Chatawa Monster

Chatawa is a tiny community in Pike County, Mississippi, close to the Louisiana line on the Tangipahoa River and the old Illinois Central Railroad. It once had as many as 500 residents, a resort and a large Catholic boarding school; today it has a post office, a retreat center and a legend. According to local tradition, a hairy, upright creature lives in the swamps and pine woods nearby, leaving claw marks on trees and, some say, taking chickens.

The best-known origin story, recorded in a Hinds Community College library guide on Mississippi paranormal lore, says a circus train bound for New Orleans derailed in the Tangipahoa swamps. Among the animals was a creature advertised as a half-man, half-ape, kept in a heavy iron cage. When the cars tumbled into the woods it was the only survivor, was spotted near St. Mary of the Pines a couple of weeks later, and escaped a search party for good. Nothing in the sources documents such a wreck.

Local historian Sam McKinney, speaking to WLBT television’s Walt Grayson, gave other explanations. He had found that nearly identical circus-train stories were told along the whole length of the railroad, from Canton to as far north as Cairo, Illinois. The nuns at St. Mary’s, he said, sometimes reported monkeys in the trees, and those animals probably came from nearby Kramer’s Lodge, a resort that kept exotic animals. McKinney also suspected the monster began as a story told by older students at the boarding school to keep homesick younger pupils from running away to New Orleans. The same WLBT report adds that a highway patrolman who owned land in the area claimed his tractor headlights once caught a hairy, upright creature slipping into the woods at the edge of his field, and that he never went back to that field alone.

The Chatawa Monster has since taken on a life beyond Pike County. It served as the mascot of a short-lived St. Louis bar named after the hamlet in 2021, and a Swedish film team made a short film about it. Locals still talk about it, as the WLBT piece notes, around the community’s artesian well.

Described as an upright, hairy, Bigfoot-like creature that is mostly glimpsed fleeing into woods or swamp, said to leave claw marks on tree trunks. The circus-train version calls it a half-man, half-ape that escaped from a cage.

The wooded bottomlands of the Tangipahoa River swamps and the surrounding pine woods near Chatawa, Pike County, close to I-55 and the Louisiana border. Reports come from the edges of fields and the woods around the old school grounds.

The Chatawa Monster is Pike County’s best-known cryptid. It appears on the Wikipedia page for the community, in regional television features, and in school-library folklore guides. It has inspired a Swedish short film and T-shirts for a St. Louis bar that took the hamlet’s name. Its setting, the former St. Mary of the Pines school, now an active retreat center, is private religious property, so visitors should respect the grounds.