Cole Hollow Road — Cohomo Monster Site

Cole Hollow Road runs through the wooded ravine and creek-bottom terrain west of East Peoria in Tazewell County, central Illinois. In the spring of 1972, it became the epicenter of one of Illinois's most dramatic mass-panic events centered on a cryptid sighting.

In early May 1972, 18-year-old Randy Emmert told friends that he and companions had encountered an enormous creature in the woods bordering Cole Hollow Road — roughly eight to nine feet tall, covered in whitish-gray hair, with long round ears, red lips, and a smell described as wet dog mixed with rotten eggs. The creature left three-toed tracks in the soft ground. Emmert subsequently called a local radio station to describe the encounter. The story was picked up and spread rapidly through the Peoria media market.

On May 25, the East Peoria Police Department received more than 200 calls in a single day from residents reporting sightings or encounters with the creature, which local media quickly dubbed 'Cohomo' — a contraction of Cole Hollow Monster. In July 1972, community interest reached a climax when a volunteer search party of more than 100 people organized to comb the Cole Hollow Road woods. The search was cut short after one of the volunteers accidentally shot himself in the foot; police disbanded the group.

Years later, Emmert publicly acknowledged that the original sighting was fabricated — a prank intended for a friend that he never expected to spread beyond his immediate circle. Despite this admission, Robert Cole, president of the East Peoria Historical Society, noted in a documented interview with CIProud.com that 'the story kind of became a legend for East Peoria,' and local residents continue to cite the 1972 events as a defining piece of community identity.

The Cohomo episode has been compared by cryptid historians to similar regional mass-sighting panics of the early 1970s (the Fouke Monster in Arkansas, Momo in Missouri) that arose in the post-In Search Of media environment. The 200-call volume on a single day, the search party, and the accidental shooting together constitute one of the most thoroughly documented cryptid-panic sequences in Illinois history.