The Beast of Bray Road: the Elkhorn werewolf sightings, Wisconsin (1989 to 1991)

Bray Road runs through farmland outside Elkhorn, in Walworth County, Wisconsin. Atlas Obscura calls it a simple mile-long stretch that connects Highway 11 with County Road NN. Quiet. Rural. An unlikely home for a werewolf.

Fall 1989. Lorianne Endrizzi, a manager at The Jury Room lounge in Elkhorn, was driving home from work at about 1:30 a.m. On the curve just before the Bray farm, she saw something at the side of the road. "As I came up to it in my car its back was to me," she said. "It was kneeling!"

It was about the size of an average man, five-foot-seven maybe, about 150 pounds. It held the thing it was eating palms up, with real long claws and pointed ears. Its eyes seemed to glow. Endrizzi herself thought that was probably her headlights. She later said a werewolf picture in a library book was "exactly what I saw."

October 31, 1991. Doristine Gipson was driving down Bray Road. It was kind of smoggy out. Suddenly her front tire lifted off the ground. There was nothing on the road, no blood or anything.

She walked to the end of the car. "Here comes this thing, and it's just running up at me!" It was big and hairy, brown with long straight hairs, and it seemed to run on two legs, its chest pulsating as it came toward her. She got back in the car. By then the thing had grabbed hold of it.

It left vertical scratch marks on her trunk. Around 9 p.m., on the way back with an 11-year-old girl she had picked up from trick-or-treating, Gipson saw it again. Kneeling down. Eating or something. "Look at that THING!" the girl said.

December 29, 1991. Linda Godfrey published the accounts in The Week, a weekly supplement to The Janesville Gazette, under the false names "Barbara" and "Pat". She also included Heather Bowey, who had seen the creature about two years earlier while playing with a friend. Walworth County humane officer Jon Fredrickson turned out to have his own file, labelled "Werewolf", with six or seven reported sightings. "The county is getting stranger," he said.

In 1992 the story went national. TV crews came to Delavan to interview Godfrey. The National Enquirer paid her and photographer Terry Mayer to stake out Bray Road. Elkhorn's Christmas parade had a Beast float.

Fredrickson thought the beast was a coyote or even a wolf. "Sometimes when a wolf or coyote is ready to pounce on an animal, it'll actually spring up, which gives the illusion that it's standing." Others suggest a gray wolf, a Great Pyrenees or Newfoundland dog, or a black bear with mange standing upright. Writing at Tetrapod Zoology, Darren Naish notes there are no bones or other remains, and no worthwhile photographic evidence. He sees a snowball effect of local tall tales, Halloween pranks and possibly some real animal sightings. No hoaxer has ever been identified.

The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin's Werewolf appeared in 2003, followed by Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America. The Asylum made a feature film in 2005, and Small Town Monsters released the documentary The Bray Road Beast in 2018. Television followed, from MonsterQuest to Lost Tapes. Godfrey died on 27 November 2022, aged 71. The legend she launched now sits beside tales like the Michigan Dogman.