In December 1991, an American journalist and cartoonist named Linda Godfrey, who wrote for a small newspaper called The Week, received a tip that a strange and frightening animal had been spotted by a high school student near the city of Elkhorn, located in the geographic centre of Walworth County, Wisconsin. The sighting took place on Bray Road, a rural backroad which runs through farmers’ fields east of town, and the animal in question bore striking resemblance to the modern Hollywood depiction of the werewolf.
“I’m pretty sure I laughed out loud,” wrote Linda Godfrey in a later reminiscence, recalling her initial reaction to the idea that a classic movie monster might be prowling the cornfields and marshy meadows of southeastern Wisconsin. Nevertheless, she called on the teenage daughter of one of her friends in order to determine whether the story might be worth pursuing. To her surprise, she discovered that the werewolf of Walworth County was a hot topic among both teenage and adult residents of Elkhorn, many of whom had seen the same creature on the same rural byway earlier that year.
Her curiosity piqued, Godfrey spent the next few weeks interviewing witnesses of what she would later dub the ‘Beast of Bray Road’. Those who claimed to have come upon the creature in their vehicles almost invariably described it as an unusually large wolf, coyote, or German shepherd with dark shaggy fur. Although some witnesses depicted the animal as quadrupedal, many more claimed that it stood on two legs like a human, equaling or exceeding the average man in height. Some portrayed it as having muscular arms and legs formed like those of a human or ape, and all who saw it run claimed that it moved with alarming agility. Nearly every sighting took place at night, and many witnesses said that the creature’s eyes reflected the glow of their car’s headlights. Disturbingly, the majority of Godfrey’s informants recalled the animal acting in a manner suggestive of intelligence, fearlessness, and malicious derision, flashing them a toothy sneer or an unnerving glare as they drove past. The sightings were so eerily consistent, their subjects so evocative of the anthropomorphic wolfmen of Hollywood horror films, that one county animal control officer who had received such reports compiled them in a special manila file folder which he facetiously labelled “Werewolf”.
Linda Godfrey’s first article on the Beast of Bray Road created a sensation in Wisconsin, prompting journalists from across the state to flock to Elkhorn to investigate the story. Encouraged by the resultant positive publicity, new witnesses claiming to have seen anthropomorphic wolves in the surrounding area emerged from the woodwork, many claiming that they had kept their stories secret for years for fear of ridicule. These new accounts engendered fresh hype, sparking a parabolic media frenzy that would grow to such a pitch as to inspire the creation of several books and a 2005 feature length horror film.
Unbeknownst to Godfrey at the time, a remarkably similar surge of public interest in bipedal canine sightings had swept through the easterly state of Michigan just five years earlier. This strange spell of enthusiasm began on April 1st, 1987, when a radio DJ named Steve Cook, who ran a radio station out of Traverse City, Michigan, released a song he had produced himself, entitled ‘The Legend’. The tune’s lyrics were inspired by the all-but-forgotten tradition of the Michigan Dogman, a mysterious bipedal dog said to have haunted the wilderness of the Great Lakes State since at least the late 19th Century. Cook, who collected local folklore as a hobby, wove some of the historical Dogman sightings he came across into a poetic chronology coloured liberally with artistic license, and published it on his station as a sort of April Fools’ Day prank. To his great surprise, dozens of listeners subsequently called into his station to tell him their own Dogman stories, regaling him with tales they heard from their grandparents, and with a handful of recent personal sightings.
At first blush, the Wisconsin Manwolf and the Michigan Dogman appear to be the mean of two different types of werewolf folklore to have swept through the Midwestern United States, namely the old French-Canadian legend of the loup-garou, and the wolfman of 20th Century Hollywood horror films. Were it not for the staggering quantity of reliable eyewitness accounts compiled by Godfrey and other researchers, skeptics could be forgiven for dismissing sightings of anthropoid wolves in Wisconsin and Michigan as misidentifications of more prosaic animals like farm dogs, coyotes, or even bears, amplified to mythic proportions and conferred extraordinary abilities by fearful imaginations pregnant with this horrifying hybrid of traditional folklore and modern myth.
The legend of the loup-garou, one of the two varieties of folklore of which the Midwestern Manwolf could be perceived to be the product, is the French version of the ancient European tradition of the werewolf. Anglican clergyman Montague Summers summarized this broader European werewolf tradition in his seminal 1933 treatise The Werewolf: Lycanthropy, writing, “We may… say that a werewolf is a human being, man, woman or child (more often the first), who either voluntarily or involuntarily changes or is metamorphosed into the apparent shape of a wolf, and who is then possessed of all the characteristics, the foul appetites, ferocity, cunning, the brute strength, and swiftness of that animal. In by far the greater majority of instances the werewolf to himself as well as to those who behold him seems completely to have assumed the furry lupine form. This shape-shifting is for the most part temporary, of longer or shorter duration, but it is sometimes supposed to be permanent.”
The loup-garou of France follows this same general European pattern. Among the most famous French loup-garou stories is the poem Bisclavret, written by the medieval French expatriate Marie de France around 1200 A.D. In this tale, the titular protagonist, a virtuous Breton baron named Bisclavret, reveals to his wife that, for reasons undisclosed, he is fated to assume the form of a wolf three out of every seven days of the week, and can only reassume his human form by donning his human clothes in private. Disgusted and horrified, Bisclavret’s wife convinces her illicit lover, a knight, to steal the baron’s clothes after one of his weekly transformations, thus preventing him from resuming human form. Although Bisclavret retains his gentile demeanor in his lupine body, Marie de France makes it clear that this noble werewolf is an anomaly. “Quite a few men became [werewolves],” interpreted Judith P. Shoaf in her 1996 translation of Bisclavret, “and set up housekeeping in the woods. A [werewolf] is a savage beast, while the fury’s on it, at least: Eats men, wreaks evil, does no good, living and roaming in the deep wood.”
Independent French fur traders called coureurs des bois, or “runners of the woods,” imported the legend of the loup-garou to New France in the early 1600s, carrying it with them on their journeys into Indian territory, some of which took them deep into the wilderness of the Pays d’en Haut, or “Upper Country”, in what is now Wisconsin and Michigan. Over time, the New World version of this Old World tradition evolved to become what some anthropologists have interpreted as a cautionary tale which served to deter young adventurers from adopting the wild lifestyle of the Canadian natives. Most classic literary renditions of the French-Canadian loup-garou legend, which were written by French-Canadian nationalists in the latter half of the 19th Century in an attempt to preserve them from oblivion, held that baptized Christians were liable to shapeshift into werewolves after going seven years without receiving the Catholic sacraments of reconciliation or the Holy Eucharist.
Like the werewolves of France and other European traditions, the loups-garous of French Canada were typically portrayed as men who temporarily but completely transformed into wolves, which were distinguishable from regular members of the lupine species only by their human demeanors, their peculiar flashing eyes, and sometimes their unusually large sizes. As Quebecois writer Pamphile LeMay characterized the transformed werewolf in his 1896 story Le Loup-garou, “It’s horrible. It looks like any other wolf, but it’s not the same. Its eyes are like burning coals, its coat is stiff, its ears stand up like horns, its tail is long.”
Another portrait of the werewolf which the Wisconsin Manwolf and the Michigan Dogman strongly evoke is the ‘Wolfman’, one of the four classic movie monsters of the 20th Century, the other three arguably being Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the undead Egyptian Mummy. Hollywood’s stereotypical wolfman made its silver screen debut in the 1935 horror film Werewolf of London. In that piece, the antihero, a pioneering English botanist named Wilfred Glendon, is bitten by a werewolf while on a field expedition in Tibet, searching for a rare flower which blossoms only by moonlight. Glendon contracts the werewolf’s mysterious malady through the bite and transforms into a werewolf himself on the next full moon. Instead of assuming the form of a proper wolf, like the loup-garou of French-Canadian folklore, Glendon metamorphoses into a hairy humanoid with fangs, pointed ears, and a pronounced widow’s peak. Despite these wolfish alterations to his countenance, Glendon remains distinctly anthropic, retaining a human nose instead of a canine muzzle.
The metamorphosed Wilfred Glendon was the first werewolf to appear on the big screen, and served as the model on which many subsequent Hollywood wolfmen were based. As Dutch anthropologist Willem de Blecourt put it in his 2013 critique of academic werewolf commentaries, “Since werewolf makeup had to be invented from scratch, it provided viewers with the first available impression of how the beast looked: a hairy, distorted, humanlike creature walking on two legs, clothed, but uttering incomprehensive sounds.”
Beginning with the 1973 film The Boy Who Cried Werewolf, which was one of the first werewolf movies to equip its monster with a bestial muzzle, Hollywood wolfmen gradually began to transform from men with wolfish features to wolves with humanoid bodies. This metamorphosis was completed eight years later, when bipedal wolves starred as the antagonists in the 1981 horror film The Howling. As the ‘World of Monsters’ YouTube channel put it in their 2020 chronology of werewolf movies, “The werewolves here are gorgeous- upright standing monstrosities complete with digitigrade legs. The human hybrid beast is finally here, with long fur, ears, claws, and canines, humanity temporarily absent.”
This image of the werewolf as a manlike wolf, bridging the gap between the traditional loup-garou and the classic Hollywood wolfman, featured in at least sixteen horror movies throughout the decade preceding Linda Godfrey’s first article on the Beast of Bray Road, and in at least six prior to the release of Steve Cook’s tune, The Legend. It is certainly possible that this creature of popular culture may have played a role in convincing alleged manwolf and dogman witnesses that the nocturnal animals they encountered throughout the American Midwest were more extraordinary than they actually were. This easy explanation, however, cannot account for another obscurer tradition endemic to North America which far precedes the wolfman’s first appearance on the silver screen.
Long before coureurs des bois brought the legend of the loup-garou to the woods of the Great Lakes, First Nations across North America told stories about mysterious creatures with the bodies of men and the heads of wolves or dogs. Unlike the werewolf of European tradition, these entities were not considered to be what some native traditions call ‘skinwalkers’, or humans with the ability to wittingly or unwilling transform into animals. Instead, these creatures were considered to be distinct beings separate from Man, often endowed with preternatural power.
Some Euro-American storytellers appear to have adopted this element of North American folklore and incorporated it into their own werewolf tales. One of these was Honore Beaugrand, one of the aforementioned 19th Century French-Canadian nationalists to immortalize the Canadian interpretation of the loup-garou in literature. In his 1892 short story Le Loup-Garou, which is based on old French-Canadian werewolf stories he heard around the campfires of his youth, Beaugrand included the fictional account of a French-Canadian trapper who stumbled upon a band of loups-garous during one of his backcountry adventures.
In 1705, the trapper told his audience- the latter being a motley assortment of soldiers, habitants, and Indian warriors assembled at Fort Richelieu to celebrate Christmas Eve- he accompanied a band of coureurs-des-bois on a canoe voyage from Lachine, on the Island of Montreal, to Illinois Country by way of the Ottawa River and the upper Great Lakes. On the fourth day of their journey, the party made camp at the head of a portage trail which circumvented the Grandes-Chaudieres, a waterfall on the Ottawa River, and resolved to spend several days hunting in the area so as to refresh their larder.
The trapper and one of his companions, muskets in hand, headed up a deer trail into the forest and succeeded in bringing down a fat deer. By the time they finished dressing and packing the meat, the sun was beginning to dip below the horizon.
“Darkness overtook us on the way,” Beaugrand wrote, “and as we were heavily burdened, we had stopped to rest and to smoke a pipe in a clump of maple-trees on the edge of the river. All at once, and without warning of any kind, we saw a bright fire of balsam boughs burning on a small island in the middle of the river. Ten or twelve renegades, half human and half beasts, with heads and tails like wolves, arms, legs, and bodies like men, and eyes glaring like burning coals, were dancing around the fire, and barking a sort of outlandish chant that was now and then changed to peals of infernal laughter. We could also vaguely perceive, lying on the ground, the body of a human being that two of the imps were engaged in cutting up, probably getting it ready for the horrible meal that the miscreants would make when the dance would be over. Although we were sitting in the shadow of the trees, partly concealed by the underbrush, we were at once discovered by the dancers, who beckoned to us to go and join them in their disgusting feast. That is the way they entrap unwary hunters for their bloody sacrifices. Our first impulse was to fly towards the woods; but we soon realized that we had to deal with loups-garous; and as we had both been to confession and taken Holy Communion before embarking at Lachine, we knew we had nothing to fear from them. White loups-garous are bad enough at any time, and you all know that only those who have remained seven years without performing their Easter duties are liable to be changed into wolves, condemned to prowl about at night until they are delivered by some Christian drawing blood from them by inflicting a wound on their forehead in the form of a cross. But we had to deal with Indian renegades, who had accepted the sacraments only in mockery, and who had never since performed any of the duties commanded by the Church. They are the worst loups-garous that one can meet, because they are constantly intent on capturing some misguided Christian, to drink his blood and to eat his flesh in their horrible fricots.”
Determined to put an end to the ghoulish carousal, the trapper and his companion cut crosses on their musket balls and rammed them into their guns along with twenty beads from a rosary which a priest had blessed. That accomplished, they fired into the crowd of wolfish revelers, sending them howling into the woods. The companions then proceeded to their main camp at the foot of the portage trail and told their friends about their frightening experience. They learned that one of their number, a particularly impious soul who “bragged of his misdeeds,” had failed to return from his hunting trip. “My opinion was then, and has never changed to this day,” the trapper concluded, “that the man who strayed from our camp, and never returned, was captured by the loups-garous, and was being eaten up by them when we disturbed their horrible feast.”
American folklorist Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin also depicted the loup-garou as a manlike wolf in her 1883 book Legends of Le Detroit, a collection of what she described as “weird tales, quaint customs and beautiful traditions” which she heard from “loving though aged lips of ancestors whose memories extend back into the [18th] century.”
One of the stories in her book, entitled Le Loup-Garous, tells of a young farmer named Pierre Lafontaine, who lived near what is now the city of Detroit, Michigan, in the year 1770. Pierre was engaged to marry Archange Simonet, the lovely daughter of a trapper who lived in her father’s cabin on Grosse Pointe, a district which hugs the western shore of Lake St. Clair.
“One evening,” Hamlin wrote, “as Pierre placed Archange on the beach near her home and she lingered, following him with her loving eyes as he swiftly rowed away until he had disappeared and only the faint echo of his Canadian boat song floated towards her, she was startled by a rustling sound near by. Looking up a wild shriek escaped her, for a monster with a wolf’s head and an enormous tail, walking erect as a human being, crossed her path. Quickly the cabin door was thrown open by Simonet, who had been roused by his daughter’s scream. Archange flew into her father’s arms and pointed to the spot where she had seen the monster, but the animal surprised by the light, had fled into the woods. Simonet’s face grew pale as Archange described, as accurately as her fears had allowed her to see, the apparition, and he recognized the dreaded Loup Garou.”
Some time later, on the day of her wedding, Archange ran into the werewolf a second time while in the woods picking flowers for her bouquet. This time, the creature was dressed in a coat and hat which he had doubtless robbed from some hapless habitant, and twirled a cane in his hand, striking “a fair caricature of a Parisian dandy.” Archange fled from the monster, which followed close behind her, and managed to slam her cabin door on it just in time.
Later that day, long after the werewolf has loped back into the woods, Archange and Pierre were married in a nearby log church. Following the ceremony, locals from the surrounding countryside congregated on the front lawn of Simonet’s cabin and commenced the matrimonial festivities.
“Whilst the merry making was at its height,” Hamlin wrote, “the dreaded Garou with a rush like the wind sprang into their midst, seized Archange and escaped with her into the forest. All were paralyzed by the sudden daring deed. But Pierre recovering, started in quick pursuit guided by the despairing cry of Archange, followed by all the men, whilst the women and children said their prayers and gave vent to loud lamentations.”
Throughout the day, members of the rescue party returned one by one to Simonet’s cabin, exhausted, their hunt fruitless. When Pierre failed to return by evening, a handful of neighbours set out to look for him. They found him wandering aimlessly in a swamp, clutching a tattered shred of wedding gown in his hand. The passage which follows incidentally evokes several strange elements of Anglo-Celtic fairy folklore which, though interesting, this author will not endeavour to analyze here. When his rescuers inquired as to how he came across the fragment of wedding dress, Pierre “returned a maniacal stare and with a blood-curdling shriek, would have jumped into the swamp if he had not been held back by his companions, who with sorrowful accents said, ‘La folie du bois’.”
A footnote explains that “La folie du bois (the folly of the woods) alludes to the well-known insane tendency which prompts those lost in the woods to go round in a continuous circle, instead of following a direct path which would lead to a clearing.”
The narrative continues: “He would always return to the same swamp, remaining there for hours gazing vacantly in the weird reflections of its slimy, stagnant waters, until some friends led him home.”
Roughly a year later, on the day of Pierre’s sister’s wedding, the bereived farmer suddenly sprang into the woods as if compelled by some sudden impulse. Later that evening, a loup-garou burst from the woods with Pierre hot on his tail. The wild-eyed farmer chased the werewolf to the edge of Lake St. Clair. “The animal,” Hamlin wrote, “seeing no escape, stood on one of the boulders strewn along the shore and stretched out his arms as if beckoning to some mysterious one. A large catfish was seen to rise on the surface of the water and opening its mouth the Loup Garou vanished; and to this day no Canadian will eat catfish. The footprint of the wolf is still shown at Grosse Pointe indelibly impressed on one of the boulders.”
As mentioned, the concept of a canine humanoid prowling the wilderness of North America predates the importation of the werewolf legend to Canada, appearing throughout disparate indigenous folkloric traditions across the Great White North. In the traditional stories of both the Interior and Coast Salish peoples of southwestern and south-central British Columbia, allusions are sometimes made to a race of dog-men who roamed the land in mythical prehistory. It may be disengenuous to propose a connection between these mythical people and allegedly extant dogmen, as the former must be considered in the context of an old Salish tradition which holds that, in the ancient past, all animals were essentially human beings which could assume or cast off their bestial forms by donning or shedding a cloak-like skin. The dog-men casually mentioned from time to time in traditional Salish stories, like fish-men and deer-men, are probably not supposed to be perceived as monsters, but rather regular dogs endowed with the long-lost shapeshifting ability once common to all animals. Nevertheless, there is at least one Interior Salish story involving canine humanoids which are clearly distinct from the dog-men of the ancient past.
In his 1912 treatise on the Thompson Indians of south-central British Columbia, Scots-Canadian anthropologist James Teit included the following story, set year an old Thompson Indian village called Spuzzum, which lies at the lower end of the Fraser Canyon:
“The Dog people lived in an underground lodge near Spuzzum. Their house was called kaxae’lx (‘dog house’), and had a false door. Strangers upon entering, and when about to leave the bottom of the ladder to step on the floor, tumbled down into a pit of great depth, where they were killed and eaten by the Dog people, who never came forward except at night.”
Far to the north of Thompson Country, in the stunted forests of the Canadian subarctic, the Dene Indians told their own manwolf stories. In his 1959 ethnological treatise on the Upper Tanana Indians of southwestern Yukon and southeastern Alaska, American anthropologist Robert A. McKennan wrote about a “goblin or ogre” which the Upper Tanana called a “te’atzan”. “According to one version,” McKennan wrote, “it has long claws and lurks along the trails in wait for some traveler. It is so feared that even the mention of its name produces a shudder. According to one shaman the te’atzan appears and disappears in a flood of light, but it is considered bad luck to see it. As in the case of the Brush Indian and other supernatural beings, shamans converse with the te’atzan in their dreams, but they are very reluctant to do so. This te’atzan belief may correspond to the goblin of the Ten’a… a monster in human form but with hairy skin and clawlike nails; or again the Upper Tanana goblin may be a reflection of the semihuman monsters feared by so many of the boreal tribes.”
The “goblin of the Ten’a” to which McKennan referred is a creature described in detail by Father Julius Jette, a French-Canadian Jesuit missionary who lived among the natives of Alaska and the Yukon throughout the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The word “Ten’a” is variation of the term Dene, or Athabascan, a blanket term for nearly all First Nations endemic to the Canadian and Alaskan subarctic. In his 1911 book, On the Superstitions of the Ten’a Indians, Jette classified the various preternatural entities which comprise the Dene pantheon. The lowest class of preternatural beings are the nekedzaltara– a word which Jette claimed designated three distinct beings. The first of type of nekedzaltara are lesser demons which serve more powerful Dene deities, like a dreaded Evil Spirit whose name translates to “The Thing That Kills Men”. The second type of creature denoted by the name nekedzaltara are “real existing animals, which are considered as endowed with mysterious qualities, and treated with peculiar circumspection.” The third variety of nekedzaltara is comprised of what Jette described as “numerous goblins or fantastical beings with which the fearsome imagination of the Ten’a has peopled the vast solitudes of his native land.”
One of the goblins belonging the third sub-category of nekedzaltara is the Yes-yu, or “ghastly wolf”, a hairy creature with human form. This monster was said to have freakishly long arms, its fingers tipped with long claw-like nails. Although the appearance of the Yes-yu “forebodes no good to a grown up person,” sleeping children whom the creature pats on the head or caresses will grow up to become medicine men.
One specific subarctic legend featuring a preternatural dogman is set in the wild country between the two great lakes of Canada’s Northwest Territories, namely Great Slave Lake and the more northerly Great Bear Lake. This region, covered with boreal forest and carpeted with frozen muskeg, is the historic homeland of the Tlicho or Dogrib Nation, a Dene people who shared a border with northeasterly Yellowknife Indians.
The legend in question, which most Dogribs know by heart, appears in an article written by a former Hudson’s Bay Company inspector named Philip H. Godsell, which was published in the March 1946 issue of the Alberta Folklore Quarterly.
“According to their traditions,” Godsell wrote, “the Dog-Ribs originated from the union of a supernatural dog-man and an Athabascan squaw. At the time of the discovery of a mountain of copper near Great [Bear] Lake by a Yellowknife woman, another squaw of the same tribe was living with her two brothers near the site of the present mining settlement of Yellowknife on Great Slave Lake.
“One day a strong and handsome stranger arrived and, at the brothers’ suggestion, took her for his wife. In the middle of the wedding night she awakened to find her husband gone, but heard an animal crunching bones around the fireplace. The same thing happened the following night. This time the bride and her brothers immediately lighted torches, but failed to find a sign of any animal. On the third night one of the brothers threw a stone axe in the direction from which the sound of the gnawing arose. A cry of agony followed, and when they lit a torch a black dog was found writhing in its death agony upon the floor. When the human husband failed to [reappear] the brothers, overcome with superstitious awe, chased their sister out of the wigwam on the assumption that she had married a dog-man and a sorcerer.
“Wandering off into the Barren Lands the squaw gave birth to a litter of puppies which she hid in a bag of unborn caribou skin. When the puppies were able to run around she was astonished one morning, on returning from her rabbit snares, to find an infant’s footprints in the ashes. Hiding herself next day she saw the puppies leap from the bag to become transformed into handsome children the moment they reached the light. With a swift movement she pulled the string of the bag, though not before three of them succeeded in jumping back into it. She managed, however, to keep two girls and two boys forcibly in the daylight, and those children became the ancestors of the present Dog-Rib tribe. In this account the Dog-Ribs look with horror upon any Indian who eats a dog, calling him a cannibal.”
Northern tales of mysterious dogmen do not end at the Arctic Circle. In his 1875 book Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, Danish geologist Dr. Hinrick Rink wrote about a strange creature of Inuit legend “whose upper limbs were those of human beings, but below the waist… were shaped like dogs. These creatures were armed with bows and arrows, and dreadful to behold, and could catch the scent of man and beast against the wind like animals.”
In his 1921 book Eskimo Folk-Tales, Greenlandic-Danish anthropologist Knud Rassmusen identified these creatures as “inland-dwellers” which inhabited the mountainous interior of the island of the Arctic Archipelago, which he described as human beings from the waist up and dogs from the waist down.
Is it possible that these monsters of Inuit, First Nations, French-Canadian, and Midwest American legend are little more than figments of fertile imaginations, or misidentifications of less extraordinary animals owing to the power of suggestion? Could the dogmen spotted historically throughout North America, and from time to time in the American Midwest today, be members of some especially wily animal species yet to be discovered by science? Or, as many of Linda Godfrey’s informants believe, is it possible that they are sinister preternatural entities conjured from some dark underworld through occult rituals? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.