A Monster Scratching on the Door Late at Night

Monster stories are usually just fun thrillers told around a campfire. But what happened in a small Illinois town 50 years ago, has never been explained.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right. We've all heard monster stories. Some are just
stories and others are allegedly true, as told firsthand by
respected folks. This is a story that took place fifty
years ago, late at night in a small town in Illinois.
I'm Patty Steele. If something scratches at your door late

(00:20):
at night, better than twice before opening it. That's next
on the back story. We're back with the back story.
I don't know about you, but when I was a
little girl, I had nothing but older brothers, and they
loved me. But they also loved to scare the hell
out of me. They'd talk about monsters seen late at

(00:42):
night in the woods behind our house. I was terrified,
and I never doubted them. Duh. But these kinds of stories,
a lot of times, are based on some sort of fact.
Let's go back to the spring of nineteen seventy three.
We're in a tiny southern Illinois town called Enfield. It
was mostly defined by long stretches of fields with rail

(01:04):
lines running through it. A little after ten o'clock at night,
Henry McDaniel heard something scratching on his front door. Don't
open it. Well, he's not listening to me, so of
course he opens it later, what he said he saw
didn't just terrify little Enfield. It pulled in reporters from
hours away, and it kicked off one of the weirdest

(01:27):
monster scares ever. So back to that night, curious about
where the sound came from, Henry grabs a flashlight and
a twenty two pistol. He steps outside into the gusty, cold,
early spring wind. Then he spots the intruder nestled between
two rose bushes. He later tells cops that the creature

(01:48):
had three legs and a short body. He describes it
as having two little, short arms coming out of its
breast area, and two pink eyes as big as flashlights,
staring at him. The creature was grayish in color, he said,
about four and a half feet tall, almost like a
human body. Spooked and sure he's seeing a monster of

(02:11):
some sort, he fires his gun at it. He squeezes
off four rounds and thinks he hit it once the
thing lets out a loud hiss. Henry says it sounded
like a wildcat. It then bolts, vaulting fifty feet in
just three leaps downhill toward the railroad tracks that connect
Enfield to the rest of the world. Deputies arrive on

(02:33):
the scene, and sure enough, they find odd sort of
dog like tracks in the earth, but with six towpath marks.
They later said that while the story sounds suspicious, Henry
seemed completely sober and rational. Of course, within hours, words
starts to spread. A few days later, a ten year
old boy says a three legged creature jumped him while

(02:56):
he played outside in the evening, shredding his sneakers. He
and his parents later admit the claim was a hoax,
but his story contributed to the viral outbreak. Then, two
weeks after Henry's first encounter, there's another one. This time
it's May sixth, about three o'clock in the morning. Henry
hears a noise and goes outside. He sees this thing again.

(03:20):
It's scurrying along the railroad trestles near his house. This
time he doesn't shoot, He just watches it lope away
into the night. Now, some radio news guys arrive in
Enfield from Kocomo, Indiana. They're going to search for the monster.
They begin combing the area near an abandoned building close
to Henry's home. They later claimed they saw a gray

(03:44):
ape like figure standing in the mist. They capture a
recording of a spooky cry unlike anything they'd ever heard,
But then someone fires a shot and the thing takes off.
At the same time, twenty five year old Lauren Coolemy,
a cryptozoologist that's a person who studies legendary creatures like

(04:04):
Bigfoot or the Lochness Monster, comes to town. He hears
the tape of the creature, which he says has a
strange banshee like screech, but he's unable to get any
other evidence. The tape, by the way, seems to have
disappeared in the ensuing fifty years. But now Enfield has
a problem. Young monster hunters arrive in town, mostly under

(04:26):
the age of twenty, a lot of them armed with
rifles and shotguns. They say they're there to photograph the thing,
but brought weapons for some protection. The local sheriff has
to chase them out of town by mid May. The
Enfield Monster is a celebrity, getting shout outs on the
radio and write ups in newspapers from the Chicago Daily

(04:48):
News down to the Alton Telegraph and beyond. It's a
full blown curiosity. But what the heck is it? Well,
there are all sorts of theories about that, maybe an
animal that looked weird late at night in the beam
of a flashlight when somebody is nervous. Some folks suggested
it was an escaped kangaroo, that the three legs were

(05:10):
really two legs, plus that heavy kangaroo tale. But Henry
says no way to that theory. He'd owned a kangaroo
when he served in Australia, and he knew what their
faces and their tracks looked like, and the tracks did
not match a kangaroo. Henry was pretty convinced that this
thing was extraterrestrial. There never has been a definitive answer

(05:32):
as to what it was, but a lot of folks
believe it was a case of public imagination running out
of control and embroidering more onto the story. They say
it was fear, fun and folklore braided together. A group
of researchers from the University of Illinois actually studied the
Enfield monster story to look at how panic and rumor spread.

(05:55):
Their paper, published in nineteen seventy eight, used Enfield as
a case study in social contagion. How a few first
hand reports there were just three of them, can balloon
into an epidemic through news stories gossip and the irresistible
magnetism of a good monster story. Folks in Enfield, though,

(06:16):
aren't embarrassed by their monster story. Over the decades, the
town's brushed with the bazaar has just become a great
local tale. And what happened is understandable, they say. A
guy here scratching at his door late at night. He's
worried about his children. He steps outside into what he
thinks is danger and believes he sees something that shouldn't exist.

(06:39):
If you've ever spent time in farm country, you know
the dark out there can feel really thick. A flashlight
beam looks like a tunnel through a sea of black.
A possum hissing at you at midnight can sound like
a demon. Then there's the pressure of reporters wanting quotes
and neighbors wanting answers. I want the answers to fit

(07:01):
the melody already in the air. Look every once in
a while, when you're outside at night, you think you
see something out there in the darkness. It's a shape
between the rose bushes and the door, And in that
electric second, you become part of the story. You are
Henry McDaniel seeing a thing that makes no sense and

(07:24):
trying to explain it to yourself. After all, every monster
is actually two things, maybe some sort of animal in
the dark and the story that rationalizes our initial fear.
I hope you like the Backstory with Patty Steele. Please
leave a review. I would love it if you'd subscribe
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(07:47):
and feel free to dm me if you have a
story you'd like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty
Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele.
The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis
Durand Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser.

(08:10):
Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday
and Friday. Feel free to reach out to me with
comments and even story suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty
Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening
to the Backstory with Patty Steele. The pieces of history
you didn't know you needed to know.