A white, apparently headless shape moving above Crawfordsville became a newspaper sensation in September 1891. The earliest report described two ice delivery men watching a huge, shapeless apparition with fins and a flaming eye. A Methodist minister’s account followed. Within days, however, the same local newspaper printed a very different explanation: two other observers had followed the supposed creature and identified a flock of killdeer.
The case can be followed through five contemporary items, preserved as clippings in the Indiana State Library’s Hoosier State Chronicles article. Reading those reports together produces a more useful history than treating the first alarming description as the whole record. It also shows that the original coverage contained humour, ridicule and speculation alongside its accounts of what people said they had seen.
The workmen’s account: 5 September
The Crawfordsville Daily Journal’s A Strange Phenomenon appeared on Saturday, 5 September 1891. It placed the experience of Marshall McIntyre and Bill Gray at about two that morning. They were preparing an ice wagon at their employer’s barn when McIntyre felt a sense of fear and looked upwards. The newspaper said he saw an apparition approaching from the west.
The description was extraordinary: a white, shroud-like shape, approximately eighteen feet long and eight feet wide, with several pairs of supposed fins. It appeared to be three or four hundred feet in the air. No head or tail was visible, but the narrative supplied a blazing eye and a wheezing, plaintive sound from an unseen mouth. These dimensions and features were reported impressions. The article supplies no method by which the size or altitude had been measured.
The shape supposedly flapped, twisted and circled above a nearby residence. The men withdrew into the barn, saw it move eastwards and return, and eventually left for the ice houses after three o’clock. The report said the phenomenon remained visible when they departed but had disappeared when they returned in daylight. An apparent object watched for a long time can still be difficult to identify in darkness; duration alone does not turn an estimated outline into a measured animal.
The newspaper’s style is part of the evidence. It opened with a literary comparison to Tam O’Shanter and ended with the men’s reported intention to bring a rifle if the apparition returned. That mixture of fear, comic exaggeration and an implied challenge to the “spook” belongs to the published account. It is not a neutral instrument record, and it should not be read as though a journalist had examined a captured creature.
The minister’s account: 7 September
Two days later, Mr. Switzer Saw the Spook introduced another witness, the Methodist minister G. W. Switzer. This report connected his experience to the object described by the workmen, while placing his observation shortly after midnight. Switzer had stepped into his back yard to obtain water from a well. He described a very dark, still night and a strange shape approaching from the southwest.
His reported dimensions were about sixteen feet by eight, resembling floating drapery. He thought it too low and too fast to be an ordinary cloud, and described a twisting movement through the air. He called his wife, and the pair watched it move beyond the church and apparently descend towards a neighbouring lawn. After briefly losing sight of it, Switzer went into the street and saw it rise again. The couple eventually went indoors while the phenomenon was still visible.
This is a second attributed account, rather than confirmation of every feature in the first. The article does not independently document the workmen’s flaming eye, nor establish that the estimates were obtained without discussion of the earlier report. It does show that the newspaper sought or received another description and that the experience was not being presented solely under the names of McIntyre and Gray.
The same item also printed competing reactions, ranging from a spiritual interpretation to a suggestion that the observers’ perceptions were unreliable. Those remarks were opinions about the story. They provide evidence of how local people discussed it, rather than a test of what had moved above the town.
The contemporary identification: 8 September
The Spook Explained, dated 8 September, is the crucial follow-up. It said that John Hornbeck had noticed the apparition around midnight, summoned Abe Hernley and investigated with him. The pair reportedly followed it about town and found that the apparent single form was a flock of hundreds of killdeer. The newspaper said the birds’ pale breasts and wings produced the ghostly appearance, while their cries accounted for the alarming sound.
It further suggested that electric lights had confused the passing birds and caused them to lose their way. Hornbeck and Hernley were said to have come close to the flock as it swept near the ground and to have been certain of the identification. This was a specific observation-based explanation offered at the time, not simply a modern dismissal imposed on a mysterious nineteenth-century story.
The limits remain worth keeping. The clipping does not provide preserved field notes, a photograph or a collected specimen. It does not reconstruct each observer’s exact position or establish that every apparent feature described earlier was reproduced. Its explanation combines the pair’s reported identification with the newspaper’s proposed mechanism involving the lights. Those are distinguishable claims, even if the combined account supplies a straightforward explanation for a pale, noisy, changing shape in the night sky.
Publicity after the explanation
The story’s life continued after the 8 September item. Famous, printed on 9 September, said that Switzer was receiving enquiries from around the country. It also described a mocking invitation from an institution treating inebriates. The point of reproducing such a detail is to recognise the ridicule directed towards a witness. The newspaper’s description of an insulting letter is not evidence that Switzer was intoxicated.
On 11 September, Asking About the Spook turned to the postmaster’s incoming mail. Some correspondents reportedly feared that the phenomenon signalled Judgment Day. A woman near St. Louis asked whether it could be seen during daylight, what colour it was and whether an earlier report from Ohio was connected. Others, the newspaper said, had been anticipating the end of the world and treated the story as confirmation.
The tone towards these readers was openly derisive. Their questions reached the public through the paper’s selection and commentary, rather than through complete reproductions of the letters. More importantly, the volume of correspondence measures interest in the report. It does not add new witnesses to the Crawfordsville sighting or independently establish an airborne monster.
A separate balloon story
The archived state-library article also reproduces a short Wichita Daily Eagle item dated 4 September 1891. It says that boys in Crawfordsville were experimenting with balloon parachutes, including the regrettable practice of sending cats aloft. The item predates the reported apparition and supplies another piece of contemporary aerial context.
It does not, however, identify a particular balloon seen by McIntyre, Gray or the Switzers. Chandler Lighty’s later state-library discussion raises the balloon report as an alternative possibility. The connection remains a hypothesis. A newspaper notice that an activity occurred in the same town cannot establish that it caused the specific experience described the following morning. The killdeer account is different because it names observers who reportedly followed the apparent phenomenon itself.
What survives of the case
The record supports a short sequence of alarming descriptions, local investigation and continuing publicity. It does not require a new species, an extraterrestrial craft or a supernatural visitor. The 8 September bird identification belongs in any account that uses the dramatic 5 September narrative. Omitting it would hide a contemporary explanation from readers.
The sources used here are the complete surviving clipping images reproduced in the archived Hoosier State Chronicles article, including both parts of Switzer’s report and all three parts of the first account. Whole newspaper issue scans were not inspected; dates follow the institutional captions. The 2020 photograph shows modern downtown Crawfordsville for context. The map uses the city’s Census reference point, rather than identifying a private witness’s home, an exact barn or a reconstructed flight path.
Sources and related reading
Crawfordsville Daily Journal, A Strange Phenomenon, 5 September 1891: complete report across three clipping panels, visually read. Archived clipping 1. Archived clipping 2. Archived clipping 3.
Crawfordsville Daily Journal, Mr. Switzer Saw the Spook, 7 September 1891: complete report across two clipping panels, visually read. Archived clipping 1. Archived clipping 2.
Crawfordsville Daily Journal, The Spook Explained, 8 September 1891: complete contemporary killdeer identification report, visually read. Archived clipping 1.
Crawfordsville Daily Journal, Famous, 9 September 1891: complete short item, visually read. Archived clipping 1.
Crawfordsville Daily Journal, Asking About the Spook, 11 September 1891: complete short item, visually read. Archived clipping 1.
Wichita Daily Eagle, 4 September 1891: short Crawfordsville balloon-parachute item, visually read. No demonstrated connection to the later sighting. Archived clipping 1.
Related case: Gore Orphanage’s ghost legend and the 1909 inquiry.