Mogollon Monster as Giant Sloth in South West

This is our friend, the giant sloth again and new information is added as well.  We get the odor generated by the decaying meat caches created by this creature and we have hard confirmation from the remarkable claws observed.  The hair also fits our expectations from other sightings.  As well, this is our second clean sighting in the South West.

Once again it is not a bear and it is not a bigfoot.

It is noteworthy, that to protect territory, it screams and presents a club as well.  Unsurprisingly, the creature laps the blood from a fresh kill.  The sloth turns most if not all its meat into maggot caches which produces the awful odor.  Here we have it drinking blood to provide initial energy.  I would have expected it to go after the liver.  Again its dentation which is vegetarian may make that inconvenient.

The death of the victim mentioned also conforms well.  Flesh is thrown around and partially uncollected. The victim was again torn apart and then buried in caches to produce a maggot crop.  We had a similar circumstance in the Appalachians although the killing was discovered before collection.

Again the monster  is not correctly identified in this report.  So far, I continue to be the only person working this line of inquiry.

The Mogollon Monster

In central and eastern Arizona, Bigfoot is known as the Mogollon Monster.

http://www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2013/09/daily-2-cents-mogollon-monster-sonny.html

According to Weird Arizona: Your Travel Guide to Arizona's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets the reclusive creature is described as being at least seven feet tall, hairless in the face, but otherwise covered with a long, thick coat of either dark or reddish brown hair. He travels with a wide, inhuman stride, sometimes leaving footprints measuring 22 inches in length. Often, reports of the elusive beast involve a piercing, sometimes deafening scream or howl unlike that produced by any known wildlife.

Those who say they've crossed paths with the beast regularly describe an eerie silence prior to their encounter, an appreciable stillness in the woods that commonly surrounds predatory animals. Even more common are reports of a strong, very foul stench, which has been described as that of dead fish, a skunk with bad body odor, decaying peat moss and—by someone with an exceptionally keen sense of smell, apparently—the musk of a snapping turtle.

Most sightings of the Mogollon Monster, as suggested by the name, occur in and around the Rim country. The lumbering giant reportedly covers territory stretching from Prescott up to Williams, east over to Winslow and down to the Heber area, but most agree he generally sticks to the vicinity of Payson, near the Rim's edge.

It was near Payson where the creature was spotted by cryptozoologist Don Davis, whose run-in is generally accepted as the first known encounter with the Mogollon Monster. Davis said he witnessed the tall, hairy beast during a Boy Scout trip in the mid-1940s, when he was about 13 years old. As he and his fellow Scouts were camping near Tonto Creek, something in the night woke him while rummaging through the boys' belongings. When Davis called out to the noisemaker, who he thought to be a fellow Scout, the figure approached him and stood over his sleeping bag. Davis later described what he saw:

There, standing still less than four feet in front of me was a monster-like man. …The creature was huge. Its eyes were deep set and hard to see, but they seemed expressionless. …His chest, shoulders, and arms were massive, especially the upper arms—easily upwards of 6 inches in diameter, perhaps much, much more.

Davis also reported being overwhelmed by the Monster's incredible odor, although he believed at first he had simply messed his sleeping bag.

An even earlier report has surfaced from a 1903 edition of "The Arizona Republican." In it, a visitor to Arizona by the name of I.W. Stevens recounts his confrontation with what he referred to as the "wild man of the rocks." Though his encounter occurred further north, within the Grand Canyon, the story may be one of the earliest written records of such a sighting.


Stevens described the wild man as having "long white hair and matted beard that reached to his knees." When he approached for a closer look, Stevens saw that the creature "wore no clothing, and upon his talon-like fingers were claws at least two inches long." He also noted that "a coat of gray hair nearly covered his body, with here and there a spot of dirty skin showing." While this is not a traditional description of the beast we've come to know in recent years, we could perhaps infer that Stevens had run across an elderly Sasquatch, possibly suffering from a touch of the mange.

Stevens went on to tell how the canyon dweller threatened him with a large club and "screamed the wildest, most unearthly screech" he had ever heard, after Stevens discovered the beast drinking the blood of two young cougars that he had just beaten to death.

Another tale, regularly told secondhand at Boy Scout summer camp, involves an Arizona pioneer named Bill Spade. Spade supposedly built a log cabin on land adjacent to what is now Camp Geronimo, a Scout facility. Spade was attacked one night by the monster, who left no trace of his victim, save for Spade's face, which was torn off and left hanging from a tree. The cabin remained for decades afterward and the Mogollon Monster could often be spotted loitering nearby, waiting for a new inhabitant to deface.

Other stories making the rounds attempt to explain the origins of the Mogollon Monster. They vary in detail, but for the most part implicate a tormented Indian bent on revenge. One variant tells of a prehistoric tribe who, for untold reasons, exiled their own chief. The chief called upon the spirits and was transformed into a hirsute bogeyman, which enabled him to scare away his former clan. He lives on today, continuing to defend his territory.

In other versions, it was the tribe's medicine man who performed the transformation, enabling the chief to seek revenge on a rival who had stolen his wife. Further variations identify the Mogollon Monster as a pioneer who was the victim of an Indian attack; he escaped into the woods, but was cursed by the spirits and went insane. In a strange amalgamation of stories, the monster is the phantom of a white man who, as punishment for murdering an Indian woman, was hung from a tree by his hands, stretched to a height of eight feet, then skinned alive and left to die. Damned by the spirits, his ghost continues to roam the woods.