The Devil Within

THE DEVIL WITHIN

THE NEW MONSTERS: THE LOVELAND FROGMAN

Episode Two — The Creature Gets a Name

Before the Loveland Frogman became one of America's strangest regional cryptids, it may have been something else entirely.

The story takes us back to Loveland, Ohio, in 1955, where a businessman or traveling salesman supposedly encountered three small humanoid figures beside a country road near the Little Miami River. Later versions describe creatures standing three or four feet tall, with leathery skin, deeply wrinkled heads and vaguely frog-like faces. Then one of them reportedly raised a strange metal rod above its head—and sparks began shooting from it.

A Frogman is strange enough.

A Frogman with a magic wand requires considerably more explanation.

In Episode Two of The New Monsters, we investigate how a handful of separate encounters gradually became the mythology of the Loveland Frogman—and why the creature's bizarre origins may have more in common with America's flying-saucer obsession than traditional cryptozoology.

The problem begins with the 1955 encounter itself. Unlike the better-documented police sightings that followed seventeen years later, there is no readily available contemporary police report establishing the version of the story we know today. Its famous details reach us largely through later researchers, paranormal literature and decades of retelling, meaning the Frogman's origin story belongs much more securely to folklore than verified history.

And then there's that wand.

America in 1955 was deep in the first great age of flying-saucer fascination. UFO reports were multiplying, science-fiction theaters were filled with extraterrestrial visitors, and stories of strange humanoids carrying mysterious technology occupied a very different corner of the American imagination. Three small beings beside a road carrying a sparking device don't necessarily sound like unknown amphibians at all. They sound suspiciously like visitors. The documentary trail is too weak to conclude that the Frogman began as a UFO story, but the possibility reveals just how dramatically a story can change depending upon the name we eventually give its creature.

Then came 1972.

Loveland police officers Ray Shockey and Mark Mathews encountered unusual animals near the Little Miami River seventeen years after the alleged 1955 incident. Suddenly, the older story had something it had previously lacked: recognizable witnesses and the authority of a police uniform. Three mysterious humanoids from 1955 could become earlier examples of the same creature encountered by police in 1972, while those later encounters appeared to prove that something had been returning to the river for decades.

Separate stories became sightings. Sightings became a pattern. And eventually, the pattern became a monster.

Once the name Loveland Frogman took hold, the transformation accelerated. Paranormal books, cryptozoology collections and eventually the internet standardized a creature that eyewitness testimony had left frustratingly incomplete. Artists supplied enormous eyes, long limbs, webbed hands and unmistakably amphibian features until generations of people who had never seen the creature nevertheless knew exactly what a Loveland Frogman was supposed to look like.

And somehow, through every transformation, the sparking wand survived.

This week on The Devil Within, we follow one of America's strangest cryptids from an uncertain roadside encounter through police reports, paranormal publishing and the internet, examining how folklore can create a coherent history from stories that may never have belonged together in the first place.

Because the Loveland Frogman wasn't simply discovered.

It was assembled.

Next time, the Frogman enters the smartphone age when teenagers playing Pokémon Go near Loveland encounter something strange beside the water. We'll also meet the police officer who publicly tried to kill his own legend by insisting that the Frogman he encountered in 1972 was actually a tailless iguana—and discover why Loveland kept its monster anyway.

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THE DEVIL WITHIN

THE NEW MONSTERS: THE LOVELAND FROGMAN

Episode One — Encounter

There are places where the modern world seems to thin after dark. Outside Loveland, Ohio, the Little Miami River winds through wooded banks, bridges and stretches of road where everything beyond the headlights can disappear into darkness. It was along this landscape in March 1972 that Loveland police officer Ray Shockey reportedly encountered something strange near the roadway—an unusual creature that moved toward the guardrail and vanished in the direction of the river.

Then another Loveland police officer encountered something in roughly the same area.

This week, The New Monsters investigates the legend of the Loveland Frogman, one of Ohio's strangest and most beloved cryptids. But beneath the stories of upright amphibious creatures and mysterious encounters is something even more interesting: a collection of separate incidents that gradually became the history of a single monster.

We begin with the landscape itself and the Little Miami River, the waterway that helped shape Loveland long before anyone imagined a Frogman living beside it. From Indigenous history and early settlement to farms, mills, railroads and the growth of Cincinnati, the river became both an economic corridor and a natural boundary between civilization and the remaining woods. Even as modern development spread outward, the river preserved precisely the sort of places where folklore thrives: dark water, wooded banks, blind curves and roads that surrender to the landscape after sunset.

Then we travel back to 1955, when the earliest and most mysterious chapter of the Frogman legend supposedly occurred. Later versions describe a motorist encountering several short, upright creatures with leathery, frog-like bodies—and even claim that one carried a bizarre rod or wand capable of producing sparks. The problem is that the original encounter is difficult to document cleanly, and many of its most famous details reach us through later retellings.

Seventeen years later, the story becomes considerably harder to ignore.

In March 1972, Officer Shockey reported encountering an unusual animal while driving near the Little Miami. Fellow officer Mark Mathews subsequently encountered something in the same area and fired at it. Years later, Mathews would insist there was nothing supernatural about what he saw: according to him, the creature was a large iguana missing its tail, probably an escaped or abandoned exotic pet.

That should have killed the legend.

Instead, it helped create one.

Because once the name Frogman entered the story, separate encounters began fitting together. The mysterious creatures of 1955 became earlier sightings of the animal encountered by police in 1972, while the credibility of the later police encounters reached backward and gave the older story an authority it had never possessed on its own. Loveland no longer had an unexplained animal sighting; it had a history.

And that's where our investigation begins.

IN THIS EPISODE

The Little Miami River and the history that shaped Loveland; the mysterious and difficult-to-document 1955 encounter; Ray Shockey's 1972 roadside sighting; Mark Mathews and the alleged tailless iguana; the exotic-pet explanation; and the strange process by which separate stories became the mythology of the Loveland Frogman.

Next time on The New Monsters, we'll go deeper into the bizarre 1955 encounter, investigate the Frogman's infamous sparking wand, and discover how paranormal books, local storytelling and eventually the internet transformed a handful of uncertain encounters into one of America's most recognizable regional cryptids.

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THE DEVIL’S LEDGER

Week of September 21, 2026

Football is back, fall is finally arriving, and the Evio Universe has assembled a particularly strange collection of stories this week.

We begin with The Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week, where an unsettling internet trend has transformed one of Dr. Seuss’s most beloved characters into nightmare fuel. AI-generated images of a sinister Cat in the Hat lurking outside homes and schools have prompted police investigations across the country, juvenile arrests—and, in Canada, a bizarre real-world incident involving someone in costume allegedly chasing a teenage girl through a neighborhood.

Then, on The Devil Within, we head to Ohio for the conclusion of our investigation into the Loveland Frogman. From a murky 1955 encounter involving strange humanoid figures and a supposedly sparking wand to two police encounters in 1972 and a wonderfully appropriate Pokémon Go sighting decades later, we examine how separate stories became the biography of a single monster—and why even a police officer’s decidedly unromantic explanation involving a tailless iguana couldn’t kill the legend.

On Criminal Mischief, Carolyn Ossorio investigates the developing case surrounding Philadelphia’s so-called “House of Horrors.” Authorities are investigating an Olney home in connection with at least seven missing women, as police and the FBI work through disturbing physical and digital evidence recovered during the investigation. With no remains yet confirmed at the property, Carolyn separates what investigators actually know from the speculation surrounding a case that is still unfolding.

Over on The Slippery, Scott and Nancy enter the heavily filtered world of Adva Lavie, the Israeli-born former flight attendant and social-media personality accused of using dating apps and aliases to enter the lives of wealthy older men and steal luxury property. Then the story acquires a billionaire, an engagement and an even stranger investigation. Lavie has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges against her, and the latest allegations remain under investigation.

Finally, This Week in Horror takes us onto the highway with Passenger, the new supernatural road-trip nightmare from director André Øvredal. A young couple leaves New York for life on the road, only to discover that something demonic may have joined them for the ride.

And with that, we say farewell to summer and welcome back pumpkin spice, football weekends, open sweater cabinets, earlier sunsets, changing leaves and—hopefully—a slight slowing of the relentless pace of life.

Listen and follow the shows of the Evio Creative network wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy what we’re doing, leave us a five-star rating and review and help other listeners discover the Evio Universe.

Watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, and turn on notifications so you never miss a new episode.

Until next week, we’ll see you across the Evio Universe.
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THE DEVIL WITHIN

THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN

Episode Three: Midnight at the Overpass

By the 1990s, everybody in Northern Virginia seemed to know the rules.

Drive out to Bunny Man Bridge after dark. Wait until midnight. Turn off the headlights. Say his name three times. Maybe get out of the car. Maybe come on Halloween. Nobody could agree on exactly how you summoned the Bunny Man, but that hardly mattered.

Because everybody agreed that if you stayed beneath that railroad bridge long enough, something would happen.

In the final chapter of our three-part investigation into The Bunny Man, we follow one of America's strangest urban legends through its most important transformation. What began with two reported encounters with a rabbit-costumed stranger in Fairfax County in October 1970 eventually became something teenagers could actually participate in.

This week, we head back beneath the railroad tracks outside Clifton, Virginia, during an era when American suburbia was developing some very particular nightmares of its own. Stranger danger was reshaping childhood. Parents inspected Halloween candy for razor blades and poison. The Satanic Panic warned that secret cults might be hiding behind otherwise ordinary American life, while a new generation of slasher movies discovered that the safest-looking suburbs made particularly effective places for monsters.

The Bunny Man fit right in.

His rabbit costume corrupted something associated with childhood innocence. His axe gave him the silhouette of a horror villain. Better still, you didn't need to travel into some remote wilderness to find him.

You needed a car, a few friends and enough nerve to drive into the woods.

Folklorists call it legend tripping: traveling to a supposedly haunted place specifically to test the story. Haunted railroad crossings, Crybaby Bridges, cemeteries, abandoned houses and mirrors capable of summoning Bloody Mary all operate on variations of the same brilliant idea. They don't merely give you a monster to believe in.

They give you something to do.

Bunny Man Bridge became one of those places. Every group of teenagers who drove beneath the tracks created another opportunity for reality to misbehave. A deer moving through the woods became a person. A branch became a weapon. A reflection became a pair of eyes. Then a freight train thundered overhead, somebody screamed, and by Monday morning four people remembered the same ten seconds four different ways.

Then the internet arrived.

The Bunny Man had spent decades traveling through newspapers, playgrounds, school buses, parties and word of mouth. Home computers and dial-up connections suddenly removed geography from the equation. The abandoned asylum could be repeated from website to website. An escaped inmate could acquire a name, a biography and a body count. Eventually, repetition itself began impersonating evidence.

That makes the Bunny Man an important creature in the evolution of The New Monsters. He wasn't born online like Slender Man, and he wasn't collaboratively constructed on the internet like the Backrooms.

The internet didn't create the Bunny Man. It inherited him.

But before we leave Fairfax County, we return to the question buried beneath more than half a century of mythology:

Who was actually inside the bunny suit?

Strip away the asylum. Strip away the escaped inmates, mutilated rabbits, murders and supernatural bridge rituals, and two reported incidents remain. In October 1970, witnesses described a rabbit-costumed figure carrying weapons and angrily complaining about trespassing. During the first encounter, a hatchet reportedly came through the window of a car. Ten days later, a similarly dressed person was reportedly encountered near an unfinished house, again armed and again furious about trespassers.

Was it an elaborate Halloween prank that escalated? An attempt to frighten people away from private property? Someone angry about the relentless development transforming Fairfax County around him?

All are possibilities.

None is an answer.

More than half a century later, the person beneath those rabbit ears remains unidentified. And perhaps that's why the Bunny Man survives so well. Remove the supernatural mythology and the story doesn't become ordinary.

The strange part was there from the beginning.

A newspaper story became a playground story. The playground story acquired a bridge. The bridge acquired an asylum. The asylum acquired escaped inmates and murders. Teenagers turned the bridge into a pilgrimage site, and eventually the internet gathered every version into a sprawling digital mythology.

No single person created the Bunny Man we know today.

Thousands of people did.

NEXT TIME ON THE NEW MONSTERS

THE LOVELAND FROGMAN

Next time, we're heading west to Loveland, Ohio, where another distinctly American monster emerged along the Little Miami River.

The story begins with a murky 1955 account involving several short, upright creatures reportedly encountered near the river—one of them, wonderfully, supposedly holding something resembling a wand or metal rod that produced sparks. Then, in March 1972, a Loveland police officer reported encountering a strange leathery animal near the roadway.

Another officer would soon encounter something as well.

And this time, he shot it.

Decades later, that officer would insist the famous Frogman wasn't a monster at all. According to him, he'd encountered a large, tailless iguana, probably someone's escaped exotic pet.

That should have killed the legend.

It didn't.

Next time on The New Monsters: The Loveland Frogman.

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The Bunny Man: Episode Three — Midnight at the Overpass.
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THE DEVIL WITHIN

THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN

Episode Two: The Bridge

There is a railroad bridge outside Clifton, Virginia, where Colchester Road narrows into a single lane and disappears beneath the tracks. For generations of Northern Virginia teenagers, it has been known by another name: Bunny Man Bridge.

According to the legend, this is where the Bunny Man lived, killed and perhaps died. Some versions claim he was an escaped asylum patient who vanished into the surrounding woods after a transport bus crashed. Others add mutilated rabbits hanging from trees, murdered children, bodies suspended from the railroad tracks and a killer who eventually returned from the dead.

It's a spectacular horror story.

There's just one problem: almost none of it appears to have happened.

In Episode Two of our three-part investigation, we follow the Bunny Man away from the documented encounters on Guinea Road and into the place that transformed him from a bizarre local mystery into a full-fledged American monster. Research by Fairfax County historian and archivist Brian Conley found no evidence of the asylum, the escaped inmates or the Bunny Man massacre supposedly connected to the bridge. The two documented incidents from October 1970 happened miles away.

So how did the Bunny Man get to Clifton?

We travel back through the history of the village itself, from the arrival of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad in 1858 to its importance during the Civil War, when the tracks became part of the military infrastructure connecting a country tearing itself apart. After the war, a railroad village grew here, preserving a pocket of older Northern Virginia even as suburban Washington expanded around it.

That landscape gave the legend something Guinea Road eventually couldn't: permanence. Construction sites become houses. Woods are cleared. Empty lots acquire addresses. But a secluded railroad overpass surrounded by trees can remain unsettling for generations. Better still, it gave teenagers somewhere they could actually visit. The Bunny Man stopped being merely something people heard about and became something they could go looking for.

From there, the mythology began building backward. An asylum appeared where historical research has found none. A bus crashed. Patients escaped. Rabbits were slaughtered. One fugitive supposedly died while another became the Bunny Man. Eventually murders, Halloween rituals and supernatural encounters were attached to the bridge, creating an elaborate origin story for a monster whose real identity had never been established.

We'll explore why those additions were so effective, how the abandoned asylum became one of American horror's favorite shortcuts for hidden evil, and why the Bunny Man's axe survived the transformation from reported weapon to unmistakable horror icon.

Most importantly, we'll see the moment when folklore becomes interactive. Teenagers began driving beneath the bridge after dark, turning off their engines and waiting for something to happen. Every movement in the woods, unexpected car or freight train thundering overhead offered another opportunity for the story to reproduce itself.

Because the Bunny Man didn't become immortal when somebody died beneath those railroad tracks.

He became immortal when people started going there to find him.

NEXT TIME

In the final chapter of our Bunny Man story, Midnight at the Overpass, we follow the legend through the 1980s and 1990s and into the early internet, when a regional Virginia ghost story suddenly gained access to a global audience. We'll explore Halloween pilgrimages, stranger danger, Satanic Panic and the peculiar rituals that taught generations of teenagers how to summon a monster.

Then we'll return to October 1970 and the question that none of the mythology has ever answered:

Who was actually inside the rabbit suit?

LISTEN • WATCH • FOLLOW

Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss the final chapter of The Bunny Man.

Rate & Review: Leave us a 5-star rating and review. It remains one of the best ways to help new listeners discover the show.

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Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and tell us: Would you spend midnight beneath Bunny Man Bridge?

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