WISCONSIN AUTHOR LINDA S. GODFREY didn’t set out to become a leading expert in the Manwolf phenomenon. She just kind of fell into it during the cold winter of 1991.
“I call myself the accidental werewolf chronicler because it was nothing that I thought of in my previous life as a career I might someday have,” Godfrey told me. She lived in the “quiet, conservative community” of Elkhorn with her husband and children. In the early 1990s she got a staff job at the small Walworth County newspaper the Week. Her original aim was to be an editorial cartoonist. She got her foot in the door at the paper when the editors agreed to run her cartoons if she accepted the small fee they paid for syndicated cartoons.
“As much as I liked it, I was finding it hard to be outraged by everything, which you need to do to draw an editorial cartoon every day. You need a really strong point of view, and I can usually see both sides of an issue,” Godfrey told me. She next tried to develop a concept for a daily comic strip but found a career in the comics biz can be almost as difficult as trying to find a cryptid, which is what Godfrey would be doing next.
Like the staff of many small publications, Godfrey began wearing many hats and was soon using the skills she learned in journalism class to report news. One day she received a strange tip. “Someone told me that people around Elkhorn were reporting seeing something that reminded them of a werewolf on Bray Road, which is a two-mile stretch of country road just outside of town. So, just for fun, I checked into it. I found out a lot of people were talking about it, and I discovered our county animal control officer had a file folder in his office that was marked WEREWOLF. That fact made it news.”
Godfrey tracked down some of the people who had supposedly witnessed the creature and began to piece together a frightening mystery. “[The witnesses] didn’t strike me as jokers or liars. They seemed very sincere and frightened over what they experienced,” Godfrey recalled. One of them even reported that they had seen the werewolf squatting by the side of the road munching on some roadkill.
Godfrey’s article ran in the Week on December 31, 1991. “We thought it would probably cause some chuckles and be gone, but in two weeks it became national news,” she told me. The two-page spread was just the first of hundreds of pages she would end up writing on the topic.
The Beast of Bray Road, as it had come to be known, drew attention from across the country. News vans rolled through Elkhorn to get reaction quotes from citizens and to shoot footage of Bray Road. As I would soon see when I went to visit Godfrey in Elkhorn, the country lane isn’t quite the creepy Transylvanian forest people hope for but a tame stretch of subdivisions and cornfields.
Elkhorn reveled in its newfound celebrity monster as werewolf fever hit the town. A local bakery peddled “werewolf cookies.” A tavern offered “silver bullet specials.” The Week produced a T-shirt featuring an illustration of the beast by Godfrey that quickly sold out. A mayoral candidate even staged a publicity photo, claiming he had been endorsed by the cryptid.
All of this had the makings of a local legend, a small-town Wisconsin answer to Point Pleasant’s Mothman. Soon Godfrey had another surprise, though: she discovered that similar reports of the creature were heading her way, not just from the Elkhorn area but from around the world.
“From that point on I sort of became the person people started sending their reports to and that media came to. As soon as the story appeared, I started getting phone calls and letters from all over.” Godfrey continues to get these reports via e-mails, phone calls, and letters. She found that a similar creature was already legendary in Michigan, where it is commonly called the Dogman. She began researching the Algonquin legends of the Wendigo, a half-human beast associated with cannibalism that purportedly stalks the woods of the Midwest and Atlantic coast. Terrified and confused people have sent her reports from as far away as Germany.
Digging through a stack of recent e-mail correspondence she had printed off, she told me of a report sent earlier in the year from a hunter in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. Godfrey said he reported he was hunting for wild boar and deer when he and his dog stumbled on a seven-foot Wolfman. “[He said] it was covered in black fur with some grayish stripes here and there. He backed up slowly and felt like it was following him. He felt threatened and fired on it, and it stumbled off into the brush.”
Godfrey began compiling all of this incoming information and her research into book format. The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf was her first book on the topic and was published in 2003. She began to record reports of other mystery animals—Bigfoot, Thunderbirds, Lizard Men, Lake Monsters—and she profiled these in books like Monsters of Wisconsin and Weird Michigan. Godfrey’s magnum opus on the Manwolf phenomenon is a collection of reports on sightings published in 2012 titled Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America. Despite the title, Godfrey preferred to call the creature a Manwolf, because unlike the Hollywood werewolves we are familiar with, reports don’t involve a human turning into a wolf under a full moon.
One of the most hair-raising stories in her recent book is from a chapter titled “Manwolf Multiples,” in which she tells the story of a terrified couple from Palmyra, Maine, who claim that they were trapped in their home by a pack of Manwolves in 2007.
“They were sitting on their front porch at night and found themselves being stalked in their own yard by a total of five upright, wolflike creatures, who were walking on their hind legs and flanking them. They were about seven feet tall, which they based on comparison to a door they passed by. They held them hostage in their house all night. The man couldn’t get to his guns because they were locked in an outer building. They called 9-1-1, who told them to call a game warden. They could see the creatures lurking and prowling around their house.”
With no nearby neighbors and fearing for relatives’ safety, the couple braved the night until the creatures vanished in the early morning. “It’s one of the longest contacts, and two credible witnesses who saw the same thing,” Godfrey noted.
According to the Navajo (or Diné people) creation story (Diné Bahane’), the first monster hunters were twin brothers named Naayéé’ neizghání (the Monster Slayer) and Tó bájísh chíní (Child of Water). In the brothers’ world at the beginning of time, the land was overrun with the Naayéé, a group of gruesome monsters that devoured the brothers’ people.
After disobeying their mother, the brothers caught the attention of Yé’iitsoh (Big Giant) and thus sought out their father, Jóhonaa’éí (the Sun) who provided them with the proper weapons to slay the giant. Wanting to rid the land of the bloodthirsty Naayéé, the brothers systematically used their brains and brawn to ambush Déélgééd (the Horned Monster) and Tsé dah hódziiłtáłii (Monster Who Kicks People Off of Cliffs), among others. After slaying these monsters and leaving their decapitated heads and hides spread across the desert, the brothers made the world a safer place for its new occupants, the Earth Surface People.
“All of these things happened a long, long time ago, it is said,” according to the Diné Bahane’.
But there are still some who say the strange and the sinister still lurk in the Navajo Nation.
Crypto Four Corners is a group based in Teec Nos Pos, inside the Navajo Nation. This, according to one of the group’s founders, JC Johnson, is apparently a Fortean vortex. Johnson told me that his group has tried to track down a variety of cryptids in the Four Corners region of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. These include (but aren’t limited to) Sasquatch, Thunderbirds, Small People (three-foot-high people in traditional Diné dress, similar to Leprechauns), and something they dub the “Night Stalker,” a flying, clawed monster that a New Mexico family claimed was terrorizing them.
And just like Linda Godfrey, they’ve investigated several reports of the Manwolf, or as Johnson prefers to call it, the Dogman. In Navajo Nation, though, Johnson says reports of Dogman can be confused with the yee naaldlooshii or Skinwalkers, which, according to Navajo beliefs, are evil witches who have the ability to shape-shift into animals. They can turn into any animal, but a common form is as a coyote or wolf. It’s said if you look at their eyes, you’ll be placed under a powerful mind control.
Johnson, a burly outdoorsman, founded C4C along with cryptid investigator David Ortiz and Diné chief Leonard Dan. They’ve investigated Skinwalker encounters, including one in a cave-dotted gorge locals have nicknamed Skinwalker Canyon. C4C is composed of an eclectic lineup of investigators, “half Navajo Diné,” Johnson says. With their camo fatigues, generous supply of firearms, and a few heavily tattooed members, C4C looks like a zombie apocalypse survival team straight out of The Walking Dead.
C4C’s eldest member, “researcher/tracker” Chief Dan, says that he first heard of the Skinwalkers from his grandparents. He says they were at one point helpful to the Diné people, spying on Spanish conquistadors, but eventually chose to take an evil path.
Johnson said in an interview that in order to become a Skinwalker, you must “sacrifice a loved one, sibling, child, someone close to you.” You then “bring in the body to the group, that they might practice necrophilia, and then feast on some of the body parts. Later they will take some of the organs and make powders and potions.” Skinwalker apprenticeship then begins.
The main difference between a Skinwalker and a Dogman, Johnson told me, is that a Skinwalker appears to be a normal person most of the time. “They could be sitting next to you in Sunday school at 9 AM, and at 9 PM they take the form of a wolf,” Johnson said. Dogman, on the other hand, is a cryptid stuck in humanoid wolf form permanently.
Months after my phone interview with Linda Godfrey, I took a trip out to Elkhorn on April 12, 2014, with my photographer friend Lacy Landre. We met up with Godfrey at Vasili’s Cafe, a classic diner in downtown Elkhorn. The plan was to have breakfast, and then Lacy and I would bravely check out the legendary Bray Road for ourselves.
“This is my go-to place,” Godfrey told us after we arrived. Settling into a booth near the window, Godfrey told us about her newest book—American Monsters: A History of Monster Lore, Legends, and Sightings in America—which details reports she’s collected of various cryptids across the country. She has also recently taken a stab at fiction, authoring a fantasy novel titled God Johnson: The Unforgiven Diary of the Disciple of a Lesser God. Talk then turned back to Bray Road.
“It’s not isolated. You’re going to drive down it and be like, Why would a monster be on this road?” she told us.
Although the major hoopla at Bray Road happened in 1991–92, sightings of the cryptid in the Elkhorn area still filter in to Godfrey. She documented a case from October 2008, from a middle-aged couple who saw it run in front of their car on Bray Road and jump a guardrail.
“They said they could see the fur flowing as it ran past,” Godfrey said.
And as the waitress delivered omelets and refilled our coffee mugs, Godfrey told us about a sighting just a couple months before Lacy’s and my arrival to Elkhorn. “There was one in February. It wasn’t on Bray Road, but it was in the vicinity,” Godfrey told us cautiously.
“Can you tell us about it?” I asked.
“Um … I can’t tell you a lot about it. The person is really antsy about remaining anonymous and is afraid his neighbors will figure it out. But the gist of it was he was working in his outbuildings, like at 3 AM in February, when it was really cold, and he heard some of his animals acting weird, making noises, so he looked out in his field and there was a bipedal running brown shaggy-furred thing with a muzzle and ears, hunched over but running on its hind feet, chasing a coyote. He chased it off into a field.”
She added, “It’s a pretty reliable source.”
“This way is a little simpler, actually. Turn left, then turn right, and you can take Court Street, which is the next street up—that’ll take you to Highway 11, and that takes you all the way to Bray Road,” Godfrey told us as we reviewed directions to get to the scene of the story. She added that most of the sightings had been at the far ends of the road, near the intersections of Bray Road and Hospital Road and County NN. We headed out.
It was a cold April, and Wisconsin was still in hibernation from a long winter. The sky was overcast and gray, a fresh rain reflecting off the narrow two-lane country road. The trees were bare as we cruised slowly down Bray Road, passing barns and cornfields shorn close to the frozen ground. Ravens hopped around, foraging for food. An occasional house, a small patch of trees. As Godfrey said, it hardly resembled a scene from a horror movie, just another stretch of country road, the same type of scenery that stretches across hundreds of miles of the Midwest.
“Not much to it,” I said to Lacy, shrugging, and we headed home.
What is this “upright canine creature” supposed to be? Godfrey has heard theories ranging from unknown or evolved animals to black magic to extraterrestrial visitors. She once got a phone call from Scotland from a man who explained his theory to her that they were werewolves from the fourth dimension. There’s even some debate on it amongst cryptozoologists, especially when Bigfooters got wind of the story and determined the cryptid was invading their turf.
“[Some Bigfooters] are very possessive, very adamant about their own theories: ‘I’m totally right and you’re totally wrong.’ They were calling it the Snouted Bigfoot, because everything had to be a Bigfoot,” Godfrey told us, smirking. “If you went to Africa and were studying chimpanzees and then you saw a hyena, would you call that a snouted chimpanzee?
When I asked skeptic Ben Radford about the Beast of Bray Road, he told me he believes it not to be a Manwolf or a Snouted Bigfoot, but a hodgepodge of “mystery mongering.”
“For a lot of these cryptozoology types, a good story is better than the truth, and they just throw all these theories out there, hoping that something sticks,” he said, waving his hands at the webcamera during our interview. “And it could be ghosts, it could be aliens, it could be fucking Dracula, here’s a dozen theories, some I pulled out of my ass! There’s no serious investigation or journalism. It’s mystery-mongering, and I find it distasteful.
“All these reports get force-fitted into this new story—that there’s werewolves running around Bray Road, which is fine, except … ” Radford leaned into the webcam, “there is no good evidence for werewolves!” He laughed.
Evidence is indeed limited to the anecdotal for this cryptid. Photos and video have all turned out to be faked. Godfrey recalls in one of her books that she met a woman who claimed she had a Manwolf scat sample. It was analyzed and determined to be from a raccoon.
Godfrey’s stance on the Beast of Bray Road is similar to Mothman promoter Jeff Wamsley and other cryptozoologists like Lyle Blackburn and his examination of the Fouke Monster. She told me she thought people had certainly been seeing something, but she couldn’t say what, and viewed herself more as a documentarian of the Manwolf mystery.
“I don’t know whether the mystery can ever be solved,” Godfrey admitted. “Just when I think I have it pinned down to one idea or another, I’ll get a slew of reports that show something else. I just feel I have become the inadvertent keeper of the lore and reports, and I hope that by recording these things that people send me, we’ll be able to get a database that people can refer to and they can make up their minds one way or the other.”