Lake Michigan Mothman

In 2011, people around Chicago began reporting a giant, flying, winged humanoid, and the reports peaked in 2017, when paranormal researcher Lon Strickler had gathered 55 accounts from the Chicago area by the end of the year. His Phantoms and Monsters site took in many of them, and a timeline kept by the Singular Fortean Society runs from that 2011 start to a man who claimed, in early July 2024, to see a winged humanoid jump off Park Tower in Chicago.

Witnesses described something between six and 10 feet tall with a 10-foot wingspan, according to a case file from WBEZ’s Curious City. The eyes were red in some reports and green or yellow in others, and other reported features included fur, leather-like skin, bat wings and no neck. Several encounters were reported near Lake Michigan, on waterfront paths and around harbors, and the creature was said to fly toward the lake.

One of the named witnesses was John Amitrano, who worked security at The Owl, a bar in Logan Square. He reported an unusual flying figure beneath an airplane passing overhead and said it looked like a pterodactyl, big-winged, with strong legs dangling underneath. What caught his attention was how it flew, rising and falling through the air instead of moving like a bird. The Singular Fortean Society timeline has a June 30, 2017, entry for a security person on break outside The Owl who reported a “bat-like humanoid” over an empty lot across the street.

On April 10, 2017, a woman walking her dog in Oz Park reported a run-in with a paralyzing winged being. On August 21, 2017, as the partial solar eclipse passed over the city, a witness near Northerly Island told Phantoms and Monsters about a scream that “sounded like squeaky truck brakes,” then saw “a large object flying low over the docks that stick out in to Burnham Harbor.” It “looked like a large black bat, but also had humanoid features.” That August, Erin Drain was on a rooftop in West Town when she saw something high in the sky. “It wasn’t being buffeted about by the wind,” she told Curious City.

University of Chicago psychologist David A. Gallo said Strickler’s compilation of 55 Chicago sightings in 2017 represents “a selective sample.” Gallo explained that “he’s not sampling random people and asking if they saw the Mothman – he’s just counting the number of people that voluntarily came forward to report a sighting,” and that people more likely to visit a paranormal site might also be more inclined to believe in a Mothman.

The Singular Fortean Society sorts its entries by likely explanation, with a “Large Birds” category for sightings most likely to be misidentified owls, herons or cranes. Its later entries include a December 30, 2021, report from a man who said he and two coworkers saw three black, red-eyed, winged creatures near a hangar at O’Hare International Airport, and an April 29, 2024, report in which Mat Sexton fired at a winged humanoid several times from his truck in northern Illinois during his third encounter.