Four Dogman Reports From Linda Godfrey's 2016 Files: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Duluth

Between September and November 2016, researcher Linda Godfrey posted three new witness reports on her blog, and a book of hers came out. They do not share a place or a body plan. What they share is a source: each rests on the witness and on Godfrey alone, with no second investigator, no lab and no clear image of an animal. Here is what each says, and what it leaves open.

Eastern Pennsylvania: a four-year "habituation" (September 10 and 15)

In two posts on September 10 and September 15, Godfrey describes a woman she calls "Jessie," from the eastern part of the state, who asked for complete anonymity.

Jessie's account starts at a woods trailhead at sunrise in October 2013. She says she smelled something rotten, heard shuffling beside what looked like a road-killed deer, and saw "a VERY large…thing…on two legs" dragging the carcass with its claws. In her words it was brown and gray, with "blazing yellow eyes" and a snout "somewhat like a husky or German shepherd," and she, at five feet one, estimated it at close to seven feet. She says it half-lunged at her car as she fled and scratched the paint and rear window.

The later events, she wrote, centered on her home. In 2015 she reported deep prints about four inches wide in mulch, scratches on siding and a glowing-eyed figure at her window that fled "on two legs" and "leapt our fence." She also reported a hard impact on a back door at about 2 a.m. on July 14, 2015, and a phone recording of a howl. In August 2016, a visiting friend glimpsed what Jessie quotes her as calling "a furry outline" in the tree line at midday: "She didn't see its face."

The witness says she does special-effects makeup work and so can tell an animal from a suit; her husband, Godfrey notes, never saw the creature. She reasons that because "two people saw it at the same time," the August glimpse "is not a hallucination." That is her inference; a shadowed outline at the edge of a tree line does not identify anything. Godfrey herself calls it "a case in progress."

Southeastern Wisconsin: two trail-camera captures (October 26)

Godfrey's October 26 post adds a postscript to a hayfield that features in her new book. The landowner appears in print under the pseudonym "Roy Smith," and Godfrey says he has since chosen to be named; this article keeps the book's name.

She says one of his trail cameras photographed a black figure against the green field on April 29, 2015. At first, she writes, "we thought it was a blackbird or crow." Zoomed in, it looked like "the head, back and arm of some large animal presumably crouched in the hay," with two further partial frames, within one second, showing very fast movement left to right. By comparing the spot with background trees, she concluded it was "at least as big as me" (she is five feet one) and far bigger than a bird.

A similar image followed in early May 2016, she says: black, furry, in a kneeling position, with a shadow around it, moving in the same direction. Posed against the 6-foot-3 owner, she reports, it appeared nearly his height "but only half as wide." Smith had been finding deer carcasses with "oddly munched and crunched areas" near the tree line.

Nothing in the post identifies the figure. It is a pair of trail-camera frames, one source's measurement by eye, and a hypothesis. A crouching person is not excluded by what is published.

Duluth, Minnesota: Monday, November 7 (November 22)

The most specific timing is in the Duluth report. The witness, a 41-year-old graphic designer and wildlife artist, told Godfrey that she was driving Maple Grove Road on the edge of town that evening when something crossed in front of her, right to left, into a field with an old barn. She wrote that the sky was cloudy and the moon "47% full." (The U.S. Naval Observatory's table puts the moon at roughly half illuminated in Duluth that day, a waxing crescent.)

She estimated the animal at about seven feet, "not on hind legs," with a "wolf/dog-like" face, a longer snout, small high-set pointed ears, an angled back and front legs longer than the rear, "almost with an injured type stride." Its eyes, she says, looked orange. She saw the headlights of a far vehicle "between the moving legs." She ruled out deer, moose and bear from her own sketches, was frightened enough to wait in a lit gas station, and calls it "the Bray Road Creature."

Godfrey notes the obvious gap: a seven-foot animal on all fours would be taller still upright, but "we can't be sure" it was bipedal, which is the defining mark of a dogman. She adds that the dread the woman describes is common in her files, and that barns often appear in reports.

The book

On October 11, 2016, Penguin Random House's TarcherPerigee published Godfrey's Monsters Among Us, which the publisher describes as covering "wolfmen who walk on two legs," a Los Angeles "lizard people" chapter and "first-hand testimony of a terrifying transformation from woman to beast." Godfrey says the Wisconsin field appears throughout it.

What ties them

All three accounts describe a large canine form near a place of human routine: a trailhead and a back yard, a field, a roadside. All have the same documentation: an interview-style email, a hand drawing, and no physical sample. All come through one researcher, who is also the author of the book. That is not a criticism, only the chain. Readers who want to explore the type can start with the site's Pennsylvania Dogman Surfaces Again in 2015.

Bottom line

Per Linda Godfrey's blog, a Pennsylvania woman reports repeated encounters since 2013; a Wisconsin landowner's cameras captured two dark crouching figures in 2015 and 2016; and a Duluth driver reports a seven-foot, wolf-faced animal crossing a road on November 7, 2016. Each is single-source. The only photographs of a figure itself are the Wisconsin trail-camera frames, which show a dark shape that no one has identified.

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Attribution / source table

• Claim: Pennsylvania: October 2013 trailhead account; 2015 events; August 2016 glimpse; Godfrey's reasoning
  Attribution: Linda Godfrey blog, Sep 10 and Sep 15, 2016 (witness emails quoted)
  Link: Part I · Part II
• Claim: Wisconsin trail-camera images; measurements; carcasses; pseudonym
  Attribution: Linda Godfrey blog, Oct 26, 2016
  Link: Godfrey
• Claim: Duluth, Nov 7, 2016: description, 47% moon, comments
  Attribution: Linda Godfrey blog, Nov 22, 2016 (witness email quoted)
  Link: Godfrey
• Claim: Moon phase at Duluth on Nov 7, 2016: waxing crescent, ~49% at noon CST
  Attribution: U.S. Naval Observatory, Astronomical Applications API (checked 2026-10-28)
  Link: USNO
• Claim: Monsters Among Us: published Oct 11, 2016; publisher blurb
  Attribution: Penguin Random House (TarcherPerigee)
  Link: PRH

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Legal / disclaimer footer

Entertainment and cryptid-news commentary only. Nothing here confirms a dogman, werewolf or any other unidentified creature. Each claim belongs to the witness or researcher named. The Pennsylvania and Wisconsin witnesses are anonymous or pseudonymous, and their locations are given only at the region level. Do not trespass on private land.