Encounters with the Beast; True Reports of Werewolves, Man-Beasts and Other Unexplained Creatures by Linda S. Godfrey, an excerpt from the forthcoming book:The creature does not rest. That means I may not languish, either. It comes skulking through my e-mails, prowling inside my phone, sneaking up inside stamped envelopes posted from Maine. The reports are legion, and often quite demanding. People see the Beast and they want to know what it is and what it wants. But what they most urgently seek is some logical reason why they were chosen to see that unidentifiable things are out there, and humans don’t know everything yet.
Being human myself, I don’t know everything about this beast, either. Not even after seventeen years of research, expeditions, interviews, reports, expert polygraphing of witnesses and much writing of books. There simply is no irrefutable evidence. But I do have some ideas. Most of them settle somewhere to either slope of the great divide, natural animal or supernatural thing? A cryptozoological beast, or, as J.K. Rowling has so whimsically put it, “magizoological?” But for all I or anyone knows, it could actually be something that straddles both categories.
What I do have is a mountain of reports of encounters. Many are from Wisconsin and Michigan, my main theater of operation, but surprising numbers of them come from all parts of the United States and other countries. And they grow steadily, averaging two to three per week.
My first book, The Beast of Bray Road (2003), looked at all the incidents I had learned about in the first decade.. The second book, Hunting the American Werewolf (2006), told all the new incidents that came to me after “Beast’s” publication. In only three years, there were over twice as many witnesses as I covered in “Beast.”And now, another three years has passed and the accordion file where I stash sightings reports has expanded to bursting.
It helped a great deal that the History Channel’s popular Monsterquest show featured Hunting as the basis of their American Werewolf episode. But most of the people who tell their tales of shock and wonder at meeting a wolf that walks upright still seem reluctant, often referred by relatives or friends. They often say they simply wish to confess their experience to someone who won’t say they are crazy. And they are in no danger there. No matter how weird their experience may be, I’ve almost always heard weirder.
Furry things with bat-wings that dive-bomb old pickup trucks? A pint-sized T-rex scrimmaging through a cornfield near Sheboygan? White canines that vaporize before a witness’s astounded eyes? Werewolves slumming in the sewers of Minot, North Dakota?
Heard ‘em all.
And just as I did in the introduction of Hunting, I wish to make it perfectly clear that these are eyewitness reports, which in themselves are not science! The evidence is mostly anecdotal, save for some photographs of footprints and those witnesses who have passed the tests of the most competent polygraph expert the History Channel could find. (And no, I don’t think that any of the were-blob photos presently circulating on the Internet, particularly those of something brown that may or may not be holding a small white dog, are good enough to prove that the Manwolf exists.)
But hundreds of witnesses say that it does. And mini-T-rexes and Man Bats aside, these observations of Manwolves and Dog Men remain surprisingly consistent in both appearance and behavior. Something that stands between five and seven feet tall, covered in shaggy fur ranging from gray to very dark brown, long-snouted, pointy-eared, and able to get around on two or four feet and switch between the modes easily…this is what most people report. Many see the creature holding or eating animal carrion, and although it often bluffs a chase or attack, in almost every case (the one exception a man in Quebec Province, Canada, whose hip was grazed by an errant fang) the creature retreats as soon as the witness is either scared senseless or departs the scene.
I would expect far greater variation if people were making up stories.
And I would expect far fewer reports.
Frankly, I would expect that such creatures did not exist at all. But judging by my emails, I am wrong. Something exists, and it looks rather like a werewolf. And it has been around for some time. The reports are not always new, but indeed often range back several decades.
One that I received very recently involved an incident dating from summer, 1970, in Hardin, Illinois, about 40 miles north of St. Louis. The experiencer was ten years old at the time and was outside his family's farmhouse alone one evening, enjoying a stroll through their peach orchard, when he heard something following him, rustling through the leaves when he walked and stopping when he stopped. He began to run for his house and as he neared it, the family dog lit out after whatever had been chasing him. The dog soon returned, tail between its legs.
The boy stayed on his porch to watch for the creature, and eventually saw it step out from the orchard. He wrote, "The dogs all barked at it but kept quite a distance away.. It looked like a German shepherd or wolf walking on its hind legs, appearing to be 7-8 feet tall. Its fur was dark, even where the lights from the front porch and the driveway were shining on it."
The creature stood there for a minute or so on its hind legs, glancing around, then turned and ran on its hind legs down a nearby road. When he finally went inside and told his family about the incident, he was met with predictable laughter.
"I was astounded when I watched the episode of Monsterquest regarding the creature in Wisconsin," he added. He also noted that there were reports of Bigfoot around that area at the time but that he was certain this was not Bigfoot.
Not all sightings are in the past, however. I am always excited to receive a report that is only a few days old, and in an accessible area. One came to me in late June, 2007. On June 26, just four days before I received the report, five young people decided to take a late-night stroll on a dead-end lane that led from a residential street between South Milwaukee and Racine to a steep bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. Between the streetlight that marked the end of Fitzsimmons Road proper and the bluff lay both areas of thick woods and open fields, some planted with corn.
Brianne Virgin, 22, Jonathan Hart, 25, and Jonathan's brother Benjamin Hart, 18, along with two 18-year old friends of Ben's, Breonna and Shawna (last names withheld), heard a high-pitched, drawn out scream coming from somewhere in the cornfield to the north of the road.. (To the south is a wheat field.) It sounded like a woman, said Brianne, yet they knew it was not human. They had walked about half the length of the road, still adjacent to the cornfield and not far from the small woods that lead to the cliff, when Ben spotted a pair of almond, yellowish eyes glaring at them from the brush. That was all his two friends, Breonna and Shawna needed to hear to return to the car.
Brianne, Ben and John stood there, Brianne's flashlight also trained on the eyes, which appeared to belong to some kind of furry, canid creature crouching on all fours. To their amazement it rose onto its hind legs and faced them. Its chest and stomach area were light tan, its doglike legs and forelimbs and face darker "clay" brown, said Brianne. Its fur was shaggy. Ben, who stands over six feet tall, said the creature was as tall or taller than he was.
The creature then moved one forelimb as if getting ready to come toward them, and the three humans shrieked and turned to run back to the car. Ben was in the lead, followed by Brianne and then John. They could hear its feet hitting the ground with the weight and rythm of a biped, but faster than a human's feet would go, they said.
At one point, the creature caught up to John, close enough that he could feel its body heat and that he "felt its presence." Then it grazed his shirt with its paws, leaving two sets of triple 5/8" slashes about one inch apart on the back of his button-front, "Cheech and Chong Up in Smoke" shirt. John said that he felt warm at the point where he was touched, but the rest of his body felt cold, "goose-bumpey and shivery." His skin was not scratched. He kept going. At a short distance before they reached the barrier and street light, they no longer heard the footsteps and turned to see the creature had vanished back into the cornfield. They got in the car and left. (I have the clawed shirt in my possession.)
All during the chase, they said, they kept hearing the same type of scream they'd heard at first in the field, but lower pitched and "more aggressive." They could not tell as they ran if it was coming from the field or the creature chasing them. Also as they ran, Brianne turned several times to turn her flashlight on John and the creature. They left immediately and told the Hart men's mother about the incident. Their mother told me the 18-year old sobbed as he told the story and was truly frightened. Their mother's sister was the one who finally contacted me.
I met with John, Brianne, Ben and the woman who contacted me at the site, and we walked the road together. The three young people stated they had not been drinking or using drugs of any sort. I found some 3-inch canine prints near the cliff's edge that may have been made by a large dog, but something far more exciting turned up on the edge of the woods near the cornfield on the north side of the road. There was a mud puddle about six feet wide which contained clear prints of the same canine animal found on the cliff, a deer that appeared to have bounded from the puddle in surprise, and a longer, three-toed print (about 8 inches) that doesn't fit any animal I know of (see photo).
The late filmmaker John Gage, who was working on a Beast of Bray Road documentary before his death in a car accident last year, also interviewed the witnesses on site and told me he was satisfied they were telling the truth.
The location fits very well with a sightings pattern I've established that leads down along the shore of Lake Michigan from north of Sheboygan through the edges of Milwaukee and Racine, into Illinois (even the Great Lakes Naval Base!), edges the southwestern border of Indiana and on up to Michigan where sighting clusters peak around Kalamazoo and again about an hour south of Traverse City.
This route is also well sprinkled with ancient and enigmatic Native American soil structures; animal-shaped effigy mounds in Wisconsin and down into Illinois, and the strange geometric "garden beds," so-called because their designs reminded settlers of formal English gardens, in the Kalamazoo area.
Whether these structures have anything to do with the creatures has yet to be resolved. Those who believe the Manwolves are supernatural may posit that they are somehow related to guardian figures common to many religious beliefs of indigenous people. (I've written much about this in both "Beast of Bray Road" and "Hunting the American Werewolf.") But there is also an argument to be made for the idea of natural creatures that travel along the same water-rich sites that Native Americans believed sacred, and where they thus erected their carefully crafted earth works. Holy sites and watering holes were often the same places, and still may be.
There is even some evidence that the creature has returned to Bray Road after about a ten-year absence. A Milwaukee nurse, her teenage daughter and daughter's friend saw a bipedal, wolf-like animal leap out of the corn there in October, 2004, and in spring of 2008, a man observed it run from a mobile home park not far from where Bray Road intersects Hwy. NN. He followed it in his car as it headed back toward Bray Road, and his last view of it was as it scrambled up a slight incline into some bushes. He noted his friends in the mobile home park had recently complained of cats going missing.
These few incidents are just a tiny sample of reports received, and I am convinced that the phenomenon is far from ended. There are simply too many reports, too widespread over space and time, too many unrelated and credible witnesses, for the bulk of sightings of this upright, unknown canine to be hoaxed (although individuals have tried this on certain rare occasions).
To my mind, the only thing to do with a creature that does not rest is to continue to observe it.
Linda S. Godfrey, excerpted by permission
http://www.beastofbrayroad.com/
http://www.weirdmichigan.com/
