McDaniel Name Game

A name in the news: Josh McDaniels. Joshua Thomas McDaniels (born April 22, 1976) is an American football coach who is the offensive coordinator of the New England Patriots of the National Football League (NFL). The Patriots lost Super Bowl LII. On February 6, 2018, McDaniels was announced as the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts. However, the same day McDaniels withdrew from the position and announced that he had decided to stay with the Patriots.

Ten years previously, on June 2, 2008, Bo Diddley, the famed American singer, guitarist, songwriter and music producer, died. It was widely reported his name was Ellas McDaniel. Born on December 30, 1928, in McComb, Mississippi, as Ellas Otha Bates, he was adopted and raised by his mother's cousin, Gussie McDaniel, whose surname he assumed. In 1934, the McDaniel family moved to the South Side of Chicago, where he dropped the Otha and became Ellas McDaniel. His music has been claimed to have created a powerful sense of voodoo sex magic. This was demonstrated most overtly when he joined the Rolling Stones on their 1994 concert broadcast of Voodoo Lounge, performing "Who Do You Love?". (h/t Johnny Walsh.)

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The following essay was first posted on May 5, 2014.

The Enfield creature attack on the McDaniel home has become an American monster classic. It also produced elaborate name game examples. Photo © Loren Coleman 1973

The Enfield Monster

The weekend of Saturday May 5th and Sunday May 6th ranks as one of those anniversaries that creeps into our consciousness, as it is mainly recalled as the peak date of the Enfield Monster mania. It was on May 6, 1973, that Henry McDaniel, for the second and last time, saw the thing that haunted the southern Illinois town of Enfield.

I was reminded of this recently by an old MacArthur High School classmate Dave Wooten, who only lately discovered I was the guy behind the initial investigations of that melodrama in southern Illinois. That he had some personal and physical links to the memories of the events back then surprised me. It is a small world.

Dave wrote: “Do you know I was there and didn’t know you were ‘on the case’! My uncle Cash Wooten was for a time game warden and county commissioner [there]. Cousin Ron Wooten is now commissioner. My grandpa Garwood lived in Enfield, just up from the tracks. I remember my aunt would not leave her windows open at night!”

The Enfield Monster period was during the time of “High Strangeness” sweeping the USA in the 1970s. At the time, I was an anthropology student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, but had moved back to central Illinois again, taking anthropology/zoology courses at the University of Illinois. Naturally, when reports of an unknown creature was registered deeper in the bottomlands at the other end of the state, I traveled there to investigate.

The facts of the case are well-known. On April 25, 1973, Mr. and Mrs. Henry McDaniel returned to their home and Henry had an encounter with a thing that looked like it had three legs, two pink eyes as big as flashlights, and short arms on a four-and-a-half-feet tall and grayish-colored body, along the L&N railroad tracks, in front of his house.

A young man, Greg Garrett, had the incredible distinction of having his tennis shoe covered foot stepped on by the sort of kangaroo-like, apelike thing. I was there, soon afterward, in that May of 1973, and interviewed various principals.

The Enfield Horror

Illinois investigator Troy Taylor, years later, would rename it the Enfield Horror and summarize, online, what happened next, this way:

On May 6, Henry McDaniel was awakened in the middle of the night by howling neighborhood dogs. He looked out his front door and saw the monster again. It was standing out near the railroad tracks. “I didn’t shoot at it or anything,” McDaniel reported. “It started on down the railroad track. It wasn’t in a hurry or anything.”
McDaniel’s reports soon brought publicity to Enfield and prompted the threats from the county sheriff, but it was too late. Soon, hordes of curiosity-seekers, reporters and researchers descended on the town. Among the “monster hunters” were five young men who were arrested by Deputy Sheriff Jim Clark as “threats to public safety” and for hunting violations. This was after they had opened fire on a gray, hairy thing that they had seen in some underbrush on May 8. Two of the men thought they had hit it, but it sped off, moving faster than a man could.
One more credible witness to the monster was Rick Rainbow, who was then the news director of radio station WWKI in Kokomo, Indiana. He and three other persons spotted the monster near an abandoned house, just a short distance from McDaniel’s place. They didn’t get much of a look at it as it was running away from them, but they later described it as about five feet tall, gray and stooped over. Rainbow did manage to tape record its cry. The wailing was also heard by eminent researcher Loren Coleman, who also came to try and track down the creature. He also heard the sound while searching an area near the McDaniel home. ~ in The Enfield Horror: The Strangest Monster Sighting in Illinois.

I did travel to Enfield in 1973, with Fortean investigator Richard Crowe and a friend of his. We searched fields, farms, and railroad tracks. We talked to many locals.

I interviewed the witnesses, examined at the siding and air conditioner damage on the McDaniel house, heard some strange screeching banshee-like sounds, took photographs, and walked away bewildered.

I wrote up my notes on the accounts for articles like “Swamp Slobs Invade Illinois” in Fate Magazine, July 1974, and in my subsequent books. 

But time moves on, and new details have emerged.

Dave Wooten’s 80 year old aunt was still alive a couple years ago, when he asked her, “Where is Greg Garrett these days?”

She answered: “Greg Garrett is dead.”

As it turns out, Garrett was killed when he was shot in the back by his wife, as he was sitting on his front porch in Enfield, Illinois, several years ago. Garrett’s wife was later acquitted of any homicide charges, as her “self-defense” arguments held up in court.

Wooten did some more checking. He talked to Bob Duckworth, the White County Sheriff at the time, and verified that Garrett was the kid that saw the Enfield monster, which also McDaniel reported seeing. Duckworth said that indeed Garrett was killed by his wife Rosie over 25 years ago.

The Name Game

Greg Garrett died violently, pierced in the back by gunfire, apparently. The name Garrett, in English, means "rules by the spear" or "hard or bold spear." American and Norse meanings for the name equal the notion "defender." In Teutonic, the meaning of the name Garrett is "spear strength." Greg means "on the watch" and "watchful." It appears that Greg Garrett, who once avoided the force of the attack of the Enfield Monster, exhibited behaviors leading to revenge from behind. He had let his guard down, it would seem.

The family name McDaniel would be highlighted two years after the Illinois incidents in John A. Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies. The McDaniels would be one of the focal points of the Mothman stories, as you may recall. Within the context of my 1983 book, Mysterious America, I pointed out in the name game chapter the two McDaniel threads from Enfield, Illinois, and Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

Let me share some of those passages with you here.

McDaniel, of course, is a name familiar for its Mothman links.

This reminds me of my exchange with [John A.] Keel about the name game in 1973, when we were discussing the new reports out of Illinois, from Enfield. On April 25, 1973, Mr. and Mrs. Henry McDaniel returned to their home and Henry had an encounter with a thing that looked like it had three legs, two pink eyes as big as flashlights, and short arms on a four-and-a-half-feet tall and grayish-colored body, along the L&N rail-road tracks, in front of his house. I traveled to Enfield....
John Keel wondered aloud with me about these reports, as he had returned from Point Pleasant well aware of the vortex the McDaniel family had found themselves in. One of the first Mothman witnesses, Linda Scarberry, was, after all, a McDaniel. Her mother saw Mothman. The McDaniel home was the focus of MIBs, telephone troubles, and poltergeist activity, thus involving Parke McDaniel and Mabel McDaniel with the Mothman flap.
Keel had uncovered a 1870s story of an individual named McDaniel who had met up with the Devil in New York State’s Catskill Mountains. Western Bigfoot Society member Vic McDaniel led expedition members to where he had found a Sasquatch bed in August 1979. As the 20th century ended, Stanley V. McDaniel, a philosophy professor and member of the Society for Planetary SETI Research, began to make a name for himself, to turn a phrase, when he produced The McDaniel Report, and a book, The Case for the Face, on his research into the possibility of artificial objects on the surface of Mars. ~ Mothman and Other Curious Encounters (NY: Paraview, 2002)

John Keel discussed the 1966-1967 Mothman-McDaniel family troubles further:

The McDaniel family had been living in the twilight zone ever since their daughter and the others had first glimpsed “Mothman.” Linda had repeatedly heard the sound “of a speeded-up phonograph record” around her own home after the incident, and peculiar manifestations indicating the presence of a poltergeist began. Finally she and Roger moved into the basement apartment in the McDaniel’s home. The poltergeist followed them. Strange lights appeared in the house, objects moved by themselves, and the heavy odor of cigar smoke was frequently noted. No one in the family smokes. (The smell of cigar smoke is commonly reported in many poltergeist cases throughout the world.) One morning Linda woke up and distinctly saw the shadowy form of a large man in the room. The house was searched. All the doors were still locked. There was no sign of a prowler. The McDaniels’ experience was one of many during the thirteen intense months of the Mothman flap. ~ Strange Creatures from Time and Space (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1970.

I continued a look at this name game...

Mabel McDaniel had seen Mothman on January 11, 1967, near Tiny’s Restaurant in Point Pleasant; then later during March, had a run-in with one of those Mad Gasser/Springheel Jack-type fellows, the Men-In-Black. Parke McDaniel had likewise been frightened by the Men-In-Black on December 23, 1967. Keel felt the name McDaniel had a far greater recurrence in these matters than random….
Keel himself has raised the question of name selectivity in his writings: “Hundreds of thousands of phenomenal events have been described in newspapers, magazines and books, and hundreds of thousands of witnesses have been named in print. When dealing with such a large body of evidence—or population—certain laws of probability should surface. We might expect that more Smiths would see UFOs than anyone else, simply because there are more Smiths around. But, in actuality, the name Smith rarely appears in a UFO report.”
What Keel found was that unusual names were the point of convergence for the phenomena. He saw McDaniel, Reeves/Reaves, Maddox, Heflin, Allen, Hill, and others, as being selected for UFO and related experiences. The Smiths, Browns, Williams, and Johnsons—the four top surnames in America—are not the most frequent precipitant names to crop up. I would add that the most unusually named witnesses seem to have the more bizarre encounters. ~ Mysterious America (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

McDaniel has a complex history to find its meaning. It is an altered form of Irish McDonnell "son of Donal," from an incorrect association of the Gaelic patronymic with the personal name Daniel ("God is my judge") - who, in the Bible, is eventually thrown to the lions. McDaniel thus is actually from the Gaelic form of Irish Donal (equivalent to Scottish Donald), and erroneously associated with the Biblical personal name Daniel. Mc means ‘son of’; therefore the surname McDaniel is Scottish in origin and derives from the ancient celtic domno "world" + val "might," "rule."

The Enfield name game is intriguing, as well. In Canada, there is an Enfield, Nova Scotia. American cities named Enfield are found in Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and North Carolina. There is an Enfield in Ireland, and three in Australia. All of these names point back to the original Enfield from England.

Enfield was recorded in Domesday Book in 1086 as Enefelde, and as Einefeld in 1214, Enfeld in 1293, and Enfild in 1564: that is "open land of a man called Ēana," or "where lambs are reared," from the Old English feld with an Old English personal name or with Old English ēan "lamb." The feld would have been a reference to an area cleared of trees within woodland later to become Enfield Chase.

"The word Enfield also has a meaning in heraldry, it is a mythical beast having the head of a fox, the chest of a greyhound, the body of a lion, the hindquarters and tail of a wolf, and forelegs like an eagle's talons. The origin of the word in this context is disputed," notes one site.

Within the field of parapsychology, the Enfield Poltergeist was the name given to claims of poltergeist activity at a council house in Brimsdown village, borough of Enfield, England, beginning in August 1977.

Many casual observers of the unexplained may have assumed the Enfield Monster of the USA was a phenomenon reported after the events of the Enfield Poltergeist of the UK, but, in reality, the Illinois sightings predate the English ones by over 4 years.

My book (with Jerome Clark), Creatures of the Outer Edge, first appearing in 1978, gave some national expose to the Enfield, Illinois, creature reports. Today that book is found as the second part of new edition (with a new introduction), The Unidentified and Creatures of the Outer Edge: The Early Works of Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman.

Yankee vs Cowboy War: Comey-Mueller vs Trump White House

On Saturday, June 17, 2017, at 9 pm Eastern, MSNBC broadcast a special presentation of All the President’s Men Revisited. The special is set for the 45th anniversary of the infamous break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, an event that lead to one of the biggest political scandals in history and the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

"Watergate," as it is called, is a grand example in the Yankee vs Cowboy theory, proposed by the late Carl Oglesby as a way to analyze all recent American political history. Watch the program and think about the parallels between then and now.

Oglesby captured the essence of his model in this opening to his introduction to the concept:

The assassination of John Kennedy and the downfall of Richard-Nixon have both been viewed as isolated moral disasters for American democracy: Kennedy's murder as a demonstration of our continuing national inability or unwillingness to cope with violence; Nixon's downfall as a demonstration of the failure of our democratic institutions to overcome the abuses of secret intelligence and electronic surveillance at the seat of national power.
But these two events represent neither isolated disasters nor a generalized failure of American institutions but something almost beyond the ability of ordinary people even to see, much less control. The two events - Dallas and Watergate - are actually concrete links in a chain of related and ominous events passing through the entire decade in which they occurred and beyond. And this chain of events itself represents only the violent eruptions of a deeper struggle of rival power elites identified here as Yankees and Cowboys.
This book proposes to show that Dallas and Watergate are intrinsically linked conspiracies in a hidden drama of coup and countercoup which represents the life of an inner oligarchic power sphere, and "invisible government," capable of any act in the pursuit of its objectives, that sets itself above the law and beyond the moral rule: a clandestine American state, perhaps an embryonic police state.... ~ Carl Oglesby, "The Yankee and Cowboy War," The Education Forum, July 4, 2017.

Watergate is in the air again because of the similarities felt by political observers and commentators between the firings of investigators looking into the actions of President Nixon and President Trump.

Let us take a trip down memory lane observing the newspaper headlines from the Watergate days and how the "headlines" in tabloids, television, and newspapers appear today regarding what's occurring in 2017. Will the current events go down in history as Russiagate, Trumpgate or some other name?

There seems little doubt we are seeing a Yankees (Yates, Comey, Rosenstein?, Mueller) vs Cowboys (Flynn, Sessions, Trump) battle occurring right before our eyes.

Jim Comey—and his prominence and subsequent career have been driven almost entirely by his dramatic testimony on March 15, 2007.
That hearing, purportedly into the politicization of the Justice Department and the partisan firings of U.S. attorneys by Ashcroft’s successor, Alberto Gonzales, was a carefully orchestrated yet seemingly spontaneous moment. The week before, Comey had carefully walked his former colleague Preet Bharara—then counsel to Senator Chuck Schumer—through the 2004 episode for the first time. “The hair stood up on the back of my neck, because I realized what a significant story this was, and I was sworn to secrecy and nobody knew about it,” Bharara told the New Yorker years later. The three men—Comey, Schumer and Bharara—kept quiet about the revelations in advance. “I was afraid that if the story got out of what Jim was going to say, the Bush administration would figure out a way to prevent him from testifying,” Bharara recalled later. “We needed to preserve the element of surprise.” by Garrett M. Graff, "What Donald Trump Needs to Know About Bob Mueller and Jim Comey," Politico Magazine, May 18, 2017.

That Jungian Year: 1977

by Loren Coleman © 2012

Thirty-five years ago, 1977 remains a strange one. It may have been a milestone point of change, coming on a synchromystic Jungian wave of passions and promises.

The world's first personal all-in-one computer (keyboard/screen/tape storage), the Commodore PET, was demonstrated for the first time ever at a consumer electronics show in Chicago in January 1977. Then the PETs were on sale by mid-year. On January 3, Apple Computer Inc. became incorporated.  The first Apple II computers were available for purchase later in 1977. NAVSTAR's Global Positioning System (GPS) was inaugurated by the US Department of Defense. The first MRI Scanner was tested in Brooklyn.

President Jimmy Carter pardoned the Vietnam War draft evaders, as the USA tried to move on from that extended conflict in Southeast Asia.

Do you remember 1977?


Star Wars opened on May 25, 1977, and became the #1 movie of the year and the then-highest grossing film of all time. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released on November 16, 1977, and became the year's #2 film. Getting the mainstream flavor of the year, yet? Well, the # 3 movie was Saturday Night Fever and the Oscar for Best Picture went to Annie Hall. Roots was first broadcast on television.

Vrillon of the "Ashtar Galactic Command" hijacked The ITN Nightly News at ITV Southern Television for six minutes. Four Palestinians hijacked a Lufthansa airliner demanding the release of 11 imprisoned members of Germany's Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, also known as the Red Army Faction.

Loren Eisely, an American anthropologist and author of The Immense Journey, died on July 9th. Then the King left the building, when Elvis Presley, 42, passed away on August 16, 1977, never showing up for the concert he was suppose to perform that night in Portland, Maine.

On May 28th, 165 people died in the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire. The New York Blackout lasted for 25 hours on July 13th-14th. The Bucharest Earthquake killed more than 1,500. A cyclone in India killed 20,000 and left 2 million homeless.

   

In 1977, along with Jerome Clark, I finished a manuscript entitled Creatures of the Outer Edge, which would to be published by Warner Books in 1978. It was a paperback book, tightly printed on 239 pages, being part two of our then-radical view of phenomena in terms of Jungian thought way back then. It was hailed as a breakthrough psychosocial look at a wide variety of Fortean, ufological, and cryptozoological accounts at the time. It had some missteps, but the data was great, and remains so.

The book is dedicated, "To John Keel, pioneer." 

Under that, there is this quotation:

There is not wanting a feast of broad joyous humor in this strange phantasmagoria, where pit and stage, and man and animal, and earth and air, are jumbled in confusion worse confounded. ~ Thomas Carlyle.

The book was first completed and submitted in 1976, and then the publisher sat on it. Our previous book, The Unidentified had appeared in August 1975, and reportedly sold 40,000 copies. We never could understand that sales quote, because we never saw much in the way of royalties. But, hey, we were young innocents, and it was just great to have a mainstream published book. Thinking about money was hardly part of the equation.

Anyway, after that second manuscript was accepted, it seemed like it was taking forever for Warner Books to decide when to bring out that next, my second book. I was not happy with the delay and the lack of up-to-date accounts in the approved-for-publication submission, so I sent in a new ending appendix. It was entitled, "Epilogue - 1977: A Year Filled With Monsters."

On the occasion of the middle of the 35th anniversary of the content of that essay, I want to share some words from there, which seem as timely today as they did then. On pages 208-209:

The mystery animals discussed in the preceding pages have continued to creep, crawl, fly, and run through the lives of humanity. As this opus quickly approaches publication, we felt it might be interesting to give a cross-section of a few noteworthy cases of 1977: cases which, in fact, further demonstrate the meanderings of the manifestations of the phenomena.
The year was a good one for sightings of the creatures of the outer edge. Bigfoot was allegedly photographed on Mount Baker in Washington State. The 'skunk ape' was photographed in Florida, but the photographer and his photos soon disappeared. The manimals were active in such widely separated locations as Easton, Pennsylvania, and Abilene, Texas. The so-called Bigfoot of Little Eagle, South Dakota made the Halloween issue of Newsweek.

In the book's epilogue, I continued by talking of the Bigfoot-type creatures being reported in Rising Sun, Ohio County, Indiana.

The phantom felines were active in Allen County, Ohio. I detailed my interview on site with Dog Warden William Reeder. Over 57 sheep had been killed by the mystery cats, locally called Black Panthers.

I spent most of June 29, 1977, traveling with Reeder, from the Nesbaum and Burkholder farms in Richlard Township, to the Richard Etter farm on Pandora Road to the Herman Hilty farm on Lugabill Road, interviewing eyewitnesses to the mayhem, as the black cats seemed to be moving down the roads, closer and closer to Lafayette, Ohio.

Bill Reeder and two officers on the Lafayette Police Department saw the big black panther in a plowed field near Lafayette. When they came up on it, the cat was walking calmly. Then it broke for the woods and ran "150 yards in two seconds flat," said the law enforcement personnel. Click and read more on the "Fayette Factor."

Stopping to give an overview, I wrote on page 217:

1977 is shaping up as a synchronistically interesting year for the cats. 1877 saw mystery feline reports from Ohio and Indiana. During 1977, besides the Ohio events, there have been sightings in Bay Springs, Mississippi; Edwardsville, Illinois; and California, Kentucky. And as we continued our investigations into the matter of the Dover Demon of Dover, Massachusetts, word came of a maned lion's having attacked two dogs near Dover, Arkansas.

I then detailed my fieldwork in April 1977 of the Dover Demon case.

On page 225, I put the year's Lawndale, Illinois, kidnapping of Marlon Lowe in context by mentioning:

The creatures of 1977 seemed to be playing cosmic jokes on a number of people. The 'Big Birds' were at it again during the year. One of these huge things with wings attacked a five-pound beagle puppy belonging to Mrs. Greg Schmitt of Rabbit Hash, Kentucky. The 'large bird' snatched a dog from her farm and dropped it in a pond 600 yards away. While local wildlife officials argued over whether or not the dog was attacked by an American Bald Eagle, the dognapping appears to have been a dry run for something more sinister. 

I overviewed the remarkable incident of the twin Thunderbirds that tried to kidnap Marlon Lowe from his front yard near Kickapoo Creek, Logan County, Illinois, in April 1977. My brother Jerry initially investigated the case. I would personally do so later on a trip to Illinois. I wrote about Lawndale, too, in that book. The case, along with many of these creatures of the outer edge from that weird year, have become part of the literature of those times.

The high strangeness of 1977, a mere 35 years ago, still fascinates me.

   

First appearing in 1975 and 1978, these two paperbacks were republished by Anomalist Books, in 2006, as a special double edition with a new introduction. The Unidentified and Creatures of the Outer Edge: The Early Works of Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman is a combined quality paperbound book from Anomalist Books. Near the top is the original cover of Creatures of the Outer Edge.