– – Things went to the dogs or at least the canids on a recent episode of Monsters and Mysteries in America. For those partial to werewolves, the first segment presented the Beast of Bray Road, a wolf-like creature seen more than 100 times in Wisconsin since the 1940’s. Incidents involving the beast seemed to peak in the 1980’s, when a Lori Endrizzi encountered an upright creature consuming road kill along a road that she was traveling home; it appeared to be developing interest in the woman as a second course before she managed to get her stalled car started and escape. A later encounter was also profiled that occurred in 2006 when a Steve Krueger was picking up deer carcasses when something rocked his truck and helped itself to both a deer carcass and an ATV ramp in the bed of his pickup! He gunned his truck and also escaped, although the missing ramp later couldn’t be located.
A second segment profiled the Dogman, more of a spirit-based creature seen near Holly, Michigan with more than 100 sightings of similar cryptids across the world. A 2005 incident was presented where a repo man was driven off by a man-dog type hybrid which drove him off the property he had entered to reposess a Cadillac.
Lastly and perhaps most terrifying were the accounts of the Wendigo, a rather nasty entity with a taste for human flesh rooted in North American legends and said to frequent the North Woods of the Great Lakes region. The Wendigo takes over people like an infection, possessing them with a cannibalistic hunger so intense that the creature is said to chew off its own lips and gnaw on its fingers. A case was presented where a Cree Indian in the 1870’s had killed and eaten his own family, claiming at his own hanging that he was no longer a man but rather possessed by a Wendigo. In a modern case from 2008, a border on a Greyhound bus attacked a fellow traveler, decapitated him, paraded around the bus with his victim’s head like a trophy, and supposedly ate pieces of flesh from his victim…again supposedly possessed by the Wendigo, which in its true form appears as a frozen, cadaverous monster…truly scary stuff!
– – As do a number of animals, bears continue to acquire skill sets, to learn, and to adapt to human-engineered objects and environments. For this reason, bears have acquired a degree of know-how and finesse, and are able to do things with greater skill and agility than once was the case. There once was a time when a a bear would have smashed a jar of peanut butter to get at its contents; now, bears having exposure to the item and a degree of experience with it can actually unscrew the lid! Bears in some locations have also acquired the ability to get into cars by manipulating door latches. In the past two weeks, three bears have been trapped in cars in Truckee, California. The trouble is that once inside a car, the door may close in on the bear, rendering it trapped within the vehicle. The bear after acquiring the desired food items that prompted its entry into the vehicle then endeavors to get out, with results that aren’t pretty for vehicle interiors, as bears claws are deadly weapons more than capable of trashing a car from within.
– – Alright! – – Who’s up for a show on cattle mutilations!
– – We can remember Chevy Chase’s classic SNL “land shark” routines, and it sounds like a plot for another outrageous Syfy channel movie, but this one’s real…a shark was found on a New York City subway car! I swear that I am not making this up…
– – I love the notion of accursed artifacts, articles from antiquity bearing some kind of spell, curse, or enchantment. Because of this, I think it’s totally cool that an ancient Egyptian statuette in the Manchester Museum in Great Britain is rotating seemingly on its own, and sensibly away from visiting tourists! This ten-inch high statue, an offering to Osiris the ancient Egyptian God of Death, dates back to about 1800 BC, and has been in the museum’s collection for about 80 years.
– – The season finale of Monsters and Mysteries in America went off with a bang in their “Desert Wasteland” episode, treating us to tales (and tails) of thunderbirds, skinwalkers, nightstalkers, and not to be forgotten, aliens! The American Southwest may be a desert wasteland, but it’s rich in really cool folklore! Of course, I was hooked, and wouldn’t have been disturbed unless there was an earthquake or I was on fire.
– – The Discovery Channel has a rather interesting show called, Monsters and Mysteries in America. – –Well, I prefer a monster to a mystery any day, but I’ll take a mystery if no good monsters or even laughable cheesy ones are available. A number of mysteries or unexplained phenomena fall into the category of urban myths, one of which as given a segment on the show was that of the black eyed kids, who should not be confused with the Black Eyed Peas, an American hip hop group…
FOXSYLVANIA 
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