Sasquatch Chronicles - SC EP:748 The Dogman Phenomenon

Episode Date: April 11, 2021

For decades, the creature described as a man with a dog's head, or a dog that walks upright has been spotted by many eyewitnesses. Join me as we examine the Dogman phenomenon. The Beast of Bray Road, also known as the Bray Road Beast and the Wisconsin Werewolf, is a purported humanoid wolf-like creature allegedly witnessed in or near the rural community of Elkhorn, Walworth County, Wisconsin. Named for the farm road in which it was first allegedly sighted, Bray Road, reports of the creature in the 1980s and 1990s prompted a local newspaper, the Walworth County Week, to assign reporter Linda Godfrey to cover the story.

They'll say that it looked almost completely canine in most cases, but it was walking on its hind legs. Is that a wolf? It looked like a dog's head. It almost looked like, if you forget about the head for a moment, it looked like a human standing there. It was just looking at me. I could see its mouth was open. I still can't believe. I saw what I saw. So this thing steps out and it's in the middle of the road and I see it. Luckily I saw it in time because I thought I was going to hit it. So I turned my wheel, I swerve around it and I almost put my entire car over. My car is sitting literally horizontal in the middle of the highway. I was like, well, what the hell was that?

Was that a coy? I wasn't sure what it was. I look at my driver's side window and I see this thing looking right at my car on all fours. And I'm trying to get a bit of look at. I'm like, what is that? I'm not sure what it was. I thought it was a coy.

But then this thing gets up on two feet and starts running towards my car. And I kind of shine at flashlight. I follow the ground because there's some blood. And I shine it up on the back of that semi. And there is something with its... I seen... I came...

I've seen... I thought it was the devil. It growled. And I mean it growled. It was the deepest. It just went right through me. Oh, I didn't want to. I wouldn't go take another step.

I couldn't take another step. It looked like somebody was bent over and had their head in the window of the deer blind. It either heard me or smelt me. And he pulled his head out of the tent and stood straight up. And that shocked me. They don't make people that big. The way it moved, almost as if it was gliding across the beach.

I've never seen anything move like that in my life. They were screaming at each other in gibberish. It sounded like a language, and they were chumpering away, back and forward, back and forwards, back and forward. I know what a bear looks like, And there is no way on this planet of what I saw were bears. What are you, your buddy?

Yeah. What's on now, sir? That's a son of a bitch is about 60 foot and nine. I don't know. Do you see him now, sir? Yes, I'm looking right here. See it. Oh, get a bit of a seat.

Don't get a minute. No touch that. Unta. Unta. Oetty. I can't stand those jawa's. Disgusting creatures. Sinocephilus.

The dog-headed men. Most people have heard of werewolves and dogmen, but few know of an ancient race of dog-headed men, better known as Sinocephalus. A Sinocephalus was essentially a man with the head of a dog. They could understand language, but had no ability to speak. Though they are sometimes depicted in artwork as being civilized and wearing clothes, they were, by all reports, savage beasts who lived to hunt and to kill. While this may sound like just another mythical creature, there are very good reasons to believe that the synocephaly may have actually existed.

These dog-headed men were described by famous explorers, such as Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo. Around 400 BC, a Greek physician wrote the following passage, describing the tribes of the sinusophilus. They speak no language but bark like dogs, and in this space, manner make themselves understood by each other. This strange entity was described by the Samarians. It's been depicted that they are talking about werewolves, but when you read what the Samarians wrote about, it is not werewolves they're talking about. The Egyptian culture also has a dog-headed man called Anubis.

He was the god of the underworld. In every culture, there is a story about a half-man, half-dog. The Greeks talk about it. It happened in the past, and it's happening today. A few years back in West Virginia, Miguel was on his way to his girlfriend's home when he ran across to a very strange creature. So I had left Norfolk around 7.30, and I was coming up 77 in West Virginia, and it was about 12 o'clock midnight, about 12.30. I've been on a row for a while. I was kind of tired, but I was still fully awake. I'm driving and just all of a sudden I see this, what I thought was the biggest coyote I've ever seen jump out in the middle of the road.

And I'm going about 75 miles an hour. And it's really, it just stops right in the middle of the highway and just freezes. And luckily for me, there weren't many cars on that road. Like I'm telling you before, like with the Sasquart, there's barely, there's at nighttime. and those times a year, there's no cars on that road. I mean, there are, but at 12.30 midnight, there's barely any cars. I'm not the only car on there. So this thing steps out, and it's in the middle of the road, and I see it.

Luckily, I saw it in time, because I thought I was going to hit it. So I turned my wheel, I swerve around it, and I almost flip my entire car over. Like, it was almost at that point of flipping over. And my tire was screeching, there was a little bit of smooth. coming up from my tires and my car is sitting literally horizontal in the middle of the highway and at that point I was like well what the hell was that is that a coy I wasn't sure what it was I look at my driver's side window and I see this thing looking right at my car on all fours and I'm trying to get a bit of look at I'm like what is that I'm not sure what it was I thought it was a coyote but then

this thing gets up on two feet feet and starts running towards my car. And at that point, I literally almost had a heart attack when it got up and started running. It was so fast. And I thought it was going to come straight through my glass and rip me out of the car. So I turned my wheel and I put my foot to the floor and I get out of that fast as I can. And when I'm trying to get back vertical and go to the right direction, this thing, I felt it hit. the back of my car, like hit the bumper.

Maybe the license play area, maybe not, probably the bumper or in that general area. I felt it bump my car. It wasn't like a really big bump because I already got some speed under me before that happened. And I'm driving down the road. I looked at my rear view mirror,

and this thing is keeping up with my car. I'm almost going 65 miles an hour. And then I see it peel off to the side of the road. I guess. I was trying to watch the road at the same time. and I just get out of there and I take off. I don't look back. One of many accounts that you'll hear of eyewitnesses running into this strange creature.

It has the appearance of a canine, but yet has the ability to get up and walk on two legs. It's very aggressive and will come after you. Most eyewitnesses describe it as evil, something sinister. Its behavior and description sounds very much like the sinus synovilus. Miguel goes on to explain the size of the creature My best guess would probably be I mean it wasn't like freakishly large But I think my best guess would be maybe seven

To maybe almost seven and a half But probably not that tall But definitely around seven foot I would put it at I was fascinated by Miguel's account And really wanted to know what he had run into During that drive What was this creature

So I asked Miguel, what is it you think you ran into? Honestly, Wes, I honestly have no idea what it is. I mean, just because we all think where was it just crap. That's just Hollywood stuff. But seeing this thing with the snout and the ears on it were so big, I couldn't even just fathom how upright and perky its ears were. And the way it was just running out my car like a man. And it's scared the hell out of me.

You know, I, it just, it felt, it felt so, I felt so much negative energy, like, after that. Because I was having a great time driving, you know, I was listening to music. I was having a great drive. And then after that happened, like, all my emotions just, like, went away. I just felt like just dead inside after that and kind of happened. The head was a lot, I'm not going to say a lot. lot bigger than a dog, but it had a pretty good side on it. I thought, it looked to me like a wolf, a German shepherd-ish head, but the ears on it were so, like, pointy and, like, really upright.

What really bothered me about it was, I mean, when I saw it on all four, it looked like a huge coyote to me, but then when it got up on two, on two legs, like, it looked like its head was like, it looked like it had like a just might sound weird to the audience but it looked like it had like a like a hump on it like a little hump like the head was like because it looked very hunched over

when it stood up and started running like I'm not saying like his waist was like leaning forward but like just the way its head was placed on it's on the top of its body it looked like it was like under a little hump or something like that it looked very awkward it looked very very sinister

It's usually described as a canine between five and a half and seven feet tall, normally around six, you know, the average. They'll say it had long muzzle with fangs. On the top of the head, pointy ears, usually large-sized pointed ears. They'll say that it looked almost completely canine in most cases, but it was walking on its hind legs. and running on its hind legs. And sometimes there'd be more than one of them doing this. In Wisconsin, there's a creature they called the Beast of Bray Road. And the first reported sighting was back in 1936.

There was a huge rash of sightings from the 80s to the 90s. An investigative journalist by the name of Linda Godfrey looked into these reports. Well, it wasn't exactly my dream vocation. I'd never actually really thought about them too much. I joined a newspaper in southeastern Wisconsin in the very late 80s, 90, 91, something like that, because I wanted to do editorial cartoons for them. And just out of happenstance, they asked me to become a reporter.

And one of my very first assignments was to check out the rumors that people around Elkhorn, Wisconsin, which happened to be my hometown, were saying that they were seeing what looked to them. They'd say, if there was such a thing as a werewolf, this is what it would be like. You know, it was standing on its hind legs, looked like a big German shepherd or wolf, shaggy brown fur, big fangs, long muzzle, pointed ears.

So I knew right away it was not anything normal, you know, because you just don't see wolves and dogs wondering around in the wild on their hind legs. My dad was from northern Wisconsin, and I spent a lot of time up in the very heavily forested northern half of the state, you know, treading around pine bogs and things like that. And I had a pretty good feel for what was natural and what wasn't. But there were continuing reports. And I happened to be working with our county animal control officer who had a middle file folder that he showed me. It was labeled werewolf.

when you've got a county animal control officer with a file folder marked werewolf into which he's compiling all these reports with contact information from people who were calling in and saying I saw this thing, you know, that was enough to start me out. And I was curious because I thought if somebody was pulling a hoax, why would all these people be calling the animal control officer and leaving their name and contact information when they could easily be. traced back for fraud. So I started looking into it. I went and interviewed them. They seemed like normal, if frightened people. It wasn't just a couple of, you know, rowdy teenagers. There were elderly people, farmers, blue collar, white collar, young people like seventh

graders on a sledding operation. And most of them didn't know that other people were seeing this thing. So I wrote it up. It went national in about two weeks. The early Inside Edition was out here, and sci-fi's new in search of, radio and TV shows everywhere, and it became nationally known. And I worked for that newspaper for 10 years. And at the end of the 10 years, I was continuing to get reports from people because that started right away. People started calling me and writing me.

And that was before the Internet, by the way. and telling me they had seen things that look like giant wolves, but also Bigfoot and also giant birds and other unidentifiable things. So I decided that I should really write something to put down how it all happened with the Beast of Bray Road and what all the witnesses said, and so there would be a good record. And lo and behold, when that got published, it just ignited another storm of more reports, more attention. And so this has been going on now for like 25 years. And I don't consider myself an expert on the topic because so much is unknown.

I consider myself a very long time student and investigator, a student of the phenomenon and an investigator of all the things that seem to go on around it. These creatures are not only seen in Wisconsin, but they're also seen all over North America and all over the world. Linda, who holds a very prominent position in the community, had a very strange encounter with the creature. She lives out in the middle of nowhere and has actually seen Sasquatch on her property. One night, she ran into something much worse.

My son had seen it and not said anything to me. Everything had quieted down with the knocking and all that. But something was creeping around our house. a lot at night. I started having animals disappear, starting my cats, dogs getting tore up, and I mean, not just

killed, but like ripped apart. I was tired. I had never lost animals and things like that before. But it would just be like ferocious, like just bloody, just ripping them apart and just doing, not even eating them.

Sometimes stuffing them up under things, under buildings and things. I was really upset. Now, I grew up in the country, and it's me and my two kids here. So I've had to learn to kind of take care of myself a little bit. And I have always done pretty much what my dad did when things would get too close, regardless of how scared it was, go out and make a, you have to kind of make a stand, like, this is my place.

But I didn't know what this was, but I decided that if it killed another thing on my property, I was killing it back. So I had started tapping on my son's window a lot I told you that. Well, this was different. He said,

it's raking it. It was raking its nails. It was leaving like raped nail marks down my windows. And you can see them, you can see them on my screen. And I just in my heart, I'm like, this is something different.

This is just different. So one, night we are sitting in the house and we hear a god-awful noise and it's one of my dogs being killed right out here in the driveway that was just horrible and i couldn't i'm not going to sit there listen to that i couldn't so i grabbed a gun i grabbed a big gun too we all did and i'm like you stay on the porch boys stay on the porch but i'm i'm shooting this i'm not letting it do this and i can't handle that so i come out to the end of the porch and as soon as I opened the door, it quit.

She was open the door and let the dog go, and I've seen it. Now, when I say I seen it, I just saw a figure run behind. I had a large semi-partch right here in my driveway. It ran behind it. And I come to the end of the porch, and I shine the flashlight, and I'm trying to find the dog, and I seen him laying there. And he's not dead, but he should have been. And I was really upset.

I just instantly started crying, but I also got Matt. And I was like, and I kind of shine that flashlight. I follow the ground because there's some blood. And I shine it up on the back of that semi. And there is something with its, I seen hands, I can't even, oh, I've seen hands, like big claws, like on the side. Like it was on the back side of it looking around at me. And as I followed it up with that flashlight, I hit this face. It looked just like, it looked like a demon.

Like I thought it was the devil. It had, I just felt it felt like a devil. And I thought, that cannot be what I'm seeing. And I caught my gun. I made, when I did hit growled. And I mean it growled. It was the deepest, scariest, scariest, oh, God. just went right through me.

Oh, I didn't want to go take another step. I couldn't take another step. I just froze. It froze right there. And I had a gun. I had an AR at 308. I mean, I could have done something, but I just froze. I didn't know what that was, but it looked,

all I can tell you is it looked just like a werewolf, just like you see off TV, as crazy as that sounds. And all I could think of was that that was a devil. And I heard my son, he had crazy, creeped up behind me. I could have joked him and he whispers in my ear. That's a demon mom. And I'm like, get back in the house. And we all just backed up and on my way. It sounds mean, but I grabbed that dog by the collar and drugging because I was so afraid to bend down. I didn't want to put my back to the thing and bend down and pick him up. So I just drugging by his collar

up on the porch. And I had my son pick him up and carry him in the house. And then I backed back into the house. I didn't know what it was, and I just, that was it. I was the most horrifying thing I've ever seen. I can't really think about it because it has changed my life because I can't even come outside, like, at night or nothing anymore. I'm walking from my car of the house is just nightmarish. I walk around fully loaded all the time.

And in the daytime, I'm sitting out here, like scanning the woods and everything constantly because that was a whole different matter. It just had a whole different vibe. Linda's son had actually seen the creature prior to this encounter happening, but never told his mother. Linda goes on to explain what her son saw and what she saw that night. Now, I am in the house at this point. I'm like, we'll lock everything up. And my son, I said, what in heaven's name is that?

And he said, Mama saw that the other day at the edge of the corn. And I said, you saw it. And he goes, yeah. He goes, it's a, it's a werewolf, but I think it's, I think it's really a demon. I'm like, that is not a demon. It's flesh and blood. And he's like, it just, he, I said, why didn't you tell me you saw something like that? And he said, well, what did you think?

What was I going to say, Mom, I saw a big wearer, a big dog. I said, yeah, that's exactly what you say. Well, what I saw was a real flesh and blood animal. But boy, it gives off the feeling of something. something completely different. It was standing up, and it was on the backside of that semi, but it had its hand. I'm calling it a hand, because that's what it looked like.

These things got like talons on the end of its fingers. That's all I saw was its hand wrapped around, and it peaked around at me, and it just kind of like, I don't really know any other way to tell you, but it gave me a grin. Like a, you ever see something and give you like an evil grin like her?

Yeah. That's what I felt. And I'm standing there with a, I don't, why I didn't pull the truth? I just froze. I just froze up. And I was so mad because I thought, here, I was going to go out there and really show him who's boss, you know, this is my property.

You get off of it. And all I did was freeze up and just, it just, I just locked up. I couldn't do nothing. I just wanted to, I just wanted to get me and my kids in the house. It's all I can think about, just get away. I don't want nothing to do with this. I don't know what this is. But it's awful confident in it.

And I just don't want to. nothing to do with it, but it was shredding up my dogs. And I was, I had every intention, to be honest, telling you to come out here and shoot whatever that was. And I saw it and did nothing but freeze up. Terrible account of Linda's dog being killed and this family being terrorized by whatever this thing is. I asked Linda, is it still around the property?

At times, yeah. It's like everything acts different when it's a, everything acts different when it's a, around animals act different. Just, I don't, the deer, they don't, they'll be gone when it's here. The deer are here now. So that lets me know it's not here. But it's like a thing that when it comes around, everything else can tell and they vacate the area.

Like the deer won't come over. There'd be a whole, the year that it was here, which was last year, there was a whole, there was a whole thing of corn and soybean stand over here and normally them deer in there every night they don't even pay no attention to our other furry buddies like they they go in there you know they're all around me fields and stuff are but they would not they were just gone it was like there was no deer there was no turkey there was nothing everything was just gone and a lot of the hunters were even commenting like man i ain't even seen a deer this year like you know just we were all like what's the deal. Then this thing showed up on the scene. And so there was no deer or nothing around. It was like the

animals knew that there was just a major predator on the scene. In part two of this series, we'll examine the history behind this dogman crypted, this weird creature people are running into. But before you hear the history behind it, it's important to hear encounters today. Shane is in municipal court judge in Ohio. When he was a teenager, he had a run-in with one of these strange creatures. This was back mid-80s, like 85-86. I was a high school kid, and I was a runner, a high school runner. Every year, my town, I live in a city called Eusiris, and we have a big Bratworths Festival every year. I probably doesn't rival Wisconsin, but for around here, it does. And so we always had this, you know, at the end of the summer, third weekend in August, we had this 10K.

And it brought people from all over Ohio and, you know, and I was training for that. And it had been really hot. It had been hot about three or four days in a row. And I went out to try to get some training runs in. It was just miserable. So I knew it was going to be hot. And I said, well, you know, I got to run five miles. That was my training I had to do.

And I thought, either I'm going to get up early in the morning and do it for it. It's hot. I'm not a morning person, never have been. And so I thought, well, I'm just going to do it at night. Now, I lived out in the country about four and a half miles out of town. If you're familiar with Ohio, for Ohio listeners, I lived right on state route four. State route four runs right through the middle of the state goes north and south and lead you right up to Cedar Point in Lake Erie. One of probably the most traversed, you know, state routes other than the big ones, you know, that run through Columbus. So I lived on a farm. I wouldn't run on state route four because back then, and even still today, there's a lot of semi-traffic with buzz up and down there. And it's just a two-lane highway. I mean, it's just two lanes. And so, in fact, the funny thing is, as I was a kid, my mom never let me have a bicycle

because she said, look, you'll get killed if you ride that bicycle out on Route 4, and she was probably right. And it was until I was about 10 years old, she would even let me go out to the mailbox. to even get the mail because semis were so, I mean, they zoomed by there so fast, literally it would suck the mail right out of your hand if you were standing there. So I was, you know, 15, 16 years old now. I always did my training runs down this little country road. It was called Temple Road. It was, you know, a car length and a half wide, I think.

And it was just right through the middle of the country. There were about three houses on Temple Road. They were all spread out. What I would do is I'd leave my house and I'd go south about 100 yards maybe. And then I would turn right onto Temple Road. And I could go two and a half miles down was state route 98. That would be my turnaround point. And I would come back and that'd be my five miles.

It was about 9.30 at night when I started off. You know, somebody might think, well, gee, that's unusual. some kids and go run it at night in the country. Not at all. I mean, I was a country kid, wasn't scared of the dark. I mean, we did, I mean, I was eight years old playing high and go seek and dark barns and running through cornfields and stuff like that. So being out at night never, never bothered me at all.

I mean, there was, and keep this in mind, you know, north central Ohio, there's no bears, there's no wolves, there's no bobcats. I mean, there's nothing out there. there that would be dangerous to a kid other than a human being. And back in the 80s, I think we were pretty naive about, you know, people grabbing kids and stuff like that. But I was a 15, 16-year-old boy. Nobody was going to just grab me. I just ran from them. But so to understand the sort of the geography, so I turned right on the Temple Road, and for about a straight mile to my right was corn. And the corn, you know, middle, early August was about head high. And I'm almost six foot. So this corn is about six foot tall. And so on my right was corn and on my left was beans. And it ran that way all the way down to the first cross road, which is a little road called Flickinger Road. And at that time, as soon as you cross Flickinger Road, which is about a car length wide, there was a woods. And I can't tell you how many acres.

the woods would have been back then, but it was pretty thick. Past that, there was a house and, you know, more cornfields, more bean fields. So on this particular evening, the moon was out, was not a full moon, but it was very, I mean, there was a lot of light. I mean, you could see there was a lot of visibility. And so I got down to stay route 98, and I made my turnaround. I was coming back, and I got back to where Flickinger Road was, which means I was about a mile away from being home.

And for some reason, I caught my spider senses, but something just went off like an alarm in my body that told me something wasn't right. And I stopped and I started looking at the woods because I just got this feeling that there was something in the woods. As I was standing there looking at the woods, I noticed that across from the woods, across that little side road Flickinger, that there were something in the corn. Now, like I said, the corn was about head high, and it was moving. Like, a lot of corn was moving.

So I knew it wasn't a dog, okay? And my first gut instinct was there were deer in the corn, because we have tons of deer. but it was weird. The way the corn moved, there was something that told me it wasn't a deer. And then I thought, well, maybe it's a person or two people. And I was like, I don't know. Who would be out here in the middle of nowhere, you know, messing around?

So I thought, I'm going to get the hell out of here. So I took off. You know, I took off at a pretty brisk pace. And when I took off running, whatever was in the corn, it took off running with me. And it stayed in the corn about three to four rows in. And it kept perfect pace with me. I mean, it didn't fall behind me.

It didn't get ahead of me. It was like pacing me. And that really freaked me out because, for one, the corn's really thick. And I thought, how could it see me? Like, how did it know what pace I was running? because I couldn't see it. I could see the corn moving, but I couldn't see what it was.

How did it know how fast I was running in order to keep pace with me? And that really freaked me out. And I realized then this was no person in the corn. No person could have ran. And I don't know to my listeners out there who've ever tried to run around in a cornfield, no way are you running at night in a cornfield that fast.

And then I realized, you know, It can't be a deer because a deer would have ran away from me. A deer wouldn't have ran with me. It wouldn't have paced me. And so I got really scared and I stopped because I wanted to see what the hell this thing was. And when I stopped, whatever was in the corn stopped too. I mean, and when I say stopped, I mean, it came to a dead stop and was perfectly still. It wasn't like the corn was moving.

Like, you know, it doesn't like it stopped running but was still kind of muscle around in the corn or, or, you know, like that, the corn didn't move. I mean, it didn't move. And so I stood there, staring, thinking something's going to happen here, and nothing did. And so I thought, she's out, I got to, you know, this is, this is creeping me out, and then I got scared. So I got this big adrenaline rush. And when I got the big adrenaline rush, I just took off as fast as I could. And when I took off, like I was, you know, coming out of the sprinters block, it took off too. And once it kept pace with me. So I knew coming up, so a half mile, the half mile mark for me to get home was an old farmhouse with some old buildings. And I knew from running up and down that road,

I knew that there was a big tree that set out by the road, I mean a huge tree. And I thought, I'm going to scale, I'm going to just climb this tree and I'm going to get up high enough where I can either see what's corn or if whatever it is comes out of the corn, I'm going to be up high and it's not going to be able to get me. Probably wasn't the best idea because then I'd have been stuck up in the tree. But at the time, that was, you know, to a teenage kid who's panicking, that seemed like the most logical thing to do. So when I got close enough to the tree, I mean, I'm gunning it.

And it, you know, I'm sprinting and it's, it's staying with me. I noticed that somebody had dehorned the tree, which means all the lower branches they had cut off. So I don't know when that happened, but I'm like, crap, I can't climb this tree. Because this tree was really big. I mean, it was really big around, and they had cut all the smaller limbs off,

so I couldn't have got up, so now I'm stuck. So my adrenaline is like, you know, they have that fighter flight and you get that big adrenaline rush. Well, you only have so much adrenaline. and I just burned it all out. And so I just felt exhausted, like, really, like, you know, couldn't hardly breathe because I had ran so hard. So I stopped by the farmhouse and the thing in the corn stopped. You know, it stopped as well.

So I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, you know, what am I going to do? So right after the farmhouse is when the bean field picked up. And so, you know, the corn's on my left. Beans are going to be on my right. And I thought, okay, I got a half mile to go. I don't know what's in the corn. I don't, it's keeping pace with me. I now know I can outrun it because I'm running as hard as I can

and it's keeping up perfect pace with me. So if it can run perfect pace with me in the corn, then outside the corner on the road, there's no way I can outrun it. So I know I'm about a half mile from home. And for me to get home, I'm going to have to get to Route 4, and I'm going to have to turn left. And if I turn left, I'm going to intersect with whatever's in the corn. Because, you know, for me to get home, I got to cross, I got to cross the busy road to get to my house. I'm going to have to cut left.

Now, the corn did not run all the way up to Route 4. there was a ditch and then there was probably 10 yards maybe maybe not that much of like just unintelligible ground and it had weeds and wild flowers and stuff like that so there was going to be about a about a you know a 10 yard five yard stretch of where this thing if it was if it came out of the corn it was just going to run right into me we'd be you know we'd run right into each other so i thought man i can't turn left I can't go home. And one of my best friends lived to the right. So I could get to Route 4 and I could turn right and I could try to go to his house. And he lived about 200 yards down. So part of me thought about trying to cut across the beanfield, you know, not even make it to Route 4,

just cut diagonally across the beanfield to try to get down to where his house was, even though he was still across the road. I'd still have to cross the road. But then I realized, no, if you're familiar with beans, there's no way I could have cut across the beans because I wouldn't have been going with the rows that had been cutting across them. And if this thing would have came out of the corn to get me, I couldn't have ran in the bean field at a trip and fell and it had me. And I thought, well, at least if I'm on asphalt, I could, you know, I could move, I could juke, I could twist, I could try to, you know. It reminded me like, you know, if you're playing, remember when you're a kid playing tag and, Even though a kid was faster than you and they were chasing you, you could always kind of juke or angle and they would miss you.

I know that sounds kind of silly, but that was kind of my thought process in a panic moment, was at least if I'm out on the road, I could do this whole, you know, playing tag thing where I'm twisting and jerking, you know, trying to get out of the way. But in the beanfield, I stuck. There's no way. So then I thought, okay, here's the plan. I got to get to Route 4. and I got to get right and sprint to my buddy's house. But the problem was, you know, and as I explained before, Route 4 is incredibly busy highway with semi-trucks.

And, you know, I enrich regular traffic. And with this being the summer, there's all kinds of Lake Erie traffic that's always coming and going. So one of the problems is if, you know, I'm going to try to sprint across the road, but I have to be cognizant of the fact that they're semi-zuming up and down this road, I could just get hit. You know, I get killed by the truck, not whatever's in the field.

So I said to myself, look, you got to conserve energy. So I broke into a very light jog because I figured, look, I'm going to wait until I get about 15 yards or so, 20 yards, 50 yards from Route 4. And when I see that I can get across, I'm going to, you know, dead sprint, don't look back, gun at my buddy's house. So I had to conserve some energy because I'd blown up, you know, my adrenaline. So I start this, you know, light jog, very light jog, trying to gather myself. And the thing that was in the corn, it started running too. And it kept pace with me. And as I was getting closer to Route 4 and I started picking up the pace, it's picking out the pace. And it's, I mean, It's probably, I'm going to say the furthest away it probably ever was was probably 25 feet maybe away from me.

And I say that. Pretty close, really. Oh, it's close. Yeah, I mean, the road is just not a very wide road where this was. And the reason why I say that is because I think to myself, you know, if I'm shooting a three-pointer in basketball, that's 20 feet. It was about five feet behind that. So it's that close to me. But I never heard it breathing.

I never heard any, I never heard it make a sound. Like it was silent other than the wrestling of the, you know, the corn stalks. So I told myself, when I get to the point where I'm going to, where the corn ends, I'm not going to look back. I said to myself, don't look back because I was scared that if whatever was in there, I might freeze up. I mean, I might see it, and I might hesitate. So I thought, I don't want to look. I don't want to look. So I'm getting closer, I'm getting closer,

and I notice that there's a semi coming from the left, but it's far enough back that I'm going to be able to get across the road. And so as I go, as I start to angle to the right and to try to hit top speed, I couldn't help myself, and I looked back. And when I look back, what I saw was this thing about six foot tall because its head was about even with the top of the corn. And it just walked out of the corn and six foot tall and it had the head, head of a dog, sort of a muscular type chest. its shoulders were rolled forward

like somebody who had really bad posture you know its shoulders roll forward long arms and I could not see its legs below the knees I never saw its knees so I can't tell you what its knee joints or anything like that

looked like and it turned its head and it looked at me and to me it looked like and this is the first the only frame of reference I had was it looked like the Egyptian god Anubis because that having seen that in books or seen that on TV, that's what it looked like. It looked like the Egyptian god Anubis with that head. And it looked to me like it was going to drop to all fours. Like if it was going to chase me, it was going to drop to all force. And the reason why I said it was because it's posture, the way it had the rolled shoulders and bending force. And forward.

It was kind of like, and I don't know if anybody out there who, a football reference, if you ever seen like a linebacker who's playing defense, how they're in an athletic stance and they're leaning forward on the balls of their feet and their shoulders are kind of forward, you know, that's what it looked like to me, that it was going to drop to all fours. Whether it was or not, I don't know. And so I see that, and I get a good look at it, it was dark, like it had dark fur on it and I bolt across the road and I'm convinced that it's right behind me.

You know, I'm convinced that it's chasing me. And I sprint. It's just as hard as I can. And my buddies had an indoor, or I'm sorry, an in-ground pool. And they had a chain link fence around it. And half the time the swinging gate to that pool was open and half the time it wasn't. And I'm sitting there praying, my God, I hope this gate's open because if I have to stop, and try to unlash that gate, it's got me.

And so as I'm getting closer, I notice that the gate is closed. And I'm like, oh, no. So as I get close to it, I just say the hell with it. And I jump as high as I can. And I throw my legs up in the air like the side, like the old Falsbury flop. And I tried to put my hand on the top of the fence and the scalloped wires on it just cut me right across my side.

I land in a stumbling thing and I just dive right into a swimming pool head first. I blew all my air out and I let my chest like drag across the bottom of the pool. And when I got to the deep part, it was about 10 feet deep, I pinched my nose and I just sat there on the bottom of the pool looking up, fully anticipating that this thing that I saw come out of the corn was going to be standing on the edge of the pool and then I'm just going to be like I'm totally screwed. and I sat on the bottom of the pool what seemed like minutes, but I'm sure it was probably 30 seconds if that. And gasping for air, I swim to the top

and it's nowhere around. I jump out of the pool. I rip open the sliding glass door on my buddy's patio. And his parents were home at the time. He had no idea I was coming. And this was back in the 80s and he had one of them big giant satellite

dishes. You remember those things that just look enormous. And here he had dialed into the Playboy channel. And I scared the absolute hell out of him because he thought it was his parents coming in. He yells and I, he looks and he said, what the heck are you doing? You know, and I kind of tell him what happened. And he was convinced that I saw a deer or I saw a coyote or I saw, I can't remember what all else he said. You know, he saw and I'm like, no, me, no, I did not, that's not what I saw. It's not what I saw. Whatever was in the corn. It wasn't a deer. And it scared, I mean, it just, it just scared me because I knew how fast that thing was that if it would have came out of the corn, I couldn't have, I couldn't have got away from it.

And so for years, I pondered, why didn't it catch me? You know, why didn't it run me down? Why didn't it catch me? Was it just playing with me? Was it toying with me? And then the other thing I wrestled with is, you know, what is it? You know, what was it that was there? Because I played cards with a group of friends the next night, and I told them the story, but I left out what exactly I saw because I knew they would have just roasted the hell out of me. You know what I mean? They would have, oh, they would have made fun of me like you wouldn't believe.

And so even the guys at the table, you know, were playing cards like, well, you know, it could have been this. It could have been that. And I'm thinking, you're thinking, look, dudes. You didn't see what I saw. You know, you didn't see it. So, you know, the interesting thing, Wes, is I never thought that it was a werewolf. You know what I mean? Because you have to understand, in the 80s, there was no internet.

There was no frame of reference for me. And to me, the werewolf was Lon Cheney Jr. went a pair of jeans and a torn flannel shirt and a flat face, you know, like a human face, with just hair on it. So for me, I didn't know what it was. And so, you know, as I grew up and I eventually became a lawyer and I'm now a judge in my hometown. And I started doing some research. And early on, I was thinking, is this like a hellhound or something?

Was this something? Because I'd heard of these things. And you remember whole Sherlock Holmes and the hounds of Baskerville. And you hear some of this stuff about, you know, these black dogs with red eyes. chasing carriages. And therefore, for a long period of time, I thought, well, you know, was it something like that? Was it some sort of demonic dog that was black dog was chasing me?

But it didn't fit the profile. It just didn't fit the profile. Why was it standing on two legs? Why did it look, it didn't, like I said, it didn't look like a dog would look. It looked like the Egyptian got a nubis. That's what it looked like. So then years later, you know, I start hearing about this, this phenomena that people are seeing called a dog man. And so I picked up one of Linda Godfried's book, who is the, I guess you would say the godmother of dogman dating back to the Beast of Bray Road, which I knew nothing about.

And I was reading this account and this guy says that what he saw looked like the Egyptian god anubis. And I said, that's it. That's what I saw. Whatever this guy saw is the exact same thing that all I saw. And then it was this, I discovered there was this whole phenomena out there about these things called dog men. And knowing what other people have seen, I'm convinced that's what was stalking me that night. It's very cool to have a judge come forward and say, I saw this saying. Shane actually started a podcast called From the Shadows.

He goes on to describe what he saw that. night. The arms were sort of thin. You know what I mean? It did not have like a big muscular set of arms. The arms were more spindly kind of long, you know what I mean? But his chest was big. And I'll give you an example. This is going to sound really silly to you. But I had a ministered dachshund. And he had short little stubby, legs, but he had an incredibly muscular chest. His chest stuck out, and he had this just really strong chest. That's what it reminded me of. It had a big chest, but skinny arms and sort of big rolled shoulders is what it looked like. It was almost like, it was almost like the arms were not

proportionate with the torso. It didn't look like it had these big powerful arms. It just didn't quite look like that to me. Now, maybe it was the angle I was at, or maybe, you know, with it being nighttime, but I got a good look at it. And to me, it looked more, very powerful torso and long arms.

I asked Shane, what do you think this thing is that you ran into? I mean, what is this creature? So here's the thing. So, you know, I like to think I'm somewhat of an educated guy. You know, I went to law school, obviously, but that doesn't make me a biologist. But, you know, I've done some study and I think, okay, is this a biological creature? All right. If it's a biological creature, what, and it's canine, it has a, if it has canine tendencies, why would it stand on two legs? You know, what's it doing on two legs? Dogs don't stand. on two legs. You know, wolves don't stand on two legs. But then again, I think, well, you know what, when it was pacing me in the corn, it was probably on all fours. It was probably run on all fours. And then when it came out of the corn, I think it probably stood up on its, on, you know, on two legs to get a better vantage point of me, I think. And then if it would have laid chase to me,

I think it probably would have dropped down on all fours. And I say that just based upon based upon its physical stature. So I tend to believe that it's a I tend to believe it's a physical animal of some sort. The thing is, what's its origin? You know what I mean? What's its origin? I mean, animals evolve.

We know that. You know, we know animals evolve, but what is this thing's origin? You know, has this thing been around for thousands of years? Or is this something that's just evolved over the last 50 years. Marco Polo mentions the sinusophily indirectly

when he had traveled to a remote island. Marco Polo writes, The people of the island are no better than wild beasts. I assure you, all the men on this island have heads like dogs and teeth and eyes likewise. They are the most cool generation and eat everybody that they can catch, if not their own race.

Stephanie lives out in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee several nights she was coming home and had a weird feeling she was being watched until one night she saw what was watching her probably 7.30 and this was Thanksgiving Day night I worked Thanksgiving Day between 7.30, 8 o'clock I've done typical pulled in the driveway

and of course maybe it was kind of in the back of my mind I've been kind of skittish a few nights of what I had happened before, but I wouldn't think in too hard about it. I pulled into the driveway. I fiddled around the car, kind of gathered my things, and I just looked up my window, the driver's side window, and I saw something, saw like little beady lights. little tiny lights and I thought, what is that?

And I pressed my face basically up against my windshield and my window. And is that a wolf? It looked like a dog tan. And it looks like the eyes were like little lights, like kind of like in the pupil of someone's eye. It was like a pupil. The pupils were lit up like little lasers. and I kept looking at it, looking at it, and I looked like a wolf. That can't be what I'm seeing.

And I just kind of just aired at it for a minute. And then I got like a rush of adrenaline, and my heart started racing. I just kind of shook it off and turned my head and got the rest of my things and told myself, Steph, you're just being stupid. This can't be what you're saying. Just get out of the car. So I got it, got my stuff, got out of the car, shut the door, and I looked up, and it was very plain what I was looking at. It looked a little different being out of the car than it did.

When I was in the car, through the experience, it almost looked like it changed in a way because it kind of didn't look like what I was seeing from inside the car. It was very light skin or light colored for gray, flaxen black, and maybe tan, reddish tan, described kind of like I had a calico cat one time, how the colors mix in together. That's what its fur look like everywhere but the face. It had a, that part of it still looked like a dog or a wolf. But right around the snout and the eyes was a whole. white, gray colored fur. It went up past like its eyes, like to its forehead, and was really,

really short, really short. All of a sudden turned into very long, wiry hair, fur. It looked kind of like how a line or a juvenile line all of a sudden changed from really short to long and it had wiry fur all over the top of its head. Which a way, I could see that there were ears. For sure, if they were standing straight up or maybe bent over, I didn't see a pronounced sharp ear to it. But the fur I said was very long and wiry. The face was, you say, or a dog, I don't believe what I was saying, that I wasn't seeing what I was saying, that there was, I told myself that there was something standing or something sitting on my dad's truck because it was actually standing. behind it. From the

belly button just about the belly button a person up is all I could see and I kept trying to relate to it saying what I was trying what I was looking at and I was just I was scared

but I wasn't terrified. I was scared because I couldn't figure out what I was looking at. The fur come down come down maybe the sides of the neck a little bit, it looked like it went all the way over the back of its head, possibly down the back of its neck. And its neck was very long. There was quite a bit of a distance between the top of the shoulders and where the head started. The were a lot larger than what I were seeing when I was sitting in my car. They were huge

huge. I could see the flex of the color in its eye around the pupil. It's like it was really large, wide bands of color around the pupil. And it went from like a yellow to a gold color. And they were like lit up. It wasn't just the pupil anymore. It was lit up in such a way. It almost made the face light up. And we have a security lot kind of in the distance. catchy light, so I wasn't catching all of it, but the face looked really lit up to me. I know we had a full moon that night, but I think it was cloudy. I don't know if that's what the other light was that I was seeing. And the color, the neck stick out to me because it was so long.

The shoulders, it looked like, if you forget about the head for a moment, it looked like a human standing there. Of course, I could tell there was really short fur on it because it was patchy lot. I had like a professional ball player, basketball player, is very fit, main kind of muscular, but not big protruding muscles. It was just like a block. There was the torso down that I could see. There was no like slant to the body.

going into the hips, like a lot of people say, they see the dog man, how it kind of viz in. I got the sense that it was just straight down, almost like if I'd have seen the lower half of its body, I felt like that it was human-like because of the way the chest and the arms looked, so much so that if I hadn't went back later to do a size comparison, I didn't realize how big what I was looking at was. The head looked very large. Large in comparison with the neck looked skinny, but it was long, looking at me.

His mouth was open, kind of like how a dog just naturally breathing with its mouth open. A dog or whatever would be, there was like little black dots, like where you could see whiskers at something and not something major. thing that I was looking at, I front of my car trying to keep my eyes on it. I got to a point to where I had to give it my back to get through the fence. I turned and it was still there. And I have a pit bull in the yard and I was calling for because I was just scared, you know, I guess I just wanted to know somebody else was with me, but I couldn't get her to come to me. And she always comes to me whenever I come in at night. She's jumping around a yard happy to see me, but she didn't come to me that night.

It's about probably 70 feet from the fence to our front door, and I kept turning sideways, looking back to Grants at it, and I saw it for a while, but when I finally got to our front porch and up to the door, I couldn't see it anymore. And my dog was in her dog house, and she was just, she was awake. She saw me. I talked to her, tried to get her to come out. She wouldn't move out of her dog box. She didn't want nothing to do with coming out of her dog box.

I went in the house kind of in disbelieve. I still can't believe. I saw what I saw. It's very confusing to me. I keep trying to think of other things that it could have been. Come on in, and shortly I went to bed. I didn't tell anybody about it. I might have been two days later that I finally tell my husband about it,

and it kind of fussed at me for not waking him up and letting him know what was going on that night, but I just couldn't believe if I saw myself. And I got him to go back with me, and it had to be about seven and a half. And the width of it was very big, whatever. was I saw to go to work, and I was thinking, okay, I'm going to see something sitting on top of my dad's truck, and that's going to explain it. There was nothing there. There wasn't nothing on my dad's truck. There wasn't anything behind it around it.

And the wise of it, hearing descriptions of Sasquatch, would match a Sasquatch maybe. I mean, there wasn't, there wasn't major muscle definition, but I could see, I could see the muscles, but it wasn't huge muscles. And it was just like a straight down. The main body was just straight, blocky, the arms. I could see the arms. I could see the space between the body and the arms. But the head, like I said, when I first saw it, I thought, wow, is that a dog man?

You know, is that a wolf? And when I got out of the car, it's almost like there's three. there was three animals in that. Like I told you that before, I couldn't reference those eyes that my husband and I were watching a television show. Maybe, I don't know, a week later, a few days later. And on this TV show, there was this owl in the background, this big huge porcelain owl, and the eyes caught my attention, and automatically it just zipped me back to the moment that I saw that. And I tell my husband, I said, wow, look at those eyes.

That looks exactly like the eyes I saw. And it was really weird. It's like the head of the line, but a dog is whale, and the eyes of an owl. I think they were self-illuminating because when I first saw that, my windows in my car are tinted, quite a bit tinted. And I could see these little beady lights. it looked like lasers almost from within the eye

that once I got out of the car and I got a better look at it it was like the entire eye was glowing and it was a there was like two shades of of yellow or gold to it. The band of the color

there was like two shades on the outside of the pupil but it almost looked I don't know if that makes sense or not, but the eyes were so big and that glow, an angle in such a way that I don't think that could have been what was lighting up the eyes. And it's far enough away that I don't think you had anything to do with it. And I was trying really hard to remember about the moon that night. I know that, like I said, it was a full moon.

I don't think the moon was popped out, but it could have been, and that could have been helping me see what I was seeing. In an upcoming show, we'll be talking about the history of this cryptid and going through many different civilizations of people reporting this specific cryptid. Thanks again for taking the time to listen to the show. I remember if you've had an encounter, shoot me an email. My email address is Wes at Sasquatch Chronicles.com. If you get a chance to check out Sasquatch Chronicles.com, you can become a member and get additional shows.

Until next time, everyone.