Crawfordsville Monster

Also Known As: also the Crawfordsville sky monster; named for the town of Crawfordsville, Indiana, where it was reported in September 1891
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Cryptids
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It is a living thing of the upper air that swims over a sleeping town on rows of fins, glowing white and making a thin wheezing cry.
Role in Mythos: It is one of the earliest American reports of a creature that lives in the sky, and later writers made it the standard example of the type.
Relation to Humans: It frightened the handful of people who saw it but touched nobody and did no damage. Two local men followed it through the streets and reported that it was a large flock of birds confused by the town’s new electric lights.

At two o’clock on a Saturday morning in early September 1891, two men in Crawfordsville, Indiana, were hitching up an ice wagon. The air was damp and the town was asleep. Marshall McIntyre and Bill Gray had deliveries to make before the heat came up, and their minds were on harness buckles. Then, by their own account, a feeling of dread came over both of them at once, and they looked up.

Something was swimming in the sky. It hung three or four hundred feet above the rooftops, long and pale, and it moved by working several pairs of fins along its sides, the way a fish holds itself in a current. It was pure white. It had no shape a man could put a name to, no head, no tail, only a great loose body like a burial sheet come adrift, and somewhere on it a single eye that burned. It made a noise as it went, a thin, wheezing, mournful sound from a mouth neither man could find. They watched it circle for the better part of an hour. Then they did the sensible thing and hid in the barn.

They were not the only ones awake. A little after midnight the Reverend G. W. Switzer, pastor of the First Methodist Church, had gone out to his well for water and seen the same pale thing overhead. He fetched his wife, and the two of them stood in the yard and watched it writhe and twist through the air with the easy glide of a snake. At one point it sank toward the lawn of Lane Place, the grand house of a late United States senator’s widow, as if it meant to land. It thought better of it, rose, and went on over the town.

The Crawfordsville Journal printed all of this on 5 September, with the measurements: about eighteen feet long and eight feet wide. That is roughly the size of a delivery wagon with the horse still attached, set afloat. The paper did not say what it was made of, and nobody got close enough to find out. No one touched it. It took nothing, broke nothing, and harmed no one.

The town’s first response was to laugh. A clinic for drunkards in nearby Plainfield wrote to the minister suggesting, kindly, that he come and stay a while. But the story travelled. The Indianapolis Journal picked it up, then papers across the country, including the Brooklyn Eagle in New York. Letters began arriving at the Crawfordsville post office. Some writers were sure the Day of Judgment had been announced. A woman in St. Louis, worried that the thing might be heading west, wrote to ask what colour it was and whether it could be seen by day.

Where it came from, the reports never said. It arrived without a history, attached to no older legend of the place, and that is unusual for a monster. It simply appeared over a small Midwestern town in the same season that the town had strung up its first electric street lights.

That detail turned out to matter. Two residents, John Hornbeck and Abe Hernley, saw the apparition for themselves and decided to chase it. They followed it from street to street until they were close enough to make out what they were looking at, and they came back with an answer. It was killdeer. Hundreds of them, a great wheeling flock of small shorebirds with white undersides and a high, plaintive call, caught above the town in the haze. The Journal reasoned that the new lamps had dazzled and confused the birds, which then milled over the glow for hours, their pale bellies flashing together as they turned. Seen from below through wet night air, a few hundred birds banking as one would look like a single white body rippling along its edges. That is the whole explanation, and it is a good one.

It was also the Journal’s own. The three other newspapers in town never mentioned a monster at all, which has led at least one historian at the Indiana State Library to suspect the Journal of selling papers. The same week, local boys had been sending up homemade paper balloons with parachutes, some of them carrying unwilling cats. A drifting sheet and a complaining cat would also account for most of what was seen and heard.

The monster would have ended there, but in 1931 the American writer Charles Fort put it in his book Lo!. Fort collected reports of things that science had declined to look at. He had found the story in the Brooklyn Eagle and assumed it was a hoax until he checked and learned that the Reverend Switzer was a real man. Fort did not mention the birds. A decade or so later a follower of his, Vincent Gaddis, enlarged the tale again, writing that hundreds of townspeople had seen the creature on a second night and that some had felt its hot breath on their faces as it passed. None of that is in the 1891 reports.

From those two writers the creature passed into the literature of unexplained animals, where it became the model for a whole proposed class: beasts that are born, live and die in the upper air and never come to ground. On that reading its powers are flight without wings, a glow of its own, and a body with no more substance than cloud. Its limits are just as clear from the record. It was seen on two nights at most, in one town, by very few named people. It never came lower than the treetops. It left no body, no track and no mark, and it has not been back. Crawfordsville, for its part, kept the electric lights.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Crawfordsville Monster?

The Crawfordsville Monster was a strange flying creature reported over Crawfordsville, Indiana, in the early hours of 5 September 1891. Witnesses described a white, shapeless body with fins moving through the sky above the town. Two local men who followed it reported that it was a flock of several hundred killdeer birds.

What did the Crawfordsville Monster look like?

The Crawfordsville Monster was described as about eighteen feet long and eight feet wide, pure white, with no clear head or tail. It had several pairs of side fins, one flaming eye, and looked like a floating shroud. It made a wheezing, mournful sound and moved through the air with a twisting motion.

Who saw the Crawfordsville Monster?

The first witnesses to the Crawfordsville Monster were two ice delivery men, Marshall McIntyre and Bill Gray, who saw it at about two in the morning. The Reverend G. W. Switzer of the First Methodist Church and his wife also saw it that night from their yard. John Hornbeck and Abe Hernley later followed it through the town and identified it as birds.

Was the Crawfordsville Monster real?

The Crawfordsville Monster was most likely a large flock of killdeer birds. The Crawfordsville Journal reported that the town’s newly installed electric lights had confused the birds, whose white undersides and plaintive calls created the illusion of one creature. The other three newspapers in town did not report a monster at all.

Why is the Crawfordsville Monster famous?

The Crawfordsville Monster is famous because the writer Charles Fort included it in his 1931 book Lo!, which collected unexplained events. Vincent Gaddis later added claims that hundreds of people saw it and felt its hot breath, details that do not appear in the 1891 reports. Later writers on unexplained animals used it as the model for creatures said to live entirely in the sky.