00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Unexplained with me your host, Richard McLean Smith, where each week we explore another true tale of high strangeness. If you're new here and you're a fan of expertly told atmospheric stories about the strange and unexplained, then you've come to the right place, and please subscribe to the show if you haven't already done so. I'm very excited to be taking Unexplained to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. I'll be performing at the Space's Surgeons Hall venue at ten oh five pm every night from August seventh to the twenty ninth, except for the sixteenth and twenty third. You can get tickets at THESPACEUK dot com. Forard Slash shows Ford Slash twenty twenty six, Ford Slash Unexplained hyphen Live. For those watching on YouTube, you can find the link below. With all that out of the way, this is Unexplained, Season nine, Episode twenty nine, The Howling Woods. When Marco Polo published his travelog in the year thirteen hundred, it amazed the reading world, a rare popular success in an era before printing and widespread literacy. The book chronicled Polo's exploration of Asia and his time in the court of the Mongol emperor Kubla Khan. The adventurous Venetian claimed to have encountered all manner of strange sights, from unicorns on the Indonesian island of Java to gigantic birds that soared above the Indian Ocean, each large enough to grasp elephants in their talents. But he wrote with particular horror of the Andaman Islands, where he observed a very particular native population. I assure you, Polo writes, the men of that island have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise. In fact, in the phase they are like big mastiff dogs. They are a most cruel generation and eat everybody that they can catch. Of course, it would be naive to assume this is a literal description of actual dog headed humanoids. Marco Polo wouldn't be the first person, and certainly not the last, to depict others in racist and crude ways in order to emphasize a perceived lack of civility. But Marco Polo was far from the only writer in antiquity to mention dog headed people. Back in the fifth century BCE, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote of dog faced creatures who haunted the lands to the west of Libya. Again, it sounds like fantasy at best, xenophobia at worst. Yet on a plateau in the western Libyan desert there is a dried river bed called Woddy, Matt and Douche, where the dusty banks and boulders are covered in graceful, dexterous etchings of animals both known and unknown. Among the camels, giraffes, and buffalo. There are depictions of humans sporting distinctly canine heads, and the carvings are four thousand years old. Perhaps the fullest description of dog headed men was recorded by the Greek physician Tisius in four hundred BCE. He referred to the race as Caino cephally, from Caino and cephale, the Greek words for dog and head, respectively. Tesius describes them as a cave dwelling tribe who lived in the mountains of India and North Africa. Their teeth were larger than dogs, their nails longer, and they spoke only in a range of guttural barks, he said. In the same era, Alexander the Great wrote to his tutor Aristotle, claiming that he had battled and captured a horde of dog faced men in India who were little more than snarling beasts, as he had it. Likewise, in the Welsh folklore, King Arthur is fated for his battle with the vicious Cumben or dogheads in what is now Edinburgh. As romanticized in the Black Book of Carmarthen, Arthur and his knight Bedevere slew hundreds of the Canid enemy in a supposed effort to protect the realm from their encroaching savagery. This beastlike framing of the chinocephaly recurs in cultural histories across the globe, from European legend to Chinese Buddhist texts to the tribal memories of the Ural Mountains. Dog headed men, it seems, haunted the fringes of the entire ancient world. With time, these stories have steadily dissolved into folklore, or have been interpreted as fearful depictions of the other, or simply rationalized away as misinterpretations of baboons and lemurs among other animals, and the world moved on from such tall tales. However, there does remain one corner of the modern world, in which the so called dog man has not yet been explained into extinction, where rumors persist of strange shapes seen prowling between the trees, eyeshine glimpsed at the edge of the campfire glow, and where dog is anything but man's best friend. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith, but most people. The story begins in nineteen eighty seven as an April Fool's prank in Traverse City, Michigan, a young DJ named Steve Cook hustled into the WTCM radio studio with a grin. The station always ran an April Fool's joke, but that year they'd been short on ideas. That morning, post Jack O'Malley had played things straight, and he'd been relieved when Steve finally arrived. Steve was a lover of the weird and the absurd. He, more than anyone at the station, had the right kind of mind for the occasion, and he hadn't let them down.
00:06:13
Speaker 2: This year.
00:06:14
Speaker 1: He'd written a song. Jack read through the lyrics and felt it seemed a little more Halloween than April Fall's. But without anything else to hand, it would have to do. A few minutes into his show, Steve played the song to his unsuspecting audience for the first time. It was called The Legend, a rather grandiose title for such a crude effort, but one that would prove far more fitting than Steve could ever anticipate. The Legend is a rhythmic poem set to a backing track of timpany drum and allulating since it opens with the story of eleven lumberjacks working in Wexford County close to the Manestee River. The men chase and torment a strange doglike creep until it's finally provoked into standing upright on its hind legs, at which point the men flee in terror, never saying much about what happened to them that night. Each verse of the song takes us through history, decade by decade, with the reemergence of the creature in every spring and summer of every year that ends with a seven. In nineteen seventeen, a sheriff finds his band of horses dead from fright. In nineteen fifty seven, a pastor is alarmed by claw marks carved deep in his church door. The song tells us that though the newspapers said they'd been made by a dog, he'd have to have stood seven foot four. Finally, Steve reaches the current spring of nineteen eighty seven and confesses that no stories or sightings have yet appeared that year. Have the dog men gone away? He asks? It was supposed to be a bit of fun, but no. Sooner had the final beat the song faded to static, then the calls began. Incredibly, after Steve Cook's song went out on air, local listeners of WTCM Radio began ringing in with their own sightings of the very creature it described. One woman reported that she'd grown up hearing similar tales from her uncle. But first Steve just laughed it off. He put it down to the success of his storytelling and his lucky amalgam of all the things that frighten you in the night, as he put it, just coming together at the right time. But Steve's song, unwittingly had done much more than that. It appeared to have opened a sluice gate in the pool of local law and memory. Over the next week, the DJs at WTCM Radio heard from many more people claiming first hand experience of the monster, and then they were weirdly specific. Callers told Steve and his colleagues over and over that the canine thing was an upright hairy bipedal creature, but crucially, it was not a werewolf. Of that they were clear. Its body was specifically defined as being part human and part dog. Over the years, Steve Kirk estimates that he's been told well over one hundred distinct accounts of what has come to be known as the Michigan dog Man. They span a century or more and came in from all across the state. There is a locust, though, and it matches Steve's song. Mapped out the supposed dog man encounters reveal a clear epicenter. The majority of sightings occur in or around the Manistee National Forest. This sprawling mosaic of hardwood trees and hardy townships covers nearly a million square acres and is popular for high king hunting, fishing, and cross country skiing. Of the thousands of adventurous souls who venture into the red pines of the Manisty, most return with memories of a fine day out, but there are some who bring back stories of meetings They are never quite able to explain of being pursued by something that walks like a human and looks like a dog, but is in fact neither. It was the summer of nineteen thirty eight. Down on the banks of the Muskegon River, on the edge of the Manistee Forest in Paris, Michigan, Seventeen year old Robert Forney was enjoying a rare day of peaceful fishing from a quiet spot behind the local fish hatchery. Robert had watched the day glide past at the end of his fishing rot. By the afternoon, the breeze was moving briskly through the foliage along the banks. As the sun danced on the shallow, slow moving water. As it had on and off throughout the day, Robert's attention slipped from the lure on the end of his rod to whatever a young man had to daydream about in nineteen thirty eight, when something suddenly punctured his reverie, a disturbing clamor of growls and barks, accompanied by the crackle of undergrowth that seemed to be drawing nearer. It sounded like a ravenous pack of wild dogs or coyotes. Even Robert glanced at the rifle lying by his feet, and then quickly snatched it up. But as he well knew as he angled the barrel toward where the sound seemed to be coming from, there were limits to how well even a crack marksman can wheeld one weapon against a pack of feral animals. Robert was far from that, and the dogs sounded full of fury. The terror of rabies was just slipping across Robert's mind when the first of the dogs breached the tree line on the opposite bank. Dark furred and of no determinate breed, it bounded straight into the river toward him without hesitation. Robert's heart caught in his mouth when the rest of the pack burst through moments later. There were five of them in total, all running and snarling into the water. Robert hurriedly raised his rifle and pointed it vaguely in their direction, not entirely sure how he was going to handle this, But as he peered down the scope, it couldn't help but be distracted by one of the dogs. In particular, For a start, it was larger than the others, much larger, with a broad black back and longer limbs, and in the treacle slow down of time, Robert noticed there was something very strange about this animal, but sheer size didn't account for. It was something about its proportions and the way it moved. Then suddenly he snapped back to the present because the lead dog was already halfway to his side of the river. With trembling hands, Robert raised his rifle and fired a single shot into the sky. A flurry of birds blasted from the trees, and the dogs snapped to a halt, then turned to flee. Robert exhaled in relief as the dogs quickly turned and scurried back into the trees, but his relief was short lived because one of the dogs didn't flee. Robert stood deathly still, keeping his eyes fixed on the strange creature before him. The dog, if that was what it was, stood its ground two dozen feet from the stricken boy. Robert slowly took up the rifle again and pointed it toward the panting animal, his finger poised on the trigger. Get gone, Robert said, But the dog didn't flinch. It simply stared Robert down with eyes that Robert only then noticed were an almost preternatural icy blue in color. And then the dog stood up as Robert would later recall it didn't stand like a dog trained to do so for treats or tricks. It stood up like a human, as Robert had it. It had shoulders and arms that dangled to its waist, ending in a clawed appendage that was somewhere between hand and poor. Its feet were submerged in the river, but its legs, which he could see, were apparently bent backwards at the knee, not at all like a human or a bear, as some have theorized it might have been. And once those legs were fully extended, the figure is said to have stood roughly seven feet tall, a vicious looking giant covered in dense black fur. The head was said to have been almost entirely canine in nature, with a long muzzle, erect ears, and hideously sharp teeth. Only those deep blue eyes struck him as being close to human, and it took all the will that Robert had to pull his own gaze away. Robert fired another shot, wildly and without proper aim, but again the strange doglike creature didn't flinch. Instead, it bared its teeth in a distinctly uncanine manner. Decades later, after DJ. Steve Cook's song had renewed interest in earlier accounts of the creature. Robert said that he thought the dog Man, as he came to call it, may have been smiling at him, but he wasn't sure. So much time had passed, but he remembered the distinct way in which its lips had curled up, in a way that was unlike any dog he'd ever seen. Finally, the dog like creature turned on its hind legs and followed the pack back into the trees, still apparently striding upright as it passed from Robert's sight. After Robert Forney told select friends and family about his frightening encounter, it wasn't long before word got around, as it does in small rural towns. For years more, anecdotes circulated of strange figures seen in the woods around the town of Paris and in surrounding counties bordering the Manistee Forest. One day, some time after his song had aired, Steve Cook received a handwritten letter. He was from a young man named Brian, who remembered how his father had forbidden him and his sister to venture out of the house after nightfall. Brian, who was from the town of Big Rapids, six miles south of Paris, claimed to have grown up hearing his dad cursing the coyotes and wolves that he sometimes heard at night. He used to assume day were the reason why his dad had been so uncompromising with him and his sister. Only later did Brian discover that it was something else entirely that his dad was afraid of. Bryan's family lived across the road from a manufacturing plant where his dad worked as a night watchman. Both the house and the factory abutted a stretch of wilderness known as the Haymarsh State Game Reserve. Back in the summer of nineteen sixty one, Brian's dad was working another of his night shifts. Sometime around three am. During a quick break, Brian's father headed home to make a pot of coffee, one of the perks of living so close to the job. With coffee in hand, he took a seat in the rocking chair on the porch and gazed out toward the plant, faintly visible under the soft, cool whip glow of the moon. As he traced his gaze along the chain link fence, he caught a flash of movement, causing him to sit up Suddenly, someone appeared to be moving along the road that ran between the house and the factory. Brian's dad knew instinctively that anyone moving about at that hour of the morning most likely had nefarious intentions. Brian's dad put down the coffee and quietly rose from his seat. Then, with one hand on his gun, he tentatively made his way back to the plant. Halfway there, he froze suddenly in utter horror. The figure was neither a vandal nor a thief. It wasn't even human. Brian's dad would later tell his son that the thing he saw was taller than any man, with a muscular body in dense fur, maybe gray or black, he couldn't quite tell in the dim light, but it was walking on two legs. As Brian's dad apparently continued to stare at the strange creature in utter amusement, it dropped momentarily from a bipedal stance to scurry about on all fours like a dog, before rising back onto two legs like a human again. It seemed to be searching for something gently. Desperate not to attract attention, Brian's father rushed to retrieve a camera from the house an old Kodak that he had some skill with. Brian's dad knew how to handle the lighting, how to account for the soft light of the moon and the street lights that created deep pools of shadows between them. So he waited until the creature stepped into an island of light, and then a rusted the lens for a long exposure. With trembling fingers, the man snapped what is thought to be the first and most compelling photo of the so called dog man ever taken. It shows an empty street topped by an arching canopy of trees, with the chain link fence in the background. In the foreground, a street light casts its harsh glow, and beneath it, half obscured by the light phole itself, is a figure that looks for all the world like an upright dog or wolf court on the cusp of movement. Its shoulders are thick and heavy, surrounding a distinctly canine head, while its torso narrows to a pair of legs angled like those of a dog. A heartbeat after the photo was taken, the creature is said to have dropped once more to all forts and sloped off through the trees and into the Haymarsh Beyond, Brian included a print of the photograph in his letter to Steve Cook and offered to provide the original negatives. As the so called dog Man has grown in notoriety over the last forty years, naturally, Brian's photograph has been at the center of the debate. Although the film Stark has been authentically dated to the early nineteen sixties, to the modern eye, in an era of digital manipulation, the image at the center of it may seem a complete farce. However, as many experts have argued, if indeed it were a hoax, any tricks that would need to have been employed to achieve it were much harder to pull off, if not practically impossible in nineteen sixty one. Of course, there are many who consider the all too convenient synchronicity between Steve Cook's dog Man Song and the sudden emergence of apparently historical dog Man encounters to be proof of a hoax. To skeptics, at least, it's clear that it was simply the fraw around the song that birthed all the outlandish backstories. Yet it's hard to dismiss the earnestness and speed with which Steve's first callers responded to the legend For a start, several called the station within minutes of hearing the song for the very first time, eager to share their own encounters, with little to no time to have manufactured their stories. And what then, of the encounters that came after Steve's song ends in nineteen eighty seven with an acknowledgment that the creature had not yet been cited that year. In nineteen ninety seven, on the tenure anniversary, Steve Cook re released the legend, but this time there was an extra verse.
00:22:55
Speaker 2: Then in the summer of eighty seven.
00:22:57
Speaker 1: Then in the summer of eighty seven near Luth it happened again at a cabin in the woods. It looked like someone had tried to break in. There were cuts around the doors that could only be made by very sharp teeth and claws. He didn't wear shoes because he didn't have feet. He walked on just two ports. Startlingly, this was no make believe edition that Steve had grasped out of thin air, but was in fact taken from an apparently very real sighting that was documented in the local paper on July twenty second, nineteen eighty seven, in Luther, a small town close to the northern arc of the Manistee River, a pair of summer tourists were woken in the night by a commotion near their cabin. When they peered nervously through the window, they apparently saw a large shape moving about their property. Two Intimidated to investigate further, they simply hunkered inside until whatever was prowling outside left them alone. In the morning, they ventured out to find the walls scarred with claw marks. Suspecting a bear attack, they called the Department of Natural Resources and a pair of agents were dispatched from the nearby Baldwin office.
00:24:16
Speaker 2: So the officer and I went out there to take a look at it. You know, it was obviously it wasn't a bear, because you know, he just tried to chew in around the doors, and you could see a dog print alongside the windows still there, and so it was obviously a dog.
00:24:37
Speaker 1: It looked as though something had been trying to claw its way inside the cabin. The Department of Natural Resources agents discovered paw prints on the windowsills and on the ground all around the cabin, but they were huge, bigger prints than either agent had ever seen before. When word of the assault on the homestead got out, locals quick to link it to the song that they'd so recently heard on the radio, and what had been a bit of local color took on a darker hue. But that was far from the last sighting of the so called Michigan dog Man. Since nineteen eighty seven, there have been dozens, maybe hundreds, of sightings of a hair suit towering figure prowling the edges of the Maynaeste. Often it's no more than a glimpse between the trees that line Michigan's county roads, a fleeting Did you see that moment from a car window? There have been more up close and personal encounters, though, like the ones a deer hunter named Sam was said to have had in November of two thousand and seven. That year saw a particularly high number of dog man sightings, but few, if any, were as telling or fry as his. At the time, Sam was on a week long hunting trip with two friends in the woods outside Reed City, to the immediate east of the Maynastee. Over the course of a long chilly day, all three young men had separated to take up positions in their respective tree stands, essentially extended high chairs that hunters can sit on for better cover. As four o'clock came and went, the sun began to descend fast on the snow covered forest. Sam thought it was time to regroup and go home. He had one foot on the ladder to get down from the tree stand when he became suddenly aware that all sound in the forest had ceased. Even at just twenty years old, Sam was experienced enough to know that that meant something predatory other than himself was in the area. Trying to stay calm, he stepped back up to the chair to wait and see what might happen next. Within minutes, the spell was broken as the sound of soft crunching snow was followed by the appearance of two fair sized bucks in the clearing below. But the deer were not alone. Sam watched in disbelief as a very different animal slinked out of the trees behind them, tall, powerfully built, covered in hair, and standing on two feet. At first, he thought it was a bear, which were known to rear up on their hind legs, but the way it walked, hunched back and hurried bears didn't move like that. Sam felt a rush of excitement shoot through his body as he wondered for a brief moment if this was in fact a bigfoot encounter. But then the creature dropped to all thoughts, and Sam saw how its ears stuck up straight from its crown and its muzzle protruded. Then he caught the ice blue of its eyes in the dust light. He realized then that what it most resembled was a dog, some kind of husky maybe, but with black fur and much much larger than any dog that he'd ever seen. From below, Sam got the whiff of a hellish odour, sulfurous and sour. Was that the stink of the creature itself? He wondered whether it was the noxious scent or the sound of movement. Something alerted the deer to the strange creature's proximity, and together they dashed from the clearing. Then the creature rose back up onto two legs and rapidly gave chase. All three animals were gone in seconds, leaving a terrified Sam alone in his tree, just trying to process what on earth he'd just seen. When his friends arrived, wondering why Sam hadn't met them at the truck, he haltingly told them about strange creature, assuming he was playing a prank. The others just laughed until they saw the look on Sam's face. A short time later, or three of them were back beneath Sam's tree stand. As Sam pointed out the strange tracks in the snow, his friends could only stare at them with wide eyed disbelief. They were dog shaped, for sure, but huge. When the young men measured them, they found the front paws to be over five inches long, with an extra two inch claws. The back legs left prints closer to eight inches in length. Sam began to wonder if it was the so called dog man that they'd heard so much about growing up. Though his friends weren't quite sold on the theory, they had to admit at least that the tracks would have been large for even the biggest black bear. The following day, Sam was far from eager to head back into the forest, so his friends left him at the cabin with a walky talkie in case he changed his mind. As the morning lengthened, oredom and self doubt began to creep in, and Sam decided to go back to his tree stand after all, but this time he armed himself with a knife and a pistol, as well as his hunting rifle. Once back in his stand, the hours passed without incident until night began to fall. It was some time around five PM when Sam heard a single gunshot bring out from the direction of his friend's tree stand, roughly one hundred yards away. At least someone's had some success, he thought. Then the walky talkie sprung into life, and a tiny scream ripped through its speaker. Within seconds, Sam heard someone coming fast through the trees. Then his friend burst into the clear wide eyed and yelling about having seen the same creature that Sam described from the day before. In utter terror, he sprinted up the ladder to join Sam, his feet barely touching the rungs. Moments later, the dark, furred figure apparently ran into the clearing. This time Sam had time to take in its details, the disproportionate length of the arms that dangled to the waist like a human's and ended in those same strange and poor like things, just like Robert Fortney had described in nineteen thirty eight. Then slowly horrifyingly, it turned its piercing blue eyes up to where Sam and his friend huddled in the tree and bared its teeth, almost as though it were grinning, is how Sam would later describe it. Then it took another step closer. Scared that it was about to climb their ladder, Sam drew his pistol, but just as he was about to shoot, the creature apparently jerked away, then ran on two legs from the clearing. The two young hunters tried desperately to raise their other friend on the walkie talkie. When their friend finally picked up, the voice on the other end asked, is this your idea of a joke? What said Sam, perplexed, is this you in a werewolf costume at my tree? Because it's not funny. Before they could respond, another screech of feedback shot out of the walky talkie, followed by five sharp gunshots. Sam and his friend are said to have leapt down immediately and raised to their other friend's location. When they got there, they apparently found him shaking at the foot of his tree stand with his rifle gripped tightly in his hands. When he finally calmed down, he filled them in on what happened. Having decided to call it a day, Sam's friend had just climbed down from the tree when he saw what he assumed was one of the other two dressed in a werewolf suit. He was just about to call out to them when the creature suddenly charged him. With nowhere to run, the man held the gun out between them and braced for impact. As the story goes, the creature knocked him off his feet and swiped ferociously at his face, but the young man managed to hold him off with his gun. Then somehow he'd got a shot off and the creature pulled back. Another shot had it scurrying all the way back into the trees. The man claimed to have fired another three times, right into the creature's back as it went, but it showed no sign of being hit. The young man offered up the stock of his gun for Sam and the other friend to examine. Deep grooves had been scratched to the wood, supposedly caused by the creature's claws. There was nothing left but for the three young men to nervously make their way back to the truck and back to the cabin. When they got there, they are said to have been unsettled to find that the snow around the property was littered with large paw prints as if something had expressly been looking for them. Deciding that they didn't want to wait around to find out what it was, they quickly packed up their belongings and brought the trip to a swift end. A short time later, with nighttime having well and truly fallen, it was with some relief that Sam started up the engine and eased his truck away from the cabin for the last time. Then a few hundred yards down the narrow track, Sam felt the entire truck jolt, as though something heavy had just collided into his rear passenger door. It would have been impossible to see what it was in the moonless dark of the forest, but Sam knew, and though he would never forget the whole terrifying ordeal, he never reported the incident to officials for fear of ridicule. He'd heard the legends himself, had never taken them seriously until then, he hardly expected anyone else to. Today, Steve Cook has moved on from his radio DJ days, and that song of his that some say started it all could be said to be a relic of a less hyper era when the media had time to dwell awhile on the oddities of small Town Americana before hoaxes and disinformation became just another cynical tool with which to flood the zone. Yet hoax or not, that novelty folk song still resonates among the town and villages in the shadow of the Maynesty and Plenty would say there's a real warning to be found in its closing lines that somewhere in the Northwoods darkness, a creature walks upright, and the best advice you'll ever get is don't go out at night. This episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Please remember to like and subscribe if you've enjoyed the show. Unexplained is an Avy Club Productions podcast created by me Richard McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. The shorter followers on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook at Unexplained Podcast and on X and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod. Until next time, Stay strange and dissonant.
Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Unexplained with me your host, Richard McLean Smith, where each week we explore another true tale of high strangeness. If you're new here and you're a fan of expertly told atmospheric stories about the strange and unexplained, then you've come to the right place, and please subscribe to the show if you haven't already done so. I'm very excited to be taking Unexplained to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. I'll be performing at the Space's Surgeons Hall venue at ten oh five pm every night from August seventh to the twenty ninth, except for the sixteenth and twenty third. You can get tickets at THESPACEUK dot com. Forard Slash shows Ford Slash twenty twenty six, Ford Slash Unexplained hyphen Live. For those watching on YouTube, you can find the link below. With all that out of the way, this is Unexplained, Season nine, Episode twenty nine, The Howling Woods. When Marco Polo published his travelog in the year thirteen hundred, it amazed the reading world, a rare popular success in an era before printing and widespread literacy. The book chronicled Polo's exploration of Asia and his time in the court of the Mongol emperor Kubla Khan. The adventurous Venetian claimed to have encountered all manner of strange sights, from unicorns on the Indonesian island of Java to gigantic birds that soared above the Indian Ocean, each large enough to grasp elephants in their talents. But he wrote with particular horror of the Andaman Islands, where he observed a very particular native population. I assure you, Polo writes, the men of that island have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise. In fact, in the phase they are like big mastiff dogs. They are a most cruel generation and eat everybody that they can catch. Of course, it would be naive to assume this is a literal description of actual dog headed humanoids. Marco Polo wouldn't be the first person, and certainly not the last, to depict others in racist and crude ways in order to emphasize a perceived lack of civility. But Marco Polo was far from the only writer in antiquity to mention dog headed people. Back in the fifth century BCE, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote of dog faced creatures who haunted the lands to the west of Libya. Again, it sounds like fantasy at best, xenophobia at worst. Yet on a plateau in the western Libyan desert there is a dried river bed called Woddy, Matt and Douche, where the dusty banks and boulders are covered in graceful, dexterous etchings of animals both known and unknown. Among the camels, giraffes, and buffalo. There are depictions of humans sporting distinctly canine heads, and the carvings are four thousand years old. Perhaps the fullest description of dog headed men was recorded by the Greek physician Tisius in four hundred BCE. He referred to the race as Caino cephally, from Caino and cephale, the Greek words for dog and head, respectively. Tesius describes them as a cave dwelling tribe who lived in the mountains of India and North Africa. Their teeth were larger than dogs, their nails longer, and they spoke only in a range of guttural barks, he said. In the same era, Alexander the Great wrote to his tutor Aristotle, claiming that he had battled and captured a horde of dog faced men in India who were little more than snarling beasts, as he had it. Likewise, in the Welsh folklore, King Arthur is fated for his battle with the vicious Cumben or dogheads in what is now Edinburgh. As romanticized in the Black Book of Carmarthen, Arthur and his knight Bedevere slew hundreds of the Canid enemy in a supposed effort to protect the realm from their encroaching savagery. This beastlike framing of the chinocephaly recurs in cultural histories across the globe, from European legend to Chinese Buddhist texts to the tribal memories of the Ural Mountains. Dog headed men, it seems, haunted the fringes of the entire ancient world. With time, these stories have steadily dissolved into folklore, or have been interpreted as fearful depictions of the other, or simply rationalized away as misinterpretations of baboons and lemurs among other animals, and the world moved on from such tall tales. However, there does remain one corner of the modern world, in which the so called dog man has not yet been explained into extinction, where rumors persist of strange shapes seen prowling between the trees, eyeshine glimpsed at the edge of the campfire glow, and where dog is anything but man's best friend. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith, but most people. The story begins in nineteen eighty seven as an April Fool's prank in Traverse City, Michigan, a young DJ named Steve Cook hustled into the WTCM radio studio with a grin. The station always ran an April Fool's joke, but that year they'd been short on ideas. That morning, post Jack O'Malley had played things straight, and he'd been relieved when Steve finally arrived. Steve was a lover of the weird and the absurd. He, more than anyone at the station, had the right kind of mind for the occasion, and he hadn't let them down.
00:06:13
Speaker 2: This year.
00:06:14
Speaker 1: He'd written a song. Jack read through the lyrics and felt it seemed a little more Halloween than April Fall's. But without anything else to hand, it would have to do. A few minutes into his show, Steve played the song to his unsuspecting audience for the first time. It was called The Legend, a rather grandiose title for such a crude effort, but one that would prove far more fitting than Steve could ever anticipate. The Legend is a rhythmic poem set to a backing track of timpany drum and allulating since it opens with the story of eleven lumberjacks working in Wexford County close to the Manestee River. The men chase and torment a strange doglike creep until it's finally provoked into standing upright on its hind legs, at which point the men flee in terror, never saying much about what happened to them that night. Each verse of the song takes us through history, decade by decade, with the reemergence of the creature in every spring and summer of every year that ends with a seven. In nineteen seventeen, a sheriff finds his band of horses dead from fright. In nineteen fifty seven, a pastor is alarmed by claw marks carved deep in his church door. The song tells us that though the newspapers said they'd been made by a dog, he'd have to have stood seven foot four. Finally, Steve reaches the current spring of nineteen eighty seven and confesses that no stories or sightings have yet appeared that year. Have the dog men gone away? He asks? It was supposed to be a bit of fun, but no. Sooner had the final beat the song faded to static, then the calls began. Incredibly, after Steve Cook's song went out on air, local listeners of WTCM Radio began ringing in with their own sightings of the very creature it described. One woman reported that she'd grown up hearing similar tales from her uncle. But first Steve just laughed it off. He put it down to the success of his storytelling and his lucky amalgam of all the things that frighten you in the night, as he put it, just coming together at the right time. But Steve's song, unwittingly had done much more than that. It appeared to have opened a sluice gate in the pool of local law and memory. Over the next week, the DJs at WTCM Radio heard from many more people claiming first hand experience of the monster, and then they were weirdly specific. Callers told Steve and his colleagues over and over that the canine thing was an upright hairy bipedal creature, but crucially, it was not a werewolf. Of that they were clear. Its body was specifically defined as being part human and part dog. Over the years, Steve Kirk estimates that he's been told well over one hundred distinct accounts of what has come to be known as the Michigan dog Man. They span a century or more and came in from all across the state. There is a locust, though, and it matches Steve's song. Mapped out the supposed dog man encounters reveal a clear epicenter. The majority of sightings occur in or around the Manistee National Forest. This sprawling mosaic of hardwood trees and hardy townships covers nearly a million square acres and is popular for high king hunting, fishing, and cross country skiing. Of the thousands of adventurous souls who venture into the red pines of the Manisty, most return with memories of a fine day out, but there are some who bring back stories of meetings They are never quite able to explain of being pursued by something that walks like a human and looks like a dog, but is in fact neither. It was the summer of nineteen thirty eight. Down on the banks of the Muskegon River, on the edge of the Manistee Forest in Paris, Michigan, Seventeen year old Robert Forney was enjoying a rare day of peaceful fishing from a quiet spot behind the local fish hatchery. Robert had watched the day glide past at the end of his fishing rot. By the afternoon, the breeze was moving briskly through the foliage along the banks. As the sun danced on the shallow, slow moving water. As it had on and off throughout the day, Robert's attention slipped from the lure on the end of his rod to whatever a young man had to daydream about in nineteen thirty eight, when something suddenly punctured his reverie, a disturbing clamor of growls and barks, accompanied by the crackle of undergrowth that seemed to be drawing nearer. It sounded like a ravenous pack of wild dogs or coyotes. Even Robert glanced at the rifle lying by his feet, and then quickly snatched it up. But as he well knew as he angled the barrel toward where the sound seemed to be coming from, there were limits to how well even a crack marksman can wheeld one weapon against a pack of feral animals. Robert was far from that, and the dogs sounded full of fury. The terror of rabies was just slipping across Robert's mind when the first of the dogs breached the tree line on the opposite bank. Dark furred and of no determinate breed, it bounded straight into the river toward him without hesitation. Robert's heart caught in his mouth when the rest of the pack burst through moments later. There were five of them in total, all running and snarling into the water. Robert hurriedly raised his rifle and pointed it vaguely in their direction, not entirely sure how he was going to handle this, But as he peered down the scope, it couldn't help but be distracted by one of the dogs. In particular, For a start, it was larger than the others, much larger, with a broad black back and longer limbs, and in the treacle slow down of time, Robert noticed there was something very strange about this animal, but sheer size didn't account for. It was something about its proportions and the way it moved. Then suddenly he snapped back to the present because the lead dog was already halfway to his side of the river. With trembling hands, Robert raised his rifle and fired a single shot into the sky. A flurry of birds blasted from the trees, and the dogs snapped to a halt, then turned to flee. Robert exhaled in relief as the dogs quickly turned and scurried back into the trees, but his relief was short lived because one of the dogs didn't flee. Robert stood deathly still, keeping his eyes fixed on the strange creature before him. The dog, if that was what it was, stood its ground two dozen feet from the stricken boy. Robert slowly took up the rifle again and pointed it toward the panting animal, his finger poised on the trigger. Get gone, Robert said, But the dog didn't flinch. It simply stared Robert down with eyes that Robert only then noticed were an almost preternatural icy blue in color. And then the dog stood up as Robert would later recall it didn't stand like a dog trained to do so for treats or tricks. It stood up like a human, as Robert had it. It had shoulders and arms that dangled to its waist, ending in a clawed appendage that was somewhere between hand and poor. Its feet were submerged in the river, but its legs, which he could see, were apparently bent backwards at the knee, not at all like a human or a bear, as some have theorized it might have been. And once those legs were fully extended, the figure is said to have stood roughly seven feet tall, a vicious looking giant covered in dense black fur. The head was said to have been almost entirely canine in nature, with a long muzzle, erect ears, and hideously sharp teeth. Only those deep blue eyes struck him as being close to human, and it took all the will that Robert had to pull his own gaze away. Robert fired another shot, wildly and without proper aim, but again the strange doglike creature didn't flinch. Instead, it bared its teeth in a distinctly uncanine manner. Decades later, after DJ. Steve Cook's song had renewed interest in earlier accounts of the creature. Robert said that he thought the dog Man, as he came to call it, may have been smiling at him, but he wasn't sure. So much time had passed, but he remembered the distinct way in which its lips had curled up, in a way that was unlike any dog he'd ever seen. Finally, the dog like creature turned on its hind legs and followed the pack back into the trees, still apparently striding upright as it passed from Robert's sight. After Robert Forney told select friends and family about his frightening encounter, it wasn't long before word got around, as it does in small rural towns. For years more, anecdotes circulated of strange figures seen in the woods around the town of Paris and in surrounding counties bordering the Manistee Forest. One day, some time after his song had aired, Steve Cook received a handwritten letter. He was from a young man named Brian, who remembered how his father had forbidden him and his sister to venture out of the house after nightfall. Brian, who was from the town of Big Rapids, six miles south of Paris, claimed to have grown up hearing his dad cursing the coyotes and wolves that he sometimes heard at night. He used to assume day were the reason why his dad had been so uncompromising with him and his sister. Only later did Brian discover that it was something else entirely that his dad was afraid of. Bryan's family lived across the road from a manufacturing plant where his dad worked as a night watchman. Both the house and the factory abutted a stretch of wilderness known as the Haymarsh State Game Reserve. Back in the summer of nineteen sixty one, Brian's dad was working another of his night shifts. Sometime around three am. During a quick break, Brian's father headed home to make a pot of coffee, one of the perks of living so close to the job. With coffee in hand, he took a seat in the rocking chair on the porch and gazed out toward the plant, faintly visible under the soft, cool whip glow of the moon. As he traced his gaze along the chain link fence, he caught a flash of movement, causing him to sit up Suddenly, someone appeared to be moving along the road that ran between the house and the factory. Brian's dad knew instinctively that anyone moving about at that hour of the morning most likely had nefarious intentions. Brian's dad put down the coffee and quietly rose from his seat. Then, with one hand on his gun, he tentatively made his way back to the plant. Halfway there, he froze suddenly in utter horror. The figure was neither a vandal nor a thief. It wasn't even human. Brian's dad would later tell his son that the thing he saw was taller than any man, with a muscular body in dense fur, maybe gray or black, he couldn't quite tell in the dim light, but it was walking on two legs. As Brian's dad apparently continued to stare at the strange creature in utter amusement, it dropped momentarily from a bipedal stance to scurry about on all fours like a dog, before rising back onto two legs like a human again. It seemed to be searching for something gently. Desperate not to attract attention, Brian's father rushed to retrieve a camera from the house an old Kodak that he had some skill with. Brian's dad knew how to handle the lighting, how to account for the soft light of the moon and the street lights that created deep pools of shadows between them. So he waited until the creature stepped into an island of light, and then a rusted the lens for a long exposure. With trembling fingers, the man snapped what is thought to be the first and most compelling photo of the so called dog man ever taken. It shows an empty street topped by an arching canopy of trees, with the chain link fence in the background. In the foreground, a street light casts its harsh glow, and beneath it, half obscured by the light phole itself, is a figure that looks for all the world like an upright dog or wolf court on the cusp of movement. Its shoulders are thick and heavy, surrounding a distinctly canine head, while its torso narrows to a pair of legs angled like those of a dog. A heartbeat after the photo was taken, the creature is said to have dropped once more to all forts and sloped off through the trees and into the Haymarsh Beyond, Brian included a print of the photograph in his letter to Steve Cook and offered to provide the original negatives. As the so called dog Man has grown in notoriety over the last forty years, naturally, Brian's photograph has been at the center of the debate. Although the film Stark has been authentically dated to the early nineteen sixties, to the modern eye, in an era of digital manipulation, the image at the center of it may seem a complete farce. However, as many experts have argued, if indeed it were a hoax, any tricks that would need to have been employed to achieve it were much harder to pull off, if not practically impossible in nineteen sixty one. Of course, there are many who consider the all too convenient synchronicity between Steve Cook's dog Man Song and the sudden emergence of apparently historical dog Man encounters to be proof of a hoax. To skeptics, at least, it's clear that it was simply the fraw around the song that birthed all the outlandish backstories. Yet it's hard to dismiss the earnestness and speed with which Steve's first callers responded to the legend For a start, several called the station within minutes of hearing the song for the very first time, eager to share their own encounters, with little to no time to have manufactured their stories. And what then, of the encounters that came after Steve's song ends in nineteen eighty seven with an acknowledgment that the creature had not yet been cited that year. In nineteen ninety seven, on the tenure anniversary, Steve Cook re released the legend, but this time there was an extra verse.
00:22:55
Speaker 2: Then in the summer of eighty seven.
00:22:57
Speaker 1: Then in the summer of eighty seven near Luth it happened again at a cabin in the woods. It looked like someone had tried to break in. There were cuts around the doors that could only be made by very sharp teeth and claws. He didn't wear shoes because he didn't have feet. He walked on just two ports. Startlingly, this was no make believe edition that Steve had grasped out of thin air, but was in fact taken from an apparently very real sighting that was documented in the local paper on July twenty second, nineteen eighty seven, in Luther, a small town close to the northern arc of the Manistee River, a pair of summer tourists were woken in the night by a commotion near their cabin. When they peered nervously through the window, they apparently saw a large shape moving about their property. Two Intimidated to investigate further, they simply hunkered inside until whatever was prowling outside left them alone. In the morning, they ventured out to find the walls scarred with claw marks. Suspecting a bear attack, they called the Department of Natural Resources and a pair of agents were dispatched from the nearby Baldwin office.
00:24:16
Speaker 2: So the officer and I went out there to take a look at it. You know, it was obviously it wasn't a bear, because you know, he just tried to chew in around the doors, and you could see a dog print alongside the windows still there, and so it was obviously a dog.
00:24:37
Speaker 1: It looked as though something had been trying to claw its way inside the cabin. The Department of Natural Resources agents discovered paw prints on the windowsills and on the ground all around the cabin, but they were huge, bigger prints than either agent had ever seen before. When word of the assault on the homestead got out, locals quick to link it to the song that they'd so recently heard on the radio, and what had been a bit of local color took on a darker hue. But that was far from the last sighting of the so called Michigan dog Man. Since nineteen eighty seven, there have been dozens, maybe hundreds, of sightings of a hair suit towering figure prowling the edges of the Maynaeste. Often it's no more than a glimpse between the trees that line Michigan's county roads, a fleeting Did you see that moment from a car window? There have been more up close and personal encounters, though, like the ones a deer hunter named Sam was said to have had in November of two thousand and seven. That year saw a particularly high number of dog man sightings, but few, if any, were as telling or fry as his. At the time, Sam was on a week long hunting trip with two friends in the woods outside Reed City, to the immediate east of the Maynastee. Over the course of a long chilly day, all three young men had separated to take up positions in their respective tree stands, essentially extended high chairs that hunters can sit on for better cover. As four o'clock came and went, the sun began to descend fast on the snow covered forest. Sam thought it was time to regroup and go home. He had one foot on the ladder to get down from the tree stand when he became suddenly aware that all sound in the forest had ceased. Even at just twenty years old, Sam was experienced enough to know that that meant something predatory other than himself was in the area. Trying to stay calm, he stepped back up to the chair to wait and see what might happen next. Within minutes, the spell was broken as the sound of soft crunching snow was followed by the appearance of two fair sized bucks in the clearing below. But the deer were not alone. Sam watched in disbelief as a very different animal slinked out of the trees behind them, tall, powerfully built, covered in hair, and standing on two feet. At first, he thought it was a bear, which were known to rear up on their hind legs, but the way it walked, hunched back and hurried bears didn't move like that. Sam felt a rush of excitement shoot through his body as he wondered for a brief moment if this was in fact a bigfoot encounter. But then the creature dropped to all thoughts, and Sam saw how its ears stuck up straight from its crown and its muzzle protruded. Then he caught the ice blue of its eyes in the dust light. He realized then that what it most resembled was a dog, some kind of husky maybe, but with black fur and much much larger than any dog that he'd ever seen. From below, Sam got the whiff of a hellish odour, sulfurous and sour. Was that the stink of the creature itself? He wondered whether it was the noxious scent or the sound of movement. Something alerted the deer to the strange creature's proximity, and together they dashed from the clearing. Then the creature rose back up onto two legs and rapidly gave chase. All three animals were gone in seconds, leaving a terrified Sam alone in his tree, just trying to process what on earth he'd just seen. When his friends arrived, wondering why Sam hadn't met them at the truck, he haltingly told them about strange creature, assuming he was playing a prank. The others just laughed until they saw the look on Sam's face. A short time later, or three of them were back beneath Sam's tree stand. As Sam pointed out the strange tracks in the snow, his friends could only stare at them with wide eyed disbelief. They were dog shaped, for sure, but huge. When the young men measured them, they found the front paws to be over five inches long, with an extra two inch claws. The back legs left prints closer to eight inches in length. Sam began to wonder if it was the so called dog man that they'd heard so much about growing up. Though his friends weren't quite sold on the theory, they had to admit at least that the tracks would have been large for even the biggest black bear. The following day, Sam was far from eager to head back into the forest, so his friends left him at the cabin with a walky talkie in case he changed his mind. As the morning lengthened, oredom and self doubt began to creep in, and Sam decided to go back to his tree stand after all, but this time he armed himself with a knife and a pistol, as well as his hunting rifle. Once back in his stand, the hours passed without incident until night began to fall. It was some time around five PM when Sam heard a single gunshot bring out from the direction of his friend's tree stand, roughly one hundred yards away. At least someone's had some success, he thought. Then the walky talkie sprung into life, and a tiny scream ripped through its speaker. Within seconds, Sam heard someone coming fast through the trees. Then his friend burst into the clear wide eyed and yelling about having seen the same creature that Sam described from the day before. In utter terror, he sprinted up the ladder to join Sam, his feet barely touching the rungs. Moments later, the dark, furred figure apparently ran into the clearing. This time Sam had time to take in its details, the disproportionate length of the arms that dangled to the waist like a human's and ended in those same strange and poor like things, just like Robert Fortney had described in nineteen thirty eight. Then slowly horrifyingly, it turned its piercing blue eyes up to where Sam and his friend huddled in the tree and bared its teeth, almost as though it were grinning, is how Sam would later describe it. Then it took another step closer. Scared that it was about to climb their ladder, Sam drew his pistol, but just as he was about to shoot, the creature apparently jerked away, then ran on two legs from the clearing. The two young hunters tried desperately to raise their other friend on the walkie talkie. When their friend finally picked up, the voice on the other end asked, is this your idea of a joke? What said Sam, perplexed, is this you in a werewolf costume at my tree? Because it's not funny. Before they could respond, another screech of feedback shot out of the walky talkie, followed by five sharp gunshots. Sam and his friend are said to have leapt down immediately and raised to their other friend's location. When they got there, they apparently found him shaking at the foot of his tree stand with his rifle gripped tightly in his hands. When he finally calmed down, he filled them in on what happened. Having decided to call it a day, Sam's friend had just climbed down from the tree when he saw what he assumed was one of the other two dressed in a werewolf suit. He was just about to call out to them when the creature suddenly charged him. With nowhere to run, the man held the gun out between them and braced for impact. As the story goes, the creature knocked him off his feet and swiped ferociously at his face, but the young man managed to hold him off with his gun. Then somehow he'd got a shot off and the creature pulled back. Another shot had it scurrying all the way back into the trees. The man claimed to have fired another three times, right into the creature's back as it went, but it showed no sign of being hit. The young man offered up the stock of his gun for Sam and the other friend to examine. Deep grooves had been scratched to the wood, supposedly caused by the creature's claws. There was nothing left but for the three young men to nervously make their way back to the truck and back to the cabin. When they got there, they are said to have been unsettled to find that the snow around the property was littered with large paw prints as if something had expressly been looking for them. Deciding that they didn't want to wait around to find out what it was, they quickly packed up their belongings and brought the trip to a swift end. A short time later, with nighttime having well and truly fallen, it was with some relief that Sam started up the engine and eased his truck away from the cabin for the last time. Then a few hundred yards down the narrow track, Sam felt the entire truck jolt, as though something heavy had just collided into his rear passenger door. It would have been impossible to see what it was in the moonless dark of the forest, but Sam knew, and though he would never forget the whole terrifying ordeal, he never reported the incident to officials for fear of ridicule. He'd heard the legends himself, had never taken them seriously until then, he hardly expected anyone else to. Today, Steve Cook has moved on from his radio DJ days, and that song of his that some say started it all could be said to be a relic of a less hyper era when the media had time to dwell awhile on the oddities of small Town Americana before hoaxes and disinformation became just another cynical tool with which to flood the zone. Yet hoax or not, that novelty folk song still resonates among the town and villages in the shadow of the Maynesty and Plenty would say there's a real warning to be found in its closing lines that somewhere in the Northwoods darkness, a creature walks upright, and the best advice you'll ever get is don't go out at night. This episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Please remember to like and subscribe if you've enjoyed the show. Unexplained is an Avy Club Productions podcast created by me Richard McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. The shorter followers on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook at Unexplained Podcast and on X and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod. Until next time, Stay strange and dissonant.
