Big Muddy / Murphysboro — 1973

The encounter

On June 25, 1973, four carnival workers in Murphysboro, Illinois—Otts Norris, Ray Adkerson, Wesley Lavander and Charles Kimble—were named in a police case file describing a single group encounter near carnival ponies. The official narrative reports a large upright figure covered in light-brown hair.

The figure was described in the police record as approximately seven to eight feet tall and moving erect near the animals. Because the surviving police narrative summarizes the group event, the same wording cannot safely be treated as four independently recorded witness statements.

The case is valuable because an official police file survives and identifies the people connected with the event. At the same time, no creature evidence or footprints are established in the current record, and separate original statements from each carnival worker would be needed to evaluate how independently their descriptions were formed.