Speaker 1: Nd Godfrey surveyed the scenery one overcast November afternoon in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one as she drove out of the little
Speaker 1: Wisconsin town of Elkhorn along Geneva Street, Passing under Highway twelve.
Speaker 1: The road took her out of town through gently rolling
Speaker 1: farm fields peppered with patches of woodland. The trees were leafless,
Speaker 1: and a faint mist rose up from surrounding patches of
Speaker 1: scrubby marshland. The fields, which had been full of corn, soybean,
Speaker 1: and hay only a couple of months earlier, were barren too,
Speaker 1: now nothing more than stubble. Located in southern Wisconsin, just
Speaker 1: north of the border with Illinois, the four mile stretch
Speaker 1: of two lane blacktop that stretched off into the distance
Speaker 1: was little more than a country lane. Bray Road was
Speaker 1: a typical slice of what some Americans call flyover country,
Speaker 1: seemingly no different from the myriad of rural byways that
Speaker 1: crisscrossed the American Heartland. Named after a family of homesteaders,
Speaker 1: The fifth generation descendants of the original Braid Brothers, still
Speaker 1: farmed in the area. It seemed the most unlikely of
Speaker 1: settings for a paranormal encounter. You're listening to Unexplained and
Speaker 1: I'm Richard mclin Smith. Back in the autumn of nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one, Linda Godfrey was working as a reporter on
Speaker 1: a local newspaper, the Walworth County week A decade earlier,
Speaker 1: she'd moved to Walworth Camp with her husband to raise
Speaker 1: their two boys in this seemingly tranquil rural setting. Since then,
Speaker 1: Godfrey had turned her hand to news reporting, writing, and
Speaker 1: drawing the occasional cartoon for the weekly paper. Forty five
Speaker 1: miles southwest of the city of Milwaukee, the county seat
Speaker 1: of Elcorn is the epitome of small town Bucolic America,
Speaker 1: so much so that in the late nineteen fifties, the
Speaker 1: Ford Motor Company had commissioned watercolor artist Cecil Johnson to
Speaker 1: paint six images of Elcorn for its company magazine to
Speaker 1: reflect the hometown image it wanted its brand to embody.
Speaker 1: But over the last few years, reporter and writer Linda
Speaker 1: Godfrey had become aware of a less cozy undercurrent to
Speaker 1: life in that part of rural Wisconsin. That had been
Speaker 1: whisperings of Satanic colt activity, as well as an increasing
Speaker 1: number of apparent UFO sightings in the region. As autumn
Speaker 1: was about to turn to winter, Godfrey's editor assigned her
Speaker 1: to cover another emerging story. There had been recent talk
Speaker 1: around Elcorn that a strange creature had been seen in
Speaker 1: the vicinity of Bray Road. One eyewitness, high school student,
Speaker 1: Doris Gibson, whom Godfrey was now on her way to meet,
Speaker 1: had apparently been driving down the road alone on Halloween
Speaker 1: night when she saw it. It all seemed a little
Speaker 1: ludicrous to Godfrey, nothing more than a tall tale from
Speaker 1: the overactive imaginings of a teenager. Before long, she was
Speaker 1: approaching the spot where she had agreed to meet the
Speaker 1: young woman, the precise location where she had apparently encountered
Speaker 1: the creature. It was early evening when she was driving
Speaker 1: along the quiet country road, the eighteen year old high
Speaker 1: school senior explained. Steering with one hand, Gibson was singing
Speaker 1: along to a song on the car radio, tapping her
Speaker 1: fingers on the steering wheel in time to the beat,
Speaker 1: when one of her car's right tires jolted momentarily off
Speaker 1: the ground startled out of her pop fueled reverie. Gibson
Speaker 1: said it felt like she'd run over something. Slamming on
Speaker 1: the brakes and putting the car in park. Gibson got
Speaker 1: out at the vehicle and peered nervously behind her into
Speaker 1: the night. With only a waning crescent moon just above
Speaker 1: the horizon, Gibson's car's headlights and glowing red tail lights
Speaker 1: eerily illuminated the faint mist that had risen around her.
Speaker 1: I was thinking, please, don't let it be a dog
Speaker 1: or a deer, explained Gibson, or worse, a person. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't either of those things. Rounding the rear of
Speaker 1: the car, she peered into the darkness, from out of
Speaker 1: which something was emerging. This thing, she said, I don't
Speaker 1: know what it was, but it was big, and it
Speaker 1: started running for me. As the shadowy figure rapidly made
Speaker 1: its way toward her, the terrified Gibson ran back to
Speaker 1: her car, scrambling to close the door, forgetting to put
Speaker 1: her seatbelt on, and shaking with fright, the teenager rammed
Speaker 1: the car into gear. She later claimed that the shadowy
Speaker 1: figure lunged at her vehicle. Gibson heard scratching sounds on
Speaker 1: the rear of her car just as her tires got
Speaker 1: traction and she drove off at speed. It wasn't long
Speaker 1: after eight pm when Gibson pulled into the driveway of
Speaker 1: her friend's house. Shaken by what she'd just experienced, the
Speaker 1: short distance to the front porch seemed a lot longer
Speaker 1: than normal. Pushing the lighted doorbell and hearing its two
Speaker 1: notes ring out, she nervously peered over her shoulder and
Speaker 1: heaved a sigh of relief as her friend opened the door.
Speaker 1: A little over an hour later, Gibson, with her friend
Speaker 1: now in the passenger seat, was back on the same
Speaker 1: stretch of road, driving slowly toward the scene of the
Speaker 1: earlier encounter. Both of the young women scanned the dark
Speaker 1: surroundings intensely. Then Gibson's grip tightened on the steering wheel
Speaker 1: as something caught her eye on the roadside just up ahead.
Speaker 1: She hissed at her friend and pointed at a large
Speaker 1: dark form crouching by the road, partly hidden by bushes.
Speaker 1: With her friend begging her to slow down, Gibson fought
Speaker 1: the impulse to press her foot on the accelerator pedal
Speaker 1: and ease the car into a steady crawl. Moments later,
Speaker 1: as they drew closer to it, the shadowy form vanished
Speaker 1: into the night, Godfrey's reporter's instincts told her that the
Speaker 1: eighteen year old was experiencing a genuine sense of fear
Speaker 1: as she recounted the events. And then there were the
Speaker 1: scratches on the trunk of her car that did indeed
Speaker 1: appear to be consistent with two sets of claws running
Speaker 1: down the trunk. Driving home in the late afternoon gloom,
Speaker 1: Godfrey reflected that Pray Road might look completely innocuous in daylight,
Speaker 1: but now in the gathering darkness, with the mist thickening,
Speaker 1: the trees really did seem to lean in just a
Speaker 1: little further and a little more ominously over the road.
Speaker 1: Soon after Linda Godfrey met the high schooler, more eye
Speaker 1: witnesses came forward, also claiming to have glimpsed an unusual
Speaker 1: creature on Bray Road. One was Laurie and Ritzy, a
Speaker 1: twenty four year old Elkhorn bar manager. And Ritzy told
Speaker 1: Godfrey that she'd been reluctant to go public with her story,
Speaker 1: initially for fear of ridicule, but on hearing that other
Speaker 1: people had reported a similar encounter, she now felt that
Speaker 1: she might be believed. It was a little over two
Speaker 1: years before. She said that she was driving home from
Speaker 1: work down Bray Road when her attention was drawn to
Speaker 1: an odd shape by the roadside. The shape appeared to
Speaker 1: be part human, part something else, and it was crouched over,
Speaker 1: looking as if it were feasting on some kind of
Speaker 1: road killed animal. She described the creature as five foot five,
Speaker 1: probably weighing around one hundred and fifty pounds, and with
Speaker 1: brownish gray fur, glowing eyes, pointed ears, and fangs, Andritzy
Speaker 1: claimed it also appeared to have fur covered hands and
Speaker 1: long claws. The bar manager apparently observed the creature for
Speaker 1: around forty five seconds before it locked a pair of
Speaker 1: glowing eyes with her and then ran off into the night,
Speaker 1: and the reports kept coming in. Laurie and Ritzy's mother,
Speaker 1: Pat Lester, the local school bus driver, remembered over here
Speaker 1: hearing one of her young passengers telling friends that she'd
Speaker 1: seen the creature around Christmas time the previous year. When
Speaker 1: Godfrey went to visit the passenger, an eleven year old schoolgirl,
Speaker 1: she described how she'd been near Loveland Road, about a
Speaker 1: mile and a half southeast of Bray Road, around four
Speaker 1: thirty one afternoon with some friends when they spotted what
Speaker 1: looked like a large dog walking along a creek in
Speaker 1: a corn field, but when the children called out to
Speaker 1: the animal, it suddenly stood up on its hind legs,
Speaker 1: looked up at them, and took four wobbly steps before
Speaker 1: dropping back down onto all fours and running straight toward them,
Speaker 1: only to turn off suddenly and run away. Another woman
Speaker 1: claimed that she was walking with her four children on
Speaker 1: Bray Road when a deer ran across the road right
Speaker 1: in front of them, chased by a large, fierce looking
Speaker 1: creature walking not on all fours but on two legs. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: dairy farmer Scott Bray claimed to have seen a strange
Speaker 1: looking dog in his pasture near Bray Road two years
Speaker 1: earlier in the autumn of nineteen eighty nine, while another
Speaker 1: local man, Russell Guest, also reported seeing a tall creature
Speaker 1: walk out of some bushes on two legs nearby. Each time,
Speaker 1: as one after another recounted their sighting, Godfrey would marvel
Speaker 1: at how white they would turn. Some even sweated visibly
Speaker 1: at the memory of it. Not everyone in the local
Speaker 1: community was convinced that there was anything unusual about the reports. However,
Speaker 1: One local man, Jeff Hubbard, who'd hunted regularly in the
Speaker 1: area for years, was unswayed by the graphic description of
Speaker 1: a two legged dog or wolf like humanoid, stating the
Speaker 1: Marshers are home to a lot of deer and coyote.
Speaker 1: I've seen plenty while out hunting, but I've never seen
Speaker 1: the creature. Meanwhile, the local sheriff's department joked about getting
Speaker 1: some silver bullets made just in case, But after several
Speaker 1: weeks collecting eyewitness reports, Godfrey was starting to wonder if
Speaker 1: there was something to the story after all. Using her
Speaker 1: skills as an illustrator, she made a sketch of the
Speaker 1: creature corresponding to the accounts. Then she spent time at
Speaker 1: the local library searching through wildlife books, trying to match
Speaker 1: the image to pictures of wolves and other local wildlife,
Speaker 1: but nothing fit. So Godfrey paid a visit to the
Speaker 1: county animal Control officer to see if they might be
Speaker 1: able to shed some light on it all. John Fredericson
Speaker 1: was a fairly straight down the line kind of guy
Speaker 1: who was typically kept busy following up on reports of
Speaker 1: mistreated dogs and cats, So when Godfrey asked him what
Speaker 1: he thought about the sightings, she was expecting to be
Speaker 1: given short shift. What happened next caught her completely by surprise.
Speaker 1: As John Fredericson explained to Linda Godfrey he'd been collecting
Speaker 1: his own reports of a strange creature in the area
Speaker 1: since nineteen eighty six. Godfrey watched, astounded as Fredericson then
Speaker 1: wandered over to a filing cabinet and pulled out a
Speaker 1: Manila folder. The one word label on it read simply werewolf.
Speaker 1: There was some common characteristics to the reports which Frederickson
Speaker 1: had compiled. Most people described a bipedal dog, but with
Speaker 1: a humanoid appearance, hairy and with clawed hands rather than paws,
Speaker 1: red or glowing yellow eyes, pointy ears, a long snout,
Speaker 1: and legs bent backwards like a dog's. The creature was
Speaker 1: often said to have stirred and run on its hind legs,
Speaker 1: all in keeping with everything Godfrey had been told. Most
Speaker 1: sightings seemed to occur between ten thirty pm and five am,
Speaker 1: and although reports occurred all year round, they seemed to
Speaker 1: peek between August and October, when cornfields full of yet
Speaker 1: to be harvested crops would facilitate covert movement, and while
Speaker 1: apparent witnesses seemed genuinely frightened by what they saw. There
Speaker 1: were no reports lots of attacks on people. In fact,
Speaker 1: when encountered, the creature seemed to want to get out
Speaker 1: of sight as quickly as possible. On December twenty ninth,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, The Walworth County Week published Godfrey's story
Speaker 1: as the Sunday's centerfold. It detailed the full testimonies of
Speaker 1: Doris Gibson and Lourie Andretzy describing the wolfish looking creature
Speaker 1: they'd seen on Bray Road. The piece also included the
Speaker 1: sketch that Godfrey had made from reports of the creature,
Speaker 1: depicting a werewolf like animal kneeling in the road clutching
Speaker 1: a hunk of meat. Avoiding the more dramatic and incendary term,
Speaker 1: Godfrey named the phenomenon the Beast of Bray Road, acknowledging
Speaker 1: that the stories seemed more like something you might read
Speaker 1: in the National Enquirer. Linda god Godfrey fully expected that
Speaker 1: not long after its publication the story would simply fade away. Instead,
Speaker 1: it launched a media frenzy, and the word where wolf
Speaker 1: was on everyone's lips. At the end of nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: newspaper editor Joe Shackleman was relaxing at home watching TV
Speaker 1: one evening in Kenosha, Wisconsin, when he became aware of
Speaker 1: the newsreader talking about the Beast of Bray Road. When
Speaker 1: Linda Godfrey's sketch or the creature appeared on the screen,
Speaker 1: every hair on Shackleman's body stood on end. He recognized
Speaker 1: that image. Rushing to the next room, he searched through
Speaker 1: stacks of documents until he found his sketch. Then Shackleman
Speaker 1: called Godfrey to relay his father's story. In nineteen thirty six,
Speaker 1: Joe's father, Mark, was in his early thirties and working
Speaker 1: as a night watchman at the Saint Coletta School for
Speaker 1: exceptional children on the outskirts of Jefferson, Wisconsin. Shackoman was
Speaker 1: out patrolling the sprawling grounds, which included orchards, gardens, and
Speaker 1: several Native American burial mounts, when he apparently saw what
Speaker 1: appeared to be a shaggy, dog faced creature with a
Speaker 1: muscular human torso kneeling on one of the mounds, digging
Speaker 1: into the earth slowly. Shackoman backed away and spotting him,
Speaker 1: the creature did the same for a few paces before
Speaker 1: running away on two legs. When Shackoman went back to
Speaker 1: the mound the next morning. He later said that the
Speaker 1: earth looked as if it had been raked over by
Speaker 1: a claw. The following evening, Shackelmann was again walking the
Speaker 1: grounds around midnight when he encountered the creature for a
Speaker 1: second time, but instead of running off this time, he
Speaker 1: claimed that it stood to face him. The watchman described
Speaker 1: the beast as covered in thick, dark hair and smelling
Speaker 1: like long dead meat. He said that it had fangs
Speaker 1: and was over six feet tall. Its thumb and forefinger
Speaker 1: seemed shrunken, so that it appeared to have only three fingers,
Speaker 1: He claimed. The creature then looked him in the eye
Speaker 1: and spoke in what seemed to be a proto human language,
Speaker 1: uttering what sounded like gard ah Rah Gadara is a
Speaker 1: place mentioned in the Bible where a man was filled
Speaker 1: with demons a deal Catholic. Shackelmann later told the story
Speaker 1: to his wife, making her promise to keep it a secret.
Speaker 1: It was some twenty two years later, in nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 1: that Mark finally told his son Joe about it. At
Speaker 1: his father's insistence, Joe started to draw what his father
Speaker 1: described being corrected over and over again until the sketch
Speaker 1: matched his father's memory. The apparent wolf like man had
Speaker 1: ears that looked like pointed devil horns, a row of
Speaker 1: prominent fangs, and no visible tale hair hung off his
Speaker 1: arms and legs like dark lichen. Satisfied finally with what
Speaker 1: Joe had drawn, his father looked down at the image.
Speaker 1: That damn thing came straight out of hell, he said.
Speaker 1: As Joe Shackleman recounted his father's story to Linda Godfrey,
Speaker 1: she was reminded that several eyewitnesses had commented that they
Speaker 1: thought what they'd seen was some kind of Satanic entity.
Speaker 1: A committed Lutheran. Godfrey wondered if there was a connection
Speaker 1: between the Beast of Bray Road and reports of Satanic
Speaker 1: rites and devil worship in the area. The idea had
Speaker 1: also been mooted by county animal control officer John Fredericson.
Speaker 1: He'd heard rumors about individuals posing as animal control officers
Speaker 1: in search of stray dogs. Then in the summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, Fredericson came across roughly a dozen animals
Speaker 1: in a ditch along Willow Road, a quiet country lane
Speaker 1: near Bray Road. Some had ropes secured around their legs.
Speaker 1: Their throats had been slit, others had been decapitated entirely
Speaker 1: or dismembered. One dog's heart had been removed. Several of
Speaker 1: the deceased animals matched the description of missing local pets.
Speaker 1: To Frederickson, it certainly looked as though the animals had
Speaker 1: been used in some kind of cult ritual. Then one
Speaker 1: law enforcement officer told him that several counties in Wisconsin
Speaker 1: were notorious for satanic cult activity, and that Walworth County
Speaker 1: was one of them. Meetings were rumored to occur in
Speaker 1: some of the county's forested areas, but when Fredericson brought
Speaker 1: his findings to the attention of the local police, his
Speaker 1: suspicions were dismissed. The local police chief insisted that the
Speaker 1: animal corpses were part of a boneyard for local livestock,
Speaker 1: and shortly afterwards they bulldozed over the ditch where the
Speaker 1: dead animals had been found. The satanic trail had gone cold,
Speaker 1: and as the months then years passed, sightings of the
Speaker 1: strange humanoid dog like creature dried up and interest died down.
Speaker 1: Then in two thousand and two, a mysterious three minute
Speaker 1: video came to light, presented by someone called Steve Cook.
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen eighty seven, Kirk wrote a song that
Speaker 1: fueled interest in another apparent creature, known as the Michigan
Speaker 1: dog Man. Kerk initially claimed that he'd found the footage
Speaker 1: on an old reel to reel tape purchased at a
Speaker 1: garage sale, purporting to have been made back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies and known as the Gabled Film. It depicted
Speaker 1: the camera operator driving his pickup truck down a rural
Speaker 1: dirt road, then suddenly being attacked by a huge, four
Speaker 1: legged beast. For nearly ten years, Cook claimed the film
Speaker 1: was real and not altered in any way, until finally
Speaker 1: admitting to Linda Godfrey on an episode of the History
Speaker 1: Channel's Monster Quest that the film was fake. In twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: Linda Godfrey was contacted by Lee Hemple, a retired maths
Speaker 1: and physics teacher from Illinois who'd bought a forty acre
Speaker 1: hayfield close to Bray Road, Impressed by stories his neighbours
Speaker 1: told him about the so called Beast of Bray Road
Speaker 1: having been seen on his property, who set up camera
Speaker 1: traps documenting the mutilation and disappearance of dozens of animal
Speaker 1: corpses in ways that he claimed defied the laws of nature.
Speaker 1: Hemple had been filming the carcass of a sixty pound deer,
Speaker 1: which he'd placed in full view of one of his cameras.
Speaker 1: The carcass disappeared overnight, but when Hemple examined the camera footage,
Speaker 1: at some time in the middle of the night, a
Speaker 1: mist had formed, obscuring the carcass from view. When the
Speaker 1: mist cleared in later footage, the deer was gone. After
Speaker 1: this incident, Emple claimed to have found unusual tracks that
Speaker 1: appeared to be the hindset of canine like prints crossing
Speaker 1: his land, taking the evidence to the local Department of
Speaker 1: Natural Resources, they told him that it was nothing but
Speaker 1: an abnormal coyote. Over the intervening years since the original
Speaker 1: Beast of Bray Road reports put Elkhorn on the map,
Speaker 1: the town has done relatively to capitalize on its beastly legend.
Speaker 1: Local opinion remains divided on whether the apparent beast is real, imagined,
Speaker 1: or a case of mangy mistaken identity. Linda Godfrey spent
Speaker 1: the latter part of her career researching and writing about
Speaker 1: the Beast of Bray Road, werewolves and other cryptozoological phenomena.
Speaker 1: She said it was something that she never felt comfortable
Speaker 1: joking about or dismissing. Everyone wants to believe in, something.
Speaker 1: She wrote in her two thousand and six book Hunting
Speaker 1: the American Werewolf. What if you see something you don't understand.
Speaker 1: The fear lies not in the beast itself, but in
Speaker 1: not knowing what to make of it. Linda Godfrey died
Speaker 1: in November twenty twenty two. No physical evidence of an
Speaker 1: unknown canid creature has so far been found in Woolworth County.
Speaker 1: Thank you to Paula Udelitche for suggesting this week's episode.
Speaker 1: This episode was written by Diane Hope. Unexplained is an
Speaker 1: av Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLain Smith. All
Speaker 1: other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also
Speaker 1: produced by Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook,
Speaker 1: featuring stories that have never before been featured on the show,
Speaker 1: is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes,
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Speaker 1: the show wherever you listen to podcasts and feel free
Speaker 1: to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding
Speaker 1: the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have
Speaker 1: an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You
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