Beast of bray road

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

RAY: Tales of a half-man half-wolf transforming beneath a full moon to stalk the innocent have terrorized listeners for centuries. Throughout history, this creature has preyed on our fear and awe of the wild – representing the darkest aspects of human nature.

[Sample from film The Curse Of The Werewolf, 1961] “It came from a land of brutality and evil, it came from a land of terror and fear, The Curse of the Werewolf” 

RAY: Wisconsin is not usually thought of in relation to werewolf folklore, but in the small town of Elkhorn strange reports of a humanoid wolf spurred a global media sensation. To the locals' shock, headlines coming from the region proclaimed to tell the story of, “The terror of the Wisconsin Wolfman.” 

[Sample from Inside Edition’s Was This Wisconsin Town Terrorized by a Werewolf?]“It had really big claws, it was holding its roadkill like it had elbows, and it was kneeling on two knees like a human being might do” 

RAY: It seemed like something straight from a horror film and yet people were actually reporting encounters with what sounded like a werewolf near the 2-mile stretch known as a Bray Road. From a small town tale that grew into an international media howl, the residents along Bray Road never expected their lives to transform into a strange phenomenon.

[Introduction Music]

RAY: Werewolves are not just the creation of the Universal Monster films. These creatures have roots in ancient history, arguably going all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh from 2100 BC. To transform into a werewolf is to surrender to the primal, the feral—to relinquish the rules of humanity and return to the natural world. This beast is not just fur and fangs; it's a symbol of the untamed spirit lurking within each of us. 

Stephen D. Sullivan, prolific fantasy and horror author, publisher, and one of the hosts of Uncanny Radio podcast,  dug deeper into werewolf folklore:

STEPHEN: So it's not just not just something that came out of England and Wales or Transylvania - it came out of Greece and there ones in China and Japan. And there's a lot of shapeshifting around the world, and often the shapeshifting is into wolves or other animals that are like the top predator in the area. Aand there was a big werewolf flap in, I think 16th or 1700s in Europe where the beast of Gévaudan and other things like that were going on. And people were obsessed with werewolves almost as much as they were obsessed with witches in a similar kind of time period.

RAY: Sounds like the stuff of legends, right?

[Sample from Inside Edition’s Was This Wisconsin Town Terrorized by a Werewolf?]“That thing was no dog, that was too big to be a dog, that thing was bigger than me.” 

RAY: Tucked away in Walworth County Wisconsin lies the quaint town of Elkhorn. Nestled between Madison and Milwaukee, its location at the crossroads of these larger cities makes it easy for outsiders to overlook. Chad Robinson, director at the Matheson Memorial Library spoke of the town’s competing claims to fame:

CHAD: Elkhorn is the county seat of Walworth County, so we're right in the center of the county. We're about 10,000 population. And we were known as the Christmas card town. A lot of times in the fifties and sixties, if you were purchasing Christmas cards, you were actually buying images of Elkhorn. It definitely is a larger town in Walworth County, but it has that very big, small town feel. So it definitely has that classic American small town feel. And then there's Bray Road.[laugh]

RAY: Let's journey back, almost a century ago, to the original grounds of St. Coletta, which has since relocated a short distance down the road. St Coletta is about 50 minutes north of Elkhorn. A Catholic school for children with developmental disabilities, the original grounds were large, and included a cemetery on the property. To the east were stretches of swamp and marshlands.

One evening in 1936, groundskeeper Mark Shackleman was walking the property. While passing through the graveyard, he noticed movement at the edge of the cemetery. As he approached, a humanoid figure came into view.. But he immediately noticed something was off. 

With its bare hands, the figure was digging into a grave.

CHAD: He suddenly saw a creature that fits the bill of a beast. So, bipedal, hairy, with a wolf or dog head that was kind of moving around a particular gravestone. And I think according to the story, he freaked out. Who wouldn't? And he took off, but he decided to come back again. So good on him. And this time he had a more one-on-one experience with it. He said the creature looked at him and growled. Something at him - it made a word, and I think the word was Garrada. 

RAY: Eventually the creature stalked off into the night, never to be seen again. Mark was so shaken by the experience, he didn’t speak of it for over 20 years. He would later recount the experience to his son in 1958. Decades would pass before there were any more reported sightings of a similar creature.

The year was 1991, and Linda Godfrey had been working as a cartoonist for a newspaper in Elkhorn called The Week. Much like the transformative power of a full moon, Linda stood unknowingly on the brink of events that would forever alter her identity. While Linda unfortunately has passed away, her husband of nearly 50 years, Steve Godfrey, remembers her fondly: 

STEVE: She was a commercial artist. Linda was very talented as an artist, and she actually had work that was some of featured in The New Yorker magazine at one time. She she had met a very successful syndicated cartoonist who lived in Lake Geneva. And she talked to him and she she thought that would be kind of fun to see if she could establish some kind of a cartoon strip and she worked with them. So she went to the Walworth County Week, which was a local newspaper. And she she started she approached them to see if they would be interested in their cartoons. And they said that they would. And I think they paid her $10 a week to produce a cartoon. In fact, right here I'm looking at in 1991, 92 and 93, Linda was actually in the best edited editorial cartoonist of the year for basically the entire U.S. So she was talented at it. And at some point the opportunity came up where the week was looking for someone to write some articles. And then just by chance, she happened to be in the office one day and someone had been reporting on some sightings of what they called a werewolf. And everybody thought that was pretty wacky. And actually none of the few writers for the paper wanted to take the story

RAY: But Linda wasn’t afraid to take up the story, treating it with serious journalistic integrity. After asking around town, she learned that whatever this creature was, it had been sighted in the vicinity of a place called Bray Road.

CHAD: So Bray Road runs from just outside of town. If you weren't aware of the history and it was a bright sunny day, you probably wouldn't know anything about it. It's just a pleasant country drive. There are a lot of farmhouses, there's a lot of cultivated fields, and there are, you know, groves and copses of woods that kind of spread around it and also some kind of low marsh lands and some sections of the road if you drove by it on a kind of a creepy cloudy day or in the dead of night, like any country road, it can seem a little spooky 

RAY: Linda’s questioning led her first to an animal control office in Walworth County. Jon Fredrickson was no stranger to calls about misidentified wildlife. But he had received multiple reports in a short span of time about a mysterious bipedal canine-like creature near Bray Road - so these stood out. 

STEVE: And the first thing he did, she reached into a file drawer. He pulled out a file folder and Linda said she looked at the label on it and it said Werewolf. That was the point. She knew there was there was something there that at some point she knew. She knew it was a story, and that started her career.

RAY: Although Fredrickson was inclined to believe the creature was a misidentified coyote, he couldn't ignore the growing number of reports. Coyote or not, many local residents were seeing something so out of the ordinary they felt compelled to report it through official channels. Linda Godfrey noted this in her seminal book, 'The Beast of Bray Road,' stating, 'If something out of the ordinary was out there, people should know about it.' 

The following audio of Linda Godfrey is used with permission from Linda’s family, and comes from Stephen D. Sullivan’s podcast Uncanny Radio.

LINDA: I was actually really skeptical in the beginning, but I was intrigued. I just thought it was just too bizarre that people in my hometown were reporting this. I wanted to find out and get to the bottom of it. And when you're open to the world, it can lead you to some really interesting places. 

RAY: She spoke to two witnesses who claimed to see the monster - Lori Endrezzi and Doris Gipson. The two women had eerily similar experiences. Lori and Doris’s accounts were the fuse that lit the match, igniting a global media firestorm.

In 1989, Lori Endrezzi was driving Bray Road in the late evening when she encountered an otherworldly being. A humanoid wolf-like creature was crouched by the roadside, gripping a dead animal in its clawed hands. The eyes reflected back into the headlights as it looked up at Lori, burning the haunting image into the terrified teen’s mind. The creature was bold, refusing to flee even as Lori approached, instead it defiantly stared down the terrified woman. After hearing the account, Linda Godfrey would draw an image of this encounter that has now become synonymous with the legend. It shows a menacing crouched werewolf sneering at the viewer. 

Then came Halloween night of ‘91; another disturbing sighting. Doris Gipson was driving down Bray Road one evening when she felt her car hit something. When she pulled over and got out of the car she saw a creature running towards her down the road. Doris says the encounter happened quickly so she didn’t get a great look, but she could see the creature’s massive chest as it approached out of the darkness, so she assumed it had to be running on two legs. She lept back into her car and sped off into the night. Later, Doris noticed scratch marks on her car which she believed were caused by the creature.

Linda Godfrey's relentless reporting corroborated the strange occurrences that had been quietly documented by local officials like Jon Fredrickson. Her work cast a national spotlight on the strange happenings in Walworth County. And her article titled Tracking down ‘The Beast of Bray Road’ gave this night stalking monster the name we know today.

LINDA: I really was never super comfortable with the term werewolf and beast is very generic. It can mean almost anything  and it just kind of stuck. And it's been with me ever since. 

STEVE: The Walworth County Week sold more newspapers that week and there was follow up article. They had almost a waiting list. They had to make a second run. So many people were interested in that story. And then the Associated Press picked it up, and I think that was a real eye opener for for me and for Linda, because the the phone never quit ringing it for days, for days and weeks. And Linda was receiving calls from all over the country, all over the world, asking for interviews.And the the thing that that amazed me was that Linda was never nervous about talking to any of these people. And kind of one of the funny things I remember is she was - she had a call with, I think it was the Detroit Free Press. And immediately after that was Houston or Dallas. And it was early in the morning and she was upstairs and she said, Hey, can you bring me some tea and toast? Because I'm going to be on this radio show. So I want to prepare for that. I said, Sure, I'll make that. And I walk upstairs. I figured she was going to be in her kind of makeshift office she had up there. Instead, she was in the bathroom and I heard she was on the phone. She was talking. And I'm thinking, well, I’m not sure what I am going to see when I walk in. But I go in the bathroom and here's Linda's taking a bubble bath. She's got the phone in one hand that she's got at a table and says, you know, she got a little table set up for her tea and the toast that I made for her. And she did two or three calls just taking a bubble bath. And, you know, just so amazingly calm and cool about it. It sounds sounded like she was, you know, very seasoned broadcaster. 

RAY: Linda had become the official keeper of the Wisconsin werewolf. Jay Bachochin, paranormal investigator, documentary filmmaker, and friend of Linda’s said it best.

JAY: She was queen of the beast, she was. She was thes queen of the beast and she loved it. 

RAY: She was interviewed by news outlets, television programs, wrote a book on the Beast of Bray Road, even developed a film,  and then would go on to write nearly 20 more books covering the paranormal. Stephen D. Sullivan, friend of Linda’s who co-hosted Uncanny Radio reflected on Linda’s legacy

STEPHEN: So I don't think she had any trouble being the queen of the hill. I think it suited her well. And I don't think there's anyone that can replace her. She seemed to be pretty convinced that this was some kind of flesh and blood creature, and she thought it was an unknown canine species of some kind in the way that Bigfoot might be some kind of an unknown ape or near human species that is very elusive and hard to find and has been around for a very long time. And she if she were here, she would tell you that it’s obviously not just Wisconsin. The Michigan Dog Man is probably a very similar. And well, you know, the ancient reports going back into Native American Times and stuff, if all those are not myths that they may be a real creature, though, whether they're a real creature that exists in our world all the time, or perhaps some supernatural parallel world or some, you know, one step beyond Twilight Zone kind of area. I don't think without physical proof and without good photographs, I don't think that that can ever be solved. And I don't think she really thought that it could ever be solved. But she was pretty convinced that it was an ongoing thing and it had been around for a long time and it was physical and real and could interact with the real world.

STEVE: I think, one of the the biggest things that happened was now all of a sudden, with this notoriety locally, she was starting to get contacted by people who had similar sightings or knew someone who did. Sometimes they were 20 years previous and people didn't want to report things because they were afraid of ridicule.

LINDA: The person writes, I was driving so I didn't get a real clear look, but it really startled me. I saw a large, mangy looking wolfish creature with very broad shoulders and every time I read that, I have to remind you that canines don't normally have shoulders. Also the head of a large wolf. It seemed to be eating roadkill. Also very typical. I think that's why they're attracted to the roads because it's easy pickings. As I drove close to it, it looked up at me. Its meal still in its mouth. It was just very weird as I got even with it. It almost looked like it was kneeling like a man on his knees with his lower legs behind him. It all happened. So fast, but it really creeped me out. And I'm not easily scared. Was about man size. If it was a dog, it would have been over 150 pounds. It was gray black and scraggly, almost like it was missing patches of hair. I definitely saw pointed ears. The face had fur grayish, but it wasn't long like a wolf. It was flatter. Its eyes were piercing. And the look it gave me sent a chill down my spine. 

JAY: And when she started getting all these different um people calling she said she had to put her BS meter on and after interviewing so many different people she started seeing that. And when she came out with her first book - because she said this book is so interesting of all the accounts of people that I met. People need to know about this and this is where you know she's a wealth of knowledge because she just absorbed everything that she researched. And so you know she went out she's looking at Michigan dog man, just different cryptids, how she would say phantoms. 

RAY: The beast brought more attention to Elkhorn than residents were used to. Some people capitalized on this, such as a bakery that sold werewolf cookies. The Week started selling t-shirts with Linda’s iconic werewolf sketch. 

STEPHEN: Probably the werewolf thing also got amplified when the local Humane Society decided it would be a fun fundraiser to issue werewolf hunting licenses, which I bought. And I still have my werewolf hunting license. And it hangs up in my studio and it's in a little plastic container and it looks like a hunting or fishing license that you might hang on a lanyard and take out to the field with you. And it says very explicitly that the werewolves are not to be harmed, but you are licensed to hunt them, right?

RAY: But, not everything was fun and games.

CHAD: Elkhorn is very close to the Illinois border and one thing you learn when you move here is there is a little bit of rivalry between the states of Wisconsin and Illinois. But so when the story broke, there was a tale of a bar in Illinois that loaded up a bus and went on a monster hunting safari, which, as you can imagine, didn't go over too well here in Elkhorn. And I know there have been instances of monster hunters who didn't get their hunting permit, if you will, that went out there and began tramping round Bray Road. And the thing to remember for all potential monster hunters is that most of that is private property so there are more than a few houses. A lot of some people are kind of let down a little bit when they drive down and say, well, this isn't that scary.

RAY: While the interest in the Beast of Bray Road has died down significantly since Linda’s article released back in ‘91, it doesn’t mean that the odd occurrences have gone away. Jay shared a story he heard from a member of his local church. 

JAY: I get this message from one of the members at the church saying ,”Hey Jay, it's Bob. Can you call my daughter Christina um, she just saw a hell hound.” Now I know where she lives, she doesn't live that far from me and it's still south of Elkhorn. I give her a call. It happened an hour previous and she was still shaken up. She said she was just coming over little town in Silver Lake Wisconsin. And as she was coming around a curve. She saw something in the road and it was dark and big but it was crouched over and she had a minivan and the closer she got to it. It turned and its eyes like just glowed greenish. But then an oncoming car was coming and just as that happened she said, “Jay this thing stood up and it was taller than me in my minivan and it had to have been about 3 men wide.” She said the thing was enormous and I'm like, whoa, what happened? She goes it trotted away and it had the head of a dog. 

RAY: Lee Hampel, a retired high-school teacher who co-owns and manages a farm near Bray Road, says he has had a litany of odd occurrences happen on the property. He believes that it could possibly be connected to what was sighted all those years ago. 

JAY: Linda is the one who introduced me to Lee back in 2014 and Lee and I have been friends since. There's been a lot of crazy things that have been happening up there with Lee Hampel’s farm. And I've got to tell you I've been up there so many times and each time I'm up there, it's a very ominous feeling that I get and it's not scared. It's a that feeling of something is not right 

RAY: Lee first started working the farm back in 2007 to bale hay. The mystery started when Lee hired a couple of local residents to help him, and they told him a story too strange to believe:

LEE: So we finished baling hay and we're standing at the west end of my barn looking out at my 35 acres. Now, both of them had lived there quite a while in that area. And the one gentleman says, you know, you know, the werewolf lives back on your property?  I’m like what are you what are you talking about? You know, the werewolf that lives back on my property. Your eyes are brown. You know, you're so full, full of it. But he said, No, no, no. He starts telling me his wife and mother in law saw it in 2010 on Bowers Road. He sarts starts with the neighbor over here, saw it, and the gentleman, the farmer who was share farming with me, saw it on Bray Road.

RAY: Not long afterwards, Lee started setting up trap cameras to try and catch a photo of something large that had been scavenging on his property. He was also noticing some very strange large canine footprints.

LEE: And I have this interesting track that started right away. It's a five toed, seven pad canid track.I have castings. I have pictures of it. It’s a five toed canid track, which is no animal in the world I can find on Google, and I've other people, you know, try to find this track or find an animal that has this particular pad and there’s zero in the world. 

RAY Lee came to believe whatever was visiting his farm was supernatural in nature. He left deer carcasses as bait. They would be moved or missing and yet his trap cameras would show nothing the next day. One evening, he actually caught what he says is a creature materializing from thin air.

LEE: So in this particular instance, I had put out a roasted chicken from Walmart. And the first picture is a nighttime picture. And there's nothing in the picture. The picture is just a picture of the trees and the chicken laying there. The next picture has a, you, partial. You can see it's a figure, you can see the head, you see the shoulders. But it's semi-transparent. And the third picture, which this all be in one second. It is a solid figure. It's got a head, shoulders. It's a solid figure. In that one second, and now it's a solid figure. So to me I have a picture of it materializing right before your eyes.

RAY: Lee has even seen the mysterious creature with his own eyes.

LEE: It was crouched down and, you know, it was crouched down. I went over there and it was drawing circles in the ground. Then it stood up and walked west, walked away from me. I was in my field looking at my neighbors field, actually. Then it dropped down to all four and then went in the woods.  And so I saw it, I've seen it. But I do have some very, very, very interesting, intriguing pictures. I have some close ups. I have some far ways of things that are not coyotes or deer. And there's no bear in southeastern Wisconsin. A bear, if a bear comes through - one came through a couple of years ago and everybody was following it and actually came down northern Illinois, then turned around, went back north. 

RAY: Linda even joined Lee on some of his stakeouts on the farm. Similar to Lee, Linda had a theory that whatever this creature was, it may not be flesh and blood.

 STEVE: And I actually think she she was leaning towards the phenomena of The Beast of Bray Road the Michigan talk man and the similar things was perhaps a portal, some kind of portal that was that was the only thing that she really ever came up with that she said it really can explain everything, that you know something comes it just seems to appear and seems to disappear and somehow people can't can't get pictures of it. She says it's just kind of this interdimensional thing. But she says, the thing is, I can't prove that either at this point. And so she was, she just loved digging into the depths of the possibilities. 

RAY: While Linda took her journalistic integrity seriously, she also had fun with the topic: 

LINDA: I have a whole room of slaving artists that they're werewolves. They actually draw rather well when their hands are normal, you know, and they don't have fur and stuff. And they're in my basement, really, you know, they like it where it's dark. 

STEPHEN: And that's great because you don't have to feed them people food. You can feed them dog food, right?

LINDA:Yeah just throw a few slabs of meat down there and keep them supplied with drawing paper and pencils they’ll illustrate anything I have.

RAY: And while Linda sadly passed in 2022, her legacy lives on. Chad Robinson is organizing the first ever Beast of Bray Road event hosted by the city of Elkhorn. 

CHAD:And so it's going to be the week before Halloween. And we're going to tie in a lot of local businesses and different groups and programs. And it's going to culminate with a beast feast, like a little dinner with the rec department. And I'm told that the beast is going to be maybe a guest of honor there. So take that for what you will. 

RAY: Linda’s presence is greatly missed. Amongst the community of Elkhorn, across the world in the paranormal community, and her family and friends.

CHAD: She's the one who kind of kept the flame of the beast alive or really the go to person, you know, cyclically when, when someone would become interested like yourself, you know, then she would be the go to person to speak to. So we miss her.

STEPHEN: I never had a bad time with Linda, and I don't think I know anybody that had a bad time with Linda. She was a great person. So I think a combination of really strong journalists doing work on a subject matter that not a lot of people were willing to take seriously and a good family member and a good friend. But that’s a great epitaph for anybody. I just wish it wasn’t an epitaph. I’d love to be able to call her up and say hi.

JAY: I always say not only a friend, she was my mentor. No matter how much I learned, even, you know, on my own and my own research, my own encounters, I always look up to her.You know she was the Obi Wan… she was the Obi Wan.

STEVE: She was a tremendous wife and companion to me. We raised two wonderful children. We have three grandsons and she enjoyed so much being around the family.I think she was very, very proud of the quality of work that she did. And I think the fact that she didn't compromise her beliefs and she didn't - she had so, so many friends, especially later on. She had so many friends in the cryptozoology community that were very close to her, very dear to her. And she and she enjoyed those friendships. And I think she would like to be remembered more as a friend and companion, teacher, and just generally a good, friendly person. 

RAY: But the Beast lives on. And we may never have an answer to all the strange occurrences reported by those who swear they’ve had an encounter with something that stands in stark contrast to our understanding of the natural world. But, like Linda, it’s important we always keep an open, inquisitive mind, and see where all roads lead, even if that road takes you to the moonlit farmside of Wisconsin, where the tall cornfields may hide a truth, too horrifying to believe.

STEPHEN: We don't know what it was. I don't think Linda would ever claim to know definitively what it was or what happened there. There are strange things in this world, and sometimes there are things that happen that you really can't explain under current scientific laws or with creatures that we know and that even claims that seem a little wacky should be looked at seriously. You know, if you think you know everything that's going on in the universe and that all the stars you see are the ones that shine in the sky, you're never going to discover black holes and you're never going to discover quantum physics. And I'm not saying believing in werewolves or looking into werewolves is going to lead to a breakthrough in clean energy for everybody. But it might lead to something that you don't expect. And I think keeping our minds open and still using science and boring down and being serious is pretty much always useful in life.