Books & film Wisconsin, United States (author's home ground)
Linda Godfrey’s I Know What I Saw: Beyond the Beast of Bray Road
Linda S. Godfrey’s 2019 book brought modern monster accounts together beyond Bray Road. Its publication offers a way into the reporter’s long trail of witness stories.
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One newspaper assignment can become a road that never quite ends.
In 1991, Linda S. Godfrey began reporting on an upright canine said to have been seen around Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Tea Krulos’s July 2019 profile in Shepherd Express traces that local assignment to the Beast of Bray Road and the books that followed. Godfrey called herself an accidental werewolf chronicler.
Her new volume, I Know What I Saw: Modern-Day Encounters with Monsters of New Urban Legend and Ancient Lore, widened the territory. Penguin Random House’s catalog dates its ebook and audio editions to July 16, 2019.
A larger territory
Krulos describes accounts of Bigfoot, Deer People and a Hawaiian Flying Dogman, alongside Wisconsin stories such as Haunchyville and a reported large wolf in Saint Francis. His profile presents Godfrey as a collector inclined to hear witnesses out, even while the identity of what they describe remains debatable.
That collecting work is part of the fascination. A creature story can arrive as a startled recollection, acquire a roadside name, then travel far enough that someone in another county recognizes a shape from their own experience. The resemblance may be significant, or it may show how powerful a shared description can become. Either possibility makes the route worth following.
The book’s title holds the witness’s confidence in five words. The questions begin immediately after them: what was visible, for how long, and what can another person recover from the account? Godfrey’s long trail from Elkhorn gives those questions a setting larger than a single stretch of road.
Sources
Original field-research illustration; not Godfrey’s book cover, portrait or witness evidence.
