Creature History, Evidence and Happenings

To the right is the photo seen round the world, the original "kneeling roadkill" sketch I did for The Week, edition Dec. 31 1991. I've often said that if I'd known how much it would be reprinted, I would have spent more time on it. At the time, we considered "The Beast of Bray Road" sort of a throwaway story for a slow news week. But it inspired many people to come forward and say they had seen the same thing, as well as sold a ton of t-shirts for the newspaper, so I guess it served its purpose.

For those who haven't read either book, the story first came to light around the beginning of the last decade; that something big, hairy and wolfish roams the country roads and woods of Walworth, Jefferson and Racine Counties. The first witnesses to come forward publicly saw the creature on or near Bray Road, a few miles outside of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, and so it became tagged, "The Beast of Bray Road." I happened to be the reporter who broke the story while working as staff writer and artist for a Delavan-based newspaper, The Week, and the beast has followed me ever since. Not bodily (I hope) but in terms of media and in people's undying interest in the stories.

I've been able to document at least seventy similar sightings, spanning the years 1936 to just a few months ago, have been interviewed for scores of radio and TV stations and have appeared on the national shows Inside Edition and Animal Planet to try to explain the phenomena. The drawing to the right is by a Frenchman named Gilles Arondeau who saw a similar beast in a forested area of France, and drew this wonderful rendering.

Is there a French connection? If you've read the book, you'll understandthe creature is not just some local yokel. And no, I have never seen it myself. Many people think it may have paranormal origins, and while I never say never, I have to point out that while its appearance is certainly WAY out of the ordinary, no one has ever observed it do anything a natural animal wouldn't do. Unless you count running like a human. But no disappearing into vapor, glowing green, or getting into a nearby spaceship. But I try to keep an open mind. No one can say for sure, and that's what keeps the mystery going.

I'm also interested in sightings that appear to be more Bigfoot-like (another trend I've seen, with a great sighting in the area of Honey Lake in western Walworth County) and even those that resemble large black dogs or black panthers. It doesn't matter when the sighting took place, it could have been years ago. The more information we have, the better the chances that we can eventually put the pieces of the puzzle together. Your name can be kept confidential if you prefer.

giant target practice creatures made and used by the Bigfoot Archery Club, Walworth WI

If you have seen anything like this around SE Wisconsin or N. Illinois, or know someone who has, please contact me as I would very much like to complete and update public knowledge on the subject.

The Werewolf Hunt: A necessary exercise in futility

One of the most recent sighting happened March 9 in Rock County, when a 22-year old history major at UW-Whitewater on her way home from her job in Janesville saw a six-foot tall, shaggy brown creature with "meaty legs" striding upright across Hwy. 59, headed for the Lima Marsh at about 12:45 a.m. She didn't get a good look at the head shape so it could have been either Bigfoot (small edition) or our canine Beast, but either way this was the first chance I'd had where the sighting was reported quickly enough and I also happened to know some people who owned land adjacent to the marsh near where the sighting occurred. I secured their permission to bring a team of professional paranormal investigators (the guys from getghostgear.com) and my Weird Wisconsin co-author Richard Hendricks, and the seven of us found ourselves squinting into the woods and fields surronding the 32-acre Lima Marsh about an hour before sunset on April 16.

We were properly equipped. Thanks to Noah Voss of getghostgear.com, we were able to organize three teams with videocameras and walkie talkies. We took turns walking the territory and staying stationary, hoping that the large beastie would shuffle past before catching on that humans sat watchng. We brought bait..a raw chicken, turkey necks, open cans of cat food...near two motion-sensor cameras set at likely places (in our minds) for a Big Furry to pass. We wandered under a waxing half moon hidden most of the time by clouds and dealt with intermittent rain showers and the knowledge that someone living only a couple of miles north of the marsh had taken a photo of a cougar in their backyard just last August. None of us were packing any heat; the most potent weapon between the seven of us was a hand-carved ebony wand wielded by Kevin Nelson just in case the creature turned out to be something more than natural. I had a heavy flashlight that could be used as a cudgel in a pinch but it would hardly be a match for the musculature of a man-beast or cougar.

It was almost as if all the animals had seen us coming and discreetly left the area. We found a gaping raccoon carcass, an opossum skull, some dead deer, but there was hardly a living mammal to be seen. One team crouched in a wooded area south of the marsh for two hours; Richard ranged fearlessly by himself exploring the railroad tracks that run through the area. In between, we munched ham sandwiches and trail mix, and swilled lukewarm coffee, our eyes continually darting to the shadows. We knew we had to stay at least until the time the creature had appeared, assuming it was indeed a creature of habit. As the witching hour approached, we watched expectantly in the direction of the road, hoping to see some brown furry arms come swinging over the ridge in the field, but only a few coyotes yipping in the distance broke the silence. Some of the guys had to get back to Madison, and so we broke "camp" about two pm after a styrofoam-cup toast of a bottle of Shiraz I'd brought along. Just as we touched our glasses, a wild yapping broke out in the field very close to us. The coyotes were either saying good bye or mocking us. We swept the field with our spotlights but didn't catch sight of the expert skulkers. And the Lima Marsh Monster was left to stride again unseen by human investigators. The witness and the land hosts have asked their names remain unreleased.

view of Lima Marsh

hunting crew back row Noah Voss, Sean Bindley, Chris Chung, Brandon

front row myself, Rick Hendricks, Kevin Nelson

HE BEAST OF BRAY ROAD....WHERE IS HE NOW

Huge Animal in Marshfield

Beast of Bray Road-ish creatures are not confined to southeastern Wisconsin. I received this account from a young man whose sisters saw something similar near Marshfield 3 years ago.The girls had been outside, listening to music in the car parked in the driveway. "About five minutes after I told them supper was ready they rushed into the house breathing really heavily and crying," wrote the young man who wishes his name withheld." My mom told them to calm down and tell us what was wrong.

Both of my sisters started telling us that a huge animal was in our front yard. At first I was skeptical about this because my sisters had made up stories before but nothing like this. Then I realised that our dog was going nuts outside barking and growling at something. Our dog wouldnt have hurt a fly but he would bark at cars and anything else than came into our yard. " This time though he seemed as though he wanted to actually attack something wich I had never seen him act that way. I asked my sisters exactly what they saw. They said that they got out of the car and started twards the house when my youngest sister caught some movement in the corner of her eye. She stared at it for a second and then my other sister noticed her. She looked where my sister was looking and was horrified, they said it looked like a giant wolf or dog of some sort. It had long brownish hair long legs and a large head. they said it staired at them for several seconds and then turned towards them and crouched as though to attack they then ran full bore into the house." The young man and his brother grabbed rifles and ran after the creature. They never saw it but did hear it crashing through the bush."his may sound crazy but I truly believe my sisters and dog had an encounter with something terrible," he added.

Dead Beast?

Back in 1992 or 1993, my friend and I were returning from a night of live music and drinking in Milwaukee. We were heading for Janeseville on highway A north of Delevan. We ran over SOMETHING BIG in the road. Not being sure what it was, we turned around for another look. It looked like a wolf, or a big dog, except it had silver/brown hair and stretched across the road. I mean it's tail was on the center line, and head was quite close to the shoulder. Even though I had been drinking, I would say confidently that it was at least 6 or 7 feet long. We angled the car a few times to get a better look, but could not make out the face, much less WHAT kind of animal it was. And even though I'm not a wimp by any measure, I wouldn't get out of the car that night for a closer look. We shrugged our shoulders, and promptly forgot the whole thing. Untill a friend of mine was dating a girl from Elkhorn, and she brought up the story of the Bray rd. Beast. Now, I am not a religious man, nor do I believe in ghosts, aliens, the afterlife.....you name it, and I'm a skeptic. What I saw that night was NOT a dog, bear, deer, human, or goat....the only thing that would fit is Wolf, and there aren't any around here, and the DNR tracks the ones up north.

The only other thing I can tell you is that there wasn't much blood--even thuogh it was laying in the road when we ran it over. I don't want to be ridiculed, but this is the only unexplained experience I have ever had. Editor's Note: So if they killed it, how come it is still being seen? Well, they didn't go back to make sure it was dead, or perhaps it reproduces! No one has ever said they thought it wasn't a natural animal of some sort.

IN SEARCH OF comes to Elkhornpdate May 17 2001 - When "In Search Of" Came to Town

What would network TV shows do for ratings if they didn't have the Beast of Bray Road to dredge up now and then? Some of you may remember the old "In Search Of" series hosted by Leonard Nimoy....In Search of Noah's Ark, etc....and now you get the chance to remember it all over as the revamped Fox show has gone "In Search of the Beast of Bray Road."

I wouldn't mind, except I do not enjoy being interviewed for television. I don't like seeing myself on TV, either. I'm not photogenic. Also, as a reporter, I like to be the one doing the interviewing. Turn the tables, especially when we are talking about nebulous subjects like werewolves, and it's a really uncomfortable experience. The problem is, I probably do have more data on the various sightings than anyone else, largely because back in 1991 I was the one who unwittingly started it all by writing about Walworth County's animal control officer having a file in his desk drawer marked "werewolf." The names in that file all belonged to people with stories to tell, and I told them. That's what I do. I guess I could say no everytime people ask me to contribute to their Beastly stories.

But if there is one thing I've learned in my decade or so of reporting, it's that it's always always always better to tell your own story than to have someone else tell it for you. Even a misquote is better than someone else second-guessing what you would have said, or worse, speculating on why you wouldn't cooperate with an interview. So when Hollywood calls, I usually do answer. With the exception of MTV news spoof shows (yes, one has asked).

So it wasn't long before the TV equipment van arrived in Walworth County bearing lights, camera, and the guy who yells, "Action!" They had a few others to interview first, and it was 3 p.m. by the time they got around to my big scene on Bray Road. We set up near Hospital Road, where one of the sightings occurred, and immediately gale force winds whipped in, along with the most traffic I've ever seen on Bray Road, totally wiping out the audio. As we stood there, clinging to the road sign to keep from being blasted off into the side of a barn, a gray-haired woman drove up in a nondescript station wagon and said something in a Russian accent so thick I couldn't make out a word. She had to repeat it 4 times before I understood she was saying, "You vant help? You vant help?" Well, yes, we did, but there vasn't much she could do for us. Reluctantly, she drove on, keeping a close watch in her rear view mirror.

The audio guy hadn't eaten all day and was begging for a candy bar, so we made a quick stop at the corner store out on 11, while the crew tried to decide where they could find a quiet, non-windy spot. It was getting on toward 5 by then, so I offered my backyard deck and they gratefully took me up on it. My street is quiet as a cemetery, I told them. And the site was perfect, they said, as soon as they saw it. Only the sound of a cardinal chirping in the trees to disturb us. Until my neighbor started rototilling his garden. And my other neighbors chose that moment to arrive home from Florida for the summer. And every airplane between Mitchell and O'Hare suddenly diverted their flight plans to swoop low over my street. The only thing unusually quiet was my fluffy, little, white dog, and so she got quite a bit of camera time. Sort of the mini-werewolf angle, I guess.

And the location wasn't that far off, either, since a creature resembling descriptions of the Bray Road beast HAS been spotted around the Lauderdale area, by at least 3 people I know of who will never come out of the sightings closet. The crew kept casting wary glances off into the underbrush of our woods , feeling a little vulnerable, I think. And when they had wrung every last confession from my lips...FOR THE LAST TIME, WHATEVER IT IS HAS NEVER SO MUCH AS SCRATCHED A HUMAN BEING (cars, horses, roadkill, but no people)....they all trooped into my house to get the standard shot of me plucking aimlessly at my computer keyboard while smiling unnaturally at the monitor. And that's when the weird thing happened.

A high-decibel SKREEEE filled the rafters of my house, galvanizing everyone's forearm flesh into instant goosebumpiness. What WAS that, asked the L.A. director, a very nice guy with a voice exactly like Joe Pesci's. Just a hawk, I told him. The windows were open, and it sounded like the redtail was sitting in my willow tree just outside with somebody pulling its tailfeathers out one by one. SKREEEEEEE! SKREEEEEEEE! SKREEEEEE! It wouldn't stop. I've heard it yell before, even felt the full vibrato one day when it skimmed right past my head while I was walking my dog. But I don't recall a concert like this. Was it a messenger of the Wolfen, warning strangers bearing cameras to beware? Just a hawk acting macho for the local crow gang? Or could it have been the raspy vocal stylings of SUSAN Hawk (who after all lives only 10 miles from my house), having sensed the nearness of TV cameras and wanting another 15 seconds of fame?

Sadly for the sound man, he'd already put his equipment away. But by the time this story gets retold for the tube, I wouldn't be surprised if the scary noise has transformed itself into...gee...d'ya think.... a wolf howl? We'll have to wait until September to find out. Unless the Writers Guild strikes, and then it could show up as soon as the networks run out of reality shows. Or maybe it will BECOME a reality show...Bray Road Survivor, perhaps. Think I'll call Susan and tell her to dust off that tankini. On Bray Road, she could at least hope for werewolf whistles.

January, 2002 VOTE FOR THE WOLFMAN In Canyon Lake, Texas, voters could vote for Jim "Wolfman"' Higdon' for Comal County judge, said the local paper The Herald-Zeitung. He's running in the Republican Party primary on March 12, 2002.Higdon earned the moniker "Wolfman" the summer of 2000, when he went to trial to keep his family pet, 3Shadow2 which looks like a wolf and allegedly killed a neighbor1s chickens. Higdon's argument that all dogs are genetically related to wolves won the case, and his family still has Shadow.

Cougar or Manwolf Prints?

It's a nice Tuesday afternoon near the end of April,2005, and I'm standing on an outdoor barstool with a barbecue spatula in my hand, attempting to shovel an eight-inch wide mass of unidentifable feces form a moss-covered roof into a big plastic Baggie. The woman holding the Baggie says, "It's got hair and bone in it, and birdseed." Bravely she takes a sniff, and almost retches. Which makes me nearly lose my lunch in turn. Mary Philippsen is a brave woman. But she wants to know what it was that ran across her cottage roof one night last week, thumping from one end to another "like a human would run," eventually crashing partially through the roof at one point and then jumping down onto her freshly mulched flower bed. "I was scared to death, I didn't move for five minutes," said Philippsen. She called her husband, who was out at the time, and said, "I think there was a man running across the roof of our house."

In the morning, she stepped outside and saw the tracks. "At first, I was angry about my flower beds," said Philippsen. She began raking over the tracks closest to the door, then realized what they might be and called the Williams Bay police to her north side cottage. The officer was already grinning as he got out of the car, she said, and making cracks about "Bigfoot." Still thinking a human had been on her roof, she asked the officer if they had been pursuing anyone, perhaps an errant teenager, the night before. He said they had not. After looking at the track above and the 8-10 others still remaining, he told her that he thought a deer had jumped on her roof then made these prints. (Do they teach anything about nature at police academies these days?) Obviously, if a deer had broken through the roof it would have made a lot different sound and would probably have broken its legs or gotten stuck. And equally obvious is the fact that these are not the little hoof prints deer make. They do look longer than they are wide, which would be more representative of wolf or canine tracks, but then mulch isn't the best tracking substance.

The cottage is small and one-story, with a mildly sloped roof about seven feet from the ground at its eaves. There are trees next to it. A cougar could easily jump to it either from the nearby deck or a tree.(NOTE: Philippsen has since moved to another state, the house was sold and the roof replaced by new owners).Interestingly, another Williams Bay resident living near the Philippsens had reported seeing a cougar to Bay police just the week before, according to the officer that visited the Philippsen homesite. Furthermore, when the officer scanned the cottage roof for other signs of animal trespass, he discovered a large pile of strange scat about a yard from the edge of the roof. Neither he or Philippsen felt obliged to take a sample at the time. Philippsen's husband contacted me a few days later, though, and I just couldn't let the opportunity pass. So that's how I came to be scooping spatulas full of mammal doo from someone's cottage roof today. I also took plaster casts of what remained of the pawprints after six or seven days and a couple of rains. I must say the casts look inconclusive. Mulch is not an ideal medium for imprinting fine detail, to say the least. But they do confirm the general size, which was about six inches across. An average cougar print is three and a half to four inches; gray wolf prints will run up to four and a half inches for an adult male. The imprecision of the mulch could easily account for the difference. They are certainly bigger than a dog, coyote, housecat, or even a deer would make.

And Mary is certain that whatever ran across her roof weighed at least 150 pounds or more. It terrified her dogs, too, she said, both of which sat shivering in her lap as the mystery creature bounded above them.

Cougars or mountain lions do like to pounce on their prey from heights, and are marvelous at leaping. But when they do their daily duty, it's their habit to find a secluded spot and cover it up with dirt. It seems un-puma like that one would stop and relieve itself on the roof. However, the scat was found on the other side of the house from where the running, jumping and tracking took place and could be totally unrelated to the mystery animal.I had to admit it didn't look like cougar leavings, which are segmented and sort of pointed on the ends. After I got home, I called Rock County's DNR wildlife biologist Doug Fendry, who said it was probably a pile of raccoon droppings. "They like to make latrines and go in the same spot," said Fendry. That would explain the Super-sized pile. (I'll probably make him a present of the Baggie anyway just to be sure.)

While I had him on the phone, I asked why it is that wildlife experts are so reluctant to admit that wild cougars could be moving back into Wisconsin? "It's not that at all," he said. "We don't say it's impossible. We know some people have them as pets. Recently a state trooper stopped someone who had two cougar kittens in their car. It's just that we want definite proof."

Bottom line; I was leaning toward cougar prints until the following happened a couple of weeks later:

Mary called and told me she had found the same footprints in the same flower bed again. The next day, sheand her sister, Jan Day, who was visiting from Florida discovered a large, matted hunk of fur on her lawn. It is dark brown on one side, and dark brown with gray "topping" on the other. The hunk is about six inches long and three inches wide, close to an inch thick in the center. No fur or skin attached. I thought it might be goat hair but someone who raises goats said no. A DNR warden I consulted examined it and said it is either from a wolf, wolf hybrid, or other large canine. Mary is now wondering if perhaps it was the Beast of Bray Road that ran over her roof. I am hoping that someone will come forward and sponsor a lab DNA test. I also have a photo of a similar footprint found by a hiker in the nearby Kishwauketoe Nature Preserve, that is printed in "Hunting the American Werewolf," and a witness sketch of a footpriint seen after a sighting in a Georgia swamp. There is a consistency in size and shape. Hopefully we will continue to accumulate evidence.

Philippsen's fur sample

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