Thorntown Gorilla

In June 1949 the small Boone County town of Thorntown, Indiana, decided there was a gorilla loose along Sugar Creek. Over the following weeks about thirty residents, some of them respected citizens, said they had glimpsed a big, dark, hairy animal. Parents kept children away from the swimming holes, men patrolled the country roads with guns, and the story was picked up by newspapers well beyond Indiana. Unlike most cryptid tales, this one has a known explanation: much of it was a costume.

According to a family-history account built from the recollections of the people involved, the scare began on June 14, 1949, when a fisherman known as Gobby Jones, then about 50, was fishing Sugar Creek with his friend George Coffman and saw something hairy and dark lunge out of the brush. Jones fled into town and told everyone he had been chased by a gorilla. In fact Coffman, Homer Birge and Asher Cones were in on it: they had stitched a bear-like suit out of two old fur coats, a wire-frame head and scraps of tin, with help from Birge’s wife. Their aim, they later said, was to cure Jones of telling tall fishing stories. Birge wore the suit, Coffman steered Jones to the spot, and Cones flashed his car headlights to signal when to appear.

What started as a joke grew past anyone’s control. For roughly a month the costumed figure turned up on dark country roads, wooden “feet” left odd tracks near the creek and in cornfields, and rangers and neighbors began to report their own sightings. The Indiana State Library’s history blog traces the newspaper trail: the Lafayette Journal and Courier reported on June 22 that the gorilla was a hoax planned by members of a local sportsmen’s club, but the hunt went on anyway, and on July 17 the Richmond Palladium ran the headline “Safari Seeks ‘Gorilla’ at Thorntown,” describing four posses, including state conservation officers. Zoos and circuses reported no missing gorillas.

The search ended on a sadder note. Searchers came across a disheveled, confused woman in the woods; newspapers did not name her, and she was taken into custody, which most people took as the end of the case. How witnesses had mistaken her for a gorilla was never really explained. The three friends hid their costume in an attic and kept quiet about their part for years. Asher Cones, the last survivor of the trio, died at age 101 in December 2014, and the Thorntown Heritage Museum hosted a memorial for him. Retellings are not consistent about the details – one popular write-up dates the prank to 1943 – but the contemporary newspaper dates cited by the State Library point to 1949.

Witnesses described a large, dark, hairy animal, usually glimpsed briefly at night or at the edge of the brush, that moved quickly and was called a gorilla rather than a bear. Newspapers repeated that about thirty people claimed a sighting. The costume behind the original appearances was bear-like, made of fur coats over overalls with a wire-framed head and painted tin teeth.

The Sugar Creek corridor, lonely country roads and cornfields around Thorntown, with reports spreading to nearby woods and parkland. All of the reported activity fell in the summer of 1949.

The Thorntown Gorilla is a favorite piece of Boone County lore and one of Indiana’s best-known monster hoaxes. Asher Cones’s death in 2014 was marked by a memorial at the Thorntown Heritage Museum, and the episode is still retold in Hoosier history blogs and in lists of apelike creature reports.