Modern CryptozoologyWe need to talk about Dogman
Dogman, a hairy humanoid, bipedal creature with a canid-type head, started its upward climb in cryptid popularity in the early 2000s. It was relatively invisible in cryptid literature prior to the work of one person: Linda Godfrey. Today, the dogman is one of the hottest mysterious animals on social media and podcasting where hundreds of stories have materialized from people who claim to have experienced this creature. Why did the dogman cryptid rise to prominence in the last 20 years? And why is modern cryptid investigation enamored with this highly paranormal creature?
We need to talk about the dogman and what it has done to modern cryptozoology.
Dogman as a para-cryptid
Starting in the 1990s, the cryptid scene was been overrun by the dogman/werewolf/canid-humanoid theme. The stories originated in the American Midwest, first in Wisconsin – thanks to Linda Godfrey’s coverage of the Beast of Bray Road. Then the Michigan Dogman legend rose to prominence across the Great Lakes area. Godfrey’s subsequent books expanded to include stories of “American Werewolves” and “Real Wolfmen”, encompassing the ancient ideas of the Egyptian god Anubis, the Rougarou legend of the southern states, and any mention of an anomalous wolf creature. Now, accounts of the “dogman” or equivalent creatures, can be found nearly nationwide.
Let’s take a step back and look at this big picture. There is nothing about the dogman descriptions or accounts that suggests it is an unknown animal that can be captured and scientifically identified. Nothing about it is biologically plausible. Consider that Bigfoot (if it was discovered to be an actual unclassified hominin) would not break the boundaries of biology as we know it; but the dogman would.
Canids (dogs or wolves, in this context) did not evolve robust bodies, human-like torsos, become bipedal, and change the functionality and morphology of their forelimbs to become arms with elbows, with long fingers and claws. This cannot naturally occur in a few years time, or may never occur if the genetic setup is not there to begin with.
An alternative would be that the animal described is not dog-like, but a baboon or kangaroo. (No one, however, is running with those latter suggestions). Therefore, the only option that one must accept in order to believe in a literal dogman, is that it is a non-natural creature, not a zoological one. Here is where the conversation leaps from the realm of “scientific” cryptozoology (if that ever existed) and lands entirely in the para-cryptid zone.
America’s werewolves
Godfrey’s coverage of the Bray Road Beast and other associated creature sightings and anomalies was commendable and in good faith. She talked to witnesses, taking their details at face value. She believed their accounts and tried very hard to lend a credible framing to the very strange body of dogman anecdotes. Her documentation, however, does not make the creature a reality. It remains unresolved what some people experienced when they described a dogman encounter.
Even with Godfrey’s documentation, we have nothing but stories. We can’t tell how truly reliable any of that information is. Many of the experiences of dogman were recounted from decades ago. Some of the tales are clearly exaggerated, as the level of detail reported was hardly possible in the dark or from far away as described.
Until Godfrey published the accounts, there were no well-documented examples that sounded credible or verifiable. Why would that be unless the animal suddenly appeared in the cultural setting?
As with Bigfoot, misidentification is always a possibility. Mangy bears, in particular, look surprisingly dog-like. Normal canids – large dogs, coyotes, wolves – are also likely to be involved. It is hard to convince people, however, that they may have been mistaken about what they think they saw.
A black bear suffering from mange.Hoaxes
The next necessary consideration is hoaxing. Unfortunately, influential hoaxes have tainted the stories of dogmen throughout their history.
The Defiance werewolf created a local panic in the Ohio town when, in 1972, Ted Davis reported to the police that he had been attacked by a “werewolf” wielding a wooden board. The creature was seen a few times, which, in turn, sparked many other residents to also say they saw it. But then it disappeared without a trace, leading to the most obvious conclusion that it was a person in a mask. When dogman tales ramped up online, this old story was resurrected and attached as further evidence of similar creatures, regardless of how weak it was.
The Gable film was uploaded to YouTube in 2007. It was made by filmmaker Mike Agrusa to look like it was taken in the 1970s. The “found footage” showed the camera person observing and being attacked by a large canid with the backstory that he was killed. For years, people argued about its authenticity as a real depiction of a cryptid, until it was revealed to be a hoax in 2010. Some newer fans of the subject never got the memo, or refused to believe it was faked.
The Michigan Dogman began its life as a song called “The Legend” released in 1987 by disc jockey Steve Cook at WTCM-FM in Traverse City, Michigan. It was intended as an April Fool’s joke, based on some legends in Michigan – an 1887 tale from Wexford County, MI where two lumberjacks claimed to see a man-dog creature, and a 1937 story from Paris, MI, where Robert Fortney said he was was attacked by wild dogs, one of which walked on two legs. A few additional accounts of strange creatures were mentioned from the intervening years but none were authenticated. Cook was astonished at the outpouring of stories that were triggered by his re-invigoration of the legend. Cook eventually collaborated with Agrusa for the Gable film.
The basis of much of the dogman lore is dubious or outright bogus. But the current hot spot for dogman tales comes from a wildlife area that has a dark history of its own.
LBL Beast
The lore of the beast in the Land Between the Lakes National Park (Kentucky-Tennessee) is a metaphorical “dog’s breakfast” – this was a term one of my former bosses used to describe a situation that was a complete mess. The LBL and its “beast” tales have served at the focus of dogman stories since about 2018. The stories now even attribute multiple deaths to the beast. Because park officials deny that these deaths have anything to do with attacks by unknown animals (or that they even happened at all), a stench of conspiracy-mongering permeates the tales.
Only one actual murder is associated with the park: Carla Atkins and Vickie Stout’s bodies were found in LBL in October of 1980. They were killed with a shotgun. Their killer was never found.
There are other famously retold stories: a family massacred in 1982, a hunter pulled from his tent and mauled, a camping family terrorized by huge creatures. The details are unclear or outright manufactured. The locals got annoyed. According to those that have lived there for decades, there is no actual folklore of a beast. It’s been manufactured – more like “fakelore”.
In 2004, a fictional story, written by “Jan Thompson” on a website that collected other stories, called Jan’s Tales, featured the tale of “The Beast of LBL”. This short story manufactured a folkloric history of a wolf-like bipedal beast and the bloody massacre of a family of three at their RV camping site (with the extra detail that the remaining child was missing). Various officers and the coroner were involved in the gruesome scene. Then the twist:
All types of samples were placed in plastic bags, marked as evidence, and carefully stowed away. As they were packaging up what appeared to be one of the fathers [sic] arms, one of the doctors noticed something wrapped between the dead fingers. Some tweezers slowly untangled a clump of long, gray and brown hairs. This too was placed in a bag, marked and put away to be analyzed at a lab later.
This story is fiction, yet it was repeated as fact. Horror filmmakers got wind of the legends and planned a movie called The Beast of LBL. I can’t find that the film was ever released but no one had anything positive to say about the parties involved in it.
[Producer] Vervoort said community reaction to the project has mostly been positive. He said he’s producing the movie because he saw a business opportunity and jumped on it. “I think it’s a case of jealousy because they’re not the ones doing it. And I saw an opportunity to create a story and I’m going with it,” Vervoort said.
Capitalizing on a fictional story promoted as real? Sounds familiar.
Fake images of Dogman are everywhere online. Even if absurdly obviously fraudulent, people click on them to comment that they believe it is real.Dogman expands to be everywhere and everything
Linda Godfrey’s efforts to collect dogman tales, unfortunately, turned her into an advocate for its reality. Her books were overly credulous. For example, she referenced Jan Thompson’s fictional tale as if it was factual. (Others did the same.) Eventually, she entertained supernatural explanations because the stories were so weird and were multiplying that it all was too much to consider dismissing them. The supernatural slide became more appealing as natural explanations didn’t add up. She was convinced that something was going on.
There was something going on: the dogman creature had resonated with popular culture about mysterious creatures and propagated. Even though the infamous TV show Monster Quest ended its run in 2010 with the reveal of the Gable film hoax, people loved the dogman story too much to give it up. The MQ end was just the beginning for the run of the dogman.
Small Town Monsters (the primary, serious producers of cryptid documentary content) jumped on the dogman train, producing multiple media pieces exaggerating and repeating the tales from the Midwest, LBL, Texas, and New Mexico. (Some programming consisted solely of witness reports filmed for the other features, loosely tied together). Unmentioned in their films is an explanation for expansion of accounts of dogman/werewolf creatures throughout the 2000s. It simply didn’t exist before this. In an attempt to account for this sudden appearance, Ron Murphy, a prolific paranormal writer, said that he thinks earlier accounts might previously been categorized as Bigfoot encounters but could have been dogman because we didn’t have a “frame of reference” then. This hypothesis fails because it ignores the facts that dogman descriptions, while often highly varied, usually include mention of a long muzzle and ears, as well as digitigrade legs. Bigfoot has small, usually unmentioned, ears, a distinctly flat face, and a human-like footprint.
That lack of prior dogmen sightings is far more likely cultural – because it was invented and promoted in the late 90s into the 2000s. We see social contagion at play -when people are hearing the associated stories and then interpreting their experiences in that framing. Another interviewee (from STM’s The Dogman Triangle) remarks that he heard of accounts from podcasts, which got him interested in the subject. This reveals how influential cryptid podcasts and social media (particularly YouTube) are in spreading the word and pulling new people into the topic.
America’s new werewolves
The trajectory of the dogman’s popularity exemplifies the move of the field of cryptozoology away from zoological cryptids towards the culturally-derived cryptid. If there are no zoological rules to be applied, then anything goes. The dogman, in its various forms, was open to addition of fun and dramatic embellishments of its story. Much was made of the creatures’ association with burial mounds and cemeteries (like Anubis), its demonic characteristics, association with Satanism and the occult and Christian references. The idea of the shapeshifter was an obvious tie-in considering its extraordinary behaviors (such as running alongside cars) and ability to not be captured. Even the fantastical story of the Hexham heads, so-called magical artifacts from the UK, were tied to the lore. Considering that LBL is a US National park, the dogman existence became a conspiracy where officials must be barred from speaking about the sightings, missing persons, and unexplained deaths.
Eventually, people described the dogman in terms of movie monsters from An American Werewolf in London, Silver Bullet and Dog Soldiers. There is significant crossover with tales of Bigfoot, Goatman, and Rougarou. Even modern chupacabra depictions are converging on the Dogman type.
Social media reveals countless AI renderings of dogman videos. Ambiguous photos are said to be of dogman.
A screengrab from a (manufactured) video of the “Black Walker”, reportedly taken in Vermont in 2009. Many people consider this evidence. In reality, such a creature would be biologically impossible.Dogman now has a reputation as a violent predator. In the LBL area particularly, believers suggest that the Dogman territory is in the North while Bigfoot’s is in the South. Sometimes they fight. Alternatively, some suggest Bigfoot protects the area and people from the dogmen. Or, maybe they work together. Or the dogman manifests via human energy. Or it travels through portals to an alternative dimension. The absurdity knows no bounds.
I find the cultural aspects of dogman, as a contemporary legend, fascinating and deserving of research and discussion. However, whenever I talk of cryptozoology as having almost entirely cultural value, I am told that it aims to be a scientific endeavor to explore possible unknown animals. We have various investigation teams searching for a prowling, predatory, magical, grave-guarding, biological impossibility, with no legitimate scientific evidence for its existence. This is, in no way, scientific.
With the Dogman as one of the most popular cryptids right now, those calling themselves cryptozoologists have some explaining to do. Those attempting to hold the line of cryptozoology as a serious “science-based” effort must address the Dogman problem. The evidence consists of unverified stories based on fictional foundations to describe a biological impossible creature. Yet, they aren’t addressing it. Instead, they continue to commodify it with media and merch, but no rational investigation. I can’t take that seriously.
Suggested reading: The Tale of the Dogman at Tetrapod Zoology
This is post 7 of the 12 Days of Cryptids.
#12DaysOfCryptids #BeastOfBrayRoad #dogman #LandBetweenTheLakesBeast #LindaGodfrey #werewolf
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