Beast of Cole Hollow Road

Eighteen-year-old Randy Emmert and a group of his friends were apparently the first ones to be confronted by the stinking simian spectre that would plague the area around Pekin, Illinois in the summer of 1972. Emmert had his encounter in early May, but eventually over 200 reports of the pale ape-like creature known as 'Cohomo' or the 'Cole Hollow Road Monster' would stack up...

Cohomo!

This illustration appeared in the Chicago Tribune

Emmert and his friends noted that the terrifying creature made a loud shrieking noise, and described it as being very large and covered in white hair. They apparently believed that it made its lair underneath a local abandoned house, but there is no indication as to why they came to this conclusion. Emmert originally didn't want to report his sighting out of fear of being thought to be insane, but he eventually pulled through. Little did he know that his report in May would kick off an outbreak of monster hysteria two months later.
The next widely-publicised sighting was on July 25th, and was reported by the Creve Coeur authorities who had apparently received a story about something big swimming in the Illinois River. Just one day later, over 200 phonecalls had been logged by the East Peoria police as coming from terrified townsfolk who had allegedly seen the hirsute horror. Also on the evening of the 26th, the Tazewell County Sheriff's Department took a presumably-frantic call from a man living in Eureka who had apparently been partaking in a family birthday party at Fondulac Park in East Peoria when he caught sight of at least one UFO. He and the rest of the party all saw some bizarre lights moving in a vertical position before going down behind some trees and disappearing. These lights left a vaporous trail behind them. Other reports included such incidents as the monster being seen walking in the forest, roaming back-yards, patrolling riverbanks and even destroying one unlucky caller's garden fence. The police - led by then-sheriff James Donahue - were skeptical of the reports but logged them nonetheless.
On July 28th, a woman in rural Pekin had a run-in with Cohomo while picking berries by an old mine. The witness was so terrified, according to her testimony to the Tazewell County Sheriff's Department, that she fled the scene immediately and left her purse behind. That same night, East Peoria Police claimed that a further two reliable citizens claimed to have seen said furry fiend. The creature was described as having long, u-shaped ears and a red mouth with sharp teeth. It had thumbs with 'long second joints'. Overall, it was compared to a mix of an ape and a caveman. Newspaper articles from the time stated that monster had a distinct stench about it comparable to that of a wet dog, rotten eggs or akin to sulphur. Early articles from the local Daily Times newspaper originally suggested that perhaps the Missouri Monster 'Momo' had migrated to Tazewell County, seeing as it had been seen just one year before the monster mayhem kicked off.
A search party even eventually took to the East Peoria woods in search of the simian monstrosity. This party consisted of roughly 100 armed men, and they patrolled the thick forest for quite a long while before one hapless volunteer accidentally shot himself in the foot and the search was promptly called off for health and safety reasons.
Another twist arrived in this already-bizarre story in 1991 when Emmert (held to be the first witness) called the Peoria Journal Star to claim that he had made the entire thing up. He and his friends had apparently invented the entire story to frighten another friend of theirs who worked late shifts at a local gas station. However, this obviously doesn't explain the rest of the 200+ reported sightings during this brief monster flap. So we are left to ask, what on earth happened in Tazewell County in the summer of 1972?

Sources
'Did a Hairy Monster Stalk Tazewell County?' published by FLOutdoorsman
Cryptid Profile: Cole Hollow Road Monster by the Pine Barrens Institute