260. Choccolocco Monster - DOC Series

0:24 Welcome back to Project Jackalope. I'm Jeremy, and we're back in the archives, pulling another file from the stack of the unexplained. Last time we stood in the freezing, silent Northwoods of Coos County, New Hampshire, hunting the woods devil. Today we're going somewhere different, somewhere where the air hangs heavy and the heat cleans your skin like a sight layer. We're heading deep into the American South, to the red Clay hills of Alabama. There's a name down there that rolls off the tongue, Choco Loco. To an outsider, it might sound almost whimsical, musical even. But for the locals of Heflin and the residents of Cleburne County, the word doesn't conjure images of creeks and playgrounds.

1:04 It conjures memories of a terror that stalked the cattle pastures and logging roads in the late 1960s. This isn't just another Bigfoot story. This is the account of a creature that didn't just hide in the wilderness, it haunted. From the chilling reports of a long haired giant screaming in the darkness to the armed chaos that gripped the back roads. This is Project Jackalope file 002 The Choco Loco Monster, The Ghost of the Ironworks. To understand the monster, you have to understand the land.

1:44 The Choco Loco State Forest is a sprawling expanse of wilderness encompassing over 4500 acres of dense pine, hardwood bottoms, and rolling hills. It sits under the heavy shadow of the southern Appalachian Mountains, acting as a gateway to the rugged Talladega National Forest. But the history here is layered and heavy. During the American Civil War, this region served as the industrial engine for the Confederacy, a landscape sparred by the heat, the open hearth, Ironworks that forged the tools of war. While those furnaces have long since been reclaimed by Ivy and rust, the ground remains rich with iron ore and the echoes of a violent, industrious past.

2:25 The locals simply call this place the Valley, a term that suggests both a geographical feature in a closed off community where outsiders are noticed and secrets are kept. For generations, the rhythm of the Valley was predictable, dictated by the seasons and the harvest. That changed in late spring of 1969. While the rest of the nation was gripped by the space race and their cultural upheaval of the late 60s, rural Alabama remained a pocket of traditional stillness. This was a world of screen doors, porch swings, and a communal trust so deep that keys were often left in ignitions overnight. Hunters and loggers moved through these woods with the confidence of men walking through their own living rooms, intimately familiar with every Creek bed. But in mid-May, that confidence began to erode a predatory tensions and settled over the region localized specifically around the Iron City Cut Off and Chugaloco Rd. This particular stretch of asphalt sits just east of the Calhoun County line, acting as a lonely artery between the tiny isolate Hamlets of Iron City and Chocaloco. This isn't a road you take by accident, It's a bypass through the deep timber, where the transition from civilization to wilderness is abrupt and absolute. In 1969, Iron City, Cut Off was a place of extreme isolation. There were no St. lights to guide the way, and the nearest neighbor might be miles of tangled briars away from your property.

3:46 If your engine sputtered to a hole or a tire went flat, you were at the mercy of the woods. For the psychological weight of the era's technology, or lack thereof, cannot be overstated. Without a cell phone or GPS, mechanical failure wasn't just an inconvenience, it was a crisis of vulnerability. The trouble local monster didn't simply appear, it haunted the periphery before making itself known. Described as a hulking bipedal entity covered in shaggy like colored fur, it reportedly stood nearly 7 feet tall, possessing a physical mass that defied the local fauna. It wasn't a bear or stray the Tau. It's movement was too fluid, its presence too deliberate. When the sightings began to peak, the sensory experience of trouble of the road became a gauntlet of dread.

4:31 The air in the valley is notoriously thick. The humidity cleans your skin like a wet shroud, carrying the scent of damp earth and decaying pine needles. At night, the forest undergoes A transformation. The canopy is so dense that it functions as a literal ceiling, tapping the heat and blocking out the moon, leaving the road in a state of void, dark, a black, and is so total that it sort of feels physical. Driving this road at night in 1969 meant navigating a tunnel of green and brown that seemed to shrink as the hours grew late. The headlights of a period vehicle offered only a narrow, flickering window into the gloom, frequently reflecting off the eyes of deer or the shimmering leaves of the blackjack oaks. With the steel frame of a car, a driver felt a curated sense of modern security buffered by the crackle of a radio in the hum of the But the moment those headlights caught a towering figure standing in the center of the road, that bubble didn't just break, it vanished.

5:29 The silence of the woods is never truly silent. It is a wall of insignoys and rustling wind. But witnesses often reported a dead zone of sound just before an encounter, as if the forest itself were holding its breath. By the time the local newspapers began picking up the story, the atmosphere in the valley had shifted from curiosity to genuine alarm. The Iron City cut off became a place of urban legend in the making, where the boundary between the known world and the prehistoric wild became dangerously thin. You weren't just looking at the trees anymore, you were wondering was looking back from the darkness beyond the high beams. It was in this specific intersection of the industrial history, topographical isolation, and the sudden loss of rural safety that juggle local monster became more than the story became a haunting reality for those caught in the road after the sun went down. The first encounters the very first reported incident, the one that truly kicked the horn's nest, involved a woman named Margaret Teague.

6:28 It was mid-May 1969, margaret's driving home from her shift at Cleburne County Hospital, likely exhausted, just wanting to get home. The rhythm of tires and asphalt had lulled her into that familiar driving trance we all know that autopilot state where the miles blur together and the mine wanders. Then suddenly, her headlights caught something on the side of the road. She would later describe what she he saw as a bugger. No, in the South, bugger doesn't mean something grows from your nose. It means a monster, a haunt, something that shouldn't exist in the natural world. The term has been used for generations, particularly in the southern Appalachians, as the specific designation for a Bigfoot like creature that stalked the mountain hollows.

7:08 This thing was standing on 2 legs. Margaret was shocked. She described in quote UN quote abomination a creature that was God awfully ugly. It was completely covered with matted hair over its entire body. But the most terrifying part was the head. She described an enormous head sitting on top human like shoulders. In the book Beast Beyond Belief, author Michael D Winkle quotes Margaret directly. Lordy, Lordy, what a head. Let's pause on that quote for a moment. It sounds folksy, maybe even a little humorous to us now sitting in the safety of our homes. But picture the scene through Margaret's windshield. She wasn't looking at a mask. She wasn't looking at a blurry shadow caught in the corner of her vision. She was looking at a biological impossibility, standing on two legs mere feet from her car, illuminated in the full glare of her headlights. The sheer shock of the sight, the quote UN quote abomination as she called it, sent her into pure, primal panic. She didn't just drive past it, She didn't eat slowly around it. She tried to flee.

8:08 Margaret whipped the steering wheel hard, tempting A frantic U-turn in the middle of the narrow County Road. That's when the nightmare scenario unfolded. Her tire spun on a loose gravel shoulder. The car lurched sideways and slid right into the ditch. Now the engine is racing. The wheels are spinning uselessly in the mud, of course, and just feet away, Literally just feet away, that quote UN quote God awfully ugly creature is still standing there watching. Margaret sat frozen in that trapped car, gripped by the terrifying realization that whatever this thing was, it could easily reach her before she can get the car moving again. She was a sitting duck in a steel cage. Her only protection was a thin barrier of glass and metal between her and something that defied every rule of nature she'd ever known.

8:52 Thankfully, Margaret survived the tell a tale, but she wasn't the only one. Later that same month, in late May, an unnamed man was driving down the same stretch of Chokaloga Rd. when he spotted something he called a varmint. But this was no raccoon or possum. He described it as a humpback combination of bear and Panther. That witness struggled to even categorize what he was seeing. He used the word varmint, which usually implies a pest, a rat, a coyote, something small and manageable. But when he described A humped back combination of bear and Panther. Now take a second to think about the silhouette that creates in your mind the arcing back of a feline ready to pounce. Mixed with a massive, shaggy bulk of a bear. It suggests a predator built for both power and speed, something that could tear through underbrush like tissue paper and outrun anything foolish enough to flee. This sighting set the stage for what happened the very next night to Johnny Ray Teague and his companions. Johnny Ray and three of his buddies were traveling through the same area, likely on high alert given the rumors flying around town, when a car just died. Not a sputter, not a cough.

10:00 Complete mechanical failure. The engine went silent, the headlights dimmed, and they be coasted to a stop in the middle of that dark isolated Rd. In cryptozoology, we call this the dampening effect. It's a controversial theory, but you see it repeated in UFO reports and high strangeness encounters constantly. The idea is that the presence of certain entities somehow interferes with electrical systems. Batteries drain, engine stall, lights flicker and fail. Whether it's electromagnetic interference, psychological phenomenon, or something else entirely remains unknown, but the pattern is undeniable. So there they were, four grown men, dead silence pressing in from all sides. They climbed out to inspect under the hood, thinking it was just a dead battery or a failed alternator. Something mechanical, something fixable, something that made sense.

10:48 That's when the piece of the night was shattered by the sound of heavy brush crashing somewhere in the darkness beyond the road. They turned and saw a beast that one of the men described as being, quote, the size of a cow. It was Gray to black in color. And strangely, they noted it was quote, humped similarly to a camel. Now let's stop and examine that specific detail. Humped similarly to a camel. That is a bizarre description for a primate or a bear. We often hear about no neck descriptions where the head sits directly on mass shoulders with no discernible neck, like a gorilla's profile, but a hump that suggests something else entirely. Could it be massive trapezius muscles built up from a lifetime of climbing steep terrain and tearing apart rotted logs for grubs? Or are we looking at a nutritional reservoir? Camels store fat in their humps for survival in the desert, allowing them to go weeks without food or water. Could a relic species in the Appalachians have evolved a similar mechanism for surviving the lean winter months when food becomes scarce?

11:49 It's a detail that feels too strange to be fabricated. If you were inventing a monster, your story to scare your buddies to get attention in a local paper, you'd say it had glowing red eyes or razor sharp fangs. You wouldn't say it looked like a candle. That detail, that oddness, lends a strange kind of credibility to Johnny Rays account. The four men scrambled back in the car and locked the doors. Their hands were shaking, their hearts were hammering. But the creature didn't attack immediately. It didn't charge the vehicle or attempt to smash through the windows. It didn't run away either. It kind of toyed with them. The creature lazily strolled around the car a few times, as if it was observing them or waiting for something, or playing with them like a cat plays with a mouse. Animals that are prey do not stroll. They dart.

12:31 They freeze, hoping to blend into their surroundings. They bolt at the first sign of danger. Only apex predators, The things that the very top of the food chain stroll. Lions stroll through the Savannah, bears will stroll through campsites. They move with confidence of creatures that fear nothing. This thing acted as if it was waiting for something, or playing with them. Finally, after what must have felt like an eternity, the creature stumbled back into the tree line and disappeared into the darkness. Johnny Ray managed to get the car started again, the engine roaring back to life as inexplicably as it had died. You can imagine the collective sigh of relief in that vehicle, the nervous laugh after the adrenaline starting to fade. But this event wasn't over. About half a mile down the road, their headlights caught something else.

13:16 Not one creature this time, three or four more of the beast standing on the edge of the tree line, watched as the car passed. This detail changes everything. Most Cryptid sightings involve a solitary animal, a lone wolf, a single entity moving through the wilderness. But a pack, a family unit actively roaming choco local Rd. together. That's a terrifying implication. It suggests a social structure. It suggests intelligence and coordination. It suggests territory. The first creature they saw, the one Johnny Ray described as the size of a cow, was terrifying enough on its own. But now they're seeing a group, 3 or 4 more of these beasts making themselves known, positioned along the roadside as if they were centuries, as if they were flanking the vehicle they were coordinating.

14:01 Were they coordinating? Were they communicating? Were they hurting the car, pushing it through their territory like wolves? Dr. Prey through a killer zone. Johnny Ray said each one looked bigger and more gruesome than the last. This wasn't a chance encounter with a lone confused animal. This was stumbling into claimed ground. This was trespassing. Word traveled fast in Cleburne County throughout the month of June 1969. The sightings continued for a span of about 7 weeks. The descriptions varied, which makes the whole phenomenon even more confusing and paradoxically, more credible. Some witnesses said that the beast was Gray. Others insisted it was black. Some reported a head full of long, stringy hair hanging down like matted dreadlocks. Others said the thick hair completely obscured the face, making it impossible to see features. But everyone agreed one fundamental thing. It was a monster.

14:53 By June, the news that spread across the state like wildfire, the mystery of the Choco Loco Monster became the talk of every barbershop, every diner, every church social from Anniston to Birmingham. And you know what happens when you tell a bunch of Alabama boys there's a monster in the woods? That's right, they loaded their trucks. The forested roads around Choco Loco were rapidly flooded. When men from around the state armed with deer rifles, shotguns, looking to kill themselves a monster and claim their place in history, it became a dangerous, chaotic scene. Rifles were being discharged at shadows. Trigger happy weekend. Warriors were shooting at every rustle in the brush, every snap of a twig, every glint of reflected light that might might be the eyes of a beast. The woods became a combat tone.

15:37 We aren't talking about organized search parties with maps, radios and coordination. We're talking about pickup trucks loaded with teenagers with cheap beer, driving slow with spotlights mounted on the cab, sweeping beams of light across the tree lines in hopes of catching a glimpse of something unnatural. That's a recipe for disaster. That's how people get shot. The fear wasn't just about the monster anymore. It was about the mistake, the wrong target, the wrong shadow, the wrong moment. Local farmers began to panic. They weren't just afraid of the monster terrorizing their livestock anymore. Now they were afraid for their livestock. They worried that their prized cows or bulls, animals worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars, would be mistaken for the monster in the dark and gunned down by some crazed hunter on Chocoloca Road. Every rustle in the pasture could be a prized bowl about to be dropped by a 30 out six because some weakened warrior thought he saw the booger.

16:27 The monster had turned the community against itself. The roads weren't safe, the woods weren't safe. And trust, that deep communal trust that had defined the valley for generations, began to fracture under the way of fear, bullets and the unknown. The confession. For decades, the legend of the Chokaloka monster sat in that Gray area between folklore and fact. A local campfire story, a strange chapter in Alabama history that refused to be fully explained or fully dismissed. The sightings had tapered off by the end of summer 1969, and as the years passed, the monster became just another ghost story whispered in the valley. Some believed.

17:09 Some and laughed it off. Most simply moved on until 2001. That Halloween, the Aniston Star published an article that seemed to put the final nail in the coffin of the legend. The piece was titled Choke a Logo Monster Jokester reveals 32 year old prank written by reporter Matthew Creamer The man behind the confession was Neil Williamson, who was living in Nancy's Creek at the time of the interview. Williamson claimed he was the mastermind behind the entire fiasco in the article. Williamson explained on boring weekend nights in June of that year, when he was only 15 years old, he would sneak out of his house after his parents had gone to bed. He'd quietly take the family forward and drive down the dark back roads, Choco Loco, looking for the perfect spot to stage his prank.

17:54 You'd pull the car off the road and drive in a short distance into the forest to conceal it from passing vehicles. In the backseat, he had stowed away his makeshift costume, an old cow skull in a large coat. The plan was brilliantly simple and terrifyingly effective. Williamson would wait in the darkness until he saw the glow of headlights approaching in the distance. Then, at just the right moment, he would throw the skull over his head and drape the coat around the shoulders, transform himself into a bizarre hunched silhouette. He would step out onto the roadside and perform what he described as a quote UN quote strange dance, which was jerky and unnatural movements designed to look as inhuman as possible in the sweep of the headlights.

18:34 He claimed he did this regularly throughout the month of June that year, and to keep things unpredictable, he would sometimes swap out the black coat for a white sheet, which he said explained the variations and witness descriptions. Some reporting a dark shadowy figure, others describing A pale, ghostly creature for a 15 year old kid in rural Alabama in 1969 must have felt like harmless fun, little mischief, a good story to tell his buddies. But the prank grew far beyond his control, spiraling into a full blown monster panic that gripped the entire region. Then came the night that almost ended, and tragedy. Williamson had brought along 2 buddies, boys he'd let in on the secret with plans of having them join in on the fun. A truck came slowly down the road in the late hours of the night, and the boys prepared to spring their surprise. But Williamson wasn't ready for what happened next. The sharp crack of a rifle shot out from the cab of the truck, aimed directly at them.

19:31 Williamson and his two buddies scrambled into the woods, running for their lives at a pitch Black Forest. He described the scene in terrifying detail, the beam of floodlight from the truck sweeping across the tree line, illuminating the trunks they desperately hid behind, their hearts pounding, their breath coming in ragged gasps, the very real possibility that they might be shot dead over a stupid prank. When the truck finally crept away, Williamson kept running. He burst through the forest into a neighboring pasture, not daring to slow down until he was far from the road. In his panic and the darkness, he tried to climb over to properties barbed wire fence and injured himself badly enough to leave a lasting impression. That, according to Williamson, was his last night as Choco Loco Monster. The fun had stopped being fun.

20:13 The joke had nearly gotten him killed. His confession seemed to close the book on one of the Alabama's strangest Cryptid legends. A teenager in a cow skull and a coat. A simple prank that got out of hand. The monster reduced to mischief. The terror reduced to teenage boredom. Case closed. Or was it the cracks in the confession? It's a tidy ending, isn't it? A poor teenager, A cow skull? A prank gone wrong, Case closed. Or is it? When you actually line up Williamson's confession with the original reports from 1969 start to appear? Not small hairline fractures, but glaring inconsistencies that demand closer examination.

20:56 Before we go further, I need to acknowledge something. The sources for this material are frustratingly difficult to verify. What you often find when researching cases like this is what is referred to as the Source Loop. 1 website sites our website, which sites A blog which sites the first website. It's a game of telephone played over 50 years where details get shaved off with each retelling, nuance gets lost and you end up with nothing but regurgitated facts that may or may not reflect what actually happened. I did this myself in earlier drafts of the script. We all do it, rewriting information in our own words to stay away from plagiarism. But this common practice is also how minute details go missing between reports.

21:37 After this occurs, report after report after report, repeated 10s or even 100 times across decades of retellings, you could be left with almost nothing of the original account. That's why for this analysis, I went back to the primary text, the newspaper articles from 1969, Williamson's 2001 confession in the Anniston Star, and a handful of first generation accounts that haven't been filtered through multiple layers of interpretation. And when you compare those sources directly, that piece is simply don't fit the puzzle Williamson is trying to sell us. Let's start with the most obvious problem, the timeline. The first sighting, the terrifying encounter with Margaret T that truly kicked off the panic, happened in mid-May of 1969.

22:22 But Neil Williamson's confession clearly states he began his hopes in June. I know it's small, but that's a gap of anywhere from two to six weeks, depending on exactly when in May Margaret had her encounter and when in June Williamson claims he started. So here's the critical question. Who was Margaret Teague looking at in that ditch in May? Williamson was still talked safely into his bed. If Williamson is telling the truth about his start date, and we have no reason to believe he'd lie about when he began, given that he's already confessing to the prank, then he cannot possibly be responsible for the sighting that started the entire panic. He cannot be the creature that sent Margaret into the ditch. He cannot be the abomination with the enormous head that she described in such visceral detail. This isn't a minor discrepancy.

23:09 This is foundational. If Williamson didn't create the first sighting, then what did? Next, let's examine the skull detail. Williamson's entire confession revolves around wearing a visible cow skull as the centerpiece of his costume. Yet when you examine the contemporary reports, actual newspaper accounts published while the sightings were happening, not a single witness mentioned a school. Not one. Margaret mentioned a huge head and described the creature as God awfully ugly. The unnamed witness described long matted hair. Johnny Ray T's group saw something the size of cow with dark shaggy fur. But nowhere, and I mean nowhere, does anyone say it looked like a man wearing a skeleton head. Or I saw a bone where the face should be. Think about the anatomy of a cow skull for a moment. It's hollow.

23:58 It has empty eye sockets, dark voids where the eyes once were. If you put that over your head, your own eyes were either hidden deep inside those sockets or you're looking out through the nasal cavity. Either way, what witnesses would see is bone calcium, the unmistakable structure of a skull. But the witnesses described eyes. Is that connected eyes that reflected light? In at least one account, witnesses reported seeing red eye shine, that distinctive glow when light hits a living retina at the right angle. You cannot fake biological eye shine with a dry bone mask unless you're rigging up battery powered lights behind the sockets. A 15 year old kid in rural Alabama didn't have access to compact LE DS or sophisticated lighting rigs. If witnesses saw eyes glowing in the darkness, they were seeing a retina reflection.

24:46 They were seeing biology, not calcium. They were seeing something alive. Then there's the white sheet claim. Williamson says he sometimes swapped out the black coat for a white sheet to keep things interesting, and that this explains the variation in color descriptions. But here's where his story reveals either ignorance of local folklore or a fundamental misunderstanding of what people were actually reporting. In Alabama folklore, a white creature is a very specific thing, a Cryptid known simply as the White Thang, spelled THA&G for Thang. To understand why this is such a glaring discrepancy, you need to know what the white thing actually represents in Alabama lore. It's a legendary creature frequently reported in Morgan, Etawa, and Jefferson counties, described as a massive, upright entity covered in thick, white shaggy hair, looking like a cross between Bigfoot and a polar bear. Some versions of the legend even suggests it's a shapeshifter, or a spirit capable of vanishing instantly. This is deeply established Southern folklore, with sightings dating back generations. If Williamson had truly been running around Choco Loco Rd. in a white sheet in June of 1969, right in the middle of Monster Mania, locals would have immediately identified it as a white thing.

26:04 Sighting. The newspapers would have made the connection. Reports would have reflected that specific terminology. Because the white thing was already part of the regional consciousness. But look at the actual reports from Choke Local Rd. The varmint was described as dark. The cow sized beast was Gray to black. The booger was covered in matted dark hair that blended into the tree line. Margaret's abomination wasn't white. Johnny Ray's creature wasn't white. Every single credible contemporary sighting describes a dark, earth toned creature that could disappear into the shadows. If Williamson was out there dancing in a bed sheet, why did no one report seeing a ghost or a white thing?

26:45 The answer is simple. Either he wasn't using a white sheet as often as he claims, or he was performing for an empty theater, scarring nobody, contributing nothing to the actual wave of sightings that gripped the valley. We also need to address the Teague connection. We have Margaret Teague reporting the first sighting in mid-May. Then roughly a week later we have Johnny Ray Teague and his companions encountering multiple creatures on Choco Logo Road 2. Dramatic reports close together in time involving people with the same last name. I attempted to verify whether Margaret and Johnny Ray were related siblings, cousins, parent and child, but I was unable to find a reliable source that proved the connection. There were a few websites that made the claim, but when I followed their cited sources, I found myself right back in the source loop. 1 site referenced another which referenced another with no primary documentation at the end of the trail.

27:37 So I cannot definitively prove these two people were related, but here's what I can say. 2 reports on a week or so apart of the same type of creature by people sharing the same surname and a small rural community. The likelihood that they were related is probably pretty high. Cleveland County wasn't exactly teaming with people. Families knew each other, Names meant something. If they were related, does that make the story more suspicious? Does it point toward a coordinated hoax within a single family? Or does it suggest something else, that this family, for whatever reason, was being targeted, That they lived or worked in an area where something was actually moving through the woods and they had the misfortune of encountering it? Without access to genealogical records or interviews with surviving family members, we can't know for certain, but the question hangs there, unanswered. Finally, let's talk about the embellishment problem. When you dig through the available sources on the truck Local Monster, you find a lot of dramatic details that simply don't appear in the original accounts. Descriptions of the skull, specific colors, behavior details.

28:42 Where did these come from? Often they appear to originate from later retellings, authors and researchers adding flourishes to make the story more engaging, more vivid, more fantastical for modern readers. I've done this myself. We all do. It's part of storytelling, but it's also how truth gets buried, period, under layers of narrative Polish. The skull detail specifically seems to appear almost exclusively in two places, Williamson's 2001 confession and subsequent articles that cite his confession. But in contemporary 1969 reports? Nothing. No mention of bone, no mention of a skull faced creature stalking the roadside. This suggests that either Williamson is telling the truth about his specific prank and he was scaring people who never made it into the newspaper reports, or he's retrofitting his teenage mischief into someone else's monster. So here's the most likely scenario if we're being brutally honest.

29:33 Neil Williamson was a bored 15 year old kid who heard the stories circulating through town in May and early June. He saw the panic building, he read the newspaper accounts, he watched as armed men flooded the back roads looking for something to shoot, and he decided to join in to ride the wave, be part of the phenomena. He went out in June, after the initial wave sightings had already begun, and played his prank. He might have even scared a few people, drivers who didn't report their encounters or incidents that got lost in the noise of the broader panic. But claiming he started it, claiming he was the booger that Margaret saw in mid-May, weeks before he ever put that cow skull over his head, that claim crumbles under the weight of the calendar. Neil Williamson was the echo, not the voice. He was a shadow puppet trying to mimic the monster. He was a teenager who saw an opportunity for mischief and took it.

30:23 Then decades later, perhaps seeking closure, perhaps seeking attention, Perhaps perhaps genuinely believing his prank was responsible for more than it actually was, came forward with a confession that conveniently explained away one of Alabama's strangest legends. But the confession doesn't explain Margaret Teague's encounter in May, Doesn't explain the I Shine, doesn't explain the pack behavior Johnny Ray witnessed. It doesn't explain why every single description pointed to a dark animal like creature rather than a boy in a bed sheet. The Choco logo monster may have been joined by a prankster in June 1969, but in my opinion, something else, something unexplained, was already stalking those roads when Neil Williamson was still asleep in his bed. Everything else Before we close this file, there are a few more threads worth pulling, details that don't fit neatly into the timeline of sightings and confession, but that add important context to the Choco logo monster legend. By late June or early July of 1969, the sighting simply stopped.

31:27 There was no climatic final encounter, no definitive resolution. The creature just vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. The armed patrols gradually dispersed. The local newspapers moved on to other stories. The valley returned to its predictable rhythms, though with a lingering sense of unease that would persist for years. The panic lasted roughly 7 weeks, a concentrated burst of terror that gripped the community before evaporating like morning fog. This timeline is itself curious. If something genuinely unknown was roaming these woods, why did it stop? Did it move on to new territory? Did it simply learn to avoid the roads after encountering so many armed humans?

32:11 Or did the presence of dozens of trigger happy weekend warriors make the area too dangerous for a teenage prankster to continue his game? We'll never know for certain, but the abrupt end to the phenomenon is as much a part of the mystery as the sightings themselves. To truly understand the trouble of a monster, we need to acknowledge the lands deeper history as well. Long before European settlers arrived, the region was Creek Nation territory. The area was inhabited by Native Americans as far back as 2500 years ago, and the Ibaka people, one of the most ancient tribal towns within the Muskogee Nation, maintained ceremonial grounds along choco loco Creek until 1830's. The name choco loco itself comes from the Creek language, though sources vary on exact translation. Some say it derives from choco Lago, meaning big Shoals, referring to the wide, shallow stream with large rock formations.

33:05 Others claim it comes from Choco Rocco, meaning big house, which by the 1700s referred to the Creek Ceremonial Square, a structure bounded by wooden bleachers with awnings too large for a roof but still called a building. Creek mythology, like many southeastern indigenous belief systems, included powerful entities that inhabit the natural world. The Big Man eater, or Atipatakoba, appears in traditional Alabama in Creek folklore as a giant cannibal monster. While this figure doesn't match the Choco Loco monsters description exactly, it establishes A cultural president for large, dangerous beings that dwell in the forest and prey on those who venture too far from safety.

33:49 Did the 1969 witnesses tap into these older narratives, perhaps unconsciously? When Margaret Teague saw something God awfully ugly standing on 2 legs in the darkness, was she seeing something entirely new? Or was her mind teaching for ancient archetypes, stories passed down through the land itself, echoing through generations? We can't draw a Direct Line from Creek folklore to the choco local monster the way we could connect the Woods Devil to the Abenaki Kiwok. The cultural disruption of the Indian removal in 1830s severed many of those narrative threads. But the land remembers even when the stories are forgotten. One specific description appears repeatedly in the witness accounts and deserves closer examination. Multiple people describe the creature as being the size of a cow.

34:36 This is a strange comparison. It's oddly specific but simultaneously vague. A cow can weigh anywhere from 800 to 1500 lbs, depending on the breed. When someone says the size of a cow, what exactly do they mean? The height? The mass? The general impression of bulk? The comparison suggests something important about what witnesses were experiencing. They weren't describing something that looked human size. They weren't comparing it to a bear or a deer, animals they would have been intimately familiar with as rural Albanians in the 1960s. They reached for cow because what they saw had a similar sense of mass and presence, something substantial, something that takes up space and way that demands attention.

35:20 This detail also complicates Williamson's confession. A 15 year old boy, even 1, standing on tip toes or hunched over to create a strange silhouette, doesn't have the massive cow. You might mistake his shadow for something larger in the panic of the moment. But the repeated use of this specific comparison across multiple independent witnesses suggests they were seeing something with real physical presence, not just a skinny teenager in a costume. What's perhaps most telling about the Choco Loco monster is what wasn't found. Despite 7 weeks of intense activity, multiple sightings by different witnesses, and dozens of armed men combing the back roads, not a single piece of physical evidence was ever recovered. No footprints were photographed.

36:03 No hair samples were collected. No photographs were taken, despite the creature reportedly appearing in full glare of headlights on multiple occasions. In an era when many rural Alabamians kept cameras in their vehicles for documenting deer kills and fish catches, is the complete absence of photographic evidence is striking. This absence cuts both ways. For skeptics, it supports the hoax theory Williamson was careful, quick, and left nothing behind. For believers, it suggests something with an almost supernatural ability to avoid leaving traces moving through the landscape like smoke. The only evidence we have is the testimony itself, the voices of frank people describing something that terrified them, recorded in newspaper articles and passed down through local memories. Since Williamson's 2001 confession, there have been no credible reports of the Tropolo monster returning to the valley. The creature appears to be a phenomenon frozen in time A7 week window in the spring and early summer of 1969, after which the roads fell silent.

37:03 This complete cessation of sightings is itself unusual in cryptozoology. Most crypto legends continue to generate sporadic reports over decades. Bigfoot sightings persist across North America. The Alabama white thing continues to be reported in other parts of the state. But the trokolocal monster? Nothing. Either Williamson successfully scared off any real creature that might have been in the area, or his confession successfully killed the legend. People no longer look for the monster on Choco Logo Rd. because they know it was just a teenager in costume. The mystery has been solved. The file close and the case archived. But as we've explored, that neat conclusion doesn't quite fit all the facts.

37:46 And sometimes the stories that stop being told are the ones most worth remembering. So what really walked down Choco Logo Rd. in the summer of 1969? Was it a 15 year old boy with a cow skull and a death wish playing a prank that spiraled beyond his control? Or was it the booger that got off the ugly thing that sent Margaret Teague into a ditch? Was it the humpbacked varmint that defies easy categorization? Was it the thing that could stole a car just by being near it? Moved in packs that stroll lazily around the vehicles like an apex predator toying with its prey? History is often rewritten by the loudest voice and it confession in a newspaper is pretty loud, especially when it offers a tidy, rational explanation that lets everyone sleep a little easier at night.

38:33 Neil Williamson's story became the official narrative. The Except the truth. Case closed. Mr. Solve, move along. But the whispers of the witnesses are still there if you listen closely enough. Margaret frozen in her car in the ditch, staring at something with an enormous head and human like shoulders. Johnny Ray and his companion surrounded by multiple creatures on a dark Rd., their engine when dead, watching those things circle their vehicle in the silence. The unnamed hunter who saw something that was neither bear nor Panther, but somehow both. The radio callers who insisted it's real. I saw it run faster than a deer. Those whispers don't quite fit him since confession. They're too detailed, too specific, too early.

39:15 They they carry the weight of genuine terror, the kind that doesn't come from seeing a teenager in a costume, but from encountering something that shouldn't exist. Maybe Williamson did prank a few drivers in June of 1969. Maybe he added his shadow to the chaos, his fake monster dancing alongside something real. Or maybe he heard the story, saw an opportunity for notoriety 32 years later, and claimed credit for a legend he never created, becoming in death shadow after that rifle shot. The acceptable answer to an unacceptable question? We may never know for certain. The truck logo monster belongs to that Gray space between folklore and fact, hoax and horror, where the best mysteries live. What I do know is this.

40:00 Something happened in the valley in the spring of 1969, something that frightened people who knew these woods, who understood the difference between a bear and a man, between a shadow and a presence. And whatever it was, prankster, predator or something we don't yet have words for, it left its mark on Chuckle up a Road. The creature may be gone, the sightings may have ended, but the questions remain hanging in the humid. Alabama air like morning fog than never quite burns away. Thank you for joining me for this file. If you have a story from Cleveland County or if you know the truth about fatigue sightings, we want to hear from you. Perhaps you're a family member who can't confirm or deny their connection. Maybe you were there in 1969 and saw something that never made it into the papers.

40:45 Or maybe you know something about the nights before Williamson claims he started his prank those critical weeks in May when the terror first began. You can find Project Jackalope on all major podcast platforms under the Infinite Rabbit Hole RSS feed. Please subscribe, leave a review, and share this file to help us continue documenting the creatures on the fringe of our reality. Until next time, check your backseat, lock your doors. And if you find yourself on a dark country Rd. where the canopy blocks out the moon, remember, sometimes the hoax is just a mask for the horror. Goodnight everyone.

41:37 Sources used for this research in this episode included the Innocent Star newspaper articles from June 1969 and the October 31st, 2001 edition featuring Matthew Creamer's article, The Choco Logo, Monster Jokester Reveals 32 Year Old Prank, The Birmingham News coverage from 1969, BFRO or Bigfoot Fuel Researchers Organization reports, and contemporaneous radio broadcast from VHMA in Anniston, AL. Additional sources include the book Beast Beyond Belief, Sneaky Werewolves, Flying Cats, Accidental Apes by Michael D Winkle, Alabama Lore, the Choco Local Monster Hug and Molly, The Lost Town of Cotton Port, and Other Mysterious tales by Will Elrich, and various historical accounts from the Alabama Forestry Commission and Encyclopedia of Alabama regarding the Choco Local State Forest, Alum County history and the Civil War era iron industry. Information on Creek Nation history and the Choco Local Creek Archaeological Complex was drawn from the Alabama Mound Trail Digital Alabama and scholarly sources on Muskogee mythology and Southeastern Indigenous folklore and historical context, and Alabama's iron furnaces during the Civil War was sourced from the Encyclopedia of Alabama's entries on Janae Furnace, Calhoun County, and Aniston.