriptions vary as the story spread.

Its method of movement may be the strangest part of the entire report. After McDaniel fired at it, he said the creature crossed roughly 50 feet in only three leaps. That combination of three legs, tiny arms, enormous eyes and extraordinary jumping ability doesn't correspond neatly with any known North American animal.

It doesn't correspond particularly well with animals from anywhere else, either.

The History of the Enfield Horror

McDaniel's encounter wasn't the only strange report circulating around Enfield.

A story eventually emerged involving a young neighbor named Greg Garrett, who supposedly encountered a strange creature shortly before McDaniel did. Later sociological researchers who investigated the events reported that Garrett and his family said the story had been fabricated, so we're not going to give that encounter the same weight as McDaniel's. The distinction matters because decades of cryptid retellings have often combined questionable reports with better-documented ones until everything becomes part of the same legend.

McDaniel's account is on firmer historical ground. Police responded after his April 25 encounter, and contemporary newspaper reports treated him seriously. Accounts describe officers finding unusual tracks around the property, while McDaniel maintained that he had fired four times and struck the animal at least once. Police reportedly considered him rational and sober when he made the report.

Pause for a second, here. WTF is wrong with people? As you read through the Oddex, one commonality is that the eyewitness is armed and almost immediately takes a shot at whatever it is looking at, and most of the time, its target is not being aggressive. Look, I'm as pro-2nd Amendment as anyone, but Jeez, take a breath before you pull the trigger, man! But I digress...

Then the story escaped Enfield. Newspapers around Illinois began reporting on the creature. Radio coverage followed, along with UFO investigators, curious visitors and people who apparently decided the logical response to an unidentified animal wandering around a populated town was to arrive with guns.

Two days after McDaniel's story reached the press, five young men from outside the area were arrested following reports of gunfire. They had rifles and shotguns and claimed to have seen the creature, although the White County sheriff was considerably less impressed. His assessment was essentially that the men had been drinking and causing trouble rather than conducting a serious cryptozoological expedition.

McDaniel, meanwhile, wasn't finished.

On May 6, he reported seeing the creature again near the railroad tracks. Contemporary wire-service coverage reported that he continued to insist something unusual was roaming the area, and investigators searched surrounding woods for tracks. Plaster casts were reportedly made of some prints.

Other investigators eventually became involved, including cryptozoologist Loren Coleman. Reports emerged of strange cries being heard and even recorded during searches of the area, although none of this produced a body, photograph or biological evidence capable of establishing what was actually there.

Then the Enfield Horror faded away.

By that point, however, the little town had already become famous enough to attract monster hunters and national press attention. The story was later interesting enough to sociologists David Miller, Kenneth Mietus and Richard Mathers that they studied the incident as an example of how reports and rumors can spread through a community.

Their conclusion complicates the legend in an interesting way. Rather than finding dozens of independent witnesses describing the same monster, they concluded that the apparent outbreak was built around no more than a few firsthand reports that grew substantially through newspaper coverage, gossip and public excitement.

So, What Were People Seeing?

This is why I told you to buckle up, because this is where things get wonderfully strange! The most commonly suggested explanations for the Enfield Horror is... a kangaroo. Yep, I just wrote that.

And it's not quite as ridiculous as it sounds.

A kangaroo standing upright has two large hind legs, small forelimbs and a substantial tail that can function almost like a third support. It moves by making enormous bounds, and an unfamiliar kangaroo encountered at night could look extraordinarily strange to someone who wasn't expecting one in southern Illinois.

There were even contemporary reports suggesting that an escaped pet kangaroo might be roaming the region. An Ohio man reportedly contacted a newspaper after the Enfield story became public and suggested that the creature could be his missing kangaroo, Macey.

Just imagine its a dark night, you are sitting in your rural Illinois farmhouse watching All in the Family, and you hear a noise outside, so you grab your gun and step out into a dimly lit farmhouse landscape, and you see an emaciated, possibly sickly man sized creature (see below)! The tail is dragging, so it looks like a third leg, your flashlight creates some eye-shine. By the way, this is Illinois you your brain is not comprehending this. Soooo... BANG!

The creature bolts off, covering 50 yards in just a few "hops", and then dissapears.

However, McDaniel reportedly knew what kangaroos looked like. He said he had been around one while serving in Australia and specifically rejected the explanation. He also argued that the tracks didn't resemble kangaroo prints.

A large ape (or a Bigfoot?) was another contemporary suggestion. That might account for the humanoid appearance and perhaps the eye-shine, but it does a lousy job explaining three legs or giant bounding leaps.

A large dog, deer or other local animal distorted by darkness is certainly possible. Human perception is notoriously unreliable during brief, frightening nighttime encounters, particularly when a flashlight is providing the only illumination. One leg could overlap another, a tail or shadow could look like an additional limb, and reflected light from an animal's eyes can appear surprisingly intense.

Then we have the tracks. Footprints sound impressive until you remember how difficult tracks can be to interpret. Soft ground, overlapping prints and disturbed soil can transform perfectly ordinary animal tracks into something considerably more exotic. The fact that casts were reportedly made is interesting, but without a well-documented specimen available for modern examination, they don't get us much closer to identifying the animal.

The 1978 sociological study provides another possibility that doesn't require McDaniel to have invented anything. He may genuinely have encountered an unusual animal. Once newspapers and radio stations spread the story, however, every strange noise, shadow and animal sighting around Enfield suddenly had a possible explanation... there was a monster in town.

Or at least everyone knew there was supposed to be one.

Our Take

We'll admit it: the Enfield Horror is exactly the kind of creature that makes the Oddex fun.

Something like Bigfoot makes anatomical sense. Give us an undiscovered large primate and, unlikely as its continued concealment in rural Illinois farmland might be, we can at least understand how the animal is supposed to function. The Enfield Horror looks like evolution had leftover parts.

Three legs, two tiny arms, enormous pink eyes, a squat body and the ability to cross a yard in a few enormous jumps is such a bizarre collection of characteristics that it's difficult to imagine someone deliberately designing it. Even the most promising skeptical explanation requires us to consider the possibility that a missing kangaroo was wandering around rural Illinois.

We also like Henry McDaniel's encounter because there is a relatively solid historical core underneath all the later monster lore. A real man reported seeing something outside his home. Police responded. Newspapers covered it immediately. Tracks were reported. McDaniel apparently stuck to his story and later reported seeing the creature again. That doesn't make his interpretation correct.

Our best guess is that McDaniel encountered an animal under terrible viewing conditions and genuinely couldn't identify it. The kangaroo theory is surprisingly attractive because of the reported body proportions and enormous leaps, although McDaniel's familiarity with kangaroos makes that explanation harder to swallow than it otherwise would be.

Everything that happened afterward is considerably murkier. Media attention brought curiosity seekers and armed monster hunters into town, reports multiplied, and the legend quickly became larger than the original encounter.

But somewhere underneath all of that noise is a simple event that remains difficult to reconstruct more than fifty years later. On a windy April night in 1973, Henry McDaniel heard something scratching at his door. He went outside to see what it was.

Whatever he found scared him badly enough to empty a gun at it.

And if we learned anything from this story, it's that when something scratches at the door after 9:00 p.m., Google "Lost Kangaroos near me" before you answer it!

Need more encounters? Check out these posts: The Van Meter Visitor and Extraterrestrials Part 1: Before Roswell