Hunting the American Werewolf: Beast Men in Wisconsin and Beyond [Paperback]

A while back I reviewed Linda Godfrey's "The Beast of Bray Road" and did so favorably. I was impressed with it. Now a sequel is out, "Hunting the American Werewolf" , and I find myself even more impressed with this one. This is not surprising, I don't think. The first book was good, but the scope was limited. Ms. Godfrey does solid research and investigation work. Like Jerry D. Coleman of the "Strange Highways" books, Linda Godfrey goes out ON SITE and IN THE FIELD to "doggedly" investigate mystery sightings. She doesn't lean heavily on other authors as sources, nor does she pull all her data off blogs or "booger" internet sites.As was evidenced in her first book...dealing mainly with a flurry of Delavan/Elkhorn, Wisconsin sightings in the 1990s (with a small scattering of Michigan-based stories thrown in, as well as a flashback to one hair raising incident in the 1930s)...AND with THIS volume as well... Linda Godfrey goes out and gets her paws dirty "DIGGING" for HER data. This is impressive and commendable.

With regard to her first book, " The Beast of Bray Road", she did a great job with a somewhat limited number of case histories to work with.

What "Beast of Bray Road" did, though, was bring forth a virtual flood of sighting reports from widespread areas and time periods, ranging from all over Wisconsin and Michigan and down even as far south as rural Georgia down below Savannah.
Ms. Godfrey received...from an excited readership...scores of new incident accounts: enough to really "sink her teeth into" (please pardon the typical Linda Godfrey-like pun) and to sustain this sequel volume; and, with data STILL coming in, enough to warrant a third volume in the not-too-distant future.

The Data thus far has led Ms. Godfrey to identify what she is tentatively terming a "Manwolf" or "Dogman"; some kind of "something" that is generally bigger than the typical wolf, dog, coyote, or hybrid canid and which shows a very odd propensity for standing up and walking around for extended periods of time on its back legs. It can, and does, drop down on all fours from time to time, and can run very quickly in this manner, but the two-legged upright stance is also shown VERY frequently, and this is NOT something the typical quadruped
is likely to do AT ALL.

This "whatsit" rarely BEHAVES like a typical canine type creature, either, and often an encounter with one evokes in the human witness a feeling of terror and a pervasive sense of "Evil" surrounding them. Godfrey does a masterful job of
analysing these sighting reports and has a superb affinity for detecting patterns of commonality in them. Her knowledge of geography is considerable and she has come up with interesting correlations between sightings and certain woods, lakes, ponds, and streams that would have "blown by" most people. She also has noted an interesting linkage with "Manwolf/Dogman" sightings and the proximity of ancient Native American effigy mound sites (relics of the "Moundbuilder Culture") as well as with burial grounds and traditional "energy paths" and "energy centers".

Which begs the question, are these "things" being seen true biological entities, or are they perhaps "spirit guardians" of certain locales that manifest themselves in terrifying forms so as to scare away trespassers on the areas they protect? There is no record of a "manwolf" or "dogman" ever actually harming anyone. They just look and act in such a manner as to inspire terror...and to send the terrorized party into the "feets don't fail me now!" mode. Anything that looks so MUCH like the perceived image of a "werewolf" would DO that, and these things are described by many as looking "like the 'Van Helsing' werewolf". This is an appearance that immediately argues AGAINST any man-in-a-suit theory with regard to them. A suit is a possibility in a sasquatch sighting, but not here. The legs prove an insurmountable problem. Someone might manage to whip himself up a truly realistic and "baaaad" werewolf head and upper torso costume, but the effect falls apart below the waist. Human legs are designed totally unlike a dog or wolf's leg, and there is no way to fake the difference (the joints and bone ratios are entirely different in length and placement) unless your creature is a MOVIE monster where computer generated imagery (CGI) can help you overcome the morphologically impossible. But these sightings are not IN a movie. They are out in the REAL woods in the REAL world. So CGI is a BEYOND-dead issue. Any other alternatives? Oh sure...the prankster can go have his legs broken and re-aligned and set so that they heal up doglike! What? You don't think so? Nobody would be that stupid? Hmmm. You're probably right. Well, try this! In order to have a great yucking time fooling folks, the prankster has both his legs AMPUTATED and then learns to walk around...and even run like hell...on a special pair of doggy-style prosthetics!!!!! What? No? You say THAT'S stupid beyond belief TOO? Well, guess what, bubbas...I totally agree!!! And that means...by process of rational elimination....that we're NOT dealing with somebody in a suit here!

So what ARE we dealing with? Good question!

Godfrey herself pushes no specific "this-or-that is THE answer" agenda here. Nothing so "dogmatic" (did you like that pun, Linda?). She lays out possibilities and lets the reader work through the data on their own. The only thing she implies in her text is the feeling that this is likely something "other" than a purely cryptozoological problem....that it is not just an "odd canid with strange walking habits" situation. One cannot help but take from Godfrey's book that we might be walking a path here that meanders very near to the edge of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone.

An excellent summer read, enthusiastically recommended.

A few years ago I attended a talk given by Linda Godfrey on her latest book about a rash of sightings of a bipedal wolf-like creature in South Central Wisconsin. I've been interested in cryptozoology since I was a kid and I decided to buy a copy of the book from the author. While the topic was indeed interesting, the book was written in such a casual fashion - with regard to both writing style and its analysis of the various witness reports - that it was ultimately disappointing for me.

So what is the book about? Starting primarily in the 1980's and early 1990's, there was a rash of sightings in southeastern Wisconsin approximately halfway between Madison and Racine of a wolf-like creature that could run on all fours yet could also stand and walk or run upright, reaching an estimated 5 1/2 to 6 1/2 feet in height. Several years ago Linda Godfrey, a local small town newspaper reporter, published a book that received some degree of national attention about this creature, The Beast of Bray Road. In the ensuing years, Ms. Godfrey was contacted by numerous individuals to report their sightings of a similar creature both in Wisconsin, in neighboring states such as Michigan and Illinois and elsewhere including Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Altogether she has recorded something apparently in the vicinity of a hundred or so sightings of this bipedal canine creature, which she refers to as a man-wolf, the bulk of which occurred in Wisconsin. In this book she also reports on a variety of other cryptozoological sightings in Wisconsin, including a number of bigfoot/sasquatch sightings, the sighting of winged and lizard-like humanoids, big cats and a history of sightings of a stockier creature that gives the appearance of being a bear-wolf hybrid or prehistoric ancestor of the wolf.

Pros

Ms. Godfrey has taken some reasonable efforts to investigate the phenomenon and does try to get the sort of information from eyewitnesses that establish credibility. To that extent, she tells the details of a number of sightings from seemingly normal and believable people, such as a Navy veteran, farmers, college students and housewives, and where the witness is willing, discloses his or her name. She also discusses in some degree of detail the settings for each of the sightings and ties them in to the presence of some form of nearby water and wilderness, either marshes, forest or both. She does mention the proximity of most of the Wisconsin sightings to the Kettle Moraine State Forest and although southern, particularly south-eastern Wisconsin is fairly well-populated (and thus not the sort of area one imagines would support an indigenous population of large, previously undiscovered predators), that state forest does indeed contain very substantial amounts of wetlands that are seldom ever visited that might provide refuge for a wolf-sized predator.

Ms. Godfrey also discusses the anatomical issues involved for canids to walk on their hind legs and I appreciated that section of the book for its attempt to shine some scientific light on the subject. The conclusion she reaches based on the works of zoologists is that the typical canine legs and hip joints are not favorably constructed for walking bipedally. Indeed, as many of you may recall from having seen something of the sort on TV on the Animal Planet channel or when Leno or Letterman have dog trainers as guests, those dogs who have been trained to walk on their hind legs do so rather stiffly and it is extremely difficult to imagine that an animal that has been trained that way who is startled at the roadside by the headlights of an oncoming vehicle would rise off the ground and stride away, rather than scamper away on all fours.

Perhaps the strongest evidence supporting the genuine nature of these sightings deals with the anatomical details of the creature or creatures, which Ms. Godfrey discusses. A human dressed up in a costume to perpetrate a hoax would have legs that, regardless of the composition of the costume, look thick, trunk-like and decidedly human. In contrast, the majority of the eyewitnesses report seeing distinctively canine-like hind legs with a backward bend and narrowing toward the ankles that is simply not possible for a person to duplicate realistically by wearing any sort of costume. This fact has me convinced that there is indeed something living in southeastern Wisconsin, whether it is some sort of wolf, coyote, dog or hybrid mix with less than fully-functionally front legs or an actual cryptozoological specimen distinct from any currently known species.

To her credit, the author does disclose to us that at the time of the initial sightings back in the 1980's, a local farmer on Bray Road was experiencing problems with romantically-inclined teenage couples "parking" near his farm at night, so to teach them a lesson, he dressed up in gorilla costume to scare them. She does mention that this farmer admitted to having donned this costume a limited number of times and stopped wearing it within a brief period, long before the rash of sightings slowed down, so it would appear that from both a chronological and a quantitative standpoint, this practical joker was not the basis of most of the sightings. She also discusses the fact that some of the sightings of mysterious non-bipedal creatures could readily be explained by non-canine creatures, namely a big cat of some sort, such as a cougar that migrated far from the assumed boundaries of its natural habitat, or a non-native big cat that escaped from or was released from a private menagerie.

CONS

So we have a fascinating subject, a seemingly knowledgeable and thorough investigator and a number of apparently credible eyewitnesses to this phenomenon, so what could possibly be wrong with this book? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is "many things." There are a multitude of problems with this book from both a stylistic and substantive standpoint.

First and foremost, Ms. Godfrey has chosen to eschew the style of a serious, objective reporter of these phenomena and instead proceeds with an extremely informal, chatty and loquacious writing style that will appeal to some people but quickly grows altogether tiresome for someone whose primary goal is the acquisition of knowledge and information. Ms. Godfrey simply sounds like a cat person of the ushy-gushy, cutesy-wootsy sort that most of us have encountered - the sort who has named her cat Mr. ___kins (insert Fluffy, Whisker, Snuggle, etc...), coos in baby talk to her little precious friends and feeds them at the table from her dinner plate. How does this impact the reading of her book? She adopts pet names for these animals, continually referring to this bipedal wolf or other similar cryptozoological phenomenon as "Furries," discussing both "big Furries" and "little Furries." This got very old, very quickly.

The second stylistic problem I had with the book was her constant references to other portions of the book, going back and forth repeatedly, making the book harder to follow.

Ms. Godfrey repeatedly weakens the substance of her book by reporting on a number of so-called sightings that range from the unlikely to the preposterous, including an account from a crackpot claiming to be a lycanthrope, someone who claims a man-wolf materialized in his bathroom but then vanished into thin air, and a man who claims he saw a man-wolf in downtown Madison, Wisconsin in the wee-hours of the morning minutes after the love of his life dumped him. She also includes an account of how some so-called spiritualist claims to have verified that the beasts are spirit creatures and claims to have contacted the chief of the spirit man-wolves and learned they do not intend harm toward mankind.

Many of these more dubious accounts seem to have been included as filler material, to beef up the page count to sufficiently respectable numbers to satisfy a publisher's minimum page number requirements. Ms. Godfrey also accomplishes this by following up many of the accounts of sightings with a pseudo-analysis of what the witness saw. She relates the sighting of what appeared to be a bipedal wolf and then will spend several paragraphs comparing this particular sighting with a variety of dissimilar sightings e.g. - "It could be a bigfoot, except ..... this creature had a long pointy nose and bigfoot sightings report a short, apelike nose.... so, it does not appear to be a bigfoot." She then brilliantly concludes that the described creature does not fit any of the characteristics of the variety of other dissimilar cryptids she discussed (which was obvious from her initial description without the need to pretend to analyze the creature) and states that it is yet another case of a man-wolf sighting.

The author seems to feel the most probable source of these sightings is that it is some sort of Native American spirit creature or creatures and she engages in a significant discussion of this possibility. One of key items of "evidence" to support this theory is that the fact that a number of these sightings occurred near several of the Native American effigy mounds that are prevalent across southern Wisconsin. A number of the effigy mounds are shaped like animals and some arguably could be considered to be shaped like wolves or "water spirits." However, a significant flaw with this theory is the fact that there are plenty of effigy mounds in other parts of Wisconsin that are nowhere near any man-wolf sightings. Indeed, just across the Mississippi River into northern Iowa, there are over two hundred effigy mounds within reasonably close proximity to Effigy Mounds National Monument, yet there apparently are no reported sightings of man-wolves in Iowa.

The main problem that results from Ms. Godfrey's treatment of this subject matter is that rather than shine light upon a very unexpected phenomenon and present a believable case for the existence of some sort of previously unknown entity, she has inadvertently trivialized the reports of those who were brave or naive enough to step forward, ignore potential ridicule and admit seeing one of these creatures. While Ms. Godfrey may claim that she's merely attempting to be even-handed in her discussion of various sorts of sightings and theories behind them, her failure to use sensible discretion to filter out the oddballs and the implausible significantly weakens this study from any perspective other than one that is purely for the purpose of entertainment.

Conclusion:

Ultimately, the most important issue in any study of the paranormal, including cryptozoology, is credibility and the author's failure to take this into consideration renders her book only slightly more useful as a reference work than a volume of fairy tails. I wanted to like this book and rate it highly, but I wanted this to be a serious non-fiction study and Ms. Godfrey treated it more as a work of entertainment.

Linda Godfrey succeeds in uncovering more sightings and tales of Wisconsin's beloved Bray Road Beast, an apparent man-wolf, or wolves, which seem to have strayed from their original haunt in Walworth County. They now apparently prowl the woods and swamps of neighboring states, and Godfrey reveals historic incidents and encounters from many other places too, even outside of the US.

In this follow-up to the Beast of Bray Road Godfrey continues to present the case of mysterious man-wolves with an opening mind, and a fun writing style that manages to keep the reader just shy of peaking the fear meter, though there are a few spots that may push the needle closer to the red.

In "Hunting the American Werewolf" the reader will find more theories about what these creatures may be; shapeshifters, hybrid wolf-dogs, or an assumed extinct bear/dog like creatures called Amphicyon. An interesting theory and, as this reviewer found, one of the most creepily entertaining suppositions in the book.

Godfrey has even explored more supernatural possibilities as well. Could they be spirit beings? Demons from hell? Aliens? These and other ideas are examined, including the unavoidable connections with Bigfoot. And, like in her previous book on the subject, Godfrey takes no shame in presenting theories that many readers will find nothing short of absurd.

She presents them all regardless of how outlandish they may seem, including a few trips down the psychic highway in which we learn that one woman has apparently contacted the head wolf creature telepathically and was informed that they mean the human race no harm, thankfully. And another in which a fellow claims a race of man-wolves travels to and from our world through interdimensional vortices.

However far fetched these theories may seem, "Hunting the American Werewolf" is a well researched book presenting down-to-earth witness accounts as well. It is entertaining on many levels. Keep an eye out for more from Linda Godfrey and we'll see where the man-wolves rear their ugly heads next...