Phantom Kangaroo

In October 1974, reports of a kangaroo roaming the Northwest Side of Chicago drew attention across Illinois. Over roughly the next month, people in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin reported kangaroo sightings, with timing that suggested more than one animal if the reports were accurate. No kangaroo was ever caught.

The episode began when two Chicago police officers were dispatched to investigate a report of a kangaroo standing on someone’s porch. Upon searching the area, the officers located the animal in an alleyway but could not apprehend it before it escaped. The animal stood about 5 ft tall and was growling, according to Karl Shuker’s retelling of a 1978 Fate article by David Fideler and Loren Coleman. It delivered several powerful kicks before leaping over a fence into another street.

Reports multiplied rapidly. A paperboy saw a kangaroo the day after the initial encounter. The following week, an animal was spotted in Schiller Woods. The week after that, a police officer reported a kangaroo just outside Plano, Illinois, describing it as jumping 8 ft (2.4 m) from a field into the road. Thirty minutes later, another kangaroo sighting was reported back in Chicago, with further eyewitness accounts spread across the surrounding countryside over the next three days. Within several days, the sightings had crossed into Indiana. The reports ceased roughly a month after the first encounter.

According to Atlas Obscura, the Chicago Tribune ran a small piece about the incident in November 1974.

Additional sightings extended the saga. In November 1974, Joe Bernotus, a commuter riding a train to work, spotted a 5-ft kangaroo, uniformly black except for a brown face and belly, from the train window.

Several explanations have been offered for the 1974 Chicago episode. The classic one is an animal escaped from a zoo or circus. Other proposed explanations include misidentification of common animals such as dogs or deer, mass psychogenic illness among anxious witnesses, or publicity stunts by local businesses using photographs imported from Australia. Coleman has also suggested that at least some phantom kangaroo accounts may not involve kangaroos at all, but rather a different cryptid he termed a “devil monkey”.

Shuker writes that sightings of mystery macropods have been documented across North America since the 1950s, especially from the East and Mid-West. In 1978, two men in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, photographed a large kangaroo beside the highway, and Coleman, described as the “leading authority on North American kangaroo sightings”, suggested the animal “looked like a Bennett’s wallaby.”