Posted By:	Jay McAfee
	Email:
	Subject:	"Mo Mo", the Missouri Monster: Pike Co, MO Sasquatch/Bigfoot Hoax
	Post Date:	March 02, 2003 at 16:06:30
	Message URL:	http://genforum.genealogy.com/mo/pike/messages/326.html
	Forum:	Pike County, MO Genealogy Forum
	Forum URL:	http://genforum.genealogy.com/mo/pike/

References to the hoax of the early 1970's in and around the Louisiana, Missouri area regarding "Mo Mo", the Missouri Monster. A Sasquatch/Bigfoot hoax. A song was written about him. ------------------------------------ Pike County Sheriff's Department, Bowling Green, Missouri Near Busch, 1971 The department received a Sasquatch sighting report near a tiny hamlet. - - - - - - - - - - Louisiana, Missouri July 11, 1972 At 3:30 pm Terri and Doris Harrison were playing the the back yard when they saw a "big hairy thing with a dog under its arm." They ran in the house and looked out the window, saw the creature standing in the ditch. It was about 7 feet tall and stinks. It ran on two legs they reported to Police Chief Shelby Ward. The report was carried in the Chicago Sun-Times July 21, 1972 and in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner July 20 1972 and other newspapers. - - - - - - - - - - Pike County Missouri Frankford: Summer 1970 Unnamed informant Creature was reported to the Pike County Sheriff's Department Description fits Sasquatch. The Sheriff said this report, the Busch report and the Louisiana, MO., reports roughly bound desolate heavily wooded areas with plenty of game, vegetation and creeks. JG, BC Archives. - - - - - - - - - - source: http://www.n2.net/prey/bigfoot/sbs/oldermo.htm =========================================================== Louisiana, Mo., is a sleepy Mississippi River town about 25 miles southeast of Hannibal, but 26 years ago this month the town gained national attention as documented reports of a wild-and-woolly man-creature - the Midwest's answer to Bigfoot - began to surface. The press jocularly dubbed the elusive and rank-smelling critter "Momo," for "Missouri Monster." The first sighting was on the afternoon of July 11, 1972. The Harrison boys - Terry, 8, and Walley, 5 - were playing near their home at the base of Marzolf Hill, a ridge that runs the length of the town. At some point, Terry felt an unease. He glanced up and saw something staring at him. It was big and hulking and ominous. Its face was obscured by a mat of long hair. Terry screamed. In the house, 15-year-old sister Doris, hearing their screams, ran to the window. "It was right by the trees," she would later tell reporters, "6 or 7 feet tall, black and hairy. It stood like a man, but it didn't look like one to me." Now, this was 1972, and, true, there were hirsute hippies roaming the forests. And at times there would be seen lumbering through town some scruffy barge hand who might prompt a double-take, but it seemed this was a new species. Both Terry and Doris said the creature seemed to have no neck, and it was carrying under its arm what looked like a dead dog flecked with blood. Edgar Harrison came home from work and found no monster, but near the tree where his excited children said the thing had stood he found faint footprints in the dust and black hairs stuck to some twigs. Harrison tried to reassure them that what they had seen was probably a hobo who by now was long gone from the area. Harrison was a deacon in the Pentecostal church, and that Friday, July 14, there was a prayer meeting at his home. Later, as the group socialized on the porch, they heard a series of growls and shrieks coming from the water reservoir atop Marzolf Hill. The harrowing sound got louder and louder as it drew nearer. The neighbors, too, came out to see what manner of beast was making such a racket. One of them yelled, "Here it comes!" In a panic they one and all fled, away from the awful screams. According to the Louisiana Press-Journal, by the time police arrived on the scene, all was quiet once more. Others began seeing Momo. About 5 the next morning, Louisiana resident Pat Howard saw a manlike creature cross the road near Marzolf Hill. He described it only as a "dark object" running like a man. On the river road that runs northward out of town, Ellis Minor, then 63, sat alone in front of his cabin. Around 10 p.m., his bird dog began to growl. Minor got his big flashlight and shined it out toward the road. "It was standing there," Minor told a UPI reporter. "I couldn't see its eyes or face - it had hair down 'bout to its hindparts. As soon as I threw the light on it, it whirled and took off thataway." On July 19, Louisiana police chief Shelby Ward organized a 20-man posse to search Marzolf Hill. Spread out with walkie-talkies, they combed the ridge from end to end. On one of the paths they saw that an old dump had been recently disturbed, rubbish dug up and strewn about. They also discovered two disinterred dog graves with bones scattered about. It was getting weirder and weirder. The Harrison home had become a staging area for Momo seekers. Edgar took Richard Crowe from Chicago's Irish Times up on Marzolf Hill. Crowe would write, "As we walked up the path, we found a set of tracks. They looked like large human footprints. Even with the heel impression incomplete, it measured 10 inches long and five inches wide. There had been no rain for 10 days and we estimated that more than 200 pounds of pressure would have been necessary to make prints in the hard soil." The intrepid party then located "a vacant shack that might serve as a sleeping place for the monster. A pile of leaves and debris in one corner may have been its bed or nest." They prowled around the shack for awhile, "then we smelled an overwhelming stench that only can be described as resembling rotten flesh or foul stagnant water. 'That's him boys,' announced Harrison. 'He's around here somewhere.'" But, again, nothing came of it. Reporters weren't the only outside investigators converging on the town. Hayden Hewes and Daniel Garcia of the International Unidentified Flying Object Bureau in Oklahoma City arrived and camped out in Harrison's backyard. They collected statements from witnesses and made plaster casts of the two tracks on Marzolf Hill. Hewes theorized that the monster was a "giant, hairy biped" left by a UFO. He said the descriptions matched some 300 other sightings he had collected, including two the previous year from Washington and the Florida Everglades. Meanwhile, there were Momo sightings up and down the Mississippi, from St. Charles County to Hannibal. A DJ on a country-music station in nearby Bowling Green recorded a song, "Momo the Missouri Monster," and that did more to fuel the legend than anything else. For several years after the scare, the town of Louisiana held Momo Days, with the residents walking around wearing wigs with the tresses in front. But the bottom line is he's still out there, spooking horses, stealing dogs - just for a snack, mind you - and still smelling as funky as the river itself. http://www.n2.net/prey/bigfoot/creatures/momo.htm The Missouri Mo-Mo surfaced in 1971 when two girls, traveling along Route 79 from Hannibal to St. Louis, encountered the creature at a roadside park where they stopped to have lunch. They first noticed a smell "like a family of skunks," and turned to see a huge, hairy beast staring at them from a thicket behind the picnic table. The girls raced to the car, hopped in, only to discover they had left the ignition keys behind on the table. The creature followed them. The girls described it as "ape-like, except that it was also human. It walked upright on two feet and its arms dangled way down." Honking the horn discouraged the beast and when it left, the girls retrieved their keys and drove away as quickly as they could. http://www.theoutlaws.com/unexplained5.htm --------------------------------------------------------- Show-Me State's Weird Corner Northeastern Missouri has had its share of mysteries. "Momo," as the monster of July and August 1972 was called, is only the most famous. Along River Road, which stretches north from Highway 54 along the Mississippi River and past the mouth of the Salt River, there is a longstanding tradition about a phantom man who walks across the road and vanishes. In the 1940s, travellers and residents repeatedly heard what sounded like a woman's screams emanating from the general vicinity of an abandoned lime kiln. The screams always came around midnight; they were never explained. In addition to recurring reports of fireballs or spook lights, there have been a number of mysterious deaths in the area. The strangest of all occurred during the winter of 1954, when a man and a woman were found dead in a car along the roadside. The woman sat on the passenger side and seemed to be asleep. The man lay crouched under the steering wheel completely nude, his clothing piled neatly 20 feet behind the car. The coroner listed the deaths as caused by "asphyxiation" even though the window on the driver's side was open all the way-this in ten-degree-below-zero weather. Stinky, Gurgling Freak Joan Mills and Mary Ryan were not on River Road that day in July 1971, but they were not far from it. Highway 79 is a backwoods road which runs north of Louisiana, Missouri, a place that would achieve a measure of immortality in Fortean annals a year later. Mills and Ryan had taken the highway on their way back to St. Louis because they were looking for a picturesque spot for a picnic. When they found a promising spot, they turned off on a dirt road, put out a blanket, and brought out the food. "We were eating lunch," Miss Ryan recalled, "when we both wrinkled up our noses at the same time. I never smelled anything as bad in my life." Her friend suggested they were smelling a whole family of skunks. Suddenly her jaw dropped and she pointed toward a brushy thicket behind her companion. "I turned around and this thing was standing there in the thicket," Miss Mills said. "The weeds were pretty high and I just saw the top part of this creature. It was staring down at us." Miss Ryan added, "It was half-ape and half-man. I've been reading up on the abominable snowman since then, and from stories and articles, you get the idea that these things are more like gorillas. This thing was not like that at all. It had hair over the body as if it was an ape. Yet, the face was definitely human. It was more like a hairy human. "Then it made a little gurgling sound like someone trying to whistle underwater," according to Miss Mills. The hairy creature stepped out of the brush and proceeded to walk toward the young women, who dashed for their Volkswagen and locked the doors. The beast, continuing to gurgle, caressed the hood of the car and then, in a clear demonstration of intelligent behavior, tried to open the doors. "It walked upright on two feet and its arms dangled way down," Miss Ryan stated. "The arms were partially covered with hair, but the hands and the palms were hairless. We had plenty of time to see this." The women were terrified-all the more so because Miss Mills had left her car keys in her purse, which she had abandoned outside in the flight to the safety of the automobile. "Finally," said Miss Mills, "my arm hit the horn ring and the thing jumped straight in the air and moved back." She kept on beeping the horn. "It stayed at a safe distance, then seemed to realize that the noise was not dangerous," Mary Ryan said. "It stopped where we had been eating, picked up my peanut butter sandwich, smelled it, then devoured it in one gulp. It started to pick up Joan's purse, dropped it, and then disappeared back into the woods." Joan Mills ran out of the car to retrieve her purse and returned to roar on down the highway at 90 miles an hour. Once back in St. Louis, the two women submitted a report to the Missouri State Patrol. "We'd have difficulty proving that the experience occurred," Miss Mills wrote, "but all you have to do is go into those hills to realize that an army of those things could live there undetected." This was a dramatic enough introduction to the events scheduled to erupt exactly one year later. Joan Mills and Mary Ryan were due to have their story confirmed in startling fashion. Hairy Dogsnatcher The "Momo" ("Missouri monster") scare began on Tuesday, July 11, 1972, at 3:30 p.m. on the outskirts of the city of Louisiana (pop. 4,600). Terry Harrison (age eight) and his brother Wally (age five) were playing in their yard, which sits at the foot of Marzolf Hill. The two boys had gone off by some old rabbit pens in the woods next to the Harrison property. Suddenly, their older sister Doris, who was inside, heard them scream and looked out the bathroom window. She saw something standing by a tree: "Six or seven feet tall, black and hairy. It stood like a man but it didn't look like one to me." The thing was flecked with blood, probably from the dead dog it carried under its arm. Its face could not be seen under the mass of hair covering it, and it seemed to be without a neck. The Harrisons' dog got very sick shortly after the incident. Its eyes grew red and it vomited for hours afterwards, finally recovering after a meal of bread and milk. That same afternoon Mrs. Clarence Lee, who lives half a block away, heard animal sounds: growling and "carrying on something terrible." Not long afterwards she talked with a farmer whose dog, a recent gift, had disappeared. He wondered if the "monster" had taken it. On July 14, Edgar Harrison -- Terry and Doris' father and a deacon in the Pentecostal Church -- conducted the regular Friday evening prayer meeting at his house. Around 8:30, the meeting began to break up. As Harrison and a dozen or so members of his congregation lingered, talking, they sighted two "fireballs" soaring from over Marzolf Hill and descending into the trees behind an abandoned school across the street. The objects appeared at five-minute intervals. The first was white and the second green. About 9:15, Harrison heard ringing noises such as might be caused by the throwing of stones onto the metal water reservoir which stands at the top of the hill. The reservoir, which holds a million and a half gallons of water, is in an area where neighborhood children often play. After one especially loud ring, Harrison reported, "I heard something that sounded like a loud growl. It got louder and louder and kept coming closer. At that time my family came running from the house. They began urging me to drive off. "I wanted to wait and see what it was that was making this noise. My family insisted that I drive away, and so I drove down Allen Street across the Town Branch. "I stopped the car and my wife and family told the congregation, 'Here it comes!' And those forty people turned and ran down the street." Police officers Jerry Floyd and John Whitaker went to the Harrison home. They searched the residence but found nothing. Late that evening, Harrison, along with several others, explored Marzolf Hill and came to an old building from which a pungent, unpleasant odor was emanating. Harrison subsequently described it as "a moldy, horse smell or a strong garbage smell." This was not to be the only time he encountered the odor -- in the days ahead he would find it whenever he approached an area from which the strange noises seemed to be coming. Around five o'clock the following morning, Pat Howard of Louisiana saw "a dark object" walking like a man cross the road near the hill. On the 19th, Police Chief Shelby Ward led a search through Marzolf Hill, accompanied by Harrison, State Conservation officer Gus Artus, and 17 others. Nothing was uncovered. But the next day Richard Crowe (a reporter for Chicago's Irish Times and for FATE Magazine) and Loren Smith went up the hill with Harrison for another look. Near the tree where Doris had seen the monster, Crowe wrote, "There was a circular spot in the brush where leaves and twigs had been stripped from the branches." Further along Crowe found evidence that someone or something had been digging in an old garbage dump, and not far away Harrison showed him two disintered dog graves with the bones scattered about. Higher up the hill they came upon two tracks some distance from each other. The first, over ten inches long and five inches wide, appeared to be a footprint; the other, five inches long and curved, was evidently the print of a hand. The prints had been made in hard soil (there had been no rain for ten days), and Crowe estimated that it would take a minimum of 200 pounds of pressure to create such impressions. Harrison led Crowe to an abandoned shack which Harrison thought might serve as a resting place for the monster. While they were there, Harrison's dog Chubby suddenly ran away; "then," Crowe wrote, "we smelled an overwhelming stench that could only be described as resembling rotten flesh or foul, stagnant water." "That's him, boys!" Harrison exclaimed. "He's around here somewhere." They shone their flashlights through the surrounding trees but saw nothing. In the distance they could hear dogs barking furiously. (While the monster was about, dogs would refuse to go up the hill, but would run up and down the street in agitated fashion.) Within five minutes the odor had subsided. Harrison, Smith and Crowe smelled it twice more before the night was over. On Friday, July 21, Ellis Minor, who lives along River Road, was sitting home alone around 10:00 or 10:30 p.m. when he heard his bird dog start to growl. At first, Minor thought the stimulus was another dog passing through the yard, but when the dog growled again, Minor snapped on his powerful flashlight and stepped outside-where he saw a six-foot-tall creature with long black hair standing erect. As soon as the light hit it, the thing turned around and dashed across the road, past the railroad tracks and into the woods… http://www2.truman.edu/~adavis/momo.html ----------------------------------------------------------- Thursday, April 19, 2001 Search for Momo continues By DON KRAUSE Courier-Post Regional Editor An investigative team is in the city of Louisiana seeking possible clues to a monster legend that stalked the community in 1972. A team from the International Society of Cryptozoology is seeking information on the Missouri Monster, Momo. A member of the team, Bill Riley, a Hannibal native, reported seeing Momo in 1972. Riley now heads bigfootbusters.com, which is sponsoring the expedition. "He came to me with this report and I find it very credible," said Richard Greenwell, a zoologist with the International Wildlife Museum and ISC's secretary. "We got to talking about coming back one day and meeting the other witnesses from the 70s. Maybe other witnesses, who have kept it to themselves to avoid ridicule, might be willing to talk after all these years." Riley, who had kept his encounter with Momo quiet for years, said there are reports of creature sightings going back many years. "A lot of people do not realize the Momo sightings in '72 were not the beginning, there's sightings that go back into the 1800s around the area," said Riley. Greenwell said that is often common across the country. "If you start digging through the newspaper archives you'll find reports going back to the 1800s when there were reports of guerrillas or Wild Men," he said. "There'll be a little article in a paper and then you don't hear anything about it and it gets forgotten." It was a little different in Louisiana in the summer of 1972. According to a Courier-Post article, Louisiana resident Edgar Harrison received a call at work from his children on July 10, 1972 about something they had seen. His 15-year-old daughter reported seeing "a monster about 10 feet tall, standing on two legs like a man, with long black hair all over and holding the body of a dog, still bleeding, in one of his arms." When he arrived home about 30 minutes later, he began searching for the creature, and only noticed a foul stench like an old mold, a few black hairs and some broken brush. However, he was convinced his children had seen something. Within a week there were three other incidents involving the alleged monster. Riley said his encounter involved Momo emerging from a treeline and then following behind him. He said the creature stepped over a fence "without losing a stride." Although reports of Bigfoot or Sasquatch are often associated with the Pacific Northwest, Greenwell said there are reported sightings scattered across the United States. "We're getting reports from all over the country," he said, noting reports from Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, as well as the midwest. "Regardless of what it is, whether it is a social phenomenon or a zoological one, these reports keep coming in," Greenwell said. "The Pacific Northwest is the core area where we get most reports, but if this thing exists, there could be remnant populations in other parts of the country," he added. "Of course local people would give it local names, Momo, Skunk Ape, it would all be the same." While in the area, the investigative team hopes to find some pieces to add to the mystery. "We hope to uncover some more evidence to add to the archives, and who knows, maybe some evidence that's still roaming around," said Riley. Greenwell will talk to the public tonight at 6 p.m. and7:30 p.m. at the Louisiana Middle School. There is a $3 fee. http://www.hannibal.net/stories/041901/com_0419010003.html