Devil Monkey: Belt Road Booger

Posted by: Loren Coleman on October 15th, 2009

There is no secret to the fact that the ridicule curtain is lowered a bit every October, and that creature stories are actively pursued by the media as the calendar nears Halloween. But who would have guessed that an old “Devil Monkey” case would be revealed in 2009?

Cryptozoological topics, naturally, are good ones to investigate this time of year for local newspaper writers, and sometimes little known ones are discovered.

Devil Monkey © Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe 1999, 2006; © Harry Trumbore 1999, 2006.

One such subject popped up this week in the guise of the “Belt Road Booger.” (Booger is a local Southern word for a strange creature, an unknown animal, a ghostly figure, and/or a haunt.) Jeff Bishop wrote the 2009 story for The Times-Herald, for his little town in the bottomlands.

The Newnan Herald was Georgia’s first newspaper after Civil War, and the outcome, The Times-Herald, which was started as a sideline by two Newnan (Coweta County, Georgia) lawyers in the days after the Civil War ended, has existed now for 143 years.

Bishop, digging in the archives, found a thirty-year old series of stories that seemed appropriate for the weeks before Halloween.

In old issues of The Times-Herald, the reporter stumbled across front-page articles with headlines like the one dated August 9, 1979, “Strange Creature Seen Here.”

“Move over, Sasquatch, Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman and the Loch Ness Monster — make room for the Belt Road Booger!” the story screamed.

Bishop wrote:

Several sightings of a “monster” sighted on Belt Road near the intersection of West Washington Street were reported that week.

“It was dark. It stands about five feet tall. It’s big across the chest. Its eyes look like diamonds at night when you shine a light on them,” was how one local woman described the “monster.”

The creature was reported to have “a face like a monkey and a long bushy tail.”

The Newnan Police Department investigated the incident but found nothing.

The creature was “alleged to have eaten the inside of an apple, leaving only the peeling, and to have bitten a hunk out of an ear of corn.” It was also supposed to have climbed into a barn in the neighborhood, and some local children speculated that he slept in some junked cars in the woods near Belt Road.

The Belt Road Booger was spotted again in the Meadowview subdivision near Arnco, described by one local resident as “the ugliest looking thing I’ve ever seen.”

She described the animal as standing between 4 and 5 feet tall, and it was covered with black hair and a tail “like a beaver’s, but it’s bushy,” with “a face like a dog.”

She said the creature dug into her flowers and tried to kill her calladiums.

Sightings were reported in the following weeks in the Smokey Road and Ishman Ballard Road areas, and then later at Sargent. Then reports began to become less frequent, and the Belt Road Booger was seemingly forgotten.

Bishop found that sightings appeared to return in April 2005, with the re-naming of the thing seen as the “Happy Valley Horror.”

An avid hunter and outdoorsman, very familiar with local wildlife described “an enormous … very hairy” beast walking upright in a field on Happy Valley Circle. He thought it was Bigfoot.

Then in August 2005, a skeptical Happy Valley Circle resident, Donna Robards, told of how her family saw the creatures in late August 2005. They described them as “big and hairy and walking upright,” but it wasn’t a bear “because the face was flat and didn’t have a snout like a bear.”

On August 25, a pair was seen, with the larger of the two creatures being 8 feet tall and covered with coarse black hair. The other was a foot shorter and its hair was reddish-brown in color.

In recognition of the 30th anniversary of the creature’s initial appearance, The Times-Herald appears to be gathering new stories and planning an update.

Clearly, the “dog-faced” case from 1979 is different than the sightings from 2005.

For hominologists, these stories fit into the diverse context of the “Devil Monkeys” reports from the South. The tail and head, of course, in the 1979 accounts, speak to something other than an ape or your typical Bigfoot described four years ago. But reports like these are nothing new.

One case summarized in my field guide involves a “giant monkey” encounter in June 1953, in the Gosainkund Pass, Nepal. George Moore, M.D. and his companion, George K. Brooks, came face to face with what they took to be Abominable Snowmen, while they were on a medical mission in the area.

Of course, Yetis don’t have long tails, but then normal monkeys aren’t man-sized and walk towards you in a misty valley in Nepal, either.

The Moore-Brooks sighting, a strange story indeed, involved two credible eyewitnesses. It remains a mystery of the Himalayas, as much as the Belt Road Booger is in Georgia.

Field Guide to Bigfoot

Find out more about other Devil Monkeys in The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates.

Please click on the button below (not the one up top) to send in your museum donation.

Thank you.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.


5 Responses to “Devil Monkey: Belt Road Booger”

  1. Animus responds:

    Last nights Destination Truth had a show on the South American Chullachaqui and this morning I was reading about the Devil Monkey in Coleman’s Mysterious America. I’ve noticed that both these creatures seem to bear a striking resemblance to each other. Could they be related?

    Also, does anyone know where Destination Truth finds its newspaper clippings? I search the web everyday and don’t find the articles of credible and current creature sighting that they seem to come up with from all over the world.

  2. cryptidsrus responds:

    Thanks for the story, Loren.

    Are these the furry creatures that hop like Kangaroos???

    I don’t have “Mysterious America” with me at the moment—but you have a picture of the critter in there. 2001 edition. I think that’s the same as these. If not, please correct me. 🙂

  3. BFilmFan responds:

    Sounds a lot like the beast that Linda Godfrey reported on in Hunting the American Werewolf.

    She did have a report from Georgia in the book.

  4. Jeremy_Wells responds:

    I’ve always loved that Adams County “Devil Monkey” report (possibly because I spent a few formative years, from age 10 to 12, living in Adams County, Ohio).
    Not far from where this sighting occurred (if I recollect correctly, don’t have the book in front of me at the moment), is the church in Duncansville where an “angel” sighting supposedly left an image burnt into the church door (somewhere my family has photos of this and I remember visiting it as a youngster). There are also hairy hominid and UFO reports from around the GE testing facility, ABC reports from the Davis Memorial State Nature Preserve (and most old-timers claimed to have seen one or two in their youth). And then, of course, there is the famous Serpent Mound.
    So much wonderful weirdness in that little “neck of the woods”!

  5. jmiles responds:

    Another odd area is Georgia is Booger Bottom, found in the western part of the state. It is known for a unique UFO sighting. See my Weird Georgia column.

    Jim Miles

Sorry. Comments have been closed.

|Top | Content|


Connect with Cryptomundo

Cryptomundo FaceBook Cryptomundo Twitter Cryptomundo Instagram Cryptomundo Pinterest

Advertisers



Creatureplica Fouke Monster Sybilla Irwin



Advertisement

|Top | FarBar|



Attention: This is the end of the usable page!
The images below are preloaded standbys only.
This is helpful to those with slower Internet connections.