The New Monsters: The Loveland Frogman - Part One
THE DEVIL WITHIN THE NEW MONSTERS: THE LOVELAND FROGMAN Episode One — Encounter There are places where the modern world seems to thin after dark. Outside Loveland, Ohio, the Little Miami River winds through wooded banks, bridges and stretches of road where everything beyond the headlights can disappear into darkness. It was along this landscape in March 1972 that Loveland police officer Ray Shockey reportedly encountered something strange near the roadway—an unusual creature that moved toward the guardrail and vanished in the direction of the river. Then another Loveland police officer encountered something in roughly the same area. This week, The New Monsters investigates the legend of the Loveland Frogman, one of Ohio's strangest and most beloved cryptids. But beneath the stories of upright amphibious creatures and mysterious encounters is something even more interesting: a collection of separate incidents that gradually became the history of a single monster. We begin with the landscape itself and the Little Miami River, the waterway that helped shape Loveland long before anyone imagined a Frogman living beside it. From Indigenous history and early settlement to farms, mills, railroads and the growth of Cincinnati, the river became both an economic corridor and a natural boundary between civilization and the remaining woods. Even as modern development spread outward, the river preserved precisely the sort of places where folklore thrives: dark water, wooded banks, blind curves and roads that surrender to the landscape after sunset. Then we travel back to 1955, when the earliest and most mysterious chapter of the Frogman legend supposedly occurred. Later versions describe a motorist encountering several short, upright creatures with leathery, frog-like bodies—and even claim that one carried a bizarre rod or wand capable of producing sparks. The problem is that the original encounter is difficult to document cleanly, and many of its most famous details reach us through later retellings. Seventeen years later, the story becomes considerably harder to ignore. In March 1972, Officer Shockey reported encountering an unusual animal while driving near the Little Miami. Fellow officer Mark Mathews subsequently encountered something in the same area and fired at it. Years later, Mathews would insist there was nothing supernatural about what he saw: according to him, the creature was a large iguana missing its tail, probably an escaped or abandoned exotic pet. That should have killed the legend. Instead, it helped create one. Because once the name Frogman entered the story, separate encounters began fitting together. The mysterious creatures of 1955 became earlier sightings of the animal encountered by police in 1972, while the credibility of the later police encounters reached backward and gave the older story an authority it had never possessed on its own. Loveland no longer had an unexplained animal sighting; it had a history. And that's where our investigation begins. IN THIS EPISODE The Little Miami River and the history that shaped Loveland; the mysterious and difficult-to-document 1955 encounter; Ray Shockey's 1972 roadside sighting; Mark Mathews and the alleged tailless iguana; the exotic-pet explanation; and the strange process by which separate stories became the mythology of the Loveland Frogman. Next time on The New Monsters, we'll go deeper into the bizarre 1955 encounter, investigate the Frogman's infamous sparking wand, and discover how paranormal books, local storytelling and eventually the internet transformed a handful of uncertain encounters into one of America's most recognizable regional cryptids. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts. Rate & Review: Leave us a 5-star rating and review to help more listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications for every new episode. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and send your stories, sightings and tips to info@eviocreative.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices