Momo (“Missouri Monster”) is another of the localized names given to hairy bipedal creatures sighted in specific geographic locations much like the Jersey Devil.

Reports of hairy half-human creatures in the area of Louisiana, Missouri (pop. 4,600), had circulated since the 1940s, and in July 1971, Joan Mills and Mary Ryan allegedly encountered a hairy half-ape, half-man on River Road near Louisiana. On August 13, 1965, a similar-looking huge, dark, hairy creature attacked Christine Van Acker as she sat with her mother in their car near Monroe, Michigan. A picture of Christine’s face with its highly visible black eye appeared in many newspapers around the country the next day.

The real Momo scare began on July 11, 1972, at about 3:30 P.M. on a relatively sunny day near the outskirts of Louisiana. After Terry Harrison and his brother Wally had gone off to look at some rabbit pens at the foot of Marzolf Hill, their older sister, Doris, who was inside, heard a scream. Looking out the bathroom window, she saw a creature standing by a tree, flecked with blood, with a dead dog under its arm. Doris and Terry described it as six or seven feet tall, black, and hairy. Its head and face were covered with hair, and no neck was visible.

It “stood like a man but it didn’t look like one,” Doris said. It soon waddled off, still with the dog under its arm. The Harrisons’s own dog grew violently ill and vomited for three hours.

Neighbours told of dogs that had disappeared. On July 14, terrible odors emanated from the sighting area, and the children’s father, Edgar Harrison, heard eerie howls as he and investigators prowled the site. On July 21, Ellis Minor, who lived on nearby River Road, heard his dogs bark; thinking it was another dog, he flashed a light out in his yard, then stepped outside to observe a six-foot-tall creature with black hair. It was standing erect in his yard. Shortly thereafter, it dashed into the woods. After two weeks, the scare—which had attracted national attention—ended.

Similar creatures, reported throughout the Midwest and eastern United States and Canada, are often referred to as “Eastern Bigfoot.” But in temperament, overall descriptions, body build, and the clear lack of similar facial features, these non-montane, unknown hairy hominoids seem unlike the Pacific Northwest’s classic Bigfoot/Sasquatch, and may be a hybrid of these classic Neo-Giants and the Marked Hominids.

SOURCE:

The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters,Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature
Written by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark – Copyright 1999 Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark

Momo Its name derived from the appellation “the Missouri monster,” Momo is described as a hair-covered, roughly 6-foot-tall (1.8m) bipedal, half-human–half-ape, that has been sighted in and around the town of Louisiana, Missouri, since at least the 1940s. Most of the reports simply are of sightings, but on one occasion, in 1965, the beast supposedly attacked a woman in a car; on another, in 1972, it reportedly killed a dog. The 1972 incident was the first of several sightings within a two-week period in a neighbourhood where several dogs had disappeared. Skeptics dismiss Momo sightings as the result of hysteria or the misidentification of ordinary animals.

SEE ALSO:

• beasts, mysterious
• man-beasts

SOURCE:

The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena – written by Patricia D. Netzley © 2006 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning