Grabbed in the Dark: Two British Upright-Canine Reports From the 1990s and 1980s, Told in 2016

A hand, not a paw. That is the detail researcher Linda Godfrey says she had never met before in an upright-canine report, and it is the center of a story that reached her about two weeks before she blogged it on April 5, 2016, from a man in south-east London, twenty years after the night it describes.

Within three weeks she posted a second British account, from a driver in northeast England who had spent years trying to name what crossed his headlights. Both rest on one source each: Godfrey's blog.

Camberwell Old Cemetery, October 9, 1996

On April 5, 2016, Godfrey posted a report from a man who asks to be called "Gary." He was 26, she writes, and on October 9, 1996 was heading to a friend's home on Underhill Road. To save twenty minutes of walking he cut through Camberwell Old Cemetery after dark, with no flashlight and no lighting in the grounds. In the middle of the cemetery, he says, something "very large and dark" moved fast. He took it for a big dog and told himself his mind was playing tricks.

Then, in his words, "something had grabbed me by my arm VERY tightly and smashed me to the ground." It stood over him, growling and dribbling, with "extremely bad breath," and began to sniff his body "exactly as a dog would do." He says he waited for a bite that never came. "Just as quick as it started it was over and the beast was gone." It "sprinted away on its hind legs."

He describes dark fur, a head like a German shepherd's and a body with "the size and musculature of a Great Dane." The eyes, he says, showed no glow; he added their shape to his sketch as "artistic license." The breath smelled of rotten fish with a "weird sweetness." Asked how it gripped him, he was firm: "It was a hand that grabbed me… a big hand, humanlike," with long, clawlike nails he puts, by comparison, at five to six inches if grown on a human hand.

He says he took six months off work with something like post-traumatic stress, remains afraid of woodland and the dark, and has not returned to the cemetery. He is candid about doubt. Part of him wants to say "a strong man in a costume," but "if that's the case it was the best costume I've ever seen."

Godfrey agrees it probably wasn't a person in a costume, citing the open-jawed breath and the deep sniffing. She sets the report beside English phantom-hound lore, whose hounds have glowing eyes, which his creature's lacked, and beside the "man-monkey" reports studied by Nick Redfern, mostly from Cannock Chase. A physical attack is rare in her files, she writes: in 24 years of collecting reports she counts a Quebec hiker with a superficial skin tear, a young man near South Milwaukee whose shirt was clawed, and a few scratched cars.

Cresswell Road, Northumberland, late summer 1989

Godfrey's April 22 post carries an email from a driver, anonymous, who says that on a late-summer night in 1989, he and a friend were cruising local villages when, at about 11 p.m. (his estimate), something ran into the road on Cresswell Road, heading south-west toward Ellington, just past the entrance to a caravan site.

He puts his speed at 30 mph at most. It stopped in the lane and looked at the car, he says. It stood on rear legs "jointed with the knee at the rear like a horse or dogs," covered in "thick, mousey grey/brown fur about 2-3 inches long." Its arms hung with forearms forward and "very long" hands; its eyes reflected the light "perfectly round and a green/yellow colour." It stood five to six feet, hunched, with a "wiry" but muscular build, a tail "maybe 4-5 inches long… more like a goats tail," and a head like a dog's or goat's with a muzzle and large ears. After a few seconds, he says, it took off over the six-foot wall "in a single bound." He adds that neither he nor his friend had used alcohol or drugs. For years afterward he searched for satyr sightings in the region, the closest category he could find, until he came across one of Godfrey's dogman sketches. The drawing in her post is her new rendering of his description, not his own sketch.

What the record holds

Each account is one man's memory, set down decades later and given to a researcher. A friend rode with the Cresswell driver, but no statement from him is published; the Camberwell witness says only his wife knew until he wrote. Neither report offers a photograph, a track or a second account. The Camberwell date is the witness's own, fixed in memory by the trauma. The Cresswell hour is the driver's own assumption ("around 23.00hrs") from the darkness.

They also differ in a way that matters. One creature stalked, seized and sniffed. The other crossed a road and left. Godfrey groups both with the upright canids, upright canids with unusual hands or limbs, but the grouping is her judgment, not a finding.

Related reading on the site: Was There Really a Werewolf in London in the 1980s? and The Cannock Chase Werewolf.

Bottom line

Per Linda Godfrey's blog, a man says a large, dog-headed creature with a human-like hand pinned him in Camberwell Old Cemetery on October 9, 1996, and another says an upright, grey-brown creature with a short tail crossed Cresswell Road in Northumberland in late summer 1989. Each account is a single witness; no photograph or second witness is published for either.

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Attribution / source table

• Claim: Camberwell: date, route, grab, sniffing, hand, nails, description, aftermath, Godfrey's comparisons and record of physical-contact reports
  Attribution: Linda Godfrey blog, Apr 5, 2016 (witness email quoted)
  Link: Godfrey
• Claim: Cresswell: late summer 1989, ~11 p.m., Cresswell Road, creature description, wall leap
  Attribution: Linda Godfrey blog, Apr 22, 2016 (witness email quoted)
  Link: Godfrey
• Claim: Legacy Monstrum post on the London report
  Attribution: Monstrum Athenaeum, Apr 19, 2016
  Link: Related post
• Claim: Legacy Monstrum post on Cannock Chase
  Attribution: Monstrum Athenaeum, Mar 12, 2015
  Link: Related post

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Legal / disclaimer footer

Entertainment and cryptid-news commentary only. Nothing here confirms a werewolf, a dogman or any other creature. Witness accounts are given as Linda Godfrey published them, and each claim belongs to its source. The witnesses are anonymous and the map locations are approximate to town or district level.