This Indiana Town Had a Monster Hunt in 1974 and Still Won’t Throw It a Party

Back in November 1974, Columbus, Indiana watched a hairy green creature terrorize multiple groups of women, jump on car hoods leaving scratch marks, and send armed monster hunters flooding into Mill Race Park until police had to close it down and appoint a “Monster Control Officer” to deal with the chaos. The local paper called it the largest monster hunt in U.S. history. Fifty years later, the tourism folks are happy to mention it alongside their ghost tours and haunted theater events, but the paranormal community is absolutely losing it over the fact that Columbus refuses to give this legend the festival treatment it deserves. Point Pleasant built an entire economy around Mothman with statues and annual festivals pulling 20,000 visitors. Columbus won’t even put up a statue of their green river creature across from the downtown sculpture garden.

• Four separate sightings occurred in just eight days, including a creature that jumped on a car and left claw marks in broad daylight.
• Over 100 cars packed Mill Race Park nightly as armed hunters forced police to close the park and appoint Officer Kenneth St. John as “Monster Control Officer.”
• While Point Pleasant’s Mothman Festival draws 20,000-32,000 visitors annually, Columbus barely acknowledges its cryptid history despite having the “largest monster hunt in U.S. history.”

When Columbus Got a Green Swamp Creature

November 1st, 1974 started like any other Friday afternoon in Columbus, Indiana. Then the Columbus Police Department got a call at 3 PM from four young women who’d just seen something standing between two trees near the boat ramp at Mill Race Park. Six or seven feet tall, bipedal, covered in dark matted fur, with a pale green face that stared at them before they bolted back to their car.

Police checked the park and found nothing. They probably figured it was teenagers messing around. Then that same night, two more young women pulled into the park to eat takeout food and chat. One of them was Tyra Cataline, who’d talk about what happened next for the rest of her life. The creature jumped onto their car hood, pounded on the windshield with long clawed hands, and left deep scratches in the paint. The car reeked afterwards. Cataline described it as “decomposed animals” and said the thing could grimace its face and growl.

When Everyone Showed Up with Guns

The Republic newspaper ran a short story on November 2nd with the headline “Monster – Women Report Seeing ‘Beast’ in Mill Race.” That’s when things went sideways. Two more men spotted the creature near the covered bridge on November 5th, saw it in daylight around 4 PM, then came back after midnight with binoculars to get a better look. They told police the monster chased them out of the park.

The Indianapolis Star picked up the story. The Chicago Tribune ran it. Suddenly Mill Race Park turned into a war zone every night. Dozens of people armed with baseball bats, shotguns, and knives combed the woods looking for a green monster. One night there were over 100 cars crammed into the parking lot. City park director Robert Gillikin told the press “It may become necessary to close the park to the public at night, not because of the ‘monster’ but because of the public.”

He followed through. Police barricaded every entrance and stationed officers to keep the armed mob out. The Columbus Police Department unofficially appointed Officer Kenneth St. John as “Monster Control Officer” just to handle the flood of media calls and keep things from getting more out of hand.

The Dogcatcher Who Saw Something Fast

City dogcatcher Rick Duckworth and his colleague John Brown got called to Mill Race Park on November 8th to rescue two cats stuck in a tree. While figuring out how to get them down, they spotted a tall figure about 200 feet away wrapped in green blankets with long reddish hair hanging in its face. Duckworth moved toward it. The thing ran into the woods “as fast as a deer.”

The cats, when they finally got put back on solid ground, “ran off like bolts of lightning.” Duckworth told The Republic he’d use his tranquilizer gun on the creature if he saw it again – the same one he used to catch dogs. But here’s where the story gets messy. Duckworth also told reporters it looked like a man in a green mask and blankets. City officials latched onto that description and declared the whole thing a hoax.

Tyra Cataline wasn’t buying it. In a 2015 Fox News interview, 41 years after the incident, she said “I know it’s real and what I saw is not a joke. It was not a person in a costume. It was really something that could move around. It could grimace its face. It was growling. It was very aggressive.”

What Point Pleasant Did with Mothman

Drive three hours west to Point Pleasant, West Virginia and you’ll find a town that knows how to milk a monster. They’ve got a 12-foot metallic Mothman statue in the center of town with a famously shapely rear end locals call the “Shiny Hiney.” There’s a Mothman Museum stuffed with eyewitness reports and old newspaper clippings. Every September since 2002, they throw a festival that started as a few card tables selling hot dogs and books.

Now it pulls between 15,000 and 32,000 visitors to a town with fewer than 5,000 residents. Hotels fill up months in advance. Restaurants do record business. Gas stations cash in on out-of-towners hoping to spot red eyes in the TNT area. You can buy Mothman-shaped cookies, shot glasses, Christmas ornaments, and cotton candy called “Moth Floss.” The town’s tourism director calls it “the paranormal convention of the East.”

Point Pleasant turned a week of weird sightings in 1966 into a full-time industry. Salem did it with witches. Roswell did it with aliens. Loch Ness did it with one grainy photo of something that might be a log.

Columbus Says No Thanks

Columbus has the architecture. The town’s famous for modernist buildings designed by Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei. There’s a downtown sculpture garden. The tourism website mentions the Mill Race Monster alongside haunted theater concerts and ghost tours, but that’s about it. No statue. No museum. No Mill Race Monster Festival with vendors selling green swamp beast pancakes.

The late Harry McCawley, an editor at The Republic, wrote a column on the 40th anniversary in 2014 saying the whole thing was a hoax that “tarnished Columbus’ reputation and needed to die.” City officials still point to Duckworth’s description of a man in blankets as proof the whole thing was a prank.

But witnesses like Cataline never changed their stories. The scratch marks on the car were real. The stench was real. And nobody’s explained how someone in a crude disguise made of blankets could run “as fast as a deer” or leave oversized footprints or inspire enough fear to send grown women into full panic mode.

Why the Paranormal Community Is Mad

Walk through any cryptozoology forum and you’ll find people fuming about Columbus wasting what they call “a sexy, hairy swamp beast” with real tourism potential. Four separate sightings in eight days. Physical evidence. A documented police response that included appointing a Monster Control Officer. Contemporary newspaper coverage calling it the largest monster hunt in U.S. history. Point Pleasant had one incident with two couples. Columbus had multiple witnesses, daylight sightings, and a creature that physically attacked a vehicle. Yet Point Pleasant gets 20,000 festival attendees and Columbus won’t even put up a roadside marker.

What Actually Happened

Nobody knows for sure. Central Indiana had multiple UFO sightings that fall, and Mill Race Park sits near railroad tracks and Camp Atterbury military base – the kind of high-energy locations where cryptid sightings tend to cluster. Was it a Bigfoot variant? An escaped exotic animal? Someone in a really good costume? The hoax theory struggles to explain the speed witnesses described, the terror in their accounts decades later, and the physical evidence left behind. By mid-November the sightings stopped and Mill Race Park went back to being a nice spot for family picnics.

The Lost Tourism Opportunity

Point Pleasant proves you can have both culture and creatures. They didn’t choose between historic preservation and Mothman – they made the cryptid part of their identity. Columbus focuses on architecture tours and modernist buildings by Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei. That’s fine, but a Mill Race Monster Festival could bring thousands of visitors every fall without clashing with the town’s reputation.

Instead, Columbus treats the whole thing like an embarrassment. Gallery 411 hosted a “Monster Show” in 2024 with artwork inspired by the creature, but that’s not a statue or annual festival. The Mill Race Monster isn’t getting a party anytime soon, and the paranormal community will keep fuming about the wasted potential of Indiana’s sexy, hairy swamp beast.