Loveland is a small city northeast of Cincinnati, a former railroad town with the Little Miami River running through it. For more than 50 years it has also been known for a creature said to live along that river, a frog like figure that walks on two legs. The Loveland Frogman now has a festival, a musical and a following among people who collect stories of cryptids. Yet one of the two police officers whose 1972 reports turned a vague local tale into a legend has said in public that what he saw, and shot, was a large lizard. How the story grew anyway is the real puzzle, and the officers’ own words are the best place to start.
Where does the story begin?
Most retellings of the Loveland story start in 1955, and in a 2015 episode of the Skeptoid podcast, the writer Ryan Haupt, who grew up partly in Loveland, set out what is known about that first account, and it is very little. The exact date is unknown, though it is often said to have been in May. There are three versions, and all involve an unnamed businessman or traveling salesman driving along an unnamed road late at night. In the fullest version he saw three figures three to four feet tall with leathery skin, webbed hands and the faces of frogs, and one of them held up a wand that threw off sparks.
Brian Maxson, a Loveland barbershop owner who helped plan the city’s 2024 festival, gave a shorter version to the Statehouse News Bureau’s Ohio Newsroom. “He saw three of these figures,” Maxson said. “And described them as 3- or 4-foot tall lizard looking things, green and scaly on the side of the road. When he stopped, they jumped toward the river. And that was the end of it.” Haupt noted that it is not clear to whom or when the businessman gave his report, and he concluded that the 1955 account is so vague that it may never have happened at all.
What did the police officers report in 1972?
The story gained weight in March 1972, when two Loveland police officers reported strange encounters on the same stretch of road. As Haupt recounts the usual version, the first came at about 1:00 a.m. on March 3, 1972, when Officer Ray Shockey was driving carefully on an icy Riverside Drive and a creature crossed the road in front of his car. In that telling it was three to four feet tall, with leathery skin like a lizard or frog, and it stood upright before climbing over the guardrail toward the river.
Haupt was careful about the sourcing for this part. He wrote that he could not find direct testimony from Shockey himself, and that he found no articles from the time in the online archives of the Loveland Herald or the Cincinnati Enquirer, or anything in the police department’s report archives. He did find that a Ray Shockey born in Loveland in 1928 served on the city’s police department for 40 years beginning in 1971, which he treated as evidence that this was the officer in question, while stopping short of calling it confirmation.
The second encounter is better documented because the officer involved, Mark Mathews, later described it himself. Published accounts spell his surname both Mathews and Matthews, and this article follows the 2016 WCPO interview in which he spoke on the record. The popular version, as Haupt summarizes it, has Mathews stopping for what he thought was an injured animal on the road around St. Patrick’s Day, seeing it rise up, and firing at it as it climbed over the guardrail.
What did Mark Mathews later say he saw?
In August 2016, after WCPO reported a new claimed sighting, Mathews contacted the Cincinnati station to give his own account. He said Shockey had called him one night in March 1972 after seeing something strange on Riverside Drive and Kemper Road near the Little Miami River. “Naturally, I didn’t believe him,” Mathews said, though he added that he could tell from Shockey’s demeanor that he had seen something.
Later that month, Mathews said, he was driving on Kemper Road near a boot factory when something ran across the road. According to WCPO, he said the animal was not walking upright and did not climb over the guardrail as the legend says, but crawled under it. He said he “had no clue what it was.” He then explained his decision to fire. “I know no one would believe me, so I shot it,” he said.
Mathews told WCPO that he recovered the body, put it in the trunk of his car and showed it to Shockey, who said it was the creature he had seen too. He identified it as a large iguana about three to three and a half feet long, missing its tail, which he said was why he did not recognize it at first. He suggested it had been someone’s pet that escaped or was released when it grew too big, and that it may have survived the cold March weather by staying near warm water released from the factory. “The thing was half dead anyway when I shot it,” he said.
Mathews also said he had told the full story, including the iguana, to the author of a book about Ohio legends, and that the author ended the account at the gunshot. He described the Frogman legend as “a big hoax” and said, “There’s a logical explanation for everything.” Haupt also cited a supposed 2001 email interview, which he said he could not trace to a primary source, in which Mathews is often quoted as calling the incident “habitually blown out of proportion.”
Why did the legend survive the lizard?
Haupt offered several reasons, all presented as possibilities. He pointed to timing, since the film The Creature from the Black Lagoon came out in 1954, the year before the businessman story, and he argued that once a sighting enters local culture, later reports become more likely. Shockey, he noted, would have grown up in Loveland with the 1955 story in the background.
He also looked at ordinary animals that a driver might have seen at night. No iguanas are native to southwestern Ohio, but Haupt wrote that Mathews’s revised account “is consistent with an animal about the size of an iguana.” For the other reports he raised a coyote or dog with mange, whose patchy skin can look leathery at night, while admitting that “there’s no evidence to support this idea.” He also rejected claims, common online, that the creature comes from a Shawnee legend of a river demon called the Shawnahooc, writing that he saw the idea only in attempts to explain the Frogman and never in Shawnee folklore itself.
Haupt found that the story picked up neighbors along the way. He described how Naomi Johnson, who reported being grabbed by something while swimming in the Ohio River at Evansville in 1955, later connected her experience to the Kelly and Hopkinsville encounter in western Kentucky. Her account is sometimes grouped with the Loveland Frogman, although no creature was seen.
Local enthusiasm has kept the legend going long after the original reports faded, and Haupt noted a 2014 musical at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival titled Hot Damn! It’s the Loveland Frog, and the Ohio Newsroom reported in 2024 that Loveland was hosting its first Return of the Frogman festival, planned to return every leap year. Maxson, who placed the creature in the same company as Bigfoot and Mothman, told the outlet, “If you’re not familiar, think of Bigfoot or Mothman.” He also pointed to how the story changes in the retelling. “Some are recorded, but a lot of it is [passed down] word of mouth, person to person,” he said. “And that’s how things get weirder as the stories change.”
The newest claimed sighting came in 2016, when a couple playing Pokémon GO photographed something by the water. Maxson said of the photo, “You could argue one way or the other on it.” It was news of that photo, according to WCPO, that prompted Mathews to call the station with his account. Asked about the long life of the legend, he offered a comparison of his own. “I don’t believe in Bigfoot either,” he said.
So what was the Loveland Frogman?
The evidence points in one direction for 1972 and nowhere at all for 1955. The only officer who has spoken on the record in recent years says the creature he shot was a tailless iguana, and that Shockey identified it as the animal he had seen. Shockey’s own words from the time have not been found, and no 1972 press coverage or police record has been found, either by Haupt or in the searches made for this article. The 1955 businessman remains unnamed and undated. What remains firmly on record is the legend itself, which a city has adopted with affection, and the question of why a lizard on an icy road became a monster story that its home city now celebrates.
Established: Two Loveland police officers reported encounters with an unusual animal near the Little Miami River in March 1972, and one of them, Mark Mathews, later said on the record that it was a large tailless iguana he shot and recovered.
Unverified: The 1955 sighting of three frog like figures by an unnamed businessman. No name, date or contemporary record has been found.
Disputed: That Officer Ray Shockey saw an upright, frog like creature. This is the usual retelling, but no direct testimony from him has been found, and Mathews said Shockey identified the dead iguana as the animal he saw.
Fringe: That a race of frog like humanoids lives along the Little Miami River.
Sources
- Ryan Haupt, The Loveland Frog, Skeptoid Podcast, episode 473, June 30, 2015. skeptoid.com
- WCPO staff, Officer reveals true story of Loveland Frogman, WCPO 9 Cincinnati, August 5, 2016. wcpo.com
- Erin Gottsacker, Loveland is “leaping into the legend” of its notorious cryptid, The Ohio Newsroom, Statehouse News Bureau, October 11, 2024. statenews.org
