Blue Man of the Ozarks

A wild, man-like creature roamed the remote, wooded hills around Douglas County, Missouri, as far back as the 1860s. In 1915, Howell County Gazette editor-publisher Will Zorn wrote of its reappearance, reported in western Howell and eastern Douglas County since the Civil War, and called it the “Blue Man of Spring Creek.” According to the stories, he threw large boulders, feasted upon livestock, and went about with a wooden club in one huge hand.

The first recorded sighting came in 1865, when Solomon “Blue Sol” Collins was hunting on the divide between North Fork and Spring Creek. The Springfield Republican’s 1915 account puts it in the early spring, after a light snow, and says Collins followed long, broad tracks with claw-like impressions for several hours over the North Fork, Indian and Spring Creek hills. On the north slope of upper Twin Mountain he came upon something “unmistakably human, though strongly resembling a vicious animal,” hurling boulders down the hillside at him. It had long black hair, wore a breechcloth, an animal-skin shoulder piece and deer-hide moccasins whose thongs made the claw marks in the snow, and carried a club. Accounts differ on the club’s length: five or six feet in the newspaper version, six or eight feet in another retelling.

Why the creature earned the name “Blue Man” remains debated. Some accounts say his jet-black fur shone blue in sunlight; others suggested he wore skins dyed with berries. A third theory held that the name simply came from Blue Sol Collins, the first person to see him.

After 1865, reports say the creature disappeared until 1874, when it reappeared and was seen by approximately twenty men before being tracked into hiding by experienced hunters. Several sightings followed through 1890. The creature seemingly vanished again until 1911, when a Douglas County posse raided its den and found “sheep pelts, hog hides, parts of dog skins, many bones, feathers and other remains from past feasts,” though the creature had already fled.

The legend exploded into regional prominence in 1915. O. C. Collins, who participated in the 1911 den raid, lost two lambs and then saw the creature running down a hog. “Jay Taber saw him less than a week ago,” the Springfield Republican reported, adding that his hair, once black, was now gray, though he was “still very active.” Several loggers near Willow Springs also reported sightings that year. Newspapers around the state carried versions of the tale, as far away as St. Joseph, where the paper played it for laughs.

Not everyone enjoyed the attention. A Springfield paper on November 12, 1915, said the stories were “wholly fictitious, according to residents of that district described as his haunts,” and that residents objected because the stories “do much injury to the region by creation the impression that the people have to go armed-to-the-teeth to protect themselves.”

Newspapers also printed origin stories credited to Jerry Hilderbrand (spelled Hildebrand in one account), who settled in Douglas County in 1820. The 1915 Springfield Republican said a French trader who visited just before the Revolutionary War cast aside a Spanish woman from Florida somewhere in the Ozarks, and that she was the Blue Man’s great-great-grandmother, with his other ancestors Indian.

Local historians note that tall tales have long been part of Ozark culture. Sharon Sanders, secretary-treasurer of the Douglas County Historical Society, said some locals were known as “kidders” who fabricated stories for amusement.

In 2015, Vincent Anderson, an Ozark County researcher, served as the point-of-contact for Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot when the show filmed an episode about the Blue Man. “Let me say: Reality TV is not reality,” Anderson said, but he did get one man to talk to him about his encounter. “This thing, by his story, chased him for about a mile,” Anderson said, until the man got to his pickup, and “that guy really experienced something.”

A reporter’s random sampling of local residents suggested the story has all but died out. An 89-year-old woman who had lived most of her life in the area looked perplexed when asked about it, a store operator whose family had been local since the 1840s hadn’t heard of him, and at least five other people with deep roots in the area knew little or nothing of the story. Local historians Sanders and Cinita Brown both know it, and one Douglas County man who declined to be named grew up hearing it from family.