The Beast of Bray Road

Real, carefully documented sightings; no physical evidence

Bray Road is a two-mile stretch of country road just outside Elkhorn, in Walworth County, Wisconsin, a tame landscape of subdivisions and cornfields. In the cold winter of 1991 Linda Godfrey, a writer and illustrator at the county weekly The Week, a supplement to the Janesville Gazette, got a tip that people around Elkhorn were seeing something on Bray Road that reminded them of a werewolf. She checked it out, just for fun, and found that a lot of people were talking, and that the county animal control officer kept a file folder marked "werewolf." That made it news. She expected it to cause a few chuckles; within two weeks it was national news, and television vans were rolling through Elkhorn.

The witnesses described an animal six or seven feet tall, built something like a man, covered in fur, with a wolf's head and glowing red or orange eyes, sometimes running on all fours and sometimes upright. One woman said she hit something crossing Bray Road, got out to look, and was chased back into her car by a large wolf-like creature that left claw marks on her rear door. Others saw it in daylight loping through the cornfields, once after a deer, or crouched by the roadside eating roadkill before it ran into the woods. Some traced the story back to 1936, when a night watchman at St. Coletta School in rural Jefferson said he saw it two nights running, digging at a burial mound on the grounds.

Godfrey began a skeptic and came to believe in the sincerity of many witnesses, though never that she knew what they had seen. Her articles became The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin's Werewolf in 2003, and she became, in her own words, the accidental werewolf chronicler, the person reports were sent to from around the world. She preferred the word manwolf, since no one claimed to see a person change under a full moon. Her last documented Elkhorn case came in October 2008, when a couple saw it run in front of their car on Bray Road and jump a guardrail. She wrote more than 20 books before her death in Janesville in November 2022, at 71.

Skeptics point to misidentified animals: a gray wolf, which occasionally wanders into Walworth County, a big dog such as a Great Pyrenees, or a black bear suffering from mange, and bears too have been seen in the county. The beast has had a 2005 horror film, a 2018 documentary and a string of television episodes, and around Halloween Elkhorn still talks about it.