Missouri is a US state in the Midwestern United States and it is bordered with the US states of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Illinois, Tennesse and Kentucky. Its capital is Jefferson City while its largest city is Kansas City that is not-in-Kansas state. Missouri is named after the Missouri River which flows through the center of the state. The state is tipped with playing a large role in the United States westward expansion.
Much of Missouri is made up of fertile prairie land with streams and rivers, southern areas of the state can be found heavily forested hills, small mountains, caves, lakes and rivers and in the southeast, there are the St. Francois Mountains.
Missouri has a diverse economy with the largest sectors being aerospace, transportation equipment, food processing, chemicals, printing and publishing, electrical equipment, light manufacturing, finance services and beer. The state also has an important agricultural sector that produces soybeans, pork, dairy products, hay, corn, eggs and more. Mining is another sector in the state with Missouri producing the most lead of any state and is a top producer of lime. Tourism, thanks to the state’s wilderness areas and state parks, also plays a big part in the state’s economy.
And now as always to move from the normal side of Missouri the stranger and more unexplained side.
First of all, there is the Missouri Monster which has been nicknamed Momo, it is basically the state’s version of a Bigfoot. It is described as a very tall bipedal creature with a large pumpkin-shaped head and long dark fur that also covers its eyes and face and as is typical with these kinds of cryptids one sign of it is a terrible foul odor in the air. It appears from a number of the sightings that Momo can be aggressive and is possibly a carnivore, but is easily startled and scared off nonetheless by loud noise and commotion.
The sightings happened in and around a town called Louisiana (it seems Missouri likes naming their places after other states), and there were numerous sightings reported and even a group of armed men went out in an attempt to hunt it down but of course they failed to ever find it as is usual.
The first major sighting that brought Momo to greater media attention happened in 1971 not far from the town when two women (Joan Mills and Mary Ryan) picnicking suddenly smelled an awful pungent odor. At first, they reasonably thought they may have disturbed some nearby skunks, but this quickly went out the window when the women spotted some kind of creature watching them in the distance, described as a hairy ape-like creature but with a human-like face.
As the beast begun to move towards the woman, they naturally became very frightened and ran towards their car and shut themselves in it. Crazily the monster attempted to break into the car and was only scared off by one of the women accidentally bumping the car horn.
Another major sighting that reached wider attention happened in 1972 and just like the first was as if it were something out of a horror movie. It happened close to the town again and just at the bottom of Marzolf Hill where two kids (Terry and Walley Harrison) were playing outside their house. One of the boys, feeling they were being watched, looked towards the trees on the hill and saw the creature.
The boy’s screams alerted the older sister Doris to look out the window of the home to also see the creature as well, which she described as 6-7 feet in height, hairy and black. Most terrifying of all is that the creature appeared to be holding a dead dog under its arm. The kids scream caused the creature to flee the scene. The father later found large footprints and strange black hair where the creature was spotted.
This also wasn’t the last strange encounter at the house though as a few days later during a prayer meeting at the house, strange howls and growls could be heard emanating from the darkness, bringing an abrupt end to the prayer gathering.
Outside of Momo it doesn’t appear that Missouri has much to offer on the cryptid side which is quite surprising as I was expecting a state with the amount of wilderness that Missouri has to perhaps have quite the number but maybe I am just being stereotypical. Anyway, I did come across an article posted on a website called cryptozoonews.com from a newspaper called the Hawarden Independent, a newspaper that was published in Iowa, but on September 19th 1895 it published a column about a cryptid in Mud Lake, Missouri.
In the article it said that the serpent in Mud Lake had been spotted “again” so it seems back then it may have been a certain spectacle at the time, which is kind of odd as you’d perhaps expect a number more newspaper clippings on it if that were the case, as it appears to be incredibly obscure and almost unheard of today.
Anyway, the sighting was made by a man called Anderson McCoy. The article goes on to say that the creature had been seen several times over the past summer and that fisherman had even briefly caught it in nets on multiple occasions only for its to manage to free itself and get away, apparently the hole left in the nets was large enough for a horse to break through.
Now this is where it gets a little crazy, the article says that McCoy was in his boat on the lake that he often used to hunt ducks, when suddenly something hit his boat from beneath which McCoy said knocked the boat 10 feet into the air and he then saw the serpent swirling around in the lake when the boat came back down. McCoy was unable to get a good enough look at the creature to give a proper description but could tell that it was huge. Apparently, McCoy’s brother’s boats have also been mysteriously struck a number of times as well.
McCoy believes that the creature could have been some kind of large fish that got into the lake from a nearby river when the water was high.
It does seem hard to believe but make of it what you will. It seems that in modern times there have been no further sightings of a strange creature in Mud Lake or even a notion that there once ever was, it appears it is something that has almost been lost in time.
Now speaking of Mud Lake itself, there are at least three lakes in Missouri called Mud Lake and it isn’t stated which one this creature was apparently sighted in so I am unable to pinpoint it on the map.
I guess if we cannot find any further cryptids in the state, I will move on to a strange potentially alien encounter instead. It happened in Tuscumbia on February 1967 when a farmer called Claude Edwards saw a strange large mushroom-like object coloured grayish-green on top of a cylinder tube in the farmers meadow close to his barn. Edwards noted that strangely his cattle in a nearby field were all grazing in the direction facing the strange object.
There were also some very strange little creatures or humanoids, seemingly intelligent beings around the strange object as well, described as being about 3-feet in height, also grayish-green, they had no visible hands and appeared to either be wearing some bulky goggles or had big black eyes, also instead of a nose or mouth they had some dark protuberances. It could have been they were either wearing some weird suits, or that is what the aliens just looked like, either way the description of the little alien things has been likened to little penguins, which is why the incident has been named the Space Penguins of Tuscumbia.
The farmer also described a sort of impenetrable force field within 15-feet around the strange object and beings. Edwards said he could not see or “feel” the force field but that the pressure it gave off was unmistakable. Edwards attempted to throw rocks at the saucer, with the intention of puncturing the craft so it could not take off for whatever reason, but the force field also completely prevented this as well and very soon after this the beings entered back into the craft and shot off into the sky never to be seen again, and perhaps also shaking their little penguin heads disapprovingly over the farmers seemingly primitive aggressiveness.
As always, I like to try and round off with an interesting haunted place. I thought in this one we would check out a place called Zombie Road as it is quite a different kind of haunting, if you can even call it that. This trail appears to be haunted by shadow people.
The road is located near to St. Louis and its original name was Lawler Ford Road, built in the 1860s for access to the Meramac River and railroad tracks. The road was dangerous enough alone due to it being narrow and having a number of blind spots, while travelling through dense woodland, the now unused train tracks also suffered several derailments. There was also a woman who was killed by a train in the area called Della McCullough and many believe her ghostly apparition can be encountered on the path. Now a days the road is abandoned and not used any longer, except by those looking to get away from society, which is often teenagers or urban explorers or just people wanting to look around, it became known by these people as Zombie Road in the 1950s onwards.
There are numerous legends and scary stories associated with the road as well as the tales of shadow people who are said to creepily watch from the distance the travelers and explorers who choose to use the road. Stories of ghosts, people disappearing and other unexplained incidents are a plenty with this now creepy place as one may expect. There is also belief from some that Native American spirits also inhabit the area and could be related to the shadow people activity reported, as it is possible that the area was formerly a Native American trail before the Lawler Ford Road was built.
Many reports of unexplained noises and disembodied footsteps and voices have come from the road from thrill seekers and paranormal investigators. Some abandoned buildings formerly used as a resort also exist along the road and have been explored by urban explorers and thrill seekers as well looking for a fright or surprise or just to look around a place since frozen in time.
Officially today the trail is called Rock Hollow Trail and is now an area for biking and jogging and so with it being a place now actually more safely accessible to the public, what’s to stop you from checking it out one day? Just make sure to be careful and personally I do not condone trespassing after hours.
And that’s strange Missouri for you, next up we will be checking out the weird and the unexplained in the state of Arkansas.
Thank you for reading this post, if you have any queries please Email me, you can find my Email in the Contacts & Community section. Please also follow The Weekly Rambler on Twitter and Facebook which you can access through the buttons at the bottom of this website. You can also use the social media buttons under each blogpost to share with your family, friends and associates. You can also subscribe to Email notifications at the right-side of this website to know whenever a new post goes up (you can easily unsubscribe from this at any time through a button in each Email notification), or alternatively you can use an RSS Feed Reader. Please also join my FB Group The Weekly Ramblers Readers Group where readers can more easily talk with each other and also with me whenever I am on, you can also find it in Community.