Loveland Frogman

The 1972 reports

The Cincinnati Post ran Si Cornell's column "Loveland monster" on March 27, 1972. Patrolman Ray Shockey, 23, said he had seen "an animal two to three feet tall with dark green or blackish scaly skin" that "ducked over the bank into the river." Patrolman Mark Mathews, 21, whom the 1972 papers spelled Matthews, said he saw the same kind of creature ten days earlier, at 6am. It "stuck its tongue out at me," he said, and the tongue was "forked like a serpent's." He fired three shots, "apparently missing." Bob Lotshaw, a zoo curator, said the officers' sketch resembled the Creature from the Black Lagoon and that the only thing he could think of in nature was "a great big frog."

On April 12, the Dayton Journal Herald's Jan Goldstein reported that the department had "tried to keep the whole thing a secret" during the week between the two sightings. His lead said police had admitted the creature "has been shot and killed by a village patrolman." In the text, Mathews said he fired a .357, "hit it four times," and saw it give "one last hop," fall into the river, and wash away. He thought it was an iguana, and Shockey declined to comment. The zoologist Parry Wakeman said the officers' composite drawing showed something "unlike any possible animal," not a reptile or amphibian "because the weather was cold," and suggested an otter or a woodchuck.

Mark Mathews, later

Mathews, a Loveland patrolman from 1971 to 1976, told X-Project Paranormal Magazine in a 2001 e-mail interview, "It was and is no 'monster.'" He said the animal "did not stand erect." In August 2016, he told WCPO a different version. The animal had crawled under the guardrail, and he shot it, he said, because "I know no one would believe me." He put the body, a large iguana about 3 or 3.5 feet long and missing its tail, in his trunk to show Shockey. He died on March 16, 2022.

The 1955 reports

Two separate 1955 reports are now folded into the legend. The newsletter Orbit, on September 2, 1955, described a Loveland businessman who saw four "strange little men about three feet tall" under a bridge. The researcher Ted Bloecher later learned that the witness was 19, an auxiliary policeman, and that a "terrible smell" hung over the area. The second report, from Branch Hill, was unknown outside the participants until August 1956. Robert Hunnicutt, a short-order chef, told Police Chief John Fritz that driving home at about 3:30am on the Madeira-Loveland Pike he had taken three figures at the roadside for "three crazy guys praying by the side of the road." Each stood about three and a half feet tall, with gray skin and a wide mouth that reminded him of a frog, and blue-white sparks jumped "back and forth from one hand to the other" above a rod or chain. He could place it only in March or April. In the late 1970s, UFO Review tied Branch Hill to the patrolmen in an article called "The Loveland Frog," and gave the patrolmen pseudonyms.

The park now

Loveland's city mascot, a frog, debuted in February 2023, and the city held a Return of the Frogman festival on October 12, 2024, which it says it will repeat only in leap years. In May 2026, WCPO reported that Tom Post was painting a mural at Nisbet Park that includes the Frogman. On April 13, 2026, two state representatives introduced House Bill 821 to designate the Loveland Frog as Ohio's official cryptid, and the House referred it to the Government Oversight Committee on May 13. On September 29, 2026, the city began raising money for a bronze sculpture and water feature at the park, with a goal of $100,000. Its campaign page showed $325 raised.

Nisbet Park is open from dawn to dusk and provides access to the Little Miami Bike Trail. The city says the park's shelters cannot be rented from March through November because of construction. Post's mural is on the Bronner Garage at the park. WCPO placed both 1972 sightings at Kemper Road and Riverside Drive, about 0.3 mile from the park. Loveland Castle, at 12075 Shore Drive, charges $5 and is open from 11am to 5pm daily from April through September and on Saturdays and Sundays the rest of the year. Jeff Craig, not the city, runs the Frogman Festival, which is March 5 and 6, 2027, at the Oasis Conference Center.