A friend of mine was a new homeowner many years ago when Halloween sneaked up on him.
When costumed kids arrived on his front stoop he was wholly unprepared, and “didn’t even have a can of pop to give them,” as he tells the story.
Ever resourceful, he grabbed some ketchup packets from the remnants of a recent fast food dinner and thrust them deep into the trick-or-treaters’ bags. He acted quickly, hoping they wouldn’t get a good look at the “treats” in an effort to avoid subsequent “tricks” from displeased young solicitors.
It worked. The kids left, and no egg, toilet paper or shaving cream recriminations followed.
Another friend called the deed monstrous, in keeping with the Halloween theme.
The ketchup packet distributor disagreed.
“Hey, those packets were sealed,” he said.
That’s one of my favorite Halloween stories from early adulthood. And my friend was right, substituting ketchup for candy wasn’t really monstrous, though mustard packets may have brought it a step closer.
This Halloween, we don’t have to search far for actual monstrousness, from everyday reports of gun violence to backbiting political advertisements making even the commercial breaks unwatchable during the evening local news broadcast.
It’s no wonder that unreal monsters occupy such a prominent pedestal in our collective imagination as early autumn transitions to late fall and brisk breezes increasingly become freezing winds.
Unlike the small monsters going door to door on Halloween, accompanied by superheroes, princesses and other pop culture characters, other monsters have garnered worldwide notoriety because their origins aren’t linked to published works of fiction.
Rather, these monsters haunt the periphery of reality. Their existence is just plausible enough to offer a tidbit of dread, while logic and probability, as well as geographic distance, indicate a lack of danger from such creatures as the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot.
Nessie may live in Scotland and Bigfoot is said to inhabit mountainous regions. Witches have a historical home in olde New England, but some scary creatures live in more local lore as well.
I took a family road trip last week to southern Illinois, an area rife with legends and mystery. Along the Mississippi River a little ways upstream from Cahokia, where archaeologists believe a large city was abruptly and mysteriously abandoned in the 1300s, a great beast dwells near a large cave hollowed into the stony riverside bluff.
The large, winged creature etched into the rock is a re-creation of an image first reported by 17th century explorers. Its first entry in the historical record was a report by the famous French missionary Jacques Marquette in 1673. The giant petroglyph was mentioned in the accounts of other European explorers until 1699, when “no other mention of it had been found until more than a hundred years had elapsed,” according to John W. Allen, author of “Legends & Lore of Southern Illinois,” published in 1963.
Allen, for 16 years the historical director at University Museum at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, said the current representation is a “faithful reproduction of the original one made by the Indians and carefully sketched by an artist” in 1826. The original, he wrote, “remained well preserved until the winter of 1846-47, when the rock was quarried away.”
Piasa, according to Allen, translates to “Bird of Evil Spirit,” while the tourism bureau based in nearby Alton indicates in a pamphlet touting the cliffside painting the name means “bird that devours men.”
The pamphlet quotes Marquette’s diary indicating there were two Piasa paintings on the bluff.
“They have horns on their heads like those of a deer, a horrible look, red eyes, a beard like a tiger’s, scales, and so long a tail that it winds about the body,” reads the description from the 1600s.
Marquette, of course, is the Jesuit priest who accompanied Louis Joliet on those early explorations of what Europeans then considered New France, including a big chunk of the Chicago area, before heading down the Illinois River and coming across the Piasa.
The legend of the beast, conveyed without specific citation, indicates the Piasa initially wasn’t much of a problem, feeding mostly on “serpents” and minding its own business until a great battle took place nearby, after which it acquired a taste for human flesh and subsequently terrorized area residents.
Determined to stop the monster from eating his friends, a local leader offered to be bait while some warriors hid nearby waiting to shoot the beast with arrows when it came to carry him away. The ploy fortunately worked and the creature’s likeness was carved into the bluff to commemorate the victory.
It’s more likely, Allen wrote, the Piasa was a representation of the Thunder Bird, which looms large throughout Native American mythology. The modern legend affixed to the ancient effigy has a nice combination of anti-violence messaging and a self-sacrificing leader story, but a more entertaining, Halloween Piasa legend, attributed only to my imagination, might link the fiendish beast, bolts of lighting flashing from its eyes, to the mysterious abandonment of the ancient city of Cahokia.
Another monster in the region isn’t enshrined on a bluff wall, and isn’t quite as ancient as the Piasa, but still it’s found a place in Illinois legend.
The Big Muddy Monster was first sighted in 1973 in Murphysboro, a small town near the Shawnee National Forest in the hills of Little Egypt. According to a city police report, some residents reported seeing a creature 7 to 8 feet tall, 300 to 350 pounds, “dirty white or cream colored” that walked on two feet. It also had “a musky odor to it,” the report indicated.
Dogs were brought in to track the creature but lost its scent in an area that was “too thick and bushy to walk through.” Other residents in the area reported a “large ghost in their backyard” around the same time.
A few days later, police took a report from someone parked at a boat launch along a wooded area of the Big Muddy River in Murphysboro who said a large creature “with light colored hair matted with mud” was “screaming, changing tones and proceeding toward the car.”
“Complainant then left the area” and went to the police department, a police report indicated, telling police “no human would be able to scream or make a noise loud as what they heard.”
Investigating police found prints in the mud at the scene about 10-12 inches long and 3 inches wide leading to the river and then heard screaming coming from the wooded area and “retreated out of the wooded area.”
By 1976, the Big Muddy Monster began appearing by name in Murphysboro police reports and its legend has continued to grow in the years since.
There’s a good chance the Murphysboro monster was a hoax, though we likely will never know for certain. And it’s more likely we never will know the true reason the Piasa beasts were enshrined in rock along the Mississippi River near Alton.
But it’s fun to explore these Illinois legends. And with Halloween upon us once again, perhaps it’s time to create some more.
Have you heard about the Rock Beast unearthed in Thornton Quarry?
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.
