The Loveland Frogman: Ohio's Bipedal Amphibian

Slow down on the Loveland bridge before dawn and look at the guardrail: a wet, frog-faced shape is crouched there, and as your high beams find it, it rises on two legs and slips over the rail toward the river before your brain finishes objecting.

Three creatures under a bridge

Loveland is a quiet town on the Little Miami River northeast of Cincinnati, and its monster is almost endearingly specific. The first notable account dates to May 1955, when a businessman driving late at night said he saw three squat, frog-faced creatures, three to four feet tall, gathered by the roadside near a bridge, one of them apparently holding a wand or rod that threw off sparks. It is an odd, detailed image, and it sat mostly forgotten for nearly two decades.

Then came 1972. In the early hours of 3 March, Loveland police officer Ray Shockey reported a frog-like creature crossing the road in his headlights before it climbed the guardrail and went over the embankment toward the river. Two weeks later another officer, Mark Matthews, saw something similar and fired at it. That second officer would later give the story its most deflating twist.

The iguana that would not die

Matthews eventually said the creature he shot at was a large iguana, probably an escaped or released pet, missing its tail, which shortened its silhouette into something more upright and strange in the dark and the cold. A tailless iguana lit by headlights on an icy road is not the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but it is a real animal doing a convincing impression of one, and it accounts for the reptilian, scaly quality several witnesses described.

The mundane reading does a lot of work. Ohio winters send cold-blooded animals into slow, awkward movement; riverbanks harbour big amphibians and reptiles; and a frog-faced silhouette is exactly what a startled driver assembles from a wet, hunched shape at the edge of the light. The 1955 "wand," meanwhile, has the flavour of a story polished in the retelling.

Why the frog keeps hopping

For all that, the legend refuses to sink. The Frogman is often compared to the kappa of Japanese folklore, a river-dwelling amphibious trickster, which says less about zoology than about how widely humans populate their waterways with something half-human and watchful. And the sightings kept coming: in August 2016 two teenagers playing Pokemon Go along the river photographed a large-eyed shape they identified as the Frogman, reviving the whole business for a new generation.

None of it needs to be a monster. But a town that produced a police officer's on-duty report, a second officer who fired his weapon, and a stubborn recurring silhouette by the same river has earned its legend the honest way, through witnesses who were not looking for one.

Below, readers have filed their own riverbank and roadside sightings and voted them True, Fake or Not sure. Set the iguana beside the frog-faced figure and decide for yourself.