Loveland Frogman — Cryptid Encyclopedia

On a cold night in 1955, a businessman driving along a road near Loveland, Ohio slammed on his brakes. Crouching by the side of the road were three bipedal figures, roughly three to four feet tall, with leathery green skin, webbed hands and feet, and wide, lipless frog-like faces. One of them held a device above its head that emitted showers of sparks. The man watched for several minutes before the creatures turned and leaped over a guardrail, disappearing toward the Little Miami River.

The Loveland Frogman resurfaced in 1972, this time witnessed by police. On March 3, Officer Ray Shockey was driving along Riverside Road near the Totes boot factory when he spotted what he thought was a dog lying in the road. When his headlights hit it, the creature stood up on two legs — revealing itself as a frog-like humanoid, three to four feet tall, weighing roughly 60 pounds, with textured leathery skin. It stared at him, then hopped over the guardrail toward the river. Two weeks later, Officer Mark Matthews had a nearly identical encounter on the same stretch of road.

Matthews later stated he believed the creature may have been a large iguana — but Shockey never wavered in his original account. The two sightings by law enforcement officers gave the Loveland Frogman a credibility that most cryptids lack.

In 2016, a teenager playing Pokémon Go near Lake Isabella in Loveland captured cellphone footage of a dark figure standing upright near the water. The Frogman, it seems, has never fully left.

"It was crouched like a frog, but it stood up and walked on two legs." — Officer Ray Shockey, Loveland Police Department, 1972.