Momo: The Missouri Monster
Momo, the Missouri Monster, was a hairy seven-foot creature reported in Louisiana, Missouri, from 11 July 1972. Searches found nothing and a hoax was alleged.
Momo, short for Missouri Monster, is a hairy, man-like creature that residents of Louisiana, Missouri, reported seeing in the summer of 1972. The first and most famous sighting came on 11 July 1972, when teenager Doris Harrison and her two younger brothers said they saw it outside their home at the foot of Star Hill. They described a figure about seven feet tall with dark fur, a terrible smell and a dead dog under one arm. More reports followed, a posse searched the woods, and national newspapers took up the story. More than a month of searching found no hard evidence. A retired local teacher later said three students had confessed to a hoax.
Momo, Missouri: What Happened in July 1972
On 11 July 1972, Doris Harrison, then a teenager, was in the kitchen while her two little brothers played in the backyard. She saw a dark-haired, man-like creature near the edge of the woods. She later described a “pumpkin-shaped head” and large glowing orange eyes. It appeared to have blood on its matted fur and was holding what looked like a dead dog.
Doris Harrison Bliss has never changed her account. Fifty years later she told the Hannibal Courier-Post that what she and her brothers saw that hot July day was not an animal known to science.
A Kansas City Times report from 31 July 1972 described the creature as black, furry and foul-smelling. It quoted a “Miss Harrison” as saying it gave a low roar that rose to a shrill whistle.
The Sightings That Followed
Once the Harrison story got out, other reports came in. People described the smell, or cries, growls and screams in the woods. Sightings were placed along the Mississippi and along creeks further west. The best known came from Richard Alan Murray, a lifelong resident who was the town’s fire chief and sat on the city council. Driving at about 11 pm near Town Branch creek, he saw an upright figure with brown hair about 20 feet away in his headlights before it ran off. “I was amazed to see something,” he said. He later admitted it could have been a bear.
One contemporary news report put the creature at nine to twelve feet tall, but most witnesses said about seven feet. Footprints were reported and some were sent to Lawrence Curtis, director of the Oklahoma City Zoo. He said they came from an unknown primate.
The Search and the Media Frenzy
The reports set off what the Courier-Post called a frenzy. Local search parties, state officials, national reporters and self-styled monster experts all came to town. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch covered the story on 19 July 1972. A posse of about twenty people went out to hunt the creature and failed. The searches went on for more than a month and found no hard evidence. Reports then thinned out over the following years and stopped.
Hoax Claims and Explanations
Retired educator Priscilla Giltner has said the whole thing was a prank by three former students who later confessed to her. She has never named them and they have never come forward, so the claim cannot be checked. Others in town have long called it a joke that made residents look foolish.
Other explanations are simpler. A black bear wandering into the river bluffs would fit some of the later reports, as Murray himself allowed. Once the story was in the papers, ordinary smells, noises and shapes in the dark were easy to read as the monster. Believers place Momo with Bigfoot and the Skunk Ape as a regional version of a large North American hominid. The Courier-Post noted that the Momo scare came five years after the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film, when such stories were fresh in the public mind.
Momo’s Legacy in Louisiana
Momo never became a big tourist draw like the Fouke Monster in Arkansas, but it stuck in local memory. Six Flags St. Louis ran a ride named after the creature from 1973 until 1994. Nashville recording artist Bill Whyte released a song about it, based on a poem by local radio announcer Joe Lewis and Paul Salois. In 2019, filmmaker Seth Breedlove released a film about the case, which mixes documentary interviews with mock 1970s monster movie scenes. For the fiftieth anniversary in 2022, Louisiana’s Chamber of Commerce chose “Show Me Mo Mo” as the theme for its October Colorfest.
What is documented is a run of sightings reported in local and national newspapers in July 1972, a failed search and no physical proof. Whether it was a bear, a prank or something else, Momo remains the best known monster story in Missouri.