Gather round now for tales of the Mogollon Monster

Clay is off today. Here’s a column from April 3, 2009:

Today’s question:

When I was a kid in Phoenix in the early ’60s, I spent a week every summer at a Boy Scout camp east of Pine, just below the Mogollon Rim. Sometimes late at night, around a campfire, the older scouts would regale us with tales of attacks on ranchers and campers by the “Mogollon Monster.” Has anyone claimed to have seen hairy ape-men in Arizona recently? The Mogollon Monster is Arizona’s version of Bigfoot. It supposedly lives, as you may have guessed, along the Mogollon Rim, although it has allegedly been spotted around Prescott and in the Grand Canyon. It seems to be a shy thing, but every now and then, it tears up a campsite or takes the campers’ food.

Don Davis, a cryptozoology investigator who died in 2002, claimed that he encountered the monster at a Boy Scout camp near Payson in the 1940s. He reported:

“The creature was huge. Its eyes were deep set and hard to see. 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.”

There is also an account from a woman who said she saw the creature near Springerville. She described it as hairy, black and about 8 feet tall.

Personally, I think it’s all hooey, but who am I to say? Stranger things have happened.