Loveland, 1972—The Loveland Frogs are among the more famous of Ohio’s cryptids, as witnesses have reported ape-men of various shapes and descriptions all over the world, and even lizard-men are fairly common in cryptozoology, but frog-men? Those seem to be unique to Loveland, a small town that’s part of the Greater Cincinnati area.
Interestingly, in 1955 there were multiple reports of small, oddly-shaped men with vaguely frog-like faces in and around Loveland, stories that are usually associated with ufology rather than cryptozoology.
The story of the Frogs proper occurs in 1972, when a pair of policemen each said they encountered a humanoid frog.
On March 3, 1972, a policeman caught sight of an upright, four-foot-tall, leathery-skinned, frog-faced creature in his car’s headlights while driving towards Loveland. The officer watched as the creature ran to the side of the road, hopped the guardrail and quickly ran down the embankment and disappeared into the water of the Little Miami River.
Two weeks later, a second officer saw a prone figure in his headlights that he at first took to be a wounded animal. He stopped his car to investigate, got out and approached the figure…and then realized it was a large, frog-like creature.
The figure jumped up into a crouched position and, as in the previous sighting by the previous officer, it ran to and vaulted the nearest guardrail. The officer fired a few shots at it, to no avail.
The second officer later said that what he saw was an ordinary iguana, and that he shot at it in order to produce a body and end the speculation of what the first officer saw. But a good monster story will always outlive a solution that could potentially dismiss it.
Illustration by Janie Walland
Monsters of Ohio 
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