The Beast of Bray Road | Wisconsin's Spine-Tingling Cryptid

1936. Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Night watchman Mike Shackleman arrives at the Coletta School for Exceptional Children just before midnight. He drives the same route every night, and he knows the grounds like the back of his hand. The former Franciscan convent has several old buildings, an orchard, and a couple of wide open fields where Native American burial grounds have been preserved. Shackleton knows there isn't much to worry about. Usually no more than a few teenagers out having fun. Flashlight in hand, he crosses through a field, making his normal rounds. Suddenly, a shadow crosses. He squints to see who it is. A hunched form on all fours begins digging in a large mound. Even from across the field, he knows it's too big for a dog. The creature turns its head to look at Shackleman and stands up on its hind legs. Looking to be over 6ft tall with a shaggy canine face, but beneath the fur, the muscular body of a man. It lets out a low growl. The smell of rotting meat fills the air. Frightened, Shackleman takes a step back. The creature turns and disappears into the woods. The following night, Shackleman returns to find the creature digging in the same mound. This time, he stands his ground. The creature rises again, opening its mouth wide, exposing large fangs. The voice seems almost human. It almost speaks to him. The creature again turns and runs away. This memory will haunt Shackleman for the rest of his life. He isn't the only one. Those who travel the area know to stay alert because of the Beast of Bray Road.

Welcome to the no Such Thing as Ghost podcast. You just heard Andy in the intro talking about a monster in a cemetery.

The Beast of Bray Road.

Cool. If it's your first time listening, I'm a hardline skeptic. Andy, how would you best describe yourself?

You know, I believe that just outside the safety of your home, somewhere out in the darkness, something is lurking, waiting for the right opportunity. Oh, wait, no, I'm sorry. I got a little carried away, but it's spooky season now.

Oh, that's right, it is spooky season.

So we're gonna start off our spookier episodes.

Oh, so we're getting really dark?

Yeah, a little bit.

Oh, cool. I like it. Sounds like fun. Hopefully it is fun.

I'm sure you're gonna love every minute of it.

I'm sure I won't. All right, so go ahead and tell us about this beast.

So, the Beast of Bray Road. Let's start out with our location. Bray road is a 17 mile rural road. It's just outside of Elkhorn, Wisconsin. It's Surrounded mostly by farmland and trees, before the Beast became famous, it was rarely visited by non residents. Oakhorn sits about 40 miles southwest of Milwaukee with a population of 10,000 people, give or take. Named by Colonel Samuel Phoenix in 1836 after he found a rack of elkhorns in a tree.

Cool.

It is unusual because the elk in Wisconsin are normally found in the northern part and this is the southern part. So it was a weird thing. So it was like elkhorn.

Elkhorn.

That's what I said. We got it. Yeah.

All right, Cool.

All right, now before we move on to the Beast, there's one more person that we need to talk about, and that's Linda Godfrey. The late, great Linda Godfrey. She was an author. She wrote many books, appearing on many shows, discussing cryptids. She wrote the most prominent book on the beast of Bray Road in 1991. She was a reporter for the Walworth County Week, a weekly supplement for the Janesville Gazette. She was assigned to cover sightings of a wolf like creature near Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Okay, so that was her first introduction into this particular cryptid and I believe cryptids in general, this was her, her big interest.

So she, she reported on this sighting and then she just made it her thing?

Kind of, yeah.

Okay.

Her, her research was so popular that she completely stopped being a reporter and went full time into the strange and unusual.

Hey, make the money where you can, I guess.

Right? Yeah. She was one of the most well known. She passed in 2022. She would tour the country doing convent Hearst for reading the belief in the unbelievable.

Okay.

Most of what we'll be talking about today will come in part from her book, the Beast of Bray Road, tailing Wisconsin's Werewolf. So a lot of these stories were ones that she did direct interviews for or reported on originally in the paper and then transferred to her book. She will kind of go on to say that maybe she did a few too many, that maybe anything that came in that was even the slightest bit suspect, she was like, beast of Berry Road, that's gotta be one of the book. So even to her own admission, she.

Went a little overboard.

She got a little carried away in the excitement. Most of the sightings there was a big huge surge in the 90s, late 80s and through the 90s. They do continue on to this day. And as we heard in the intro, the first one that seemed similar was 1936.

Okay, and with the 1936. Are you going to talk more about the 1936 sighting?

So that was basically the whole story. It was passed down by his Son Linda had discussed it with him. I will send you a picture now of a sketch that was made by the account of Mr. Shackleman. So the typical description of the beast, it stands 6 to 7ft tall, covered in coarse gray or brown fur. Sometimes people will say it's a little bit darker, but that could be because it's seen at night a lot. It can walk upright on its hind legs like a human, or drop onto all fours and sprint like a dog. The head is said to resemble a wolf or a German shepherd, which that's.

Not what this picture's showing me.

This description is a compilation of all the sightings.

Okay.

Not just this picture. Pointed ears, sharp fangs. Its eyes shine orange, red or yellow in the dark. Very muscular, estimated to weigh between 4 and 700 pounds.

I was going to make that comment. This picture, he's got like, delts, like scenario going on. Some biceps, pretty elongated, like arms. And the face. Oh, boy. And we'll have this picture posted. The face is something.

Yeah. It doesn't really look like a dog. It has some human traits to it mixed with dog. Definitely not German shepherd in this drawing. This person.

Maybe it's a sketch. It's a sketch. It is what it is. Yeah.

Usually the witnesses will say it smells terrible. Again, the rotting meat smell from the opening story.

Well, I assumed the rotting meat smell might have been something to do. I thought maybe it was like grave digging and eating bodies.

Well, those were Native American burial grounds.

Oh.

And burial mounds in the Pacific. So if it was actually digging in that story, I don't think those would give off that smell.

Probably not.

That could have been. Maybe it was just sitting on the hill eating something else. Because as we'll see in some other stories, it does like to feed, eat livestock and wild animals. It could have just happened to stop on the mound.

Coyote behavior.

And as you like to point out, Native American burial grounds and the such are.

Man, does the paranormal love that.

They. They like to connect it. So that could have been an after.

Just to give it some time.

Just so happened to be there. Did it have a connection to that?

We love to throw out Native American burial grounds and Native American stuff because it gives it some kind of North American history to it. It's ancient stuff.

When we talk about what this thing could be, I'm sure that will probably come up again.

Great. I look forward to it.

The first modern sightings came in the fall of 1989 by Laura Andrizi. She was driving home from work. She was a manager at the jury Room, which was a lounge in Elkhorn. She heads down Bray Road. Off to the side, she sees a massive creature with its back turned. So she slows to get a better look. It was kneeling. Its elbows were up, its claws facing out. It had very long claws.

So kind of out, like in a. I'm gonna get you, like.

No, because it was kneeling, facing away from her. Okay.

So the claws are out.

Claws. It was sitting, like, hunched over, I guess, with its, like. What would you would say, your hands facing, like, outward, like. Yeah, in a kneeling position.

Okay.

A kind of awkward position. It was holding something. So it had. It was like balancing something in its claws in its hands. And it was possibly roadkill, she says. She notes that unlike most animals that would run when the headlights hit it, this creature turned and stared at her. So she became terrified and just sped off, hurried home. That's the first one that Linda came to town to report on. That was one of the articles she wrote. Two years later, Doris Gibson is driving down Bray Road on Halloween night. It was very foggy out, and she hit something. So she stopped after about 50ft and gets out to assess the damage. She looks around the road and can't find anything. There's nothing behind her car, nothing laying on the side of the road. So she heads back to her car. Just as she gets to the back of the car, she hears something running out of the woods. And quote, here comes this thing, and it's running at me. It was no dog. It was bigger than me. I've never seen a human run like that. And my uncle was a track star.

All right, so she knows about running.

She knows about running.

Here's. I have a question. So is she saying that she hit this she creature.

She felt like she hit something. Like there was a.

Would it not do? I would think that this. How much did it weigh again?

400 To 700 pounds.

400 To 700 pounds. She did. And her car is demolished.

Yeah. If you hit a deer, it's.

It ruins your car.

So I. I think by the description, she ran over something, so I don't. I would assume it wasn't.

It was like a beast.

It could have been something maybe that.

Was coming, was running out of the woods to go. Ooh, yeah. Sweet, fresh possum.

Yeah.

Not necessarily at her.

It was probably spot. It's probably had already spotted the possum.

Yeah.

And then she did the dirty work for it. And it was just coming to collect.

Yeah.

And it did run towards her.

She got out of her car. The beast Was afraid that she was going to scoop up the possum because.

You never know, she might be looking for some sweet roadkill.

Yeah. And then he was like, no, I'm going to get to that first.

Yeah.

And she misinterpret that as her being attacked.

Correct. Okay, well, possibility. I'm not saying. Correct.

Correct.

She quickly jumps into her car and puts the pedal to the floor. At the same moment, the creature catches up and leaps on her trunk.

Why she did take the possum. And he was unhappy.

There is no evidence in the details of the story that says whether or not there was a possum or whether or not she took the possum.

The alleged possum was in her trunk. Allegedly. And the beast was allegedly mad that she took the alleged possum.

Allegedly.

Allegedly.

And then it allegedly slid right off of the trunk.

Okay.

She would say that she would have been dinner if the beast had caught her.

It doesn't sound like the beast's M.O. Though.

Well, she thought that. And I would agree. None of the stories that I've told show any evidence of the beast actually being aggressive. Aggressive towards people. In fact, the opening story runs off into the woods. The first one is just sitting there chomping on some.

I have a real problem with these monster things because I want these monsters to be aggressive towards people. I want these monsters to be eating people. Why am I worried about a monster doesn't eat me? I'd rather have this monster be like, oh my God, this. This monster is actually after me. But this. These monsters always seem to be worried about something else. Not so much about the people either. Messing with them, like hellhounds and stuff like that. They're just messing with people. Skinwalkers or just eating livestock. They're not really doing anything. Why are we so worried about these monster sightings? And they really don't pose any threats to humans.

I mean, maybe you're kind of on the right track. Maybe we shouldn't be so terrified. Maybe we should just be more inclusive of things we don't know about.

But it always. But I think it's gonna be a. We're at spooky time and I think we're going to have a man eating monster, a man eating werewolf monster thing.

At the beginning of spooky time.

This thing is feasting on carrion. He's eating roadkill. He's not doing anything. I thought he was going to be wiping out a whole village full of people. That's what I want.

Well, maybe we'll get to that point. Okay, I don't think we'll still early in spooky season. There could be more. All right. I could tell you a story next time of an entire town being decimated by some creature.

You won't, though, because I would have heard about it.

Or would you? Maybe the government would have covered it up.

Oh, God. Okay. Yeah, you're right.

Anyway, so she thought she was getting eaten alive. That's the point of that. Later, Gibson picks up a friend from a party. She's on her way home, and the friend screams, look at that thing. Gibson isn't stopping this time. She just speeds off.

So she said, multiple encounters with this.

In the same night, in the same.

Night with this monster. This monster is like, tail on her.

He was just sitting there waiting.

He's like, the possum is in that trunk. That monster wants the possum.

So you're saying he wasn't waiting on the road. He followed her home. Couldn't get in the trunk. She came back out because she knew she had to go pick up her friend. Scared the beast off because he was digging in her trunk. And then when she got in the car, he was like, well, where are you going? And so he chased her down the road.

Correct.

And then she picked up her friend from the party.

Yep.

And he was. You know, it was a car. So he was like, well, I'm not chasing that thing all the way down there to the party. There's people there. I don't like people.

No. Doesn't want to eat them.

So, yeah, he's not hungry for people. He's hungry for possum.

For possum.

And so he waits there. All of a sudden, he gets a big whiff of possum again. Here comes. Here comes old Miss Gibson with a car and his possum.

With his possum.

And her friend is like, look at that thing. And he's.

And he's like, probably shed a tear. He's like, excuse me. That's all awful judgmental. She stole my possum.

And you're gonna be calling this fella who was sitting here hungry on the side of the road.

That's terrible. The other thing is, it's like, I have a possum in my trunk. That's how I attract the beast of Bray Road. Same way as if I am meeting a dog. And it's like, oh, I want this dog to be friendly with me. I've got a pocket full of bacon. That's. You're doing the same thing.

You're attracting you're attracting it with your possum trunk.

Yeah. So, I mean, I feel bad for the beast of Bray Road.

Every story we've talked about, there's been all roadkill or other animals, no people. Okay, so you're correct.

Yeah, I don't. I don't see the harm in this guy. He might look a little bit. He's a big. He's intimidating, he's hairy, he resembles a werewolf. Doesn't seem that bad to me so far. He's most. He's kind of doing like. He's cleaning up the streets, man. He's taking care of all the roadkill.

Yeah, seems like a good guy.

He's doing a service.

So you've mentioned werewolves. That's one possibility that people think this thing could be by the description, of course. Another popular North American legend is the Dogman.

Oh, okay.

There's legends of dogmen all over the country. The Michigan Dogman, Dog man.

There's lots of dog men everywhere.

I mean, there's been everywhere. In Frenchtown, Ohio, they have a dogman legend. Here in Kentucky, we have the land between the lakes, which has a dogman legend.

Oh, okay.

So they're typically described in the same way. They're larger than a dog or a wolf. They're able to walk on two legs. They're muscular, very muscular. So muscular from all that.

Why are all these creepers? I mean, you know, we talked about the Hopkinsville goblin. They were all. They had to find pecks. Why are all these monsters so fit? What's their secret?

I guess because they're not allowed into society because everybody's scared of them. So they're just. They got time. They have time on their hands to work out some. Only work upper body. These dog men are pretty fast. Apparently so. Now more widespread through history, of course, is the werewolf. The werewolf has.

Through history. Do we mean like okay, through world.

History, through stories and it's still history.

I agree. Okay. I just wanted to make sure we weren't misrepresenting it as like historical fact. But that's fine. Go ahead.

These are. It's factual that these things were written down. That's all I'm saying.

Okay, that's great. That's fine. I can accept that.

The first of appearance of a human turning into a wolf was from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian text. The goddess Ishtar turns her ex into a wolf and he's doomed to live in that form forever. In Greek mythology, King. In Greek mythology, King Lycaon Lycaon who served Zeus. Human flesh was punished, and you guessed it, by being turned into a wolf.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lycanthropy comes from the Greek words for wolf, Leo and man. Anthropos, used by ancient physicians to describe a mental illness when people believed they were wolves. Right now, 200 years before we had the Salem Witch Trials, men and women in Europe were being convicted of transforming into wolves and mutilating and eating people.

Right. See, now we're talking.

And we've all seen movies and read books, so you know the rest of the tale. You gotta have silver bullets. They turn on a full moon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And sometimes it's just, you know, a really hairy grandma in the woods. Let's move back to more actual beast of Bray Road sightings in March of 1990. Dairy farmer Mike Etten reports a dog like beasts sitting like a raccoon near the intersection of Bray Road and Hospital Road.

Sitting like a raccoon.

So I guess squatted down. Okay, could have been just like a dog.

But a raccoon.

But a raccoon. He specifically says it was sitting like a raccoon. He says it's much larger than the average dog and it used its front paws to hold on to whatever it was eating.

Wait a second. Much larger than an average dog? It's very much large. It's a seven foot tall monster dog.

He didn't specify how big he thought it was. He just said it was bigger than the average dog.

Smarter than the average bear.

I mean, that too, apparently.

All right, let's go.

It used its front paws to hold on to whatever it was eating. Eden did admit he had been drinking before the incident.

Yeah, yeah, listen, I was toasted, man,.

Just so you guys know. But he knows what he saw.

He knows what he saw.

When he walked by, the creature looked up and he saw a thick, wide snout, shorter than a normal dog's muzzle.

Wait, isn't now the. Now the description's changed altogether, it sounds like a bear.

Well, maybe it's in between something.

Oh, okay, go ahead.

I mean, I don't know. I'm just going by what he said.

Okay, good.

Shorter than the normal dog's muzzle. And it had thick dark hair covering its legs. So that's the end of Mike Eddins sighting.

That's it. Okay, great.

Just another.

Didn't rush him, didn't try to take his possum.

He didn't carry a possum. It already had some. Some kind of thing eating it.

I just assumed everybody was carrying possums with them, either in their trunks or on their backs.

Is that something that happened? I thought everybody in Wisconsin just carried cheese.

I don't know anything about this place.

Well, I don't. Then we'll fast forward to Christmas of 1990, where 11 year old Heather Bowen was walking with some friends on Loveland about a mile and a half southeast of the intersection of Bray and Hospital Road. So same area as the most recent story. They spotted what they thought was a large dog walking by the creek over in a cornfield. The kids excitedly turned and started to call the dog, as you should, bipedal dog. Well, it wasn't bipedal at this moment. At this moment.

Okay.

Because then the creature raises up and start stumbling around on its hind legs. They said it walked awkwardly. It rose up and it apparently it took some time. It couldn't walk as well on the tine legs. It was stumbling around in the creek. Naturally, the girls are now frightened and they take off towards Bolin's home about 250 yards away. The creature drops back to all fours and gives chase. When they reach the porch, they turned and the creature disappeared. So this account, they're not carrying any.

Possums that we know of, but they did call it.

So maybe it wasn't chasing out of hunger, maybe it just wanted to play ball.

Yeah, maybe it was responding. The fact that you were like, come here, come here, boy, come here.

And it's like, hey, what are you guys doing? We getting possum and it come here.

You do that to a dog creature, guess what's going to happen?

Instincts are kicking in.

The dog brain takes over.

So that one's a little bit different that they weren't driving down the road with possum in their trunk. So I don't know, maybe.

I think, I think all these people are just equipped with possums. I think possums are a passive, a passive buff for all the people here in this town.

We're going to have to, you know, get on the ground and ask some.

Questions Again, like, like to your point, if you call a dog man like a dog, would it respond like a dog or like a man? Like, excuse me, that's very condescending for you to whistle at me and come say come here boy. Or is my dog brain taking over? And I'm gonna go, oh,.

You're saying it could be one of two things. Either instincts kicked in and the dog instincts in particular. And it was like, oh, I heard whistling, I gotta run, I gotta run. And the other hand, it could be the dog man and his man instincts kick in and he's like, why are you talking to me like a dog? I am also a man. I'm a dog and a man.

I deserve respect.

You could at least call me Mr. Dog man something, you know, you, you're just a bunch of kids.

Yeah, but I'm meddling kids disrespecting me. Yeah, like that's ridiculous. Where's your parents at? Maybe he was coming up to go take him by the ear.

He's going to go tell him and.

Take him to the parents house and be like, can you believe these kids.

Were just wandering down Bray Road all by themselves? Yeah, where's the parental guidance?

Exactly.

I mean, it was 1990. There was no parental guidance then. Well, well, there wasn't for me.

Well, you are a juvenile delinquent, so it doesn't matter.

I was just running around calling dogs over in the cornfield, carrying my possum. Yeah, no, I didn't do any of that.

Told you.

Anyway, sightings persist off and on through the years. So 2017, skipping even further ahead, we have some evidence now of what could be the creature.

Great.

And Lee Hamper, a retired high school teacher, moves from Illinois to Elkhorn. He'd heard of the rumors when he bought his 8 acre hay farm, but he was skeptical of it. He didn't believe any of this Dogman nonsense. But after living there for a little while, he's cleaning up roadkill down Bray Road. As one does, apparently everybody does. But this time he found a raccoon and he drops this raccoon in a hole on the edge of his property. He's clearing it off the road, moving it into the hole.

The hole?

Yeah. Didn't bury it or nothing, just put it in the hole.

Put it in a hole.

Comes back a couple days later, it's gone. No, he finds the raccoon. Oh, it's cut open from neck to abdomen.

Okay.

Out of the hole. Now it's been moved. It's moved out of the hole and it's been cut.

Okay.

And so he's like, that's kind of weird. So he puts more roadkill in the same hole for fun.

Just experiments.

Experiments? Yeah, the logical mind. You keep putting more roadkill in the hole and see what happens. Same thing keeps happening. Roadkills out of the hole, cut open. Okay. So now he decides he's gonna set up some cameras and he gets a deer this time. At the same time, he also reports seeing strange objects and lights in the sky over his farm.

Oh, here we go.

Don't know if that's connected. No idea.

Okay.

The deer completely disappears. Wait, there's no trace of the deer.

Now it's not a deer. That's outside of the hole that's cut from.

Nope, nope. This time it's completely different. So he goes and he checks the cameras. The deer is seen there. Suddenly, a dark mist covers the screen. And nearby, he finds a set of tracks, which he does take a cast of. I'm going to send you a picture of the trail cam and the cast that he took.

Oh, yes, please. I can't believe the M.O. Changed so much.

You're going to have to zoom now.

All of a sudden, there's lights in the sky. A mist has come across it to disguise its whereabouts. And we have footprints. None of these things existed before.

There is actual other reports of trail cam footage where a mist just comes in. And there are reports of pictures of people taking in the woods thinking they saw a Bigfoot. When they look at the pictures, it's just a dark mist. There is other.

I'm looking at the pictures. I have a big problem with the trail cam pictures. Why did this idiot. That can't work. I don't know how computers work. Sets up a trail cam and then takes a picture of his computer monitor as proof.

Well, I mean, you can see a dark mist on it.

That could be. It looks like bad Photoshop or it looks like something smeared on it. I don't see it in motion. I don't see before, I don't see after. I see a photograph printed out of somebody's picture in a book. Like, it doesn't. This is stupid. I don't see the mist moving. The two frames that I can see look exactly the same, and they're two seconds apart. And I can't see any discernible difference between the two images. If this is some kind of moving mistake, this. That is dumb and done on purpose. And now we have pictures of footprints here. What's the first footprint here?

The first one. The first one is a wolf.

The first one's a wolf.

And the second one is the cast that he took. So it is smaller than the wolf print.

Yeah, that's dumb. And I have nothing, scale or reference. There's not a ruler next to it. I have no idea about its scale.

So that's useless.

Great. What's next?

So, I mean, basically, I was going to talk about. There is a history of the mist being involved with cryptids.

All right, go ahead.

Not only in recent lore, but if you look back in mythology. Okay, so the white weaving are spirits of women from Dutch folklore. They're ambiguous depending on where you go. They're believed to either be elves or fairies. Ghost switches with women of the swamp, but they also appear in a mist.

What does that mean?

I'm just giving you a.

You're talking about something completely different. You're talking about other elements of mist. I see mist all the time. I see fog.

But does it come up when you're trying to see what happened to your deer that you laid out?

It doesn't happen to that person either. The guy took a picture. He took a picture, printed it out, put it in a notebook, and then that's all he provided with anybody. There's two seconds difference. The mist doesn't appear to move. I can't tell because it's a picture of someone's notebook where they print out a piece. They couldn't even provide you with the original picture.

Well, I didn't ask him for the original picture. We can go ask him.

Oh, let's ask him. And let's see who provides it. I want the video. Show me the video. Don't give me still photographs. What are we doing?

Well, we're like eight months into our show, so, you know, maybe when we get a little bit bigger, I can get to.

No, here's my thing.

We're trying to. I can only dig up what.

Yeah, there's been other situations of scary things that produce mist. That doesn't mean anything to me. I'm talking about a werewolf slash dogman slash whatever stupid other thing that we're going to label it as. And. And it had an mo. Nobody else saw any mist. Now all of a sudden, this jabroni. Well, nobody else saw mist.

Took a video of it eating roadkill.

Neither did he.

He did.

There's no video.

Well, there is a video.

I'm sure there's. If there is, I didn't see it.

And the other thing is, he printed.

Out pictures and put them in a notebook like a jabroni. That is nothing. He could have provided the video to the Internet. No, instead he took a pic. He took the video, took a screen from it, printed it out, put it in a notebook like he's scrapbooking, and then took a picture of his scrapbook and then posted this. What are we doing?

That's just the picture that I have of it.

That's great. Well, if there's another picture, if there's the actual video available, somebody please provide it, and I guarantee it's Some kind of smudge on a lens or a grasshopper sitting on it. Other thing is, he put it. It was broad daylight.

It was very bright.

Very bright. Very bright image. That's the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my entire life. Then he took a picture. I have no reference of his land or the area. There's a picture of a wolf print, and there's a picture of some kind of other print in some kind of dried mud situation. I have no idea what any of this stuff looks like. There's no scale to it. There's no measurement of it. There's nothing.

I mean, it's compared to a wol,.

But I don't know the scale. I can zoom in and go, look how much bigger it is, the wolf print. Look how smaller it is than this. It doesn't make any sense. There's no measurement of it.

I understand that. I thought it was weird that it was smaller because it's supposed to be bigger than a wolf.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. There's no. There's no scale reference. You'd have to put a measurement to it to tell me exactly what the size was. So that's dumb. I don't know why this werewolf dog man's MO is completely changed, because now he does not. He's. He's still eating the roadkill, but now he produces a magical mist that Andy has told me goes back to some place again.

You don't.

You.

You don't know that he wasn't turning into a mist. You don't know that the mist has anything to do with it. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with it. Why are we. Maybe this guy, this. Because it was part of his story.

All right, great.

Just like I put in that he saw lights in the sky. Nobody else saw lights in the sky.

I don't like that.

Did they just not see them or were they not there?

I don't like the idea of going, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Because it's. Everything is. So we include everything because there's a giant grab bag of garbage and we can put it all together and we can act like it belongs together. And we're gonna find a way to make it fit somehow, some way. Let's just make up enough stuff and bring up enough another other, you know, enough other stories that have existed way before this and children's tales and nonsense. And then we're going to put it all together to make us feel better about this actual nonsense existing. This is just A giant waste of everybody's time.

So what exactly do you think it is then?

I think it's nothing.

So you don't think it's a werewolf?

No, because I don't think I know that werewolves don't exist.

And you don't think it's a Dogman?

I don't know what a Dogman is, but I can guarantee it doesn't exist.

I mean, it's pretty self explanatory.

It's a dog, man.

It's a dog.

I know men exist. Not together. It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Fido.

Okay, I don't think that's how I remembered that phrase, but it's how it goes. It sounds pretty good though. Yeah, and I mean really just, you know, blows the Dogman theory right out of the water.

I mean, I nailed it, right?

Took one time because now it couldn't even be like a possibility. It's traveling through dimensions.

Oh my. Why? Why? What's with the community? The paranormal community? It's like. Okay, here's the reason you don't see these creatures.

Could that be what the mist is?

They don't always. They don't always exist in our reality at all times. That's how we can make it. So it seems like that's why you. That's why you don't see it, is because they're able to dimension hop. Because that makes the most sense. There's a big dog thing that can manipulate. Maybe it's interdimensional. Tramp.

Tramp's not doing it on purpose. Maybe it's just accidentally slimming through the wormhole and accidentally coming out on Bray Road.

I don't slip through wormholes.

Well, lucky you.

I can't accidentally slip through. Why is this creature able to do it?

Maybe it's being manipulated by whatever was in the lights in the sky. Maybe it was bringing it through.

It's just all this stuff with little.

Misty magic all the time.

This stuff is. It's so predictable. How do we in our pseudo scientific, nonsensical, not operating in reality way? How do we make this so that we can still keep believing in this dumb stuff? Oh, I got an idea. Let's make up more nonsense. Oh, that didn't work out. Let's make up more nonsense. That doesn't explain this. Oh, let's make up more nonsense. Let's just keep making up nonsense until we can fool ourselves into believing that magical realities exist. I don't want to operate in the real world. I want to live in fairytown and then I want to have magic and giant mushrooms to bounce off of. And then it rains candy and boo ba dooba dooba dooba. Operate in reality, people. Let's be normal humans.

I've never heard of it raining candy. I've heard of meat showers. There's never, never candy ring.

I'm just saying, I've said it before. I can say whatever I want to. And I can explain. I can in the most baby brained way, explain myself out of some nonsense and just go, this is why. This is why. This is why. Always pointing to the next thing. It's not how science works.

You go, hey, what if this thing that I don't know about, what if I could prove it in a way? I don't know how that way is now, but I'm going to do experiments and figure it out.

That's not the way that works. There's no experiments here. It's everybody else making up another story.

There's somebody should be doing an experiment and finding out how the mist fits in and how the dog and the man became one and why it likes possum so much.

Wasting our time. It's like talking to a flat Earther. And you show them all the math, you show them everything else, and they don't like it and they hate it and they go, well, there must be something wrong. Like, that's not why. That's because of this. Like, what are we doing? We'll never get to the bottom of anything because everybody wants to make something up because they want to live in la la land. All right, I'm done.

Well, what about.

No, no, don't look at me like that when you're, when you're saying that.

I was gonna say, what if it was a bear with mange?

Oh, that's fine. But again, I'm. There's bears in that area.

Yeah, Especially they're not as common in that particular area.

Yeah.

So if a bear wandered in and it was a little mangy, it is.

Weird that a bear would hop onto the back of a car.

Maybe it was just very sick and scared. I don't know.

Well, if a bear is scared of something, it's like, oh, my God, well, let me run toward the scary thing. Can hop on it.

I mean, a bear's bigger than me, so it'd be more likely the bear would run at something.

I get it.

But it was because it being scared was not like, oh, that thing can kill me. It was just a little person.

I mean, a bear with mange is a Thing. But I mean, here's the biggest thing is like, why are we worrying about. We do want to worry about. Maybe it could have been this. We also need to worry about the mental state of the people seeing these things.

So also, my last suggestion. What if it was just a larger wolf? What if it was a large dog? What if someone saw on the side of the road and fear kicked in?

Here's my favorite thing. And I think I.

And then one thing led to another and multiple people saw it. And then they were like, oh, remember in 1936 when this guy saw it? And that's.

That's fine, I guess, but that's still not the point. Here's the biggest thing. When it comes to all this stuff, they're full of it. That's what most of all these things are. Sometimes you misidentify. Maybe you misidentify something, right? And you're like, whoa, that looks weird. I don't like that. That's scary. I'm gonna get out of here. But I think for the most part, it's just nonsense. Somebody. Most these people are just full of it. I think that's really what it is. Again, I think some of the times it's in good fun, right? You have these cryptids. They're all over the place, and you're getting in all the action. But sometimes it's okay to look at somebody and go, nope, you're lying. There's plenty of people I can look at and just use normal, everyday human, like, interaction, like social skills to go, oh, that person's full of it. Why does the paranormal community lack the ability, lack the social skills and be able to read social cues to go, oh, that person's lying. Everybody in the paranormal community goes, yep, yep. And they accept everything at face value.

That's not true.

It's like dealing with toddlers.

You're doing exactly the opposite. I gave you multiple things that it could be. And even when I gave you reasonable things, great. You were like, no, there was nothing there.

But here's the biggest thing is, like,.

Sometimes they saw something.

No, they didn't. And I hate that phrase. Do not. Do not put that. We're never putting that on a T shirt.

There were multiple reports of something.

There's always multiple reports of something. Every story goes like this, and sometimes there's nothing. And most of the time, I would venture to say it's nothing. And no one saw anything. Anything.

And so they. Absolutely. There was definitely not a bear with mane.

There might have been a bear with mane.

No you said no. You said no. There was nothing. You're telling everybody as we get into the spooky time of the year, there's nothing to worry about. You can just go on your merry way. Mind your business.

You wander into the woods, yes, you're.

Fine with nothing to worry about just because you saw something growling at you over there. Don't worry about it. It's nothing.

I'm not talking about normal woods stuff. I'm talking about a gosh darn werewolf dogman.

Just because you're walking down a busy street in a big city and you hear loud noises off in an alley, don't worry about it. It's nothing.

That is completely and utterly different.

There's self preservation, kind of what you just said. There's nothing to worry about. Just live your lives, be happy.

You know what?

There's nothing out there whatsoever.

You're also a stupid person. All right, what else we got?

I mean, you can tell them how to get ahold of us if you want to.

I don't want to do that. You do that.

No, you do it.

All right. You can find us on Instagram, no such thing as Ghost Pod. We do some shorts and everything else. Same as TikTok, which is no such thing as ghosts. You can go to Facebook, which is no such thing as ghosts. Go to our website, which is no such thing as ghost show. On there, you can listen to the episodes. You can, you know, give my email. You click the mic, leave us a voicemail. So we can talk about your story if you would like. Right. I mean, I just sat here and complained about all these other stories I've heard, and I will do the same with your story. And that's just the name. That's just the name of the game. It's the way it's going to go. Andy's going to be all in it and I'm going to go.

Well, that's probably. You're going to have to accept that, just like I do. I put up with it every week.

And to be honest, as frustrating as I seem, it's all pretty much in good fun. But it's.

It's fine.

But, yeah, you can find us on, you know, Apple and all that stuff. Spotify, make sure you leave a rating review. That'd be great. We would appreciate the five stars. And what else do we forget?

I don't think anything.

All right, well, see you next time. It.