The Beast of Bray Road

A medieval wood cut of a werewolf. The Beast of Bray Road looks a bit like this, except bulkier, hairier, and minus that mankini thing this guy has going on.

Bray Road is a rural stretch of road near Elkhorn, Wisconsin, unremarkable in nearly every respect save for one.  It is said that a monster lurks in the surrounding woods, a hulking thing of fur and claws and teeth called the Beast of Bray Road.  Sightings of the supposed beast began in the 1980′s, but similar creatures have been seen around southern Wisconsin, northern Illinois, and parts of Michigan.  The creature is also known by a less publicized but a much more descriptive moniker, the Michigan Dogman.

The Beast is described as being between seven and ten feet tall and about four to eight hundred pounds.  Its body is covered in shaggy, brown gray hair, and it is described as being built like a very large, very bulky man.  It is primarily said to walk on two legs, but eyewitness reports also claim that it’s almost equally comfortable dropping down on all fours.  Witnesses also claim there is a strong odor associated with the creature, like a musky or musty smell.  In general, this critter sounds like a fairly standard description of Bigfoot, save for two important differences: the occasional four footed gait and the fact that the Beast of Bray Road is said to have a wolf’s head atop a mostly humanoid body.
This strange twist led local papers to dub the Beast a “werewolf”, although there are no accounts of any humans transforming into the creature so the label is a bit of a misnomer.

Now, at least Bigfoot has the benefit of plausibility.  After all, at one time there were gigantic apes alive in parts of Asia, and there are about 6.5 billion bipedal apes wandering around the planet as we speak.  While there have been hundred and hundreds of stories over the span of human history of anthropomorphic animals, so far there is no scientific evidence of such a being’s existence.  Such a being, say an anthropomorphic dog, would not make any biological sense.  There’s a good reason why humans look like we do–we’ve evolved over millions of years to a bipedal, omnivorous lifestyle.  Wolves look like they do also for very good evolutionary reasons–they are highly adapted predators, designed by evolution to hunt.  There’s really no way you could mix and match a hominid body and a canine skull and get an animal that could survive.  Not that you would ever see such a mix anyway, since the two lines are of descent are at best distant cousins.

I think that the Beast of Bray road is not a biological organism, but rather a being of belief, like so many folkloric monsters.  Probably the stories resulted from either tall tails that took on a life of their own, misidentification of local fauna (such as bears) or some combination of both.  That being said, it doesn’t make the story any less real for the people who have had the misfortune of seeing the Beast of Bray Road.