Wild Man of the Grand Canyon

10/5/2024

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Unlike the stories told of Bigfoot, this cryptid has a much more dangerous reputation. It's described as nocturnal, omnivorous and extremely territorial. Its footprints have been measured at 22 inches.

Mogollon Rim

The Mogollon Monster is reported as mimicking birds, coyotes and other wildlife, as well as making unusual whistling sounds. Most disturbing of all it's purported to visit campsites after dark, while humans are sleeping nearby.

The monster is described as measuring between 7 to 10 feet in height, and that he smells very badly, similar to dead fish or a skunk.

The Ponderosa pines of northern Arizona is where most sightings come from. There are encounters that said it's covered in white, gray or dark brown hair with either green or red eyes.

This cryptid has been reported as far back as 1903. It's described as a towering aggressive creature whose call chills the blood, and is anything but human-sounding.

The first recorded sighting of the beast occurred in 1901, but was reported in 1903 when I.W. Stevens described he had business in northwestern Arizona that took him to the lower end of the Grand Canyon at the Colorado River. He told the newspapers:

I saw … a man with long white hair and a matted beard that reached his knees. He wore no clothing and upon his talon-like fingers were claws at least two inches long. A coat of gray hair nearly covered his body, with here and there a patch of dirty skin showing...
The creature turned his face toward me. Horrors! What a face! It was seared and burned brown by the sun, with fiery green eyes.

Sightings of the Mogollon Monster date back to 1901.

The creature charged him while wielding a club, but at the last moment a mountain lion showed up with two cubs. Williams shot the mountain lion and the beast ran away, however as he was making his way back to his boat he saw it was eating all three mountain lions, and lapping their blood up. He had heard of the "wild man of the rocks", and he wondered if this was one of three men who hostile Indians had set adrift on the river many years before, who had lost his sanity and continued to scrounge through the landscape for sustenance.

There have been other sightings of a similar creature in the area of Mogollon Rim in northern Arizona, as well as Prescott Valley and Clifton.

Don Davis, a cryptozoologist reported an encounter in 1944, when he was only 13 years old and on a Boy Scout camping trip. The troop was camped out by the Tonto Creek, when the sound of someone rummaging around through their things woke up several of the boys. He thought it was one of the others scouts, and he yelled out for him to go back to bed. The rustling stopped and the person came over to where Davis was inside his sleeping bag and stood over him. His response was typically that of a child, and many adults, he just covered his head with the sleeping bag. The creature left, its awful funk trailing behind it.

He described it this way:

There, standing still less than four feet in front of me was a monster-like man. The creature was huge. Its eyes were deep-set and hard to see, but they seemed expressionless. His face seemed pretty much devoid of hair, but there seemed to be hair along the sides of his face. His chest, shoulders and arms were massive, especially the upper arms — easily upwards of 6 inches in diameter, perhaps much, much more. I could see he was pretty hairy, but didn’t observe really how thick the body hair was. The face/head was very square; square sides and squared up chin, like a box.

I.W. Steven's encounter with a "wild man" c.1903

This same scenario has been described by other campers in the Mogollon Rim area, where the creature had crept into their campsite and rummaged through their belongings, and steals food. Others have had stones thrown at them as they are walking or hiking the trails. Besides a woman-like scream it's been heard to whoop, whistle and howl.

Author Bentley Little in 2000 retold the story of Bill Spade, a pioneer who built a cabin at the foot of the Rim who was attacked on a rainy night. The next day rescuers found what was left of him, which was his face hanging from the branch of a tree. It was said he had been killed by the monster.

Camp Geronimo was built next to where Spade's empty house remained. Word had it that scouts would see a large figure nosing around the property.

In2006, Collette Altaha spokesperson for the White Mountain Apache Nation described sightings of the creature which had been dubbed the Mogollon Monster.

Tribal police had seen the creature looking through windows.

Marjorie Grimes who lives on the reservation said she had first seen it in 1982, and the last time in 2004 when she was driving home from Cibecue. She described the incident this way: "It was all black and it was tall! The way it walked; it was taking big strides. I put on the brakes and raced back and looked between the two trees where it was, and it was gone!"

A wild man was captured in Huachuca after Stevens released his story about his encounter at Mogollon Rim. c.1903

Susan Farnsworth, the author of the The Mogollon Monster: Arizona's Bigfoot (1996) started to receive many reports in 2007 about sightings. In Memorial Day, 2008 she traveled to the area with her husband. Than a week later, Alex Hearn with the Arizona Cryptozoological Research Organization and other researchers found a 19-inch footprint 20 feet from their tent.

In 2014 or 2018, a sociology student hiking through Canyon Point trail came across a creature kneeling down as it drank water. Suddenly the hairy man looked towards her, and she started to wave her arms around in order to scare it. It stood up and ran into the canyon. She said it had a human face with no hair on it, a thick nose, thin lips, reddish brown eyes and the body was covered in hair. She said it was a "troll-looking creature". This was in Payson, near where Davis had his encounters as child in the 1940s.

Scientist believe that an animal of this type could not remain hidden for this length of time, and the stories told of encounters are simply hoaxes. They point out that up to the 1930s grizzly bears could be found in the forests of Arizona.

Strangely, only a month after Steven's story was published in 1903, a note appeared in an Arizona newspaper where a wild man was captured at Huachuca Siding and taken to Tombstone. He was described as insane, and had been seen frequently in the Huachuca mountains for some time past. They had no clue to his identity.

Sheriff Dell Lewis of Cochise County was in Tucson yesterday on his way to Phoenix with a loco who was captured on Green's place in the Huachuca Mountains. The man had become a veritable wild man. His hair reaches in a tangled mass below his shoulders, his nails have grown out something like those of a wild beast and until the time of his capture the wild man lived in a cave in the mountains, subsisting on wild roots and herbs.