1
- Long ago the ancient Greeks
told the tale of Lycian and of Arcadia,
a cruel King and father of many children.
A man with no time for authority figures
and contempt for the Gods.
So it was that one night, in order to test
the omnipotence of the great Zeus
he invited him to dinner
and served him a meal
he would never forget, the boiled flesh
of his youngest son, Niktamus.
But Zeus of course was all knowing,
and straight away restored
the dead child's life,
and in his rage Zeus
cursed Lycian, damning him
to wander the Earth as a savage beast,
the Lycan, a wolf.
- The Beast of Bray Road
was not even my first book.
I had one that I'd been
researching for six years
about a true crime poison
murder in Walworth county
that happened in the
1920's and I really wanted
to get that story out too,
so I wrote that one first,
that was my second book,
the Beast of Bray Road,
tailing Wisconsin's
werewolf, and that really,
again I thought it would settle things
kind of once and for all and it just
brought the whole thing to life again.
Elkhorn is a very pretty nice, little town
right in the center of Walworth county,
it's where the court
house and everything is,
it has a beautiful town square
that was the subject of some famous
Christmas cards years ago.
It's just a very nice
conservative little town,
it's just a great place
to raise my family,
and it doesn't look
like a place that would
harbor a werewolf.
- Situated in Walworth County,
the city of Elkhorn is comprised of nearly
eight square miles of
land and has a population
of just over 10,000 people.
It was founded in the early 1800's
and acts as the county seat, due in part
to it's location at the
geographic center of the county.
Elkhorn has become a thriving little town
thanks to its proximity to the
nearby tourist destinations
of Lake Geneva and Delavan
Lake, both home to resorts
and considered popular vacation get aways.
Nevertheless the area also has its share
of local legends and lore.
- I'd never considered that
it was particularly weird
but when you start looking at
all the variety of terrain,
we have hauntings everywhere,
everything about the state
is what you don't picture
when you initially here
the term Wisconsin.
Also, a very long time and
special Native American presence
that isn't necessarily just weird,
you know it just makes
Wisconsin a very different
sort of place and maybe sets the stage
for some of the other things
that come later that are weird.
- The state is actually
one of the hottest states
of paranormal activity, number one.
I don't know if it's
the Native American's,
the history there, but there's
also a lot of UFO sightings,
just in our state that I've
even seen just down here
in South East Wisconsin,
as well as a lot of other
crazy things, so I definitely
think it is something special.
Wisconsin welcomes you.
- Elkhorn got it's name
because someone saw an elk horn
hanging in a tree, but it
wasn't from around here,
there weren't elk in this area.
So the theory is that someone coming back
from the west had an elk horn
and threw it up in the tree.
I guess that's the
rumor I've heard anyway.
- In her books Linda Godfrey
has detailed a number of
Wisconsin's more infamous
tall tales, from hair covered forest elves
that roam the northern regions,
to mysterious aberrations
that haunt it's numerous
abandoned buildings.
An aquatic monster is
said to lurk in the depths
of Lake Winnebago, while
hitch hiking phantoms
have been seen by a number
of unsuspecting motorists
traveling Highway 12 late at night.
Amongst all the legends and fables
that make up the folk
law of the badger state,
you'll also find records of encounters
with ape like creatures that
date back to the mid 1800's,
particularly in the wooded
sections of a state,
mostly known for it's prairies.
It's also been home to a handful of cults,
most often near the city of Milwaukee
which lies 46 miles north east of Elkhorn.
Strangely the state of Wisconsin has also
found itself embroiled in Satanic
and ritualistic activity over the years,
as recently as 2011 it
made national headlines
when two women attempted to murder a man
they'd lured to their Milwaukee apartment.
They stabbed him over 300 times
in what the victim claimed
was a Satanic ritual.
Then there's the infamous
Slender Man stabbing
which took place in waukesha,
some thirty miles north of Elkhorn.
In this case two 12 year old girls
assaulted and nearly
killed one of their peers
while trying to appease
what is essentially
a fictional internet character.
Perhaps Elkhorn with its
old fashioned city square
and numerous churches
has avoided that aspect
of the states tragic side.
- People of Elkhorn run a wide gammit,
we have farmers, a very
strong group of merchants,
because the court house is there
we have a lot of lawyers in the town.
So it's a great mix of people, and again,
it doesn't fit that stereotype,
I'm sure there's one guy
walking around the square
eating the cheese you know,
but generally it's just
nice small town folks.
- Just down Geneva Street
through downtown Elkhorn
beyond the Highway 12 overpass
lies an unassuming stretch
of blacktop called Bray Road.
Bordered by farmland and the
occasional stands of trees
the road runs nearly
perpendicular to Highway 12
to the south west and
parallel to Highway 43
which lies just to it's north.
Until the 1960's, when
the highways were built
Bray Road was rarely traveled by outsiders
and we essentially a driveway for those
that lived along its rough unpainted path.
- The Bray family started moving here
in the late 1890's and at one time
there were four brothers
that all lived down here.
My great grandfather
bought our farm in 1902
and I believe he was the
last one of the brothers
to move in this area.
- It's interesting, Bray Road
is nothing scary looking,
it's like going down any
farming road or rural road.
Because it's farmers it's
all fifth generation farmers,
they all know each other,
it's very privately owned,
you can't just stop off on
the road and look around
because you know one farmer's
gonna notify the other one,
hey somebody's on your land.
- I had discovered already
by some overlooked books
that I found in the library that Bray Road
at one time was a Native American trail
that lead out to some other area of lakes
that would have been summer places.
- Just the way the road
kind of winds around
down through here, it
was probably some sort
of a trading trail at one time.
Out in the middle of one of the fields,
there was a remnants of an old
homestead and shack out there
that had been used for
trading with the Indians.
- Bray Road is
just over four miles long,
within that stretch a
handful of country roads
cross it's path, such as
Brookwood Lane, Plank Road,
and Hospital Road.
Coming from Elkhorn Bray
dead ends into Interstate 11.
Acres of cornfields and
patchy woods are intermingled
with farms, residential
houses and swampy marshlands.
In the last 20 years the
only thing that's changed
are the number of people
that visit the road
hoping to catch sight of a creature
that put Elkhorn on the world map
nearly three decades ago.
- It was December of
1991, and I'd been working
for a short time as a newspaper reporter
at a small countywide newspaper
in Walworth County, Wisconsin.
And it came to my attention
that there were people
around my own home town of Elkhorn
that were saying they had
seen what looked to them,
like a werewolf along this
four mile stretch of road
outside of Elkhorn.
And I remember laughing
because it just seemed
so ludicrous to me, and I mentioned it
to our county animal control officer.
- My name is John Frederickson,
I believe it was back in 1986,
that's when I first became
involved with the whole
animal welfare, I was appointed
the Walworth County humane
officer at that time.
Primarily to investigate
crimes against animals
and enforce state statutes
and county ordinance.
- And I said, have you
heard what people are saying
about there being this
big canine type thing,
they're calling it a
werewolf out on Bray Road?
- There was kind of a freelance reporter,
Linda Kelp.
The one freelance reporter had found out
what Lori Endrezzi had seen,
and from there I believe
it went to Linda Godfrey.
And I believe at that time I
had invited Lori Endrezzi in
to talk to her about her sightings,
and at that time I made a manila folder
marked werewolf and that's kind of where
the whole werewolf folder comes in there.
- And he opened up his desk drawer,
pulled out a manila file folder
that was marker werewolf,
or labeled werewolf and at that moment
is when it became news really
because when you've got a county official
with a file folder marked
werewolf that's news.
- There was the one sighting,
when somebody was traveling
down I43 right by Delavan here
and they got off at the
Delavan exit and some large
creature ran right in front of their car.
And then there were the so
called sightings on Bray Road.
- He showed me the contents,
it was notes he'd written
from people who were indeed phoning him
and saying I don't know what it was,
I saw this thing, if I had to
say it looked like a werewolf
because it had the head of
a wolf or German Shepherd,
it was huge, it stood and
ran on it's hind legs.
- And I believe there was a story,
a mother walking down the road
with her child or children.
Up ahead the road a deer
came running across the road
then behind it some creature on two legs
was chasing the deer.
Nothing too elaborate,
nothing that could be
confirmed obviously.
- I began to call upon
these people and when I went
to interview them in person I discovered
I did not think that they were crazy
or trying to hoax something.
They came from a very wide demographic,
they were older, younger, male, female,
blue collar, white collar.
So it was a diverse group, I thought well,
there's something,
they're seeing something.
I didn't know what it was.
- A typical report is a
biped walking humanoid dog
with the muzzle, with the ears,
about seven to eight feet tall, hairy,
hands like, I don't want
to say like a human,
but humanoid hands with claws.
- It had the head of a
wolf or German shepherd,
it was huge, it stood and
ran on it's hind legs.
- They said fangs and the
red eyes, the pointy ears,
almost like a German shepherd,
but it's standing up on two
legs, and it's ginormous,
it's taller than any person.
- Covered with fur, long snout,
and it's legs were bent
backwards like a dogs.
- And just ferocious looking,
something that people say
is a complete nightmare to see.
- One thing I've noticed
is that the closer
in time it is between the sighting
and their reporting it to
me the more I still see
that fear response and I
will actually sometimes
just see people reliving
the fear, they turn white,
they turn red, they start sweating.
I've had one woman even burst into tears
while she's telling me because they still
feel this sort of visceral
contact with this creature.
- On Halloween night 1991
Doris Gibson had what would become known
as the first publicly recorded sighting
of the Beast of Bray Road.
Her experience would launch
a rash of reported sightings
around Walworth County.
- She was a senior in
high school at the time
and was driving down Bray Road,
she felt like this muffled thump,
and she was afraid that
she'd hit somebody's dog,
or ran over an animal or something.
She said I saw this thing,
I don't know what it was
but it was big,
and it started running for me.
She said I could hear it's feet
on the asphalt boom, boom,
it actually lunged for her car
and scraped its claws
on the trunk of the car.
And she showed this to me,
I remember examining it
and they were consistent
with two sets of claws
clawing their way down
the back of the car,
and that was one of the things
that scared her so badly.
- Shortly
after Gibson's sighting
a Milwaukee teen Tom Brichta would have
his own encounter with
the Beast of Bray Road.
- My name is Tom Brichta, I
live in Tremaine, Oklahoma
on highway C, it was a Saturday night,
late July, early August
and I was coming home
from a wedding reception,
I had my friend Scott
and my friend Chris from
Hanover Park Illinois
in the car with me, it was very foggy,
we could barely see two
car lengths ahead of you.
And we started smelling this funny odor,
this real foul smelling odor
like this skunky kind of smell.
I had noticed a hand
sticking out into the road,
and my friend had noticed me looking out
on the side of the road, and he had looked
and he had seen whatever it was,
it was huge, it was really large,
it was whitish, gray and
black, streaks in it.
It was hairy, it was
reaching out towards my car,
it scratched a small piece
of pin striping from my car.
The fingers were either pointed or had
quite the nails on them, I did not get
any facial detail but it was frightening,
it was very frightening.
And now as long as I think about this,
not a day goes by that I don't,
and I know a day won't go by
that I won't think about it.
I can remember like it was just yesterday.
- Another one was Lori Endrezzi,
at the time she was a young single mother
and she was a bar manager in town,
and was driving home from work.
She suddenly, her attention
was drawn to something
in the ditch.
- From what she had said
something was kneeling down,
crouched over on the side of the road,
eating, some type of roadkill.
- She said it was actually kneeling
in a way that she didn't
think a canine could kneel.
And the other weird thing
is that it was holding
some type of road kill animal.
It frightened her very, very deeply,
and she said that she spent a lot of time
at the library looking for
what it might have been,
and it didn't match any natural
wolf pictures she had seen.
Now she actually, she was one of the ones
that had called John Frederickson,
and she went to his office
to talk to him about it.
- We were discussing different
things that it may have been.
It was something of the
natural order of nature,
such as some type of animal,
being a coyote or wolf,
and there happened random wolf
sightings around that time.
If it wasn't something along
the natural order of nature
then possibly could have
been something along
the supernatural realm of things.
- He had a row of books on the
shelf behind him at his desk,
and when they started talking about this,
the books started flying off the shelf.
- Not too long into the
conversation some books
that were up on a bookshelf
just came flying down,
and there really wasn't
any cause for the books
to go flying off the shelf.
So that was the end of that conversation.
- It was just a one off
story as far as I knew,
I did this quick drawing
because I was also
the illustrator and
cartoonist for the newspaper,
and it ran, and that
was when it all began.
Within days and even weeks
people were contacting
the newspaper office, but
the media were starting
to catch on to it, it was just astounding.
Nobody expected that
sort of reaction to it.
- It was a pretty good
joke up and down the road.
- My family actually
struggled with it a little bit
because this kind of popped up
right after my Father had died.
So my mom was just getting
used to living on the farm,
in the house, by herself,
and all these lights
were flashing around the buildings,
and people walking up and down the road.
So we went from kind of
amusement to kind of upset,
to well okay it's just a deal,
just kind of had fun
with it after a while.
- I remember my editor
and I had talked about it
and said yeah local people
will have fun with it
for a couple of weeks and
then it will just go away.
And nothing could have been
further from the truth.
It had legs, no pun intended.
The story just stuck and
grew bigger and bigger.
- Yeah, I believe when the paper came out
and the story came out,
that's when I think the more,
I don't want to say the
panic, but the fear set in.
- The people that had
actual sightings obviously,
I believe a lot of those people did have
an actual fear of what they had seen.
Not knowing quite how to rationalize it.
- Of course there was a lot of ribbing,
and teasing of people who
said they had seen it.
The local sheriffs
department's talking about
silver bullets and
whatnot, and that they were
making silver bullets in case
they ran across the beast,
or whatever.
- Some of the witnesses,
because they later came forward
with their actual identity
said they wish they hadn't
come forward with it.
But on the other hand
there were other people
who had secretly seen
it, and were then saying,
yeah it's right, it is there I've seen it.
- On December 29th, 1991,
Godfrey's article detailing
the initial sightings
of the Beast of Bray Road
ran in The Week a Delavan newspaper.
Almost immediately the story kicked up
a flurry of activity around the area.
Perhaps most notably were a
string of calls and letters
to the newspaper from witnesses
who had seen similar creatures.
Many of the witnesses
were from other towns,
counties and even states who
wished to express to Godfrey
the seriousness in which
the story should be handled.
The first inkling of the
larger scope of this phenomenon
was beginning to take
shape in Linda's mind,
even as the story of the Bray Road Beast
began to take on a life of it's own.
In September of 1991,
Scott Bray, a local farmer,
had a sighting of what he referred to
as an abnormally large dog or wolf
in the field behind his house.
Scott described the animal as
taller than a German shepherd
with pointed ears, a tail,
long gray and black hair,
and a massive muscular build.
Around the same time as
the Scott Bray sighting,
another Elkhorn local named Russell Guest,
spotted a creature near Bray Road,
walking briefly on two legs
before dropping to all fours
in an aggressive stance.
Guest turned and ran from the creature
which he described as being
larger than a german shepherd
with black and grayish hair
and around five feet tall
when it was standing on two legs.
On January 8th 1991,
Robert Bushman and his wife
spotted a large black
animal running on all fours,
chasing a deer just down
the road from Elkhorn.
The couple were driving on I43
near Delavan in broad daylight
when the sighting occurred.
They described the animal
as being far too large
to be a wolf but were
unable to give a thorough
description due to the
speed which it was running.
As sightings continued
Godfrey received other reports
from witnesses who claimed to have seen
the same creature decades earlier.
Strangely the oldest reported sighting
was also the first to hint
at a more sinister origin
for the Beast of Bray Road.
- One of the most
surprising and interesting
accounts that I received
happened right after
the first stories broke,
this happened not in Walworth County
but in the adjacent Jefferson County,
which isn't all that far away.
A newspaper editor called me and said,
my dad saw this thing in 1936,
and his father was the nightwatchman
for St Coletta institute, which
was a Catholic institution
for taking care of people
with special needs.
They had preserved on
the grounds a number of
ancient burial mounds, Mark
Shackleman was the name
of the mans father and his job every night
was to walk the whole grounds
with this big flashlight,
and this one night he walked up on an area
where there were several
mounds, and saw something
large on top of one of the mounds.
When he went and looked more closely
he saw that it was
something that reminded him
of a canine head but it was
a really large creature,
and it was digging furiously
in the top of the mound
as if it was trying to get something out
that it knew was in there.
He was shocked, the creature
was shocked and ran off
but the next night he went back
and the creature was there again.
It stood up, faced him,
and made what sounded like,
he described as sort of
a protohuman language,
and what it sounded like to the man
was the utterance of the word Gadara.
Which if you go to the New
Testament in the Christian Bible
you'll find that's the
place where there was a man
who was filled with Demons,
and he was called the Gadarine
because it was in the region of Gadara,
and that was where Jesus cast
the Demons out of this man.
And it's interesting
because I found out later
that one of the priests
to the Catholic church
that was kind of attached to
the St Coletta organization
had very bad problems
after he exorcized a demon
from a young person who
lived in that Parrish,
and then the Demon attached itself to him.
So you have this whole sort of tradition
of Demonology possession going on,
and then you get this
unknown creature standing up
on an old burial mound,
and uttering a word
that could have been the
Biblical word Gadara,
and it's just very,
very strange happenings.
- While Mark
Shacklemans 1930's encounter
with a similarly strange beast
may have aroused some suspicions of a more
unearthly genesis for the phenomenon,
it was Lori Endrezzi, the first witness
of the Beast of Bray
Road in the modern era
who drew a parallel between
the creature she had seen
and an ancient evil.
In an interview with Endrezzi
a few years after her sighting
she professed her belief to Godfrey
that the Beast of Bray
Road was Satanic in origin.
A Demonic entity, perhaps,
the Dark Prince himself.
The correlation between the canid creature
and the black arts may
seem ludicrous to some.
It was not as unbelievable
to some investigators
and it wouldn't be the last
time that a witness felt
instead of an undiscovered animal,
they had come face to
face with evil incarnate.
- In my opinion there is
a dark side to this world.
So with some of these sightings they're
part of the natural order of nature,
and it was some animal,
some type of animal,
that's easily believable.
Or I wouldn't doubt if it
could have been something
along the supernatural
realm of things also
from what I had experienced
during those days.
- With the Beast of Bray Road
making it's presence known around the area
local media were tied up in a story
that went back even further
then the first known sightings.
That of a local Satanic cult,
rumored to be holding
meetings in the forested
areas of Walworth County.
During the late 80s and
early 90s John Frederickson
was called to the scene of
multiple animal mutilations
including one in which
dozens of mutilated bodies
had been discovered.
While local police insisted
the site was nothing more
then a bone yard for local livestock
Frederickson recognized the potential
for more ritualistic causes of death,
when he discovered many of the carcasses
had been subject to gruesome treatment
that involved the removal of organs.
However, the local police
bulldozed the location
before a thorough investigation
could be completed.
Many ritualistic beliefs
revolve around the notion
of conjuring an entity,
occasionally a Demon
for nefarious purposes, as
John Frederickson discovered,
the link between the Beast
of Bray Road and Satanism
might not be as far removed
as it may at first appeared.
In the early 1990's John
received a phone call
from an anonymous source who stated
that she was aware of
illicit, cult like gatherings
taking place in the area.
- At that time there was actually
quite a bit of Satanic
information that was coming in.
Some of it was obviously
teenager type involvement,
their dabbling into Devil worship,
and there were a couple other places
that were a little more
intense, with an older crowd,
adult crowd, that took the
whole role of Satanic religion
serious and whatnot.
Anything from teachers to
possible law enforcement
people being involved.
Yeah I guess some of their get togethers
at this one location were quite involved.
People from around the
world actually would show up
and they would go back into the woods
and have their little ritualistic
ceremonies and whatnot.
Walworth County I had found out
from a higher law enforcement department
who one day just showing
up out of nowhere,
and introduced himself to me.
Filled me in on some
of the Satanic activity
happening around the entire state,
and I think there was
three of four counties
that were notorious for occult
activity, Satanic activity.
And I was somewhat surprised
that Walworth County
just happened to be one of those.
- The wolf is seen as the
symbol of greed and consumption,
and probably because it
has such a violent nature
it's seen as this chaotic force in society
that kinds of threatens
stability in the culture.
And this is often done
through the abuse of science
or the abuse of magic or technology.
And it creates what's called
the abhuman, which is not human
and it's basically an individual that has
lost the ability to control
themselves and their desires,
and in some cases they can't control
whether they change into
this creature or not.
- I wouldn't discount,
again from my experiences,
and seeing what I've seen and what not.
I wouldn't totally rule out
some type of occult activity
if by chance somebody invoked some type
of a occult type beast.
- Throughout history we find
many legends and lore
pertaining to canid creatures.
In Egyptian hieroglyphics
we learn of Anubis,
God of the dead, a jackal headed creature
who decided which souls should
pass on to the afterlife.
In the Bible's old testament,
a king by the name of
Neberkenezer was exiled
from his kingdom and forced to wander
the forest and fields as a wild beast,
cursed to live like a wolf.
Norse mythology has
it's own representation
of the werewolf in the
form of the ancient saga
of the Volsungs, which tells the story
of a father and son who discovered pelts
which gave the wearer the power
to become a wolf for 10 days.
Donning the pelts the duo turned into
blood thirsty savage creatures
and went on a killing rampage.
Engulfed in blood lust
the father eventually
attacked his own son pointing to something
which has since become a
vital part of werewolf tales,
the loss of control.
Across the world the
werewolf has found a home
in nearly every culture.
- In the epic of Gilgamesh,
which is written about 2000BC
you had this interesting
character called Incadu,
which is sort of a wild
man, he's covered in hair,
he's got long hair, and
he lives with the animals.
He ends up battling Gilgamesh,
who's the hero of the story and
they're equal strength wise.
But Gilgamesh wins
because, arguably because
he's educated and part of civilization.
Incadu becomes Gilgamesh's servant
and there's this sort of
running theme throughout
Western literature of
that sort of animal nature
needing to be sublimated.
- In the very beginning when
I wrote the story about it
I was just sort of thinking
what would I call this.
It was a thing that was very hard to name.
I didn't want to call it the werewolf
because right away I didn't
believe it was a werewolf,
so I titled it the Beast of
Bray Road and it just stuck.
But it doesn't mean, I know now,
that there's only one
thing out on one road.
The descriptions people
gave of the Michigan dog man
were no different then the descriptions
people gave of the Beast of Bray Road.
- I believe that the
werewolf lore had to have,
it started somewhere,
and every lore or myth
has some truth to it, so I do believe
that anything in the United Kingdom,
I think we're seeing the
same thing, personally.
- Well anybody who studied
the Middle Ages in Europe
knows that there were alleged werewolves.
There are other accounts
of so called werewolves
in those same middle ages
that were considered occult
and tied to witchcraft.
If you admitted you were a werewolf,
or somebody could prove
that you were a werewolf,
you were dead meat, you would
be executed in most cases
for the years that these
trials were going on
at their greatest height.
- In Germany for instance, in 1589,
you got what's called
the werewolf of Bedburg,
and a guy named Peter
Stubb evidently had fangs,
and claimed to have a
desire for human blood.
Claimed to have murdered some 16 people,
he was put on trial
and found to be guilty.
- There was the Beast of
Gevaudan, probably the most famous
and in that case it's very different
from these Bray Road sightings
because the Bray Road beast
would duck and run for cover
after it had been seen by people.
But back in the Middle Ages, this thing,
was killing dozens and dozens
of people and livestock.
It was some real animal, real killer.
- This is in Southern France,
between June 1764 and June 1767,
there are reports of this giant wolf
over 200 attacks, some
half of which were lethal.
The victims tended to be disemboweled,
clothes were taken off, and
throats cut and beheaded.
The death of the creature
finally came in June 1767,
Jean Duhamel famously shot it with bullets
that were supposedly made
from a silver chalice
that had been blessed by a priest.
So that's sort of where the
idea of the silver bullet
killing the werewolf comes from.
- So it seems to me like a
very different phenomenon
that was happening back then,
where you have lots of
predation of both livestock
and human beings, and
animals that were able
to be shot and captured and exhibited.
- In America Native Indian lore
involving wolves and man
wolves has been ignored
by many paranormal researchers.
The Mohawk Indians believe
that some of the tribe
could shift form into other creatures.
They referred to them as the Limakin,
in the Western United States,
perhaps it is the Navajo
who are best known for their legends
of shape-shifting men
known as skin-walkers.
- Especially the Navajo
where you had this evil witch
that's able to change into a wolf,
or some other type of animal.
And typically they acquire this capability
by committing some type
of taboo like using magic
to curse someone instead
of healing someone.
So they sort of contrast with
the healer or the medicine man
so as a result they're sort
of a paria to that culture.
- Wisconsin had a great
number of different
Native American tribes living here.
When I asked them what they thought
the true nature of these
upright canines were,
they said well, we believe that these
are not normal, usual modern animals.
That they're very old, that
they were here before we were,
and that that came from the spirit world.
- All of these stories tend to
focus on mankind's either
abusing technology,
or going to a place where he
should not in the first place,
or investigating beyond
where he should be.
Typically this awakes the monster,
or brings the monster about,
or changes the human being into a monster.
We have this facade of being civilized
and cordial to one another,
but there's always that sort of
that inner animal that
can surface at any point.
And monsters sort of allow
us to experience that
without it actually happening.
- As time
passed the local reaction
had exceeded Linda Godfrey's expectations,
placing her at the center
of a werewolf whirlwind.
Reporters from no less
than four Milwaukee based
television stations appeared in Elkhorn,
looking for Godfrey, as
well as any eye witnesses
that would go on record and of course
the Bray Road Beast itself.
Radio and wire services
carried the terrifying tales
beyond the Wisconsin border and in no time
a modern legend roared to life.
Curiosity seekers arrived
in Lafayette Township
for the express purpose
of driving up and down
Bray Road in hopes of
seeing a hairy monster.
Nationally televised
programs such as Sightings
and Inside Edition devoted
segments of their shows
to the Walworth County werewolf,
thrusting the story into
even greater prominence.
Linda Godfrey's files began
to swell with sighting reports
and she found herself becoming
the unlikely spokesperson
for a phenomenon that defied reason.
And then after the major
waves of publicity had crested
and the attention given
to Elkhorn began to recede
life along Bray Road slowly
regained it's quiet composure.
Godfrey however, remained busy,
the sheer volume of reports,
the veracity of the eyewitnesses
and the persistence since that something
significant had occurred,
inspired her to write
about the entire experience.
In 2003, she released
the Beast of Bray Road,
a book that traced the history
of her involvement in the breaking story,
detailed the most compelling sightings,
and speculated about the
true nature of the dog man,
in the wake of the books release
there was a resurgence in sightings
of bipedal wolf like creatures
in the vicinity of Elkhorn and Bray Road.
Almost all of these encounters took place
as people were driving at night.
Sometimes the canid was seen
streaking through the cornfields.
Other times across the road in front
of the startled motorist,
often giving it's distinctive sneer
that terrorizes those
unfortunate enough to see it.
In one unforgettable case, a creature,
described as larger
than an Irish wolf hound
kept pace with a car for well over a mile.
The vehicle was traveling at
a speed of 55 miles per hour.
While the Beast of Bray Road
and Godfrey's subsequent
writing opened a door for many witnesses
to discuss their confrontations,
often for the first time.
Still others could not being themselves
to talk about what they had seen.
Either they did not want to accept
that such a thing could really exist,
or they were even more
fearful of being ridiculed.
- The thing is a lot of
people stopped going public
with their sightings because they saw
how the first ones were made fun of,
and they didn't want to lose their jobs
or be made fun of themselves.
- As soon as there came out
the Elkhorn in the paper
it went national, now all of a sudden
everybody's looking for this.
So did it die down from
the early 90s till now?
I don't think so, I just
think that there are a lot
of people that aren't coming forward
saying they saw something
in fear of ridicule.
- I'm sure it'd be natural for somebody
to have the wits scared out of them,
maybe just tell some close friends but not
want it to go public
or anything like that.
No doubt.
- As the mystery
of what was being seen
in Elkhorn began to spread
to the rest of the country
theories as to what could
explain the existence
of such a creature began to formulate.
While there was a precedence
in the form of myths and legends
relating to upright wolf
like beings around the world
no one had postulated on the existence
of such a being within the natural realm.
Until Linda Godfrey's own investigations
lead her to do just that.
- One thing that I was
always trying to work with
were the commonalities in
the descriptions from people
and I realized that almost everybody
was describing basically the same thing.
Which was something that
stood five to seven feet tall,
had that head like a
wolf or German shepherd,
I called it the indigenous dog man
because I was reasoning it
could have been something
that was just a very minor mutation
of slightly larger paws
and maybe some sort
of adjustment in the spinal column.
That perhaps it was advantageous for it
to be able to stand up.
If it's advantageous, and
then more of these reproduce,
you know, it's the
natural law of adaptation,
that more of them would persist
in these grassland areas.
- In the snow we came
across this wolf print
that was bigger then my hand,
and there were several of them,
and it is, it's frightening to see
something that giant out there.
- They're generally seen
running on all fours
but people recognize them
as something different
because they'll say they
were as big as a pony,
a Shetland pony, or a calf.
- Residents up here, they
know what wolves look like,
dogs look like, coyotes look like.
- Ricky Sanchez
has a vested interest
in getting to the bottom
of the dog man enigma.
That's because a pack of these creatures
apparently frequents his
acreage near the Horicon Marsh
located approximately 100
miles north of Bray Road.
- 2017 is when it all
started at my property.
It all started one night
around one of the o'clock.
I walked outside with a head lamp,
we don't have, like
we're out in the country,
so there's no lights out,
and I saw this large black
object in the property
but beside the silhouette
which really could focus
with the headlamps were the two eyes.
Didn't really pay much attention to it
because it was really low to the ground,
so I kept walking towards the car.
As I got to the trunk of
the car I glanced at again,
and it was slowly walking
crouched down to the ground
but towards me.
So I'm trying to figure out what is this?
So I walked towards it a little bit,
and it walked backwards
while still looking at me.
That sparked my curiosity because it was
coming towards me, the
cat normally doesn't
come towards me, I put
the headlamp on brighter
and kind of walked towards it,
and it tried to back in the same position.
So I walked towards it more and it kept on
walking backwards and backwards
while still looking at me,
and still looking at me walked back until
it reached one of the
trees on the property.
Flipped up, looked at me, now
it's eyes shine at my height
and it just stood and stared at me.
I'm still trying to
figure out what the hell
because now it's higher up, so my headlamp
can't really focus on what it is.
Brought the water in,
brought the dogs inside,
by the time I went back out it was gone.
- For the next few weeks
repeated activity would
occur on Ricky's property,
including multiple
sightings of strange shapes
moving through the fields and forests
surrounding his house.
On more then one occasion he saw not one,
but multiple pairs of strange glowing eyes
peering at him from the darkness.
As Ricky began to search for answers
as to what was prowling on his farm
he began to investigate other sightings
of upright canids in the surrounding area.
Soon the activity would
extend to his neighbors homes
including the house
located closest to his.
- So according to my neighbor,
which is my nextdoor neighbor
he gets up to work at two
o'clock in the morning.
He puts his trash in the
back of his pickup truck,
and drives out to the front of the road,
picks up his trash, goes to
the corner, puts it down.
But he's hearing something from the truck,
as he turns around to go
back towards his truck
he sees this dog like, wolf like creature
in front of his pickup
truck pacing back and forth,
looking at him.
He froze, it was in a kind
of crouched down position
but not completely on
fours, looking at him
as it paced back and forth.
He got into his truck and went to work
after he got his composure back
because he didn't know what it was.
Probably a week after,
this was mostly every week,
we were outside with a
bonfire me and my neighbor,
and my dad, my dad comes home
from Springfield, Mass for vacation.
My dad had gone inside,
so it was one of those days we
decided to just call it quits
because there were too many
mosquitoes and go inside.
When we threw water on the fire
it was looking at us from the other side
of our field of our property.
His eye shine was probably at my height,
but you could see a silhouette,
it wasn't on all fours,
it wasn't starting erectile,
it looked like it was scared.
It looked terrified, it ran.
While it was on the
grass it ran on two legs.
When we got to the trail,
it's already overgrown,
so you can't see through the
treeline, it's already June.
So you know, you have
bushes and everything,
you can't see, so I got kind of iffy,
I told him let's head
back because if this guy
is either side we don't have
a lot of space between us to react.
So by then I told my neighbor I think
it's time for us to go inside.
- Many people will tell me that they felt
it was giving them a message,
and the messages vary from,
I could jump on your car
and get you if I wanted too,
or if you tell anyone about
me I'll come and find you,
or I'm better than you
are, you puny little human.
That sort of thing.
- I believe it's something
new to the environment.
Why it sometimes preferred
when it was first seen
to first scavenge instead of hunting.
It has not breed to a specific look,
you have so much variations to it.
Paranormal no, like I said, it
eats, it drinks, it breaths.
Can it do certain things that
we might not think is possible?
Yes, but other things that
people think that is paranormal,
for me at least, I have been able
to scientifically figure out.
- I've always done field work,
you know gone out followed tracks,
looked for signs, things like that.
But I had the best opportunity ever
several years ago when I
was contacted by a gentleman
who bought a 40 some acre hay
field, part of an old farm,
that was adjacent to Bray Road.
He was a retired math and
physics teacher from Illinois.
- I bought the property in 2007,
my farm is in between Bowers and Bray.
I was new in the area so I had
not talked with many people.
I cut hay, and it was ready to be bailed
on a Sunday in September 2013.
So I basically went down the road
to a couple of local farmers, and I said
I need help getting hay up,
will you guys come and help,
and they said, sure we'll come and help.
So they did.
And after we got done, the one guys said,
he said well you know
the Beast of Bray Road
lives back on your property there.
He said, oh yeah, he said, my wife saw it,
and another farmer saw it,
and then he's telling me
another farmer saw it.
The one farmer who had
seen it on Bray Road,
eating a raccoon.
And I go okay, sure, you know, so forth.
So a couple days later I
was driving down Bowers Road
and there was a raccoon so I
took it and threw it outback
on my property line, and
go back two days later,
and here the raccoon is cut open,
and the intestines are gone.
- He found a raccoon that was lying there
looking like something had zipped it,
from under it's chin down to
the length of its abdomen,
and taken the insides
out in one neat scoop,
set them next to the creature.
- So then I, couple days later,
I got a badger, it was
dead on the road, roadkill,
put it down in the hole, three days later
it's out of the hole like 10-15 feet away,
and a badger weighs 20-25 pounds.
So I know a birds not
picking this thing up,
and there's no path, the grass
is all still around this.
So what I do is reach
down and take it out.
I said so alright some guys
coming back on my property
and doing this, that's crazy.
So then I started setting up cameras.
- As Lee's curiosity
about the happenings on
his property began to grow,
the strangeness of what he was
dealing with followed suit.
Over the next four years he would document
the disappearance and dismemberment
of dozens of mutilated animal corpses
that defied the rules of nature.
While the trail cameras he set out
were meant to capture evidence on whatever
was behind the mutilations it soon
began capturing mysterious
lights and objects in the sky,
along with other unexplainable phenomenon.
When Lee had a sighting
of what he believed
to be a set of red eyes
belonging to the Beast itself
in a field late one night,
it only served to intensify
his search for answers.
Before long Lee had begun
filling photo albums
with evidence of unusual occurrences
taking place on his farm.
- I basically had a deer
out for three years,
three to four years.
There was things happening with the deer
and the lights, they
were very close together.
- He had the idea of bringing
a small deer that he found,
it was a 60 pound roadkill deer.
- And then a mist came
and like cloaked it,
and then the deer's gone.
- The deer set down in kind
of a little nest of grass
on the edge of his property
and when he came back
the deer was gone.
He thought aha, it'll
be on the trail camera.
He looked at it, and at
the time that the deer
would have had to have been taken
this strange mist appeared,
and it was in frame
after frame after frame.
In the first beginning you
can see the deer's hoofs
lying there and in the last frame
the deer is gone.
- I said let's go look for
tracks, so we go look for tracks.
There's these five toed, seven pad tracks
that I have many pictures
of and castings off
along the edge of the field.
- And he could see that there were tracks
that looked like large canine prints
deeply embedded in the soil
and there was only the hind set,
and it had to go somehow
over a barbed wire fence
and into the next field.
He and a friend of his followed it
all the way through that
field to where it ended up
at another road and they had to stop.
- I've gone to the Field Museum,
they sent me to a track expert,
who said these are not
tracks, these are not animals.
They said, you can go to home depot
and buy stilts and walk around your field
and make those tracks.
There's nobody walking
around my field with stilts.
I tried universities,
University of Wisconsin,
I tried to talk to them.
I've tried VNR, they tell
me it's an abnormal coyote,
and they've looked at the tracks,
oh that's an abnormal coyote.
- Lee's farm seems
to be uniquely positioned
to reveal new information about
the mysteries of Bray Road.
The data he's collected thus far implies
that the wolf man or whatever it is,
is only one piece in a much larger puzzle.
If this impression is
true, it begs the question,
why does this puzzling phenomenon
appear to recur over and over
again in South East Wisconsin?
The phenomenon Lee's
witnessed on his property
also seems to connect some
of the stranger aspects
of the modern day monster
to its ancient ancestors.
Whether the dog man, if it exists,
is merely a mythological figure,
a misplaced, uncataloged animal,
or something far beyond our understanding
its presence continues to challenge
those that seek answers,
causing people like Lee
and Linda Godfrey to continually
seek new explanations
for a mystery that might never be solved.
- I believe it exists, I've seen it.
I have evidence, I'm past that,
now I want to to know
where is it coming from?
Does it really live here?
Why does it need food at all,
does it actually use it for food?
That's my pursuit.
- While Wisconsin
is known for its dairy cows,
cheese curds and endless fields,
its town of Elkhorn is
known more for it's beast.
Yet in the years since the first sightings
the town has done little
to embrace the legend
that has grown around their local monster.
In the 90s at the height of
the Bray Road media frenzy,
t-shirts were sold, and
today you can still find
the silver bullet
special at the local bar.
But aside from the
occasional curiosity seeker
asking for directions to the werewolf
Elkhorn is just another
small Midwestern town.
- I don't know that it's got
a commercial value to it.
There's a little bit of notoriety,
but then there's still a
lot of people in the area
that have never actually heard of it.
- I'm gonna say that people still want
to turn their backs on
it, for the tourism,
Elkhorn's not a big touristy town.
But you've got to remember the people
that are really interested in this,
it's a small portion of the population,
they're not trying to
market it to the mainstream.
- So it's always been a
divided reaction in the town
and I think that's to be expected.
- I've had stuff sent to me from magazines
in the back of airline seats
about the Beast of Bray Road
from friends that are traveling.
All around the country
I'll have people say,
Bray, oh like the Beast of Bray Road?
So it's amazing how
far the story has gone.
- In the beginning I
thought that the people
were seeing something, I
did not know what it was,
and I still don't claim to
know for sure what it was.
The newspaper was selling lots of t-shirts
and they asked me to do a
poster they could hand out
to people for it.
I was okay with that, I
actually have a cartoon
in one of the papers that
had a cartoon drawing
of the werewolf being psychoanalyzed,
because all the people were driving me,
you know it was just kind of a fun thing.
Somewhere in there I came to a point
where my curiosity blended
with the realization
that people were seeing something
that looked like an upright canine,
and nobody knew why,
nobody knew what it was.
And the sightings continued
and continued, and continued.
I'm not sure after 26 years that I feel
that comfortable really joking about it
because I've learned that
it runs so deep worldwide
in so many channels, so many places
that I think there's a lot more to it
then appeared on the
surface back in '91, '92.
And why it popped up in
Elkhorn I'll never know.
- In many ways
this lonely stretch of road
in Walworth County Wisconsin
is completely ordinary.
No different then the thousands of byways
which cut through the
heartland of America.
And perhaps that is the
most unsettling element
in the flat pastureland of the Midwest,
or the haunted meadows of
Europe it can be anywhere.
On quiet back roads late at night,
or in your own backyard in broad daylight.
Whatever this creature is
the Bray Road Beast is an intruder,
a being which forces itself into the lives
of those unlucky enough to see it.
It could happen anywhere, at any time,
it could happen to you.