A Ribbit-ingFrog Blog: Our Day Amongst the Cryptids

Cryptid lovers – rejoice. Non-cryptid lovers – brace yourself. The Art Show is proud to present a behind-the-scenes look at the 2025 Frogman Festival for our latest Insider segment. Check it out on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HZ0D6S-P1A.

This was the third annual festival, but the lore of the Loveland Frogman spans decades. Legend has it that the Frogman is a bipedal, reptilian humanoid standing around three to four feet tall and, by some accounts, totes a magic wand. The first Frogman – or, rather, Frogmen – sighting took place in 1955, as one person drove across the Little Miami River and witnessed a trio of the cryptid. Subsequent sightings occurred in the 1970s. 

In 1972, Loveland police officer Ray Shockey was driving along the same river when he witnessed a reptilian creature which stood on its legs and scurried over a guardrail into the river. Fellow officer Mark Matthews soon witnessed the same – and after shooting the creature, claims to have discovered that what Shockey really saw was just a tail-less iguana scurrying across the road on its hind legs (which somehow seems creepier to me).

To this day, Matthews claims that there’s no such thing as a Frogman. But in the years since, more sightings have been reported. The most recent encounter took place in 2016, while a few youths were playing Pokémon GO (I can’t make this stuff up). Regardless of your take on the veracity of these stories, without a doubt, the Frogman has captured the popular imagination of the region and beyond

I was away at college for previous iterations of the Frogman Festival, which brings together artists, writers, experts, performers, general enthusiasts – and now, The Art Show producers – to celebrate the mystique of our regional cryptid. I had been dying to see what the festival was about for years, so receiving a custom press pass the second I walked into the convention center was a pretty legendary moment for me. Squee!

Production Assistant Derrick Smith and I spent the day in Loveland gathering footage of festival wares and happenings, from crocheted cryptids to the indoor parade led by the Pied Piper of Loveland. My multiple Frogman sightings made logging and organizing my footage after the fact quite challenging. I had to make sure there was a distinction among “Steampunk Frogman,” “Hawaiian Shirt Frogman,” “Cowbell Frogman” and more (watch the Insider, and you’ll understand).

So what does the Frogman have to do with our concept of “art?” You wouldn’t believe how many vendors we saw, each with our own creative spin on the Frogman (you also wouldn’t believe how much financial restraint this The Art Show producer practiced with so much one-of-a-kind merch on all sides). We saw Frogman knit sweaters, carved walking sticks, iridescent stickers, plushies, ink stamps, glistening mosaics and so much more. Some interpretations leaned more cartoonish, some were extremely literal, some were actually a little eerie and others were just all-around adorable. We even saw a Frogman tattooing – just one of many froggy flash designs the tattoo artists were offering that day. 

One of my personal favorites was a blanket featuring a super jacked Frogman, visible here:

And Frogman was just one of the cryptids represented that day. Sure, he’s the star of the festival, but he’s also backed up by Mothman, the Fresno Nightcrawlers, the Flatwoods Monster, the Hopkinsville Goblins (hey, Kentucky!) – I could go on. During the festival, I personally encountered cryptids I’d never even heard of – perfect fodder for later Wikipedia rabbit holes – and I look forward to exploring other cryptids reported to roam throughout Ohio (beware the Grassman). 

I also feel like I would be remiss in not giving a shoutout to Monstrum here, a PBS Digital Studios series that takes a deep dive into the lore of creatures, cryptids, legends and the like around the world (still waiting on a Frogman episode, Dr. Zarka!). 

What I’ve also realized in taking my The Art Show approach to the Frogman is that just a handful of sightings – none of which can be fully confirmed – was more than enough to spark peoples’ imagination. Usually only a small batch of people claim to witness cryptids in the flesh, and oftentimes their descriptions are pretty limited, or vary from witness to witness. That said, artists don’t have much to go off of when they decide to create an interpretation of these beings that may or may not exist. Yet somehow, they manage to take whatever information we have, even if it’s a handful of stories amassed and handed down throughout the decades, and run with it, creating a chain reaction of iterations of something we’re just not too sure about, and maybe never will be. 

But regardless of whether they exist or not, cryptids will continue to remain a muse for many – this The Art Show producer included. 

Nadya Ellerhorst
CET and Think^TV Producer