A real, documented 1972 monster panic on the Mississippi bluffs
Momo, short for Missouri Monster, came out of the woods at Louisiana, Missouri, a historic Pike County river town on the Mississippi, on 11 July 1972. Two young boys were playing in the backyard of their home at the foot of Star Hill, on the rural edge of town, when their older sister Doris, in the kitchen, heard them scream. Through the window she saw a massive, dark-haired, man-like creature about 7 feet tall with a pumpkin-shaped head, so much hair that only its glowing orange eyes showed, holding what looked like a dead dog. The children said it smelled terrible.
More reports followed through the weeks after, up and down the river and farther west along other waterways: glimpses in the woods, a beastly smell, bear-like growls and inhuman screams. The most notable came from Richard Allan Murray, the town's fire chief and a member of the city council, who said that while driving along the small creek through the middle of town his headlights caught a huge upright figure, which ran off. He had thought it all nonsense, he said, until he saw something. The press arrived, and so did curiosity seekers and monster hunters from across the country; a 20-person posse went out to hunt the creature and found nothing. Tracks were sent to Lawrence Curtis, director of the Oklahoma City Zoo, who judged them those of an unknown primate.
It was the right summer for a monster. Five years earlier Roger Patterson had shot the most famous Bigfoot film of all in Northern California, and the Loch Ness monster and flying saucers were in the news again. Judy Schmidt of the Louisiana Area Historical Museum points out that caves under the limestone bluffs and plenty of wildlife made Pike County a likely hideout, and that native tribes told of such beasts long before. More than a month of searching turned up no hard evidence.
The town is still divided. Doris Harrison Bliss maintains that what she and her brothers saw was no animal known to science. A retired Louisiana teacher, Priscilla Giltner, says it was all a bamboozle by three of her former students, who confessed to the caper; she has never named them. Either way Momo stuck. Joe Lewis and Paul Salois wrote the poem behind Bill Whyte's song Mo Mo the Missouri Monster, Six Flags St. Louis ran a ride named for the creature from 1973 to 1994, a docudrama, Momo: The Missouri Monster, came out in 2019, and for the 50th anniversary the town's Colorfest took Show Me Mo Mo as its theme.
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