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Books
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INTO THE SHADOWS
American Unsolved Mysteries & Tales of the Unexplained by Troy Taylor
OUT PAST THE
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Hauntings, Horrors & Unsolved Mysteries of the Great Outdoors
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The mythological belief in werewolves has been with us for
centuries. Many historians and folklorists have pondered the origins of the
belief in lycanthropy, which is really the human ability to change into not
only wolves but bears, big cats and other dangerous creatures. Of all of these
transformations though, that of man into wolf is the best known. This is
largely due to the Old World traditions of wolves being feared as predators by
the Europeans. There are many historical accounts of wolves preying on human
beings during wars and hard winters, although not all of these accounts can be
taken as fact. However, the true accounts were prevalent enough that the
French had a word for the wolf that has acquired a taste for human flesh, the
“werewolf” or the loup-garou.
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Although modern
naturalists and wildlife experts would all agree that the wolf has gained
an unfair reputation over the years, centuries of stories and links to the
dark side have maintained most people’s fears about these creatures. In
northern Europe, wolf men or berserkers - which were warriors clad in
animal skins - were greatly feared for this viciousness and the
slaughtering of other warriors and innocents alike. In the Baltic and
Slavic regions of Europe, people worshipped a wolf deity that could be
benevolent or deadly without warning.
As Christianity rose to power, the church condemned such
beliefs and soon, the wolf was seen as a symbol of evil. Many debated over
whether or not men really turned into wolves or if Satan merely caused
witnesses to be deluded into thinking a man had changed into a wolf. |
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For those who claimed such powers, their delusions were
frighteningly real. Many people who believed themselves to be werewolves
testified, under torture and otherwise, of murdering both people and animals
while in their transformed state. For this reason, many researcher today have
associated being a “werewolf” with those we would deem to be murderously
mentally ill. Among these were serial killers like Stubbe Peeter, who was
tried in Germany in 1589 for a 25 year crime spree. During that time, he
murdered adults and children (including his own son), committed cannibalism
and incest and attacked animals. Peeter claimed to have made a pact with
Satan, who had then given him an animal pelt that would change him into a
wolf. In 1598, French authorities arrested Jacques Roulet after he was found
hiding in some brush and covered with the blood of a mutilated teenaged boy.
Roulet claimed that he had killed the boy while transformed into a werewolf.
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With tales such of
this, lycanthropy has been deemed as a serious mental disorder. But can we
really place all accounts of werewolves into a category of human
dysfunction? There are sightings and accounts that do exist, although few
of them, that lead researchers to ponder whether or not man-wolves can
actually be real. In reality, these creatures should not exist, but so
much of our understanding of these creatures comes from anthropologists
and folklorists (not to mention the movies) and since these sensible
people would never believe that a werewolf could possibly be seen - they
natural dismiss any true accounts that might surface. |
This is not to say that werewolves are real - I leave such
decisions for the reader to judge - but there are some accounts out there that
just might have you thinking twice. Remember that werewolves are only slightly
less implausible than many other creatures that people claim to see (from
Bigfoot to giant winged creatures) but most of us have a lot less trouble
believing in the other assorted monsters said to wander the land. The stories
that follow do not amount to trying to convince the reader that true
werewolves are prowling America, but they are worthy of interest.
Werewolves in Wisconsin
One of the first Wisconsin werewolf sightings occurred in 1936. A man named
Mark Schackelman reportedly encountering a talking wolfman just east of
Jefferson, Wisconsin on Highway 18. As he was driving along the road one
evening, he spotted a figure digging in an old Indian mound. He looked closer
and saw that the figure was a strange, hair-covered creature that stood erect
and stood more than six feet tall. The face of the creature boasted a muzzle
and features of both an ape and a dog. Its hands were oddly formed with a
twisted thumb and three fully formed fingers. The beast gave off a putrid
smell that was like “decaying meat”.
Schackelman returned to the site the following evening,
hoping for another look, and this time, he actually heard the creature speak
in what he described as being “neo human”. The beats uttered a “three-syllable
growling noise that sounded like gadara with the emphasis on the second
syllable.” Schackelman was a religious man and after spotting this obviously
“evil” creature, he began to back away from it and to pray. Eventually the
creature was lost to sight.
But did it turn up again? In 1964, another man, Dennis
Fewless, had a similar sighting less than two miles away. Fewless was driving
home around midnight from his job at the Admiral Television Corp. in Harvard,
Illinois. After turning onto Highway 89 from Highway 14, his headlights caught
an animal running across the road in front of him. It was dark brown in color
and he estimated that it weighed between 400 and 500 pounds. He also described
it as being seven or eight feet tall. It ran across the highway, jumped a
barbed wire fence and vanished. Fewless returned to the spot (in the daylight)
hours to look for footprints or other evidence but the hard, sun-dried ground
offered nothing. They did find where the corn had been pushed aside as the
beast entered the field though. “I was awful scared that night,” Fewless told
author Jay Rath. “That was no man. It was all hairy from head to feet.”
In 1972, a werewolf returned to Wisconsin. One night, a
woman in rural Jefferson County called the police to report an attempted break
in at her home. According to an investigation conducted by the Wisconsin
Department of Natural Resources, she said that the intruder was a “large,
unknown animal” that had come to the house and had tried to get in the door.
The creature departed but returned again a few weeks later and injured one of
her farm animals. The account stated that the creature had long, dark hair,
stood about eight feet tall and walked upright like a man. Its arms were long
and it had claws on each hand. After trying to enter the house, the beast went
out to the barn and attacked a horse that was stabled there. It left behind a
deep gash on the animal that stretched from one shoulder to the other. A
footprint left behind was more than a foot long. Bigfoot investigators
dismissed the report, saying that a Sasquatch would never be that aggressive.
But what about a werewolf?
Perhaps the most celebrated and strange werewolf reports of
recent years again come from Wisconsin and involve what has been dubbed the
“Bray Road Beast”. The first public sighting of the monster occurred on
October 31, 1999 when 18 year old Doristine Gipson of Elkhorn was driving
along Bray Road near Delavan. As she neared the intersection of Hospital Road,
she felt her right front tire jump off the ground as if she had hit something.
She stopped the car and peered into the darkness to see a dark, hairy form
racing toward her. She jumped back into the car and was attempting to drive
away when the beast jumped onto her trunk. Luckily, it was too wet for the
creature to hang on and it fell off onto the pavement. Doristine returned to
the site later on that evening with a young girl that she was taking out
trick-or-treating and saw a large form on the side of the road.
She told about her encounter the next day and as word
spread, more local people began to step forward with their own encounters with
the beast, dating back to 1989. One night in the fall of that year, Lorianne
Endrizzi was rounding a curve on Bray Road (just a half mile from the site of
the later incident) and saw what she thought was a person hunched over on the
side of the road. When she slowed down, she took a closer look at the figure
on the passenger side of the car. She was no more than six feet away from it
at the time. The sighting lasted for about 45 seconds and she stated that she
clearly saw a beast with grayish, brown hair, fangs and pointed ears. “His
face was … long and snouty, like a wolf”. The creature also had glowing yellow
eyes. She reported that she had no idea what this thing could have been until
she saw a book at the library that had an illustration of a werewolf in it.
Around the same time period, a dairy farmer from Elkhorn
(near Delavan) named Scott Bray reported seeing a “strange looking dog” in his
pasture near Bray Road. He said that the beast was larger and taller than a
German Shepherd and had pointed ears, a hair tail and long gray and black
hair. He added that it was built very heavy in the front, as if it had a
strong chest. He followed the “dog” to a large pile of rocks but the creature
had vanished. He did find that it had left behind huge footprints though,
which disappeared into the grass of the pasture.
The sightings continued and added up to a number of bizarre
encounters between 1989 and 1992. The creature resembled no known animals, but
alternately was compared to dogs, bears and wolves. According to Jerome Clark,
Dan Groebner of the International Wolf Research Center in Ely, Minnesota
stated that the creature could not be a wild wolf. To further complicate
matters, all sorts of other sightings in the region also began to pour in,
including Bigfoot-like creatures, animal mutilations and men in black. As
seems to be the chaos during most Fortean flaps, all matter of high
strangeness began to filter into the area.
Click Here
to Read A More Detailed Account of the Bray Road Werewolf Sightings
Eventually, all of the sightings died out, leaving fear,
confusion and many unanswered questions behind. For now, the mystery of the
Bray Road creature - along with that of America’s other werewolf reports -
remains unsolved.
© Copyright 2002 by Troy Taylor. All Rights Reserved.
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