Carol Dentz of Bollinger County has submitted three consecutive maintenance requests citing a large hair-covered figure in the treeline as the reason her fence still isn’t fixed. The county has not yet closed the ticket.

Carol Dentz does not claim to be a cryptid researcher. She is not on any forum I’m aware of, she does not have a blog, and when I reached her by phone on a Tuesday afternoon she was, by the sound of it, folding laundry. What she is, as best I can determine, is a sixty-three-year-old retired school administrator in Bollinger County, Missouri, who has now filed three separate maintenance requests with her homeowners’ association describing Momo — the Missouri Monster, a bipedal, hair-covered figure with a documented presence in this region going back to the early 1970s — as the primary obstacle to her fence repair. She has used the phrase ‘ongoing landscaping issue’ each time. The HOA has not escalated. The fence remains unrepaired. Momo, per Carol, remains in the treeline.

The first request was filed in late April. I obtained copies of all three through a contact I won’t name because she works for the county and has a mortgage. The language across all three requests is consistent in a way I find notable — not escalating, not panicked, just iterative. Request one states that the fence contractor ‘could not safely access the rear property line due to the presence of a large figure in the adjacent wood line.’ Request two, filed six weeks later, notes that ‘the issue described in the previous request has not resolved and the figure remains intermittently visible from the back porch.’ Request three, submitted earlier this month, reads in its entirety: ‘Same as before. Still there. Still large. Still covered in hair. Fence cannot proceed at this time.’ There is something about that third one. I have read it several times.

Community Notice

Eight Witnesses, One Work Order

Carol is not alone in this. By the time I drove out to Bollinger County — I came down from a separate assignment in Illinois, took Route 60 east, stopped at a diner in Poplar Bluff I’ve had on my list since 2021 and can now confirm deserves to be there — I had identified seven additional witnesses in a roughly four-mile radius who had seen something consistent with Carol’s description between March and the present. An adult male figure, hair-covered, height estimated between six-and-a-half and eight feet depending on the witness, observed at or near the tree line bordering a stretch of second-growth timber east of Zalma. No one had filed anything except Carol. When I asked one neighbor why he hadn’t reported it, he looked at me for a moment and said, ‘Reported it where?’

I’m not saying it’s an animal and I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m saying it’s there most evenings around dusk and the contractor won’t come back until it isn’t, and that’s a problem I need someone to solve.

— Carol Dentz, Bollinger County resident and HOA request author

I spent two evenings at the property with Carol’s permission. She set out a folding chair for me on the back porch without being asked, which I appreciated. She brought me coffee on the second evening without asking if I wanted it, which I also appreciated. The tree line sits approximately ninety meters from the rear fence line — the one that needs repairing — and on both evenings I observed movement in the brush consistent with something large. The second evening I had my camera with a 400mm lens and what I got was not nothing. It is also not definitive. I have added the images to a file I’m maintaining. When I got back to my vehicle I found the trail mix had fallen off the seat and I couldn’t locate the voice recorder again despite the drive back being unpaved the whole way.

The third request is the one that got my attention, honestly. Because usually people either stop filing or they start filing very differently. She just… kept going. Same tone. Like she was reporting a dead streetlight.

— Dana Bright, Senior Field Correspondent, What The Cryptid? News Network

I called the HOA management company before I left the county. The person I spoke to confirmed the work order was open, confirmed it was categorized under ‘property maintenance — exterior,’ and when I asked whether they had a protocol for situations in which a cryptid was the stated obstacle to completion, there was a pause long enough that I wrote it down in notebook one. She ultimately said they would ‘look into whether this falls under our standard resolution timeline.’ I thanked her and gave her the WTC tip line in case anything developed. She did not sound like she would be using it. I have been wrong about that before.

What I keep returning to is the specific plainness of Carol Dentz’s language. She is not trying to convince anyone of anything. She is not performing alarm or disbelief or the kind of careful hedging I see from people who have googled whether anyone will take them seriously before they put something in writing. She saw something. It’s still there. She needs her fence fixed and she can’t get it fixed until the situation resolves. She filed a form. She filed it again. She filed it a third time. The HOA ticket is open. Momo, if the eight witnesses in a four-mile radius are to be believed, is still in the trees. Carol Dentz is, I think, handling this better than most institutions would. I’m still working the story.