The Momo: Case File #008
Location: Louisiana, Missouri (the town, not the state)
Date: July 11, 1972
Status: Unresolved
The Sighting
On July 11, 1972, the Harrison children were playing in their backyard on Marzolf Hill, just outside the small town of Louisiana, Missouri — a river town of about 4,000 people on the Mississippi. Two of the children looked up the hill and saw something standing at the tree line.
It was enormous — seven feet tall, covered head to toe in dark black hair. Its head was shaped like a pumpkin, round and large, sitting directly on its shoulders with no visible neck. Hair covered even its eyes. And tucked under one arm, like a person carrying a bag of groceries, was a dead dog.
The children screamed. Their older sister ran to the window and saw it too — a massive, dark, hair-covered figure holding the carcass of a dog, standing at the edge of the woods and staring down at the house. Then the smell hit. A wave of nausea-inducing stench that made the family physically ill.
The Encounter
"It was seven feet tall, hairy all over, and carrying a dead dog under its arm."
— Description from the 1972 Harrison children sighting
The Harrison sighting wasn't the first. A year earlier, in July 1971, Joan Mills and Mary Ryan had been driving along a highway near Louisiana when they encountered what they described as a "half-ape, half-man" creature standing at the roadside. It was massive, dark, and covered in hair. They didn't stop.
But after the Harrison encounter, the town erupted. Over the summer of 1972, multiple witnesses reported seeing the creature in and around Louisiana. Footprints were found — enormous, three-toed tracks unlike any known animal. The stench was reported repeatedly, a rotten, overwhelming odor that preceded the sightings.
What They Saw
- Approximately seven feet tall with a massive build
- Pumpkin-shaped head with no visible neck
- Entirely covered in dark black hair — including over the eyes
- Carried dead animals under its arm
- Three-toed footprints
- Overwhelming, nauseating stench
- Seen on Marzolf Hill and along roads near Louisiana, Missouri
The Aftermath
Louisiana, Missouri did what small American towns do when something impossible shows up: they formed a posse. A twenty-person armed search party combed Marzolf Hill and the surrounding woods. They found tracks. They found areas where vegetation had been flattened. They found the smell. They did not find Momo.
Researchers descended on the town — including notable cryptozoologist Loren Coleman. The media followed. For a few weeks in the summer of 1972, the Missouri Monster was national news. Then the sightings tapered off, the cameras left, and Louisiana went back to being a quiet town on the river.
The Name
"Momo" is simply short for "Missouri Monster" — a name coined by the press during the 1972 flap. It's efficient and slightly absurd, which somehow fits a seven-foot creature with a pumpkin head carrying dead dogs through the woods of small-town Missouri.
Current Status
Momo has not been reliably reported since the 1970s. The creature came, it terrified a town, and it left — taking its dead animals and its terrible smell with it. Louisiana, Missouri is still a small river town. Marzolf Hill is still wooded and quiet. And somewhere in the old newspaper archives of Pike County, there are sketches of three-toed footprints that no one ever matched to a known animal.