April 25th, 1973.

Enfield, Illinois.

Late one night in home alone, the McDaniel children heard scratching.

The back door, then the front.

Something seemed to keep moving, as if it were trying to find a weak spot in the house.

The brother and sister were understandably spooked.

Henry Jr.

grabbed the family's loaded .22 pistol, ready to defend themselves.

When their parents finally arrived home, their father, Henry McDaniel, didn't believe the children at first, but when he heard the unusual scratching sound at the front door, he quickly changed his tune.

Armed with a gun and a flashlight, Henry flung the front door open.

What he saw standing in his front yard was a creature that looked out of this world.

Henry fired four shots at the strange creature, but he easily leapt away into the night, leaving behind bizarre looking tracks and a slimy substance on the door.

It was the first night in what would become known as the Enfield Horror.

[tense music] This was the start of how a small farming town became home to one of America's strangest monster stories.

And the nation's reaction to it was so fascinating, it was studied by sociologists.

So what exactly did Henry McDaniel see?

[graphics scratching] [calm music] [camera clicking] When state troopers arrived at the McDaniel residence to investigate, they found evidence that seemed to support at least part of Henry's story.

Their search revealed tracks in the ground that looked like a dog's paw, but with six toe pads.

Plaster casts were made from the mysterious tracks.

They also discovered the back screen door was torn, and there were deep scratches in the wood.

A slimy substance was found on what remained of the screen and strands of strange fur hung from the rose bushes in the front yard.

The police interviewed Henry, and to his credit, Henry seemed rational and sober.

He was a disabled war veteran, a father, and by some accounts, an antique dealer.

Henry was kind of an eccentric fellow who lived, you know, I don't want to say on the edge of town, but actually quite literally, he really did live close to the edge of town.

(Emily) Henry described the creature as having pink eyes, a large head, was a dirty-ish gray color, hairy, about four or five feet tall.

Henry said it stood right in front of the door on three legs, just like a human being.

The troopers also interviewed neighbors, and one claimed their boy had encountered the same creature earlier that evening when it stomped on the boy's foot and tore his shoe.

Gunshots and the police presence roused neighbors.

And after the state troopers left, a large gathering of locals converged on Henry's property, discussing the event and speculating on what Henry had actually seen.

It was reported somewhere in the vicinity of 50 to 75 people kind of poked out, you know, came and gathered around near his house to see, "What's going on?"

(Emily) Weirdly, numerous reports of kangaroos roaming the Midwest had been happening for decades, and many thought he had seen an escaped kangaroo.

On May 16th, three weeks after Henry's first report of the Enfield Monster, a letter was sent to a nearby newspaper from a man claiming that his pet kangaroo Macey had gone missing about a year prior in Ohio.

He offered a $500 reward for its safe return.

Henry, however, insisted that he knew what kangaroos looked like, having kept one as a pet during his army service in World War II while stationed in Australia.

For what it's worth, a man Henry described as "a dafty gent" even gave him a lie detector test, which showed he was telling the truth.

Henry claimed he had a photostatic memory.

He told reporters he wasn't scared, and even joked he would like to have the creature as a pet and charge admission.

[calm music] The following day, the local newspaper, the "Carmi Times," detailed McDaniel's encounter with a weird creature.

Twenty-four hours later, the Enfield Horror became a national news story.

As the story picked up steam, Henry received over 200 phone calls.

One person claimed to be a government official, who told him that similar sightings were usually connected to UFO activity.

I mean, cue eye roll.

It's not known how credible the official was, but it's very possible the man was trying to prank Henry.

After all, stories about alien encounters were popular at the time.

County Sheriff Roy Poshard, Jr.

had a different problem.

Curious strangers were starting to arrive in Enfield looking for a monster.

Cryptid hunters swarmed the small town, and some of them were armed.

After reports of gunfire one evening, several young men from out of town were arrested and charged with hunting violations.

They did not have a hunting license, as if you would have a hunting license for hunting monsters, but they didn't have any kind of hunting license.

And they had heard about the episode.

So they said, "Well, we were just hunting the monsters."

The sheriff dismissed the idea that they were serious investigators, saying they were just "out drinking and raising hell."

Sheriff Poshard had little patience for the monster story.

It brought monster investigators into town, and his normal work was disrupted by arrests, media calls, and complaints from residents.

His ultimate opinion on the monster was: "there ain't a damn thing to it."

One investigator was Rick Rainbow, a radio station news director from Indiana.

On May 6th, Rick and some of his colleagues spotted a strange creature at an abandoned home near Henry's property.

[tense music] It looked similar to what Henry described.

About five feet tall, gray in color, but moving as if hunched over.

Rainbow even recorded a strange cry he believed came from the creature.

Unfortunately, that recording has been lost to time.

Later that night at 3:00 AM, Henry saw the creature a second time, walking along the railroad tracks near his home.

It seemed unfazed by the neighborhood dogs, which barked and howled at its presence.

After that sighting, Henry made up his mind that the creature wasn't from here.

Henry claimed, "If they do find it, "they will find more than one, "and they won't be from this planet, I can tell you that."

Anthropology student and budding cryptozoologist Loren Coleman also came to investigate.

And while he did not see the Enfield Monster, he too heard a strange scream.

Not everyone took the alleged evidence and sightings seriously.

In fact, most locals didn't believe Henry or his family.

Rumors began to spread that Sheriff Poshard was threatening to arrest Henry and sent him to "the funny farm" if he kept making claims about the creature.

Others whispered that Henry even left town to avoid the attention and ridicule.

The events in Enfield drew so much attention that noted sociologists wanted to study what happened.

They weren't trying to prove whether the creature was real or not.

They were more interested in learning about the psychological and social factors behind the events and what made them so sensational.

At first glance, the Enfield Monster seems like a textbook case of mass hysteria: A strange encounter makes the news, rumors spread, more people begin reporting sightings, and before long, an entire town appears convinced a monster is terrorizing them.

[calm music] Enfield made for an interesting case study.

Was the town genuinely swept up in a wave of collective belief, or was something else happening?

To answer that question, sociologist David Miller, along with his colleagues Kenneth J. Mietus and Richard A. Mathers from Western Illinois University, traveled to Enfield just two weeks after the first sightings of the creature.

I said, "Hey, this is an active event.

"Let's go down and see which of these perspectives "gives the best explanation for what's going on, in terms of this so-called mass hysterical phenomenon."

(Emily) Rather than searching for a monster, they interviewed residents, local officials, and witnesses, to understand how the story had spread.

I was surprised how open people were in terms of their willingness to take the time to talk with us.

Was this a case of hysteria driven by social contagion?

At the time, there was kind of a, the social contagion model by Herbert Blumer, which was introduced back in 1939.

I think the conventional notion is that very, very large segments of the population kind of take leave of their senses, they become very emotionally aroused and very suggestible, and are willing to believe the most outlandish ideas, and suddenly seem to lose all their ability to critically reason.

And that this would represent fairly large segments of the population.

And that somehow this is infectious or contagious-- If you're near people who are experiencing this, they will catch it and suddenly become hysterical as well.

What they found surprised them.

They noticed there was a big discrepancy between the news reports and what residents were actually saying.

Despite the national headlines, there were very few firsthand sightings.

(Kenneth) What we kind of discovered here was that for the most part, not that many people even reported seeing a monster.

Some of the most sensational stories, including the boy who claimed the monster had stomped on his foot and torn his shoe, turned out to be fabricated.

So we actually talked to the family of the boy and the, both the boy and his mom.

And it was kind of a joke that they were pulling on the local, the news guys that were coming down there.

So they had a little fun.

The kid found a shredded tennis shoe and, "This was my tennis shoe, and the monster tore it all up."

The sociologists concluded that Enfield was not a classic case of mass hysteria.

What we essentially discovered was that the hysterical, so-called hysterical behavior, the number of monster sightings was really quite limited.

It was really more kind of a conversation, sort of "A unique event happened, let's talk about it."

But not really much different than people would've probably talked about "Well, hey, did you hear the gas station burned down yesterday?"

By every standard of this whole contagion image of collective behavior, none of those things really happened, but the news media picked up on it, the idea.

(Emily) It was a single event amplified by rumors, newspapers, and radio broadcasts that evolved into a legend.

It wasn't a case of mass social contagion.

And it didn't really cause a lot of disruption other than the fact that, you know, the initial sighting with the police and the crowd kind of wanted to know what went on.

(Emily) That's what makes the Enfield Horror especially relevant.

It demonstrates how quickly folklore can form if enough people are talking about a strange occurrence.

Add in local media that becomes national media, and that only gives it more weight.

And once it hit the wire services, it was-- it was an open season.

You know, everybody was broadcasting about this.

We are still doing this today.

Just one search on cryptids or UFOs on social media quickly reveals a similar kind of collective storytelling that intensifies over time.

It's just happening at an even faster pace.

(Kenneth) I was probably a little bit surprised, too, by the fact that this particular model of social contagion just fell so flat in terms of its ability to explain what was happening.

Because at that time, that was the prevailing theoretical model that most collective behavior theorists approached these kinds of events with.

And yeah, it was so stunningly wrong.

[laughing] That was surprising.

The term "mass hysteria" in general has become so well adopted or integrated into our cultural explanation for these kinds of things that people really see it as a very real phenomena.

And I really have serious doubts about how real and extensive it is.

Whenever I hear that term used, like "Well, maybe."

More than 50 years later, there's still no consensus about what Henry saw that April night.

The physical evidence has long disappeared, and only newspaper clippings and witness accounts remain.

Sheriff Poshard retired, the sightings faded, and the crowds moved on.

Maybe it was just an unfamiliar animal in poor lighting, or the excitement of the moment shaped what Henry thought he saw, or maybe he encountered something he simply couldn't identify.

Henry became almost as much a subject of discussion as the creature itself.

Some locals treated him as a sincere man, while others saw him as perhaps a little too eager to talk.

One of the more common responses that we got when we first started interviewing people was the first line was, "Well, you gotta know Henry."

Nobody was really terribly upset.

It was just sort of like, "Well, Henry's up to his old tricks again."

(Emily) The story took on a life of its own.

Long before social media, Enfield showed us just how quickly an extraordinary story could spread and evolve.

The Enfield Horror demonstrates what we've always done as a species: make up stories about the weird things that happen in our world.

It's not mass hysteria, it's human nature.

A large head, a-- Walking along the railroad tracks near his home.

I don't know why I said that weird.

Railroad tracks.

Okay.

Along with his colleagues, Kenneth J. Mietus and... Is it Midas, like Midas Touch?

-Pah-shard?

-(speaker) Poshard.

Poshard.

...at the county sheriff, Roy Poshard Jr.