4 case files, newest first.
In December 1900, families living in the ruins of the abandoned Fort Lowell said a tall figure in high boots and a soldier's uniform was coming out of the walls at night. Shots and dogs couldn't catch it. Within weeks two territorial papers had turned it into a running joke, and the people who first reported it were nearly written out of their own story.
For a month in the autumn of 1894, people on South Main Street in Tucson reported a night prowler that changed shape: a dog, a hog, a burro, a man on all fours. Armed parties hunted it, and rumor blamed an elderly Tohono O'odham woman. Then the Citizen announced that “the Main street spook has been laid.” It was a thief in a pillow-case mask.
Six weeks after Phoenix's Salton sea serpent, a Tucson paper told how a fire bell, a frightened teamster and a moonlit crowd led to a seven-headed monster rising from the flooded Santa Cruz and preaching a sermon about rain and real estate. Yuma's paper called it “trash.” Part two of the Salton serpent case.
Between 1924 and 1930, lead crosses and swords with Latin inscriptions came out of the caliche beside an old lime kiln on Silverbell Road. They seemed to tell of a Roman-Jewish colony in eighth-century Arizona. The 1925 skeptics had it right: they're a hoax.
