Momo the Monster

The Momo flap broke into the open on July 11, 1972, behind the home of the Harrison family at the foot of Marzolf Hill. Eight-year-old Terry Harrison and his brother were playing in the yard when their teenaged sister Doris looked out a bathroom window and started screaming. Standing at the edge of the trees was a tall, hairy, manlike thing, dark from head to foot, blood smeared down its hair — and dangling from its grip was a dead dog.

The creature gave off a smell the family never forgot, a heavy reek of rotting flesh. Their own dog took violently ill and threw up for hours afterward. The Harrisons' story spread through the river town like a brushfire, and other accounts came forward to meet it — strange tracks, a fireball seen over the hill, a farmer's missing dog. By the end of July, Louisiana, Missouri, was a town that locked its doors and watched the timberline.

The Harrison sighting was the spark, but it landed in dry kindling. Days earlier, two picnickers near the river bluffs reported a hairy creature shambling toward them, and a local woman recounted a similar fright. As the story grew, residents reported footprints pressed into the ground around Marzolf Hill, an overpowering stench drifting down off the slope, and dogs that would not stop barking at the treeline after dark.

By late July the city had organized armed search parties that climbed Marzolf Hill hunting the thing, while reporters and cryptid investigators poured into town. The posse turned up odd tracks and a lean-to of bent saplings, but never the creature itself. As suddenly as it had come, the Missouri Monster melted back into the timber, and the sightings tapered off into autumn — leaving behind a name the town has never fully shaken.

Investigators have argued over Momo for fifty years. Some place it squarely in the Bigfoot family — the right height, the dark hair, the foul odor reported again and again across North American sasquatch lore. Others note that 1972 was a feverish summer of monster sightings across the Midwest, and suspect the river town talked itself into a shared fright fed by hot weather, newspaper headlines, and a genuinely strange first encounter no one could explain.

Whatever climbed Marzolf Hill that July, the legend stuck to Louisiana, Missouri, the way the smell stuck to the Harrisons' yard. Momo is remembered as one of the most vivid Bigfoot-type cases the Midwest ever produced — pumpkin head, no neck, a dead dog under its arm, and that unforgettable reek. The hill above town still stands dark and timbered over the bluffs, and on a hot, still summer night, the older folks will tell you they can still imagine what's up there, waiting for the next quiet year to come back down.