• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Werewolves

An American werewolf, and it's in . . . Elkhorn?

Author's tale of creature turned out to have (hairy) legs

By MEGAN TWOHEY
[email protected]

Posted: Feb. 25, 2004

Elkhorn - Linda Godfrey thought the first story she wrote on the subject would be her last.

But almost immediately after the weekly newspaper in this small city published her article about local werewolf sightings in early 1992, Godfrey's phone started ringing.

Other witnesses came forward. People claiming to be werewolves surfaced. The national media swooped into town.

"I thought people would talk about the story for two weeks and then it would blow over," Godfrey said. "I was so wrong. Interest in the werewolf went on and on. People weren't going to forget about it."

Enticed by the response, Godfrey plunged into what became more than 10 years of digging.

What she found were dozens of accounts of people who have seen something resembling a werewolf in Wisconsin. Six more articles followed. Last year, she decided to write a book about the accounts. "The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin's Werewolf" - a title taken from werewolf sightings along a rural road near Elkhorn - hit book stores last fall.

Along the way, Godfrey, a part-time teacher and librarian at Kansasville Grade School, became convinced that the state is indeed home to . . . something.

"At first I didn't believe there was a man changing into a wolf on Bray Road," Godfrey said this week during an interview at her home, which is tucked along a rural stretch of old farmland eight miles outside Elkhorn. "Now I'm more open."

Not that she thinks it's an actual werewolf.
Spooky stories

Most of the descriptions she collected paint a picture of a furry, eight-foot creature with pointy ears that prowls the night scavenging for road kill and live animals.

The first account Godfrey heard of a wolf or large dog with human characteristics came from a woman in Spring Prairie, a tiny community east of Elkhorn.

In her book, Godfrey, 52, describes how the woman was driving home from Elkhorn one night in 1989 on Bray Road when she came across a "dark brownish-gray" animal the size of a man. The animal was using its claws to eat road kill. After searching through books at the library, the woman found an illustration of a werewolf that looked like the creature she had seen.

Other accounts came from men and women of all ages, whose sightings occurred all over the state, and, in some cases, dated back to the 1920s and 1930s.

Because she was the first person to write about the sightings, Godfrey has come to be viewed as an expert on the subject.

She started making local TV and radio appearances soon after she wrote her first story on the Beast of Bray Road. Over the years, she has obliged reporters from national TV shows, like Inside Edition, who have traveled to Elkhorn to sniff out a werewolf.

For one tabloid, she actually camped out on Bray Road with a photographer and a baked chicken that was placed in a ditch with the goal of enticing the beast. Much to the tabloid's disappointment, no werewolf appeared.

In Godfrey's eyes, it was her duty to help other members of the media.

"I felt that because I had the information, I had an obligation to share it," she said.

Godfrey said she has received even more attention since her book was released last fall.

She has participated in numerous book signings and other types of public appearances to discuss her work. Just last weekend, she addressed a conference hosted by the American Ghost Hunting Society in Alton, Ill.

Godfrey, who has begun researching a follow-up to the "Beast of Bray Road," says she thinks her students at Kansasville Elementary School have benefited from seeing someone they know have a book published.

"It's been good for them to see that authors are real people," she said.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/feb04/210304.asp
 
mike_legs said:
To me it looks like a very unkempt standard poodle. Poor thing.

It actually looks frighteningly like my unkempt standard poodle!
 
Also you have Jo-Jo the dog faced boy.
And I think the other is leo the lion faced man.

I think they are real. Not faked.

Anybody know? I have lots of books on sideshow freaks etc and none have said that they were fakes.
 
Highland Werewolves

There's not that many stories of werewolves in the Scottish Highlands. The one that's most famous is the Wulver - and it is still pretty obscure. It is described in Jessie Saxby's Shetland Traditional Lore as being a man with a wolf's head, with short brown hair all over him. He lived in a cave dug out of the side of a steep knowe, half-way up a hill. He did not molest folk if they did not molest him. He was fond of fishing. A small rock in the deep water is known to this day as the "Wulver's Stane". He would sit there for hours, fishing for sillaks and piltaks. He was reported to have frequently left a few fish on the window sill of some poor person.

There is an account of tourists fleeing Glen Affric in terror after hearing an unearthly howl at night, from the 1980's I think. I've spent a long time out in the wild places of the Highlands, and have seen or heard nothing werewolfy at all. Few big cats, though.
 
Interesting piece:

Howling at the Moon: Modern-day Lycanthropy

By Vaughan
Tue Apr 13th, 2004 at 06:09:21 AM EST



If the legends are to be believed, lycanthropy has been with us since King Lycaon was transformed into a wolf, in retribution for serving human flesh to Zeus during a dinner party in ancient Greece. Ever since, the werewolf has followed the human race through whispered tales and popular myth, stalking towns and villages from the Caucasus to Colorado. The popularity and seeming irrationality of these stories has been a traditional target for debunkers of the supernatural. Rationalisations of the werewolf myth have stretched from theories of rabies infection to ergot poisoning. More difficult to dispel has been the delusional convictions of people with clinical lycanthropy. Often submerged in intense psychosis, affected individuals report the feeling of transformation into various forms of animal, some experienced as so unusual, the animal has yet to be identified.


____________________________


The werewolf, despite having lost some of its potency through its appearance in the unintentionally camp horror movies of the seventies and eighties, seems to retain much of its menace which has been the bane of rural communities for generations. The mythical affliction supposedly at the root of the human-animal transformation is lycanthropy, a supernatural condition variously attributed to bites from a werewolf encounter, drinking water from one of its footprints or perhaps any number of localised and idiosyncratic cultural transgressions.

As a medical syndrome, it remains much less of a legend than its cultural counterpart. Although a million miles from the 'silver-bullet and wolfsbane' clichés of the movies, it remains focused on the human-to-animal transformation experience. Unsurprisingly it is linked to the altered states of mind that accompany psychosis (the reality-bending mental state that typically involves delusions and hallucinations) with the transformation only seeming to happen in the mind and behaviour of the affected person.

A seminal study on lycanthropy from the famous McLean Hospital (temporary residence of both mathematician John Nash and poet Sylvia Plath) reported on a series of cases and proposed some diagnostic criteria by which lycanthropy could be recognised:
A patient reports in a moment of clarity or looking back the he sometimes feels as an animal or has felt like one.
A patient behaves in a manner that resembles animal behaviour, for example crying, grumbling or creeping.

According to these criteria, either a delusional belief in current or past transformation, or behaviour that suggests a person thinks of themselves as transformed, is considered evidence of clinical lycanthropy. The authors go on to note that although the condition seems to be an expression of psychosis there is no specific diagnosis of mental or neurological illness associated with its behavioural consequences.

It also seems that lycanthropy is not specific to an experience of human-to-wolf transformation. In fact, there is a small ark of creatures that have been reported as part of the shape-shifting experience. A recent review of the medical literature from early 2004 lists over thirty published cases of lycanthropy, only the minority of which have wolf or dog themes. Canines are certainly not uncommon, although the experience of being transformed into cats, horses, birds and tigers has been reported on more than one occasion, with frogs, and even bees, being reported in some instances. A 1989 case study described how one individual reported a serial transformation, experiencing a change from human, to dog, to horse, and then finally cat, before returning to the (perhaps rather mundane) reality of human existence after treatment.

More curious are the reports of people who experienced transformation into an animal only listed as 'unspecified', leaving the reader to wonder whether the patient claimed to be changing into a creature so obscure, it left the hospital staff baffled. Perhaps we should be encouraging psychiatrists to brush up on their zoology in case they are missing rare species in their consulting rooms.

Zoological problems aside, the question remains as to why people experience lycanthropy at all. Psychosis is certainly a strange fish, and the bizarre and uncanny are not unusual in this state. Nevertheless, simply defining it as just 'another type of weird' does not get us any further along the way to explaining its formation and development.

One important factor may be differences or changes in parts of the brain known to be involved in representing body shape. A brain scanning study of two people with lycanthropy showed that these areas display unusual activation, suggesting that when people report their bodies are changing shape, they may be genuinely perceiving those feelings. Body shape distortions are not unknown in mental and neurological illness, so this may help explain at least part of the process. One further puzzle is why an affected person doesn't simply report that their body "feels like it's changing in odd ways", rather than presenting with a delusional belief that they are changing into a specific animal. There is much evidence that psychosis is more than just odd perceptual experiences so perhaps lycanthropy is the result of these unusual bodily experiences being understood by an already mixed-up mind.

However, the contribution of culture should not be entirely ignored. Many of our day-to-day explanations are heavily influenced by our background and we often have neat cultural pigeon-holes which we slot unusual experiences into. For example, there are many explanations as to why we might experience seeing someone whom we know is already dead, including having an hallucination, misidentifying a living person, or perhaps seeing a supernatural 'replaying' of a traumatic event. Whether you believe in any of these explanations or not, the reality of the situation is likely to end up being communicated to others in terms of the neat cultural concept of 'seeing a ghost'.

Similarly, we have a large cultural resource when it comes to animal transformation experiences, as many societies have included this concept into myths, stories, or rituals. The natives of the Siberian plains had specific ceremonies to aid shape-shifting, including the preparation of a heady potion which used both opium and hemlock as ingredients. The Siberians were certainly not alone, and the desire to acquire animal abilities has permeated most, if not all, of the world's cultures. There have also been cases of 'feral children' seemingly raised by animals after losing their parents and many have been reliably documented in modern times. Psychiatrist Lucien Malson collected over fifty cases in his landmark book. More cases have surfaced since its publication in 1964, suggesting that some beliefs about lycanthropy might stem from unusual maternal relationships between humans and animals.

Of course, there is room to argue that supernatural myths could originate from people relating their experiences of what could be now classified as psychosis. In reality, the interaction between human experience and culture is difficult (perhaps impossible) to separate. Lycanthropy is no different. Whilst mainstream psychiatry assumes that someone who believes themselves to be an animal is mentally ill, someone who deliberately tries to accomplish the same with psychoactive potions and ritual is considered a shaman in many societies around the world. It seems context is critical even for the most unusual of beliefs.

From this wider perspective, lycanthropy is perhaps one aspect of a whole spectrum of experiences involving identification with animals. It may be a little more striking than the banality of Teen Wolf and perhaps coloured by anomalous activity in the brain, but it still gives us an insight into how the most extraordinary of experiences can reflect the society in which they occur.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/4/12/91631/6905

Soe of the links in the article:

Psychol Med. 1988 Feb;18(1):113-20.

Lycanthropy: alive and well in the twentieth century.

Keck PE, Pope HG, Hudson JI, McElroy SL, Kulick AR.

Epidemiology Laboratory, McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA 02178.

Lycanthropy, the belief that one has been transformed into an animal (or behaviour suggestive of such a belief), has been described by physicians and clerics since antiquity, but has received scant attention in the modern literature. Some have even thought the syndrome extinct. However, in a review of patients admitted to our centre since 1974, we identified twelve cases of lycanthropy, ranging in duration from one day to 13 years. The syndrome was generally associated with severe psychosis, but not with any specific psychiatric diagnosis or neurological findings, or with any particular outcome. As a rare but colourful presentation of psychosis, lycanthropy appears to have survived into modern times.

Source

Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2004 Jan;109(1):19-22.

Lycanthropy--psychopathological and psychodynamical aspects.

Garlipp P, Godecke-Koch T, Dietrich DE, Haltenhof H.

Department of Social Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany. [email protected]

Objective: The imagination of being transformed into an animal or being an animal is called lycanthropy. The phenomenon is presented and psychodynamical aspects are discussed.

Method: A literature review forms the base of this discussion of a psychopathological phenomenon.

Results: The lycanthropic symptomatology represents a spectrum of continuity of developmental and culture-dependent normal behaviour via partial forms to the complete picture of lycanthropy. It is observed in different mental disorders.

Conclusion: Lycanthropy is interpreted by the authors as a delusion in the sense of the self-identity disorder defined by Scharfetter. It is mainly found in affective and schizophrenic disorders but can be a symptom of other psychiatric disorders as well. Psychodynamically this kind of delusion can be interpreted as an attempt to project suppressed affects, especially with aggressive or sexual content, into the figure of an animal. Psychotherapy and/or neuroleptic medication can be effective.

Source

Psychopathology. 1989;22(6):344-7.

Multiple serial lycanthropy. A case report.

Dening TR, West A.

St Crispin Hospital, Northampton, UK.

A case is described who exhibited lycanthropy during an acute psychotic illness. During a short period she experienced herself as four different species of animal, an occurrence not previously reported. The phenomenon of lycanthropy is most appropriately regarded as a delusion, but the abnormal subjective experience is stressed, not just the falsely-held belief.

Source

Psychopathology. 1999 Jul-Aug;32(4):173-6.

Lycanthropy: new evidence of its origin.

Moselhy HF.

Bushey Fields Hospital, Dudley, UK.

Two cases of lycanthropy will be described. Its possible aetiology and psychopathology will be discussed. In the first case there is clear evidence of an organic origin of the syndrome which is reported for the first time.

Source

Emps
 
The Beast of Bray Road that Emperor linked to earlier seems interesting to me (particularly because it might fit the Tulpa theory of creature sightings as exposed in the infamous Monsters of the Id! thread....

Particularly interesting was this bit from an Amazon Review:

And what do we find out from Ms. Godfrey? That a lot of people(feet-on-the-ground people, not Kooks) over quite some time, have seen a very strange "something" in the fields and forests of rural and semi-rural Wisconsin. It is something that stands about 5 to 5 1/2 feet tall, has a head with the general configuration of a wolf, or dog, or coyote, a broad shouldered, heavy-muscled upper torso, well muscled arms like a body builder's, human-like hands with claws on them, powerful thighs tapering down into skinny "shins" and ankles. This description alone (referencing "arms" and "legs" separately) suggests something bipedal, though the creature often does go to all fours). Accounts also say the back legs look "funny", the implication being that they are jointed animal fashion("crooked as a dog's hind leg" as the saying goes).But the "arms" are not? Odd. The thing is often seen by a roadside, seemingly eating road kill, which it holds(while squatting) in its "hands"(?) with the "palms"(?) turned face up. Most peculiar.

Godfrey takes the reader through possible Satanic associations, cryptozoological connections ( a creature the Ioway Indians called a "shunka-warak'in"),mysterious animal mutilations, and a chilling incident from the 1930s when a nightwatchman encountered a strangely similar creature that snarled out the word "Gaddarah" at him and then turned and walked away with a sneer when the man began praying to God for deliverance.
This book is well worth having, both to read for information and pondering, or for good old-fashioned cheap thrills. If you want to sit in front of the fire on a dark night and scare the bejeebies out of yourself, don't miss it. Will it make you want to jump up and book immediate fare to Elkhorn or Delavan, Wisconsin? Well, I can't guarantee THAT!!!

And the Weird Wisconsin site has some original tales that are well worth reading:

http://www.weird-wi.com/brayroad/index.htm

But the important question might be - has anybody read the book yet? I'm going to have to track it down....
 
Goldstein~ said:
"....the Shunka Warik'in....[a] hyena like cryptid.... from the midwestern USA, which has been reported to walk occasionally on its hind legs and is thus linked to 'werewolf' stories."

What's the name of the Northern (?) Argentina wild dog which likewise often walks bipedally and has thus also been referenced to "explain away" werewolf sightings in the area?
 
Spookyangel said:
"Dracula could turn himself into a wolf anyway, so that's not that far off being a werewolf, except that he could change at will and werewolves have no control over it."

I dunno. If the testimonies of the defendents in a whole raft of French werewolf trials from the late 16th and early 17th Centuries can be trusted those records indicate that the REASON they roamed about in wolf-form was that they LIKED the practice and enjoyed running with - and feeding with - the pack. This seems to suggest a certain amount of CHOICE in the matter.

Of course there may be a difference between classical quadrupedal werewolves and the hirshute humanoid "wolf men" so popularized by Hollywood. Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) certainly wanted NO part of the "curse."

Thank you for pointing out that Count Dracula was arguably a werewolf as well as a vampire, due to his ability to transform himself into a wolf-shape.

I sometimes wonder if vampires, werewolves and even chupacabras could not be merely variant names for the same blood-thirsty paranormal entity.
 
A new article on The Werewolves of Britain by Nick Redfern is online at the Fate Magazine site here.

We already have a thread on the Flixton, Yorkshire werewolf here.

I don't think the new piece adds much but it gathers some tales together usefully. 8)
 
I'm waiting to meet a chap I know who is convinced he saw a werewolf in Kent,certainly gave him a big fright,and he's a heavy dude biker type.
 
Cool - let us know how that goes.

JamesWhitehead said:
A new article on The Werewolves of Britain by Nick Redfern is online at the Fate Magazine site here.

We already have a thread on the Flixton, Yorkshire werewolf here.

I don't think the new piece adds much but it gathers some tales together usefully. 8)

He has updated it with more info on other more recent cases some of which look to be dog headed men reports:

www.cryptomundo.com/bigfoot-report/werewolves-uk/

One of the comments there suggests they aren't werewolves but Sasquatches - is this because Bigfeet are slightly more accepted as being "real"? I'm unsure in what direction Occam would swing his razor as they seem to have a similar likelihood.
 
A Canadian werewolf? Whatever next?

Accused killer in triple murder told man he was a werewolf

By The Canadian Press

MEDICINE HAT, Alta. — Two acquaintances of a man accused of murdering his pre-teen girl-

friend’s family say he professed to be a 300-year-old werewolf who liked the taste of blood.

But Jeremy Allan Steinke’s terminally ill mother says her son is not the man many think he is and has a good heart.

Daniel Clark, 22, told the Calgary Herald he once saw Steinke wearing what he thought was a small vial of blood around his neck and heard him refer to himself as a lycan — short for lycanthrope, or werewolf.

"I said, ‘Yeah, whatever floats your boat,’" Clark said.

Steinke, 23, and his 12-year-old girlfriend are each charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her parents and eight-year-old brother in their Medicine Hat, Alta., home.

Jordan Attfield, 17, a former roommate of Steinke, said he once deliberately cut his hand with a knife and licked it.

"He never drank blood out of a glass or anything," said Attfield. "I never saw that, but he did when he saw it on himself. He’d lick it up."

Steinke’s dying mother presented a different picture of him between sobs and a description of how she has become a prisoner in her own home, a woman scorned by town gossips and hounded by reporters on her doorstep.

"He’s not the man everybody thinks he is," Jacqueline May said. "This is my son," she said, holding her favourite picture showing a clean-cut, smiling Steinke in his 16th year.

"He has a heart of gold," May, 43, said as she sat in her old trailer in a mobile home community on the edge of Medicine Hat.

"We may not be rich, but we have a lot of love."

May, who has been diagnosed with terminal lung disease, said she does not believe the werewolf story.

"Never. No, never."

Clark agreed that despite Steinke’s odd behaviour, he seemed to be a decent person.

"He was very respectful in me and my girlfriend’s home," said Clark. "He never swore at us."

Both Clark and Attfield confirmed Steinke and the accused girl were into goth culture. They said Steinke often dressed in ripped black jeans with body pins, wore his short hair spiked, had a bandana around his neck that he could pull over his face, liked eyeliner and sometimes wore a spiked dog chain around his neck.

Attfield said he lived with Steinke for about three months but moved out about four weeks ago when his roommate became increasingly agitated after breaking up with his fiancee.

About a week after the breakup, Steinke met the young girl, but thought she was 14, Attfield said.

Both men said Steinke did not meet her on the website vampirefreaks.com, as has been widely reported. They say the couple met at an all-ages punk show in Medicine Hat.

Steinke and the girl, who cannot be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, were arrested Monday in Leader, Sask. They are to appear in court again next week.

Three of their friends were also picked up with them, but were not charged.

One of them, a girl who visited May earlier in the week, said she thought they were all going to Saskatchewan to go camping.

The Herald reported that when arrested, Steinke told her, "Tell my mom she can have my TV and that I love her."

In a lengthy interview in her trailer, which has been thoroughly combed by police searching for evidence, May described her son as respectful and loving.

"If we ever disagreed, he would always apologize after. We were like that."

She last spoke with her son on Saturday.

http://thechronicleherald.ca/Canada/499990.html

Also a few more bits and bobs and musings and tangents here.
 
Purely for a bit of fun...I found out about a week ago that my brother (reasoonably intelligent and erudite) has a genuine phobia of werewolves. I tried a little delving and found him to be quite genuine about this...odderer and odderer...
 
LividBullseye said:
I'm waiting to meet a chap I know who is convinced he saw a werewolf in Kent,certainly gave him a big fright,and he's a heavy dude biker type.
Any news on this, Bullseye?
 
According to Jan Michael Greer's Monsters the 'etheric body' is allergic to silver, or something like that. I don't have the book to hand any more as I gave it to a charity shop on the grounds that it was rubbish.
 
Shape Shifting

While I've long accepted the existence of "spectral wolves" and "black dogs," I never had much faith in werewolves, as such. I couldn't seem to come up with anything even remotely approaching a mechanism which would permit a human to "shift" into a canine. I can think of ways (however unlikely) by which a human corpse might re-animate as a vampire or a zombie (especially in the traditional Haitian sense), but humans turning into wolves, no.

But if it's a matter of "merely" shifting 10 to 20 percent of human DNA by some supreme effort of will (or perhaps a terminally bad run of rotten luck), I can ALMOST visualize that transformation scene, which is probably an extremely painful process.

Perhaps this is quite literally what is indicated by "shape shifting."
 
See the problem is that while we share high proportions fo DNA with other creatures its the differences that are key not the similarities.

Such a transformation can't work by natural laws and must be inherently magical (even if you were to try and work in some DNA shifting mechanism it is so incredibly unlikely that a magical explanation is at least as likely). How about you actually swap places with a you in an alternate reality where everyone is a werewolf? People there might speak of werehumans.
 
Mighty_Emperor said:
. How about you actually swap places with a you in an alternate reality where everyone is a werewolf? People there might speak of werehumans.

That's an idea worth considering. Folklore certainly has its share of "dog-men," at least some of whom are presumably dogs which occasionally transform into humans. And some stories of seductive "cat-women" I've read, I find myself wondering if these slinky creatures might not spend the vast majority of their time sleek and furry and purring by the fireside.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
Mighty_Emperor said:
. How about you actually swap places with a you in an alternate reality where everyone is a werewolf? People there might speak of werehumans.

That's an idea worth considering. Folklore certainly has its share of "dog-men," at least some of whom are presumably dogs which occasionally transform into humans. And some stories of seductive "cat-women" I've read, I find myself wondering if these slinky creatures might not spend the vast majority of their time sleek and furry and purring by the fireside.

Good point. In fact it could explain a few other Fortean phenomena:

1. Mysterious disappareances - people cycling out but noothing cycling back in (which one might expect from laws of thermodynamics)

2. Doppelgangers and bilocation - two of you in one reality at once.

3. Crytpozoology - if you could swap places with an alternat you then somewhere in the Multiverse is a Sasquatch you going about your life just bigger and hairier.

Going back to your DNA suggestion and with 3 in mind one then can't rule out other were-beasts of a cryptozoological nature: After all we share even more DNA with Gigantopithecus.
 
French Werewolves

There's an interesting similarity of names between French werewolves and Satanists in 16th and 17th century France.

First there's werewolves Gilles GARNIER (1573) and Jean GRENIER (1603).

Then three decades after Grenier we have the accused (and executed) Satanist, the unfortunate Father Urbain GRANDIER of Loudon nuns infamy.
 
...am I really going to reply to this thread 17 years on. Yes, I think I will. I grew up in Kinloss - lived there from 1978 - 1985 - and we did have a legend of a werewolf living in the woods at Kinloss. We called it King Hairy - and though the name seems ridiculous now - we took it all very seriously back then. It was rumoured to live under a huge pile of sticks in the wood - just up from the Astra Cinema. That's it really. A childhood legend - but reading this post did prick those memories - and I also met up with a friend for the first time since those days (the first time since 1984) so I'm quite justified in a late replay to this thread hehehe
Joking aside though - and no, I don't really think there was a werewolf living in the woods there - the whole area has a very odd, otherworldly feel to it - and probably led to the whole interconnected mythology that me and my friends built up through our childhoods. There was a strangling tree (destroyed in an apocalyptic fight with King Hairy one stormy night), 'mutoids' living in the Kinloss Burn, living skeletons who worked for 'The Dark Force' - a disembodied evil that resided deep within 'The Black Woods' in Forres (in reality, the back of Cluny Hill). We only half believed in all of this - but we never quite disbelieved in it either. Still, with a free standing Pictish stone (Sueno's Stone, now encased in glass - it was just in the middle of a field when I was a kid) - and 'the witches stone' in Forres (marking the spot where a poor woman was burnt to death on suspicion of witchcraft (after being rolled in a barrel down Cluny Hill) - it is perhaps little surprising that we populated our local woods with monsters and werewolves.
 
...am I really going to reply to this thread 17 years on. Yes, I think I will. I grew up in Kinloss - lived there from 1978 - 1985 - and we did have a legend of a werewolf living in the woods at Kinloss. We called it King Hairy - and though the name seems ridiculous now - we took it all very seriously back then. It was rumoured to live under a huge pile of sticks in the wood - just up from the Astra Cinema. That's it really. A childhood legend - but reading this post did prick those memories - and I also met up with a friend for the first time since those days (the first time since 1984) so I'm quite justified in a late replay to this thread hehehe
Joking aside though - and no, I don't really think there was a werewolf living in the woods there - the whole area has a very odd, otherworldly feel to it - and probably led to the whole interconnected mythology that me and my friends built up through our childhoods. There was a strangling tree (destroyed in an apocalyptic fight with King Hairy one stormy night), 'mutoids' living in the Kinloss Burn, living skeletons who worked for 'The Dark Force' - a disembodied evil that resided deep within 'The Black Woods' in Forres (in reality, the back of Cluny Hill). We only half believed in all of this - but we never quite disbelieved in it either. Still, with a free standing Pictish stone (Sueno's Stone, now encased in glass - it was just in the middle of a field when I was a kid) - and 'the witches stone' in Forres (marking the spot where a poor woman was burnt to death on suspicion of witchcraft (after being rolled in a barrel down Cluny Hill) - it is perhaps little surprising that we populated our local woods with monsters and werewolves.
I prefer this common sense approach vs. jumping to conclusions on age old mythology. As for legendary local woods many believe (or claim to) believe that something ominous is out other than wild dogs, large cats, bear, crocodilians, etc, etc. The science for lycanthropy is that it's caused by a physical imbalance in the brain. Add to that the rare disorder hypertrichosis (total body hair). I wouldn't dismiss a supernatural entity or physical cryptid out of hand, but the evidence is lacking.
https://www.livescience.com/14430-werewolf-disorder-gene-discovered-excess-hair.html
https://the-gist.org/2015/08/clinical-lycanthropy-where-psychiatry-and-mythology-collide/
 
I do not believe in people changing species, however , people are seeing these dog men worldwide at the moment. Dog man encounters radio on YouTube has 100s of testimonies.

People are seeing some kind of upright canine. Fascinating stuff.
 
I do not believe in people changing species, however , people are seeing these dog men worldwide at the moment. Dog man encounters radio on YouTube has 100s of testimonies.

People are seeing some kind of upright canine. Fascinating stuff.
Are you referring to werewolves or dog-headed men?
We have a separate thread for dog-headed men, if you're interested.
 
Spotted this on Reddit last night.
Guy driving at night in rural Wisconsin spots a large wolf to the right of the road. Got his mobile out to take a couple of photos of this rare sight, when the wolf (supposedly) went into a bipedal stance and walked like a human.
The consensus is that it's Photoshopped or a staged taxidermy mock-up. Still creepy though - especially the second photo, where the creature's arm bones can be seen:

 
Looks like there's something wrong with its forelimbs, which may explain why it's walking on its hind limbs.
They are kinda shrivelled up, perhaps with flesh missing.
 
Back
Top