Crosley Monster

In July 2006, four teenagers encountered something unusual while fishing at Harsin Pond in the Crosley Fish and Wildlife Area, and said a figure seven feet tall, with dark hair and yellow-orange glowing eyes, stood near the tree line. The encounter, which sent the teens fleeing into the night, became the most detailed account of what has come to be known as the Crosley Monster, an Indiana cryptid linked to the dense woodlands of Jennings County.

Bryce Mayer told the story in “Crosley Monster, myth or real?”, an October 31, 2006, column for the North Vernon Plain Dealer and the North Vernon Sun. One evening last July, he wrote, Corey Mullikin, Terry Snyder, Clint Maschino and Robbie Evans walked to Harsin Pond in Crosley to spend the night fishing and camping. Around 11 p.m., while the four were fishing from the dam, “we heard some strange noises and tree branches snapping behind us,” Snyder said. “I didn’t know what it was, and at first thought it might be a deer,” Mullikin told Mayer. The boys saw a pair of yellow-orange glowing eyes reflecting their lantern light. Mullikin estimated the figure was at least seven feet tall and standing on two legs at the tree line. Snyder never got a clear view of the animal itself, only its eyes and its shadow in the lantern light. “I saw his shadow from our lantern and it was huge,” he said. “You could see from the shadow he had a bunch of hair, too. He looked filthy.”

The creature shook tree limbs and brush but made no noise of its own during the encounter. The boys took off running, crossing Ind. 7 and sprinting down Grayford Road, and Mullikin said the creature gave chase through the cornfield beside the road. “I could hear him knocking down corn stalks behind us and to the side,” he said. He also heard a neighbor’s dogs. “There were two big German shepherds and they were barking like crazy,” he said. “Then all of a sudden we heard one of the dogs yelp and they stopped barking.”

Weeks later, Mullikin had a second encounter while squirrel hunting alone in the same general area near Harsin Pond. He said he heard a screaming sound matching recordings of alleged Sasquatch vocalizations played at a Bigfoot lecture by wildlife educator Larry Battson of Putnam County. “He was big and covered in black fur,” Mullikin said. The creature chased him again, running on all fours in circles as Mullikin fled backward through the woods for three miles while carrying a 12-gauge shotgun. He reported the second encounter to Battson but told no one else.

Mullikin told Mayer that at age eight his great uncle had recounted seeing the creature from a parked car, describing it as “a big thing of black fur” that shook the vehicle when headlights were turned toward it. Stories of a creature called the Crosley Monster or Crosley Creature have circulated in Jennings County since at least the late 1950s, Mayer reported.

Battson told reporters he had no reason to doubt the four teenagers. He has spent thirty years interviewing Bigfoot witnesses and examining evidence throughout the United States. “From what I’ve seen and been told, there is definitely something to this,” Battson said. “Either this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever known, or one of the most interesting animals ever known.”

Local officials were more skeptical. Bill Beville, an Indiana Department of Natural Resources conservation officer with sixteen years on the job, told Mayer he often heard Crosley Monster reports alongside rumors of panthers and rattlesnakes in Jennings County but had seen no evidence. He suggested the teens may have fabricated the story “to get their girlfriends to snuggle up to them in their car.” Larry Allsop, who was manager of the Crosley Fish & Wildlife Area for nearly 34 years, said he received as many as a dozen Crosley Monster reports annually from deer, rabbit, squirrel and turkey hunters but doubted Bigfoot creatures were there because no evidence had ever been found. He recalled that a local man had confessed to a Crosley Monster hoax in the late 1950s.

Skeptics have offered misidentification instead: black bears can stand upright and have reddish eyeshine, and some suggest escaped exotic pets, like chimpanzees, could start monstrous rumors. There’s no carcass, bone, tissue sample or other physical evidence. One writer at Bigfoot Encounters was also amazed that someone could run three miles backwards while being chased by a large, hairy creature “without running into a tree or encountering any other obstacle.”

Harsin Pond is part of the Crosley Fish & Wildlife Area, which one source puts at 4,288 acres and another at 4,228.