It’s hard to believe that Australian kangaroos could be hopping around all over the United States. But what’s even harder to imagine is that these out-of-place marsupials appear to posses supernatural abilities as they rummage through the backyards of bewildered people in California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana, to name a few. Phantom kangaroos have been spotted in a variety of urban and rural settings and are said to be particularly hostile. They are described to be 3.5 - 5.5 feet tall with glowing eyes and ghostly characteristics. They have been blamed for slaughtering numerous dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, and other small animals in areas with high kangaroo activity.

According to W. Haden Blackman’s Field Guide to North American Monsters, the first reported phantom kangaroo sighting was on June 12, 1899 in Richmond, Wisconsin.

Interestingly, the phantom kangaroo activity appears to occur in waves. Several witnesses in South Pittsburgh, Tennessee, including a Reverend W. J. Hancock, spotted the creature in January of 1934. The sightings coincided with mysterious killings of a dog and several chickens. The Kangaroo was allegedly seen fleeing the scene carrying sheep.

From 1957 to 1967, phantom kangaroos haunted Coon Rapids, Minnesota and were spotted by numerous startled witnesses who dubbed it "Big Bunny".

Hundreds of people witnessed a phantom kangaroo in Chicago, Illinois, on October 18, 1974. It kept people away with viscous displays and vanished over a fence before police could capture it.

In 1980, a kangaroo was said to haunt San Fransisco’s Golden Gate Park.

Evidence of these phantom kangaroos is severely limited. One of the mysterious marsupials was allegedly hit by a car and killed on August 31, 1981. However, both the corpse and the anonymous driver disappeared before they could be investigated. And a fuzzy photograph taken on April 24, 1978, shows a slumping figure (which resembles a kangaroo) in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

So what are these phantom kangaroos? Are they ghostly apparitions of Australian wildlife? Or are they zoo escapees? The latter is the most likely explanation, but local zoos were contacted during a number of these mass sightings and none reported missing their kangaroos. Plus the zoo escapee theory does not explain the "intangible" quality these creatures appear to have. Whatever these ghostly apparitions are, they have caught the attention of many Fortean researchers, startled numerous eye-witnesses, and avoided police officials who attempt to capture them.

Propleopus oscillans

The “carnivorous” kangaroo
While the term ‘carnivore’ might seem to indicate that it hunted, it merely means that it could eat meat. Studies of the fossils of this large rat-kangaroo suggest that it was an opportunistic carnivore and ate insects, vertebrates, fruits and soft leaves. We have, in our illustration drawn him eating a large birds egg, (perhaps belonging to the Mihirung) which he might have been able to steal.



The kangaroo-like Propleopus might have weighed 70 or so kilograms while the rat-kangaroos of today are only 3 or 4 kilos in weight. To call him a carnivore is not so bizarre when you think that the modern Musky Rat-kangaroo eats insects and the Burrowing Bettong sometimes scavenge sheep carcasses. Propleopus all had large shearing and very stout grinding teeth so would have been able to cope with some meat in their diet. Whether they hunted for it is not so certain on evidence.

Propleopus

Carnivorous kangaroos from the pliocene and pleistocene. The last pleistocene survivor of the lineage propleopus oscillans, stood about two metres tall.

Bizarre 'horned' kangaroo fossils unearthed May 2003 - New Scientist



The first complete skulls of a bizarre "horned" kangaroo are the star finds in the cache of fossils newly unearthed from caves in the Nullarbor Plain, Australia

Reconstruction of Propleopus, the Giant Rat Kangaroo, by Frank Knight (from Kadimakara. Extinct Vertebrates of Australia).