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player ready...ELKHORN, Wis. — Bray Road runs for 3 miles through Elkhorn, Wisconsin. At the south, it begins not far from Lake Geneva. Enter off U.S. Route 12, curl east, and other than a slight jog, it’s pretty much a straight shot to State Route 11. Hence all the snaking peel-out marks left by amateur racers. Foliage rustles in the autumn wind here, and where there aren’t corn husks swaying, there are flat, lonely expanses of dirt where crops have been harvested.
As Midwestern scenes go, there’s nothing remarkable about Bray Road.
Other than the werewolf that has stalked it for nearly a century.
Chicago has long boasted of its paranormal residents. Humanoid moths and demon babies, hitchhiking ghouls, the occasional sea monster and even a suspicious phantom kangaroo or two. But southeastern Wisconsin — specifically that cluster of rural communities along the Illinois line — has harbored the Beast of Bray Road since 1936.
Other than a handful of recurring characteristics — pointy ears, long muzzle, sharp claws, hunched back, curiously inverted hind legs and a preference for walking on two feet — sightings of this abomination are, at best, inconsistent: Some say it is precisely 5 feet, 8 inches tall, and some say it is closer to 7 feet tall. Some claim its yellow eyes burn with fathomless evil, and some say it just tends to look annoyed in passing headlights. When it’s not brown, hulking and shaggy, it’s silver-gray and emaciated. Some believe it’s more undiscovered dog-wolf than werewolf; some insist it’s Bigfoot.
Or a stray black bear, or a disoriented gray wolf, or a cougar with a spinal deformity.
Whatever the Beast of Bray Road is, he just turned 90 and he’s going nowhere.
“I’d say about half of Elkhorn would tell you, ‘Nope, the Beast ain’t real,’” said Jake Jenkins of J.J.’s Pumpkins, just off Bray Road. “But then a quarter would say ‘Eh … maybe?’ And you got a solid quarter dead certain: ‘Yeah, he’s real and I’ve seen him.’ I myself have not. But I have come across tracks in the woods around here, the size of a basketball, that make me scratch my head, especially when we get a fresh snowfall.
“The legend seems to have gained more traction in the past decade or so. But back in high school, this wasn’t something that everyone knew — or even wanted to talk about.”
On a recent visit to Elkhorn, I poked my head into Howl at the Moon Gems and a manager warned cryptically, “Not many will speak about the Beast.” She sounded so much like the hotel clerk in a werewolf movie, I thought at first she was joking. Except she refused to elaborate or say anything more. Kate Abbe, head of the Elkhorn Area Chamber of Commerce, said it can be a wary subject around here: “Especially if you live near Bray Road, you keep quiet because we already have enough people showing up in town hoping to find the Beast, and the people on that road definitely don’t want to deal with strangers standing on their doorsteps at 2 in the morning, asking questions.”
On the other hand, there are local farmers now offering Beast-centric hayrides, and for the past several years, the city of Elkhorn itself has hosted Beast Fest, a family-friendly Halloween bash with Build-a-Beast competitions, Beast folklore lectures and Beast line dancing — “you know, to celebrate what’s here in our own backyard,” said Karl Sorvick, director of the parks and recreation department. During fall, when J.J.’s Pumpkins has a corn maze, Jenkins stalks it wearing an ape costume and calling himself the Beast: “It’s not a werewolf costume because, if the Beast is real, it’s what I imagine he is, kind of a Sasquatch.” Indeed, the Beast is such a fixture of Elkhorn culture, it’s the rare politician who comes through who doesn’t make some winky allusion to the creature: In 1993, a Republican state representative went so far as to shoot a TV ad that showed a man in a werewolf suit casting a ballot for him, claiming the Beast of Bray Road’s endorsement.
Dan Hess, of the Wisconsin Historical Society — which hosts its own annual autumn folklore event starring an appearance by the Beast — lives in Elkhorn, not far from Bray Road. “To me, the best part of this is that as a local story, it’s been handed down for a century. But as a resident, it’s telling that though it’s a farm area, you can’t really see everything around here. The Kettle Moraine State Forest is right at our edge, and there are nooks and crannies where something could hide. And the further north you go here, the more forest and rivers there are, and the more believable a legend like this could seem.”
He’s referring to the fact that the legend actually originates 40 minutes north, in Jefferson County. A night watchman named Mark Shackleman at St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children — a facility for people with developmental disabilities, and for more than 50 years, home of Rosemary Kennedy, oldest sister of John F. Kennedy — was making his rounds and heard a scratching. Surrounding this former Franciscan convent were orchards and open fields and Native American burial mounds. Shackleman saw what he initially thought was a large dog digging in one. It ran off, only to return the next night, and this time it bared its fangs, and seemed to growl out a word: “Gar-dar-rah …”
“Which some believe is a reference to Gadara, the name of the town where Jesus is supposed to have performed an exorcism and cast demons out of a guy,” said Seth Breedlove, an Ohio-based filmmaker who made a 2018 documentary, “The Bray Road Beast.” “You got to admit, for a legend, this has everything — it’s a horror movie come to life. It’s got a terrifying creature, it’s got a smattering of creepy reports over a century, and it’s just super weird — not to mention all the work that Linda Godfrey did on sightings.”
That would be Linda Godfrey, the Janesville, Wisconsin, journalist and cryptozoologist (the study of improbable animals) who died at 71 in 2022. She was considered the country’s leading werewolf researcher. When I visited her
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at home in 2019 for a profile, her office was stocked with man-beast artifacts; a permit to capture werewolves hung on a wall. In fact, the Beast is now so associated with Godfrey that without her it’d be just another rumor. That’s what it was in 1991, when Godfrey first reported on a series of dog-wolf sightings near Bray Road for the small weekly community newspaper that she wrote for.She told me: “One day I was talking to a local animal control officer and said, ‘You hear about this thing people are seeing on Bray Road?’ And he pulls a manilla folder out of his desk. It’s labeled ‘Werewolf.’ I was a novice reporter then, but even I knew if a county official is keeping onto a folder of possible werewolves, you probably have a story.”
Godfrey went on to write many books on the topic, including “The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf,” “Hunting the American Werewolf” and “I Know What I Saw.” She gathered hundreds of eyewitness sightings going back decades. She investigated potential migratory paths and came to believe that, if the Beast existed, it was an undiscovered species — or interdimensional being. (One detail that nagged at her: The lack of werewolf bones left by dead werewolves.) She learned the night watchman’s story wasn’t actually relayed until years later, when Shackleman, on his deathbed, told his son, a Wisconsin newspaper editor who later wrote about it. Using diaries, memoirs and letters, she unearthed centuries of folklore on Midwest werewolves linking Wisconsin’s Beast to early Midwest settlers from France and Northern Europe (the original lycan hunting grounds), as well as “near-feral” homeless men who wandered the region during the Depression. Among the stories she gathered is the tale of an “itinerant dance instructor” from Germany whose arrival in a village near Madison coincided suspiciously with the deaths of several children; officials said the children died of an illness, but the man was forever assumed to be a wolf.
She also staked out Bray Road herself, many times.
Chad Lewis, an Eau Claire-based researcher of the strange and unusual, often went with Godfrey. “We would sit for hours, talk theories, footprints, if there was a breeding population — there are so many sightings in southern Wisconsin there’d have to be. I used to drive there every day. But it’s probably not a solvable thing. It’s a belief; you can’t solve it. And yet, you know how you could be dropped by helicopter anywhere these days and it’d feel like everywhere else? This is that area, like the outskirts of any Midwest town. Except not everyone has a Beast of Bray Road. It’s what stands out. I’m more fascinated now by how much a story like this means to the people who live with it.”
—
I staked out Bray Road myself. From about 2:30 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. on a Friday night. I’ve had better Friday nights. It was frigid and eerie, and since there is no real road shoulder, every set of headlights held anxiety. Luckily, there weren’t many cars. There was, instead, a stillness so enveloping that John Carpenter could have shot a lifetime of movies there. Leaves unhook from branches and startle you with shadows. The only beast I saw was a solitary deer, poking its head from between cornstalks, crossing to the road and bounding out again. But you can picture a werewolf living here — it’s not much of a stretch to imagine one stepping nonchalantly out of the corn and filling your headlights.
That, actually, is how many sightings go.
There used to be more, locals say — the peak was the late 1980s and early ’90s — but often, a driver comes across some sort of animal kneeling on the pavement, cradling a meal of roadkill the way you might admire an Italian beef. The Beast also has attacked a Plymouth Sundance, chased an 11-year-old girl across a snowy December field and been suspected for years of pet disappearances. (As far back as the early 1970s, there are newspaper reports of Department of Natural Resources officers investigating ape-like creatures.) It has appeared Halloween night, and leapt across the tops of cornfields. Its tracks are said to just vanish. And it doesn’t stick to Bray Road: In the last 10 years, it has been spotted nearby in the towns of Spring Prairie and Lyons, south of the Alpine Valley Music Theatre. The Beast, or some Beast-like relative, also has been seen in Milwaukee, outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Lake Geneva and, across the state line, in Antioch, Galena and lurking near the Great Lakes Naval Station in Lake County.
What photos there are — blurry.
Godfrey liked to say the majority of eyewitnesses she spoke with seemed credible and sane; Breedlove, though, said he’s interviewed “at least 100 werewolf witnesses by now, and there’s either a preponderance of weed use or they’re into occult rituals.” In the front yard of a home on Bray Road, there’s a huge snarling Beast carved out of an old diseased elm tree, held in place by heavy steel chains. The homeowner, who asked to be identified only as Jerry, said 20 cars a day stop and take pictures, but he doesn’t believe in the Beast himself: “When I was younger, a friend of mine would run around Bray Road in a wolf mask, until some farmer shot at him and so he stopped going out.”
But generally, the locals I spoke with believed something is out there.
Two farmers I ran into who were talking by the side of the road — neither of whom wanted to be named because they said they’d come off crazy to the rest of their farming colleagues — didn’t dismiss the legend outright. One said that, not so long ago, she and her daughter saw something large and broad-shouldered, and definitely not a deer, jump across the corn, so they bolted home. The other farmer only laughed and said, for a town full of seemingly stoic farmers who like to mutter that the Beast is a fantasy, “I have never seen more spotlights on tractors than I have in Elkhorn.”
Lee Hampel, though, who owns a 35-acre hay farm adjacent to Bray Road, says he has seen the Beast several times. He has stories, pictures of tracks and indistinct photos of… something. He keeps security cameras running around the clock. He said he owned the farm for a few years before he even heard the legend, then a farmer mentioned seeing the Beast eating a raccoon.
Soon after, Hampel began to notice signs of the creature.
He said he hasn’t seen it since 2024.
“Elkhorn doesn’t like to talk about it, so we don’t really know how often it is seen. But science, of course, is full of unknown things.” He shares Godfrey’s theory that it’s an unclassified species. “Maybe in 75 years, we’ll know for sure. People will say, ‘Oh, back in 2026, Lee Hampel had all sorts of information on that dogman.’ I have a neighbor who has lived here 50 years, never seen it. But he’s seeing all these odd tracks and tells me he doesn’t know what’s making them. Well, I know. It’s the Beast of Bray Road!”
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