Monstrum Athenaeum Tearing open the cryptid world of werewolves, vampires & zombies.
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The farmlands of southern Wisconsin may seem like an ideal place to live and raise a family with rolling hills and woody outcrops surrounding dairy farms and small towns. However, there’s a dark legend looming over the town of Elkhorn, Wisconsin and its neighboring townships. A creature rumored to be half man and half wolf (a werewolf) has been roaming the countryside for several decades. It’s known as the Beast of Bray Road, Bray Road Beast for short, and has become one of the most popular urban legends of our time. But is it really just an urban legend? This is an individual account of one eyewitness who claims to have seen the elusive creature not once, not twice, but five times since 2002.
Don Young is a hunter and hunting guide who lives in southern Wisconsin. He claims to have seen the Beast of Bray Road more times than any other person; a record five encounters. During his most recent encounter, he said he spotted the creature through the scope of his hunting rifle in the summer of 2006 and claimed it was from six to seven feet in height, with black and brown fur. It was bulky with low hanging, muscular arms and its feet were very human-like. His description of the creature’s “black eyes” is also very similar to other reported sightings.
Mr. Young goes on to tell how he had the creature in his sights but that he couldn’t convince himself to pull the trigger, not knowing if the creature was real or just a man in a suit playing a joke. Had he pulled the trigger and it turned out to be a person, instead if the Beast, it could have been murder. Likewise, if it was a wolf or a bear, then it would have been poaching, as he didn’t have the proper licenses for hunting those animals at the time.
The next thing Mr. Young recalls is the creature made a twelve foot leap across a nearby ditch, before heading into the woods, disappearing from his view. In retrospect, by his own deduction of this encounter and based on his years in the field as a hunter and a guide, Mr. Young claims it couldn’t have been a man in a suit after all because it was too big and because a person can’t leap a ditch like that. He also believes it couldn’t have been a bear, although the build was similar, because bears also can’t leap any significant distance. Finally, he ruled out the possibility of the creature being a wolf because the creature didn’t remotely resemble the build of a wolf or dog.
Whatever it was that Don Young has encountered so many times in the woods of southern Wisconsin, he is but one of many living witnesses to the legend of the Beast of Bray Road. As logic and reason rest in his mind, Mr. Young has let the mystery of what the Beast really is live yet another day.
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