On the night of 21 January 1879, according to the story as it has come down through generations of retelling, a man driving a cart of luggage from Ranton toward Woodcock in Shropshire was crossing the double-arched bridge where the road meets the Shropshire Union Canal when a black, shaggy creature with large white eyes sprang suddenly from the roadside plantation and landed directly on his horse's back. He tried desperately to knock the creature off with his own whip, which is said to have passed straight through the thing as though it had no physical substance at all, and the terrified horse bolted violently down the road with the creature still clinging on grimly. The driver's own account, once he finally reached the next village, frightened the local residents badly enough that at least one of them reportedly refused to cross that same bridge at all that night.
The bridge in question, numbered 39, sits directly on the county line between Staffordshire and Shropshire, and the creature became known locally, and rather memorably, as the Man-Monkey. One later, considerably less formal tradition holds it to be the ghost of a boatman who drowned in the canal, somehow able through his own death to take on this monstrous animal shape rather than remaining in ordinary human form.
The story did not remain confined to the nineteenth century, either: a boater enjoying an ordinary 1980s canal holiday reported seeing what they themselves described as a huge black hairy monkey staring down at them from a bridge on this very stretch of canal, apparently without knowing anything at all about the older nineteenth-century tale beforehand. The location straddles Staffordshire and Shropshire closely enough that different sources place the bridge in either county depending on which they consult, and no version of the story actually names the original carter or offers any corroborating detail beyond his own account itself, which places the Man-Monkey firmly at the thinner end of local canal folklore rather than among anything genuinely documented at the actual time it supposedly happened.
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