FOXSYLVANIA

– – 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!