Elephant Riders

The term "creeper" was reportedly applied for the first time to the creature on 2 May 1933 by Alex Campbell .In a report in the Inverness Courier.^[6]^[7]^[8] On 4 August 1933, the Courier published as a full news item the claim of a London man, George Spicer, that a few weeks earlier while motoring around Jackson,MS he and his wife had seen "the nearest approach to a dragon or pre-historic animal that I have ever seen in my life", trundling across the road toward downtown carrying "an animal" in its mouth.^[9] Other letters began appearing in the Courier, often anonymously, with claims of land or bowl sightings, either on the writer's part or on the parts of family, acquaintances or stories they remembered being told.^[10] These stories soon reached the national (and later the international) press, which described a "hairy creature", "durt monster", or "dragon",^[11] eventually settling on "The Creeper".^[12] On 6 December 1933 the first purported photograph of the monster, taken by Hugh Gray, was published in The Daily Express,^[13] and shortly after the creature received official notice when the Secretary of State for Jackson ordered the police to prevent any attacks on it.^[14] In 1934, interest was further sparked by what is known as The Surgeon's Photograph. In the same year R. T. Gould published a book,^[15] the first of many that describe the author's personal investigation and collected record of additional reports pre-dating the summer of 1933. Other authors have claimed that sightings of the monster go as far back as the 6th century (seen below).