The Complete Idiot's Guide to Werewolves (30 page)

In 1967, two fishermen were returning their rowboat to the south shore of Manistee County’s Claybake Lake after a day of catching little to nothing in the way of fish. As they got closer to shore, one man noticed some kind of animal was swimming right for their boat. At first, they thought it must be a deer. But why would a deer, a naturally wary animal, be moving toward them?

 

By the time the creature was upon them, they were certain that this was no deer. They saw a hairy, humanoid figure with a doglike snout and pawed hands and feet. They stood there, awestruck, as the creature suddenly slammed into the boat. It placed its front paws over the side of the boat and began to pull itself on board. The two men finally got their nerves back together. They took up oars and began to beat the creature back before it could get onto their boat. Eventually, the creature let go and the two men rowed for the shore. Once safely on land, they scanned the area. The creature was by then nowhere to be seen.

In July of 1987, an animal attack call came into the Lake County Sheriff’s Office. Apparently, a large animal had tried to force its way into a small cabin in the area, doing some damage in the process. The sheriff headed to the scene, but only after contacting a forestry ranger and asking him to come along. The two men even made jokes about the Dog-Man during their telephone conversation.

 

When they arrived on the scene, however, their laughter turned to shock. Wood planks on the cabin’s exterior had been shredded in certain places, and deep gouges in the wood appeared to have been made by massive claws (some were as deep as 2 inches). The outer screens to nearly every window of the cabin had been torn to pieces. The sheriff commented that it must have been a bear. The cabin owner, however, insisted that it had definitely
not
been a bear. The cabin owner also pointed out unusual tracks in the dirt, which could not have come from a bear. In fact, they resembled a dog’s paw prints … only
much
bigger. The sheriff and ranger filed the case as an attack by an “unidentified animal.” Apparently, neither public servant was willing to submit the incident as a “Dog-Man attack.”

In the late winter months of 1993, a teenage girl named Courtney (who reported the event a decade later) encountered a Dog-Man near her parents’ rural home near Lake Todd in Reed City, Michigan. The sighting occurred as Courtney was sneaking a cigarette behind the house. At the time, around dusk, she reported that she had been facing a dilapidated barn on the neighboring property.

 

A piece of farm machinery near the barn seemed to move, and Courtney thought it might be a deer. Suddenly, however, trees nearby the barn began shaking and she heard the sound of branches snapping. Suddenly, a very large animal emerged from the woods, apparently standing on two legs. She claimed that it also had a canine snout and pointed ears. The sun had set by now, and the darkness impeded her vision. Courtney dropped her smoke and dashed indoors for a flashlight. By the time she came back outside, however, the creature had disappeared.

In early 2009, two teenage girls were babysitting for a neighbor in Temple, Michigan. After nightfall, they put the children to bed and sat together in the living room to watch television. Suddenly, they saw a hulking shadow pass across the window. They were both terrified, believing that a potential intruder might be lurking outside.

 

In order to help them see outside, and to prevent the person outside from seeing in, they immediately shut off every light in the house. Soon after, they heard a loud rustle that seemed to be coming from the property’s nearby barn. The girls headed for a window on that side of the house, now believing that this might be a bear after the owner’s chickens. Just in case, one girl grabbed her digital camera from her purse.

 

They got up the nerve to step out onto the porch together. As soon as the girls emerged, they described what they saw as a “giant dog” coming out from around the barn. It looked at them briefly before taking off into the woods. One girl managed to snap off a picture with the camera just in time. The picture is now considered an impressive piece of evidence that supports the Dog-Man’s existence. In truth, the figure in this photo does seem to look very “werewolflike.” Copies of the photograph are available all over the Internet.

 

When the owners returned, the girls told them what had happened. The man of the house went out to the barn to investigate. He claimed to have found a number of rather large paw prints in the snow around the barn. Unfortunately, they were destroyed by new snowfall before they could be cast or documented.

From the last week of July into the early weeks of August in 1972, some “thing” was lurking in darkness around the area of the Norfolk-Western railroad tracks, located on the outskirts of the small town of Defiance, Ohio.

 

The first encounter was on the Saturday night of July 25, 1972, when railroad employee Ted Davis found himself confronted by a 6-foot-tall, hairy … thing. Thinking this must be a practical joke, Mr. Davis started to say something. The thing, however, ran off into the nearby woods before he could say a word. The next night, he and another co-worker saw it again, this time at a distance. Both men decided they should let authorities know about it. Their descriptions were fairly similar (for example, both men said it had been wearing blue jeans … something werewolves are known to do … right?) except when it came to height. Mr. Davis told officers that it was about 6 feet tall. His co-worker, however, claimed that it was more like 8 feet tall. Authorities decided to investigate but chose not to disclose the report to the local townspeople. After all, this was probably just some bored local kids messing around.

 

In the days that followed, witnesses began coming into the Defiance police station with similar, but mostly vague and unusual, descriptions of nocturnal attacks. They insisted that their assailant was tall (between 7 and 9 feet, according to many eyewitness statements to police), covered with fur, with fangs and the head of an animal … basically explaining that it/he looked a
lot
like a werewolf. Within a little more than one week, at least three people had reported being violently accosted by the same furry perpetrator.

One detail, however, soon blew most of the air out of the initial theories that these attacks were being carried out by a werewolf. In the second week, another man was attacked by something tall and hairy. This time, however, the thing smacked him over the head, “pro wrestler style,” with a wood two-by-four. Though dazed, the man managed to escape.

 

The night just after this, a group of three unidentified locals entered the Defiance Police Station in a state of absolute panic. They begged the officers to protect them. When asked what they needed protection from, the only answer they could provide was that they were being chased by a “thing.” Apparently, they’d heard this “thing” but never actually laid eyes on it. Sometime shortly after this, it would seem almost the whole town of Defiance, Ohio, went temporarily insane. Chaos (and some hilarity) soon ensued.

 

That same night, just after one in the morning, a panicked local man came to the police station to report that something had begun following him near the tracks earlier the previous evening. He’d run to a local hotel to take shelter in the lobby, where he appears to have been for most of the night before going to the police.

 

Only 10 minutes later, a local woman called the station, telling officers that a friend had come by her house in a state of absolute hysteria. She’d only just heard the story about this “thing” and had gone frantic because for the last few weeks, at two o’clock every morning, someone (or perhaps some “thing”) had been rattling the knob of her front door. Hearing about the “thing” and realizing how close to two o’clock it was, the woman had immediately fled her own house (probably still wearing her nightgown). She sought refuge at the nearby home of a friend, who then called the police.

 

Sightings continued on for a couple of weeks, mostly coming in from railroad employees and motorists. However, the attacks seem to have stopped. Perhaps the so-called “Werewolf of Defiance,” who was almost certainly some idiot in a mask, decided that he liked being a local legend much better than consistently sucking at being a mugger.

In towns and shires all across the United Kingdom, one can find a multitude of local legends regarding unusual occurrences related to encounters with ghostly black dog figures. The ill fates that are often said to have befallen those who have seen these dogs have led many to label them with the title of
hellhounds.