Millions of years ago, in the Carboniferous period, the land
that would become Ohio was a hot, muggy swamp home to a variety of giant
amphibious beasts such as the giant salamander-croc Stegops, the
boomerang-headed Platyrhinops, the sinuous, eel-like Diceratosaurus, and
many more. Is it possible some of these creatures survived into the modern day,
evolving over the eons into bipedal humanoids lurking in remote waterways like
the Creature from the Black Lagoon? Well, no. Probably not. But that would make
a pretty great backstory for Ohio’s favorite legendary creatures, the Loveland
Frogs.
The story of the Frogs began in the summer of 1955 when a
businessman driving through Clermont County saw three batrachian beings huddled
together on the side of the road. When he got out of his car and approached the
creatures, one of them raised a spark-emitting wand that scared him away.
The Loveland Frogs did not reappear again until 1972 when
police officer Ray Shockey saw what he initially thought was a dog lying in the
middle of the road. As he stepped closer, the animal stood up on its hind legs-
revealing itself to be more amphibious than canine- and quickly hopped over a
guardrail. A few weeks later another officer, Mark Matthews, sighted another of
the strange creatures resting by the side of the road.
The Frogs disappeared into folklore for several decades
until 2016 when two teenagers claimed to have encountered one while they were
playing Pokemon Go! near Lake Isabelle. Pictures taken by one of the witnesses
show a wide-mouthed creature with eerily glowing eyes half-submerged in the
waters of the lake (as a huge Dungeons & Dragons nerd, I can’t help
comparing the photo to the Blindheim, a weird frog-like, cave-dwelling,
luminous-eyed being from the classic Fiend Folio tome).
A recent article,
however, suggests that the beast in the photo may be nothing more than a lawn
decoration with light-up eyes. A hoax, most likely, but one made in the spirit
of keeping the legend of the Loveland Frogs alive.
There is quite a fondness
for the Frogs in the Loveland area, so much so that the critter even got its
own bluegrass musical called “Hot Damn! It’s the Loveland Frog!”
Ohio is not the only part of the Midwest with its own
frog-humanoids, though. In 1951, Indiana steelworker and entrepreneurial
advertiser Harrison Bailey had a close encounter with several odd batrachian
beasts. Bailey’s unique brand of
advertising involved painting clients’ slogans on a large tractor wheel and
rolling it by hand down a length of highway, where the eye-catching oddity
would be seen by hundreds of people. While rolling his tire along Illinois
Highway 7 one day, Bailey encountered an oval, silver object piloted by two
beings wearing green masks. The entities allegedly paralyzed Bailey somehow and
asked him where he was going and what he was doing. Once Bailey answered, they
released him and allowed him to continue on his way. But when he walked away,
he discovered that several hours had passed, though he had no memory of the
missing time. Bailey did not talk about the incident for 25 years until he
underwent hypnosis therapy to figure out what happened in the forgotten hours
after he encountered the craft. Bailey recalled being suddenly swarmed and
chased by a pack of foot-long humanoid frogs, accompanied by an entourage of
tiny, hard-shelled “bugs”. The creatures herded him towards the craft and the
green-masked beings who, in addition to the asking him where he was going, also
told him that there were extraterrestrial beings living among humanity and that
they wished to establish peaceful communication with Earth.
Could
the weird tiny frog-creatures that Bailey encountered be related to the
Loveland Frogs? Are there secret populations of intelligent, possibly
extraterrestrial, amphibians lurking in hidden places throughout the Midwest? Again,
probably not. But I think that bit of folklore, like the idea of Carboniferous amphibians
surviving to the present day, would make a pretty fitting addition to the
legend of Loveland’s bipedal, wand-wielding amphibious cryptids.
SOURCES
An article from the Cincy Weekend about the Loveland Frogs
An entry from Weird U.S. about the Loveland Frogs
