How do you investigate a monster?

In many ways it’s like any other kind of research. You look through sources — both online and in print — and track down the origins of eyewitness accounts. But what makes this kind of research tricky is the endless fountain of misinformation online.

Now, you might be thinking, “Gary, it’s the internet…it’s basically a firehose of misinformation,” and you wouldn’t be wrong! But when it comes to incidents of high strangeness there aren’t exactly a lot of mainstream, trustworthy sources to tap into. I often rely on local newspaper articles, research journals, and the handful of non-sensationalized online accounts I can find.

This week’s tale was particularly difficult. I honestly nearly gave up on it. But after several hours spent digging through obscure journals and newspapers, and one very kind researcher in Pennsylvania, I finally had enough pieces of the puzzle to make out the whole picture. So, what I’d like to do today is retrace my steps and bring you along as I breakdown, source by source, the story of the Amish Country Creature.

That Lead is Pretty Slim, Jim

Some writers plot out their work weeks, even months in advance. Me, well, I’ve never believed in planning. Would it make my life easier? Probably. But I need the spontaneity. Or, if I’m being honest with myself, I need the pressure of a looming deadline. Sometimes when I sit down to write Monster of the Week I know where the story is going to go. Like with the The Olgoï-Khorkhoï. But most of the time I spend a few hours brainstorming ideas. This week, I began by researching the Yucca Man, a bigfoot-esque monster native to my area of SoCal. That search brought me to the day’s least reputable source: It’s Something Wiki.

If you find Wikipedia to be an inconsistent and at times frustrating source I implore you to go spend a few minutes on a fan-made wiki. Seriously. It will give you a new perspective on how helpful and accurate Wikipedia can actually be.

Anyway. The Yucca Man was proving to be uninspiring, so I clicked away and scrolled through the wiki’s big ol’ list of monsters™ until something jumped out at me. That’s where I first encountered an article about the Amish Country Creature. It was brief, just a little over 200 words. But it was enough to get me interested.

“An ungodly looking creature created havoc among the local god-fearing Amish Community, [sic] Pennsylvania in august 1973,” the article began.

It describes the creature as gray with a white mane, about as “large as a heifer,” with fangs and curved horns. It walked on two legs and moved quickly. In one encounter, like a minotaur without a maze, the creature charged down a couple of brothers who were loading hay onto a cart. The creature appeared again the next day. This time it attacked a man who was cutting grass down with a scythe. In this encounter the monster gets a third horn and a long tail. The article claims this happened just five miles from the previous incident. The man raised the scythe to defend himself but the creature ripped it out of his hands.

In the final encounter, which occurred the next day “on a farm midway between the two earlier incidents,” a woman feeding chickens witnessed the creature stealing two of her geese. She was able to rush to the defense of the birds, recovering one, while the creature made off with the other.

If those stories feel a little light on the details…yes, they are, welcome to the world of copy and paste online monster stories. Here’s what we know. The sightings happened in Pennsylvania in 1973 . We assume the people in the story were Amish by the name of the creature, but that’s never established in the story. There are no names. No direct quotes. No citations. It’s not even told with much finesse. When you have a creature that looks like it’s straight out of Greek mythology, that story demands a traditional narrative arc. Instead we get a very detached and abstract account of an encounter with the strange and zero evidence to back it up. Slim pickings, as they say.

New Name, Same Story

With little to go on besides a name, I plugged ‘Amish Country Creature’ into my frenemy Google. After an exasperated sigh over AI search results, I found my next lead. Uncharted Lancaster is a website that chronicles the weird history of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Shoutout to the blog’s founder, Adam, for his brief piece on the Amish Country Creature…or as he called it the ‘Amish Terrorizing Demonic Delinquent’.

All of the information from the ‘It’s Something Wiki’ was there. But Adam’s account gives us some more details, like a slightly more detailed timeline. His claim is that it happened in August of 1973, so, late summer. He also tells us that it occurred in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and specifically that it happened to Amish farmers. He also mentions that the man who had his scythe stolen returned the next day with an “investigator” to find that the creature had eaten part of the tool’s wooden handle.

But the most important new piece of information we get from Adam's article is a potential source for the story: Phillip L. Rife’s book America’s Nightmare Monsters.

An actual citation! Now we’re getting somewhere! All I had to do was find a copy of Rife’s book. Thankfully I have experience looking up obscure books on the paranormal and in no time at all I secured a digital copy of America’s Nightmare Monsters.

In Pursuit of Patchwork Monsters

Rife’s description of the creature matched the other two sources nearly word for word.

“(It's) the size of a good heifer, gray in color with a white mane. It had tiger-like fangs and curved horns like a billy goat. (It) ran upright on long legs, and had long grizzly claws.” — America’s Nightmare Monsters, Pg 16.

Unfortunately, there was no real new information in the book. And Rife didn’t cite any other sources. It seemed like I’d hit a dead end. Frustrated, I decided to dig deeper into Pennsylvania folklore. After all, Rife’s book was published in 2001. There was a nearly 30 year gap between the sighting and America’s Nightmare Monsters. Assuming Rife hadn’t made the whole thing up, surely there most be another report out there.

And after a lot of searching I was able to track down what felt like the earliest version of the story. It comes from Pursuit: The Journal of The Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained Vol 7, No 1 from January, 1974.

On page 14 of this issue there’s a story by Allen V. Noe that, by now, is very familiar. I’m including the full text below so you can read the account yourself.

“In the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area, "Big Valley" residents saw a creature "the size of a good heifer, gray in color with a white mane. It had tiger-like fangs and curved horns like a billy goat, it ran upright on long legs and had long grizzly claws.

Two brothers saw the creature approaching while they were bringing in a load of hay. The team of horses bolted, and both brothers were thrown from the wagon. Neither was seriously injured. The ground was dry and hard, and no tracks were found.

The next evening another farmer was clearing weeds from a fence row near the foot of a mountain about five miles from the first occurrence. He heard a ferocious roar, and turned to see the appalling creature charging toward him. At the last moment, he swung his scythe in an effort to defend himself, but it was torn out of his hands. He fled, and luckily escaped with his life. This man added to the first description that the creature had three horns and a tail! The next morning, investigators found that the creature had apparently eaten all the wooden parts of the scythe. Nothing was left except the blade and some bolts. It was speculated that the creature craved salt as the result of the prolonged heat wave.

Again, on the following evening, at a farm about midway between the first two, a woman was feeding her chickens when she heard a commotion. She turned to see the creature grabbing two of her largest geese, one in each paw. With more indignation than common sense, she gave chase, waving her apron wildly. The creature turned and threw one of the geese at her with such force that it knocked her to the ground, then made good its escape. The report stated that there were a lot of nervous farmers in the "Big Valley".”

— Pursuit: The Journal of The Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained Vol 7, No 1

Aptly enough, at this point I’d made significant progress in my pursuit of this creature. But…things still weren’t adding up. Noe cited an unnamed report which claimed that farmers in the area were nervous, but doesn’t give any further information on it. Which meant there had to be another source somewhere.

By now I’d spent around ten hours researching the Amish Country Creature, and this was before I’d even written a word. And yet, I still hadn’t found the bottom of this rabbit hole. I had to keep searching. So I took the one new clue that Noe’s article had given me and ran with it: Big Valley.

The Big Valley Monster

The first thing I learned was that “Big Valley” is not in Lancaster County. It’s in Mifflin County, about an hour-ish north of Lancaster. Also known as Kishacoquillas Valley, the area has an Amish population of a little over 3,000. It’s not unheard of for a writer to make a mistake like this when it comes to local geography. I’ve even covered these sorts of errors before. No one is perfect. But the revelations didn’t end there. Our twice named creature now had a third title: The Big Valley Monster.

On top of that, he also had an origin story, courtesy of Mifflin County Historical Society member Forest K. Fisher, who was kind enough to send me scans of the original articles.

In October 1973, writer Warden Sherwood Hartman had planned out a four part series on a terrifying beast. The first article ran in the Lewistown Sentinel on September 29, 1973 inside Hartman’s regular column "Bits & Pieces.”

This was it! The original report on the Amish Country Creature aka Amish Terrorizing Demonic Delinquent aka Big Valley Monster.

All of the subsequent information from future articles was there, only more fleshed out and told with the flair of an old school 70’s journalist. We get names of the eyewitnesses and even a report on the one and only fatality, the goose that was flung at the final witness so hard it’s neck was broken.

The column also ran alongside an illustration of the creature, looking more minotaur-like than ever. All the descriptors are there: Gray fur, a white mane, grizzly-like paws, tiger-like teeth, even the tail that was left out of other artist’s renderings.

But there was one more thing...

As it turns out, that first column would also be the last. Despite planning a four-part series, the Sentinel ran a follow-up on October 2nd, 1973 claiming that the series had been canceled. They also issued an apology. Why? Well, I’ll let them explain:

Oh Mr. Hartman, if only you knew just how much confusion your little foray into fiction would actually cause!

Do I Believe

This may be the first time I’ve been able to write such a definitive conclusion to one of these. Normally, I’m left contemplating the limits of trust and belief when it comes to eyewitnesses and their stories. But not this time. I do not believe in the Amish Country Creature, because there never was an Amish Country Creature.

What we do have here, is a good example of how easily misinformation can spread, and shift, and mutate taking on new faces and new names, losing more and more detail until it becomes something else entirely. It’s a prescient lesson for our current political reality. One that we can all learn from. No matter how safe you think you are from the grip of falsehood, it’s never more than a click away.

Normally, this is where I’d ask you what you think the eyewitness saw? But I hope I’ve done enough to show you exactly what the Amish Country Creature was. So instead, Let me know if you have any other favorite hoaxes in the comments!

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Bonus Round: If you’ve read this far, enjoy this letter to the editor, published in the Sentinel on October 4, 1973 describing Hartman’s monster.