296 – The Beast of Bray Road Returns: The 30th Anniversary with Linda Godfrey
"A certain number of people, good honest working folk, had seen something—something unusual. Something scary. Something hairy that relished pavement patty dinners!"
That was the caption underneath the cartoon of an upright wolf eating roadkill that ran in the December 29th, 1991 article of The Week, the local paper of the small Wisconsin city of Elkhorn. It was an article that they thought would be fun but forgotten soon after. Stories were spreading among the kids of the town that people seeing a huge dog or wolf on two legs along a rural road late at night. The original reporter, Linda Godfrey, had to fight to get the article published.
We’ve talked with Linda on the podcast many times, but on this special anniversary, Mike and his sister Allison bring Linda back to talk about how things have changed in the three decades since Linda broke the story.
It all started with a folder labeled “Werewolf”
Once Linda Godfrey went to the Walworth County Animal Control officer, he already had a stack of reported sightings and unusual occurrences and the manila folder was labeled “Werewolf”.
The sightings go back to 1936
Once Linda ran the story, people started contacting her about their own sightings. One man detailed his own father’s encounter not far from Bray Road with a strange creature decades before. A story he had only shared with family before. The monster that his father had seen had all the hallmarks of the Beast that people were seeing along Bray Road in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
It’s Not Just Upright Wolves or Canines
Linda has also discovered hundreds of sightings of big cats in Wisconsin, sightings that the Department of Natural Resources says are impossible. Those sightings have political implications so sometimes cryptozoology can bleed over into the world of state politics, land zoning, and animal control.
A never-before reported sighting
While driving home from Lake Geneva (where we have one of our most popular ghost tours!) a couple saw a puzzling creature in a cornfield in the middle of the day. Only after hearing about the Beast of Bray Road for the first time on TV a year later, did they realize that they had seen the same thing!
Listen to a special podcast episode featuring an interview with the original investigator and hear a firsthand never-before revealed encounter with the Beast of Bray Road…
