The official state bird of Ohio is the Cardinal. The official flower is the red carnation. The official tree is the buckeye. Now, if a new bill makes it through the state legislature, Ohio may also adopt something a little less biologically verifiable: an official state cryptid.
Authored by Representatives Tristan Rader and Jean Schmidt, should House Bill 821 pass, it will declare that the Loveland Frogman is the first official cryptid of the state of Ohio, and it would be the first official state cryptid in the United States.
Admittedly, I had never heard of the Loveland Frogman before this. To give myself a quick crash course in his lore, I gave him a quick Wikipedia read and perused the Google image gallery. From the images, I gather that he’s often represented in one of two ways: as a weird little freak or as a sexy, beefy, frog hunk. He either looks like he wants to eat your children or he’s going to sweep you off your feet. There is no in between.
Ohio Is for Cryptids
As the Wikipedia entry says, the legend of the frogman began late at night on a desolate road in 1955. A driver was heading out of the Branch Hill neighborhood when he saw three humanoid figures standing on their hind legs on the side of the road, each about 3 to 4 feet tall, with froggy faces and bodies. Another version of the story takes place under a bridge, and one of the Frogmen had a wand that shot sparks, a detail that feels like a hat on a hat, ya’know?
The best part of the Frogman’s Wikipedia page is the image on the right-hand side of an iguana with the caption “The so-called ‘frog’ was more likely a large, tailless iguana.” Love it. Love that a reptilian quadruped got turned into a four-foot-tall humanoid frogman in a cloak who was presumably hitchhiking.
Frogman would make headlines again decades later, this time in 2016, when, at peak Pokémon Go hysteria, a couple out exploring the world to catch Pokémon as Nintendo intended, spotted the fabled amphibian, yet their years of intense Pokémon training seemingly failed them as they did not capture the Frogman, averting a future wherein they would have become legends in their own right.
If passed, Ohio would become the first state in the U.S. to designate an official cryptid. Not to be outdone, California is reportedly exploring similar legislation to name Bigfoot as its own state cryptid.
We may be witnessing the beginning of a trend, and a rather fitting one. In an era defined by conspiracy theories, fractured realities, and the blatant obliteration of shared facts, it feels appropriate that states are starting to codify their silly bullshit alongside real birds and trees.
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