"In the late 1980s, people driving along Bray Road, which is located near Elkhorn, Wisconsin, reported running into a large, werewolf type beast. Linda Godfrey, a news reporter at the time, covered the stories when she heard about them in the early 1990s and called the creature "The Beast of Bray Road." The name stuck, and that's what cryptozoologists have called it since.
"The first Bray Road sighting occurred in 1981. One afternoon, as Marvin Kirschnik was driving on Highway 11, not far from its intersection with Bray Road,when he saw something standing one two legs behind a fallen tree. He stopped and moved over to the passenger side to get a better look. The creature had its paws on the tree, and was standing about six feet tall. It had a dog's face, but a body that looked like a human's. The two had a staredown for about a minute before Kirschnik left. He drew a sketch if the creature when he got home, and later made other representations of the animal to cope with the memory. Not wanting to be ridiculed, he kept the story to himself for 20 years. "I didn't tell anyone for two weeks at first, and when I told my wife she laughed at me." He said. Kirschnik later told his story on the TV show MonsterQuest and passed a polygraph test (aka a lie detector test.)
"Five years after Marvin Kirschnik's sighting, in 1986, Diane Koeing, a factory worker, was heading home from Burlington. It was late, so she decided to use Bray Road as a shortcut to Elkhorn. She had not heard of the creature, so she drove through Bray Road with her doors unlocked, windows down, and had the radio playing. As far as she knew, there was nothing on the road to be afraid of. She was wrong.
"As she was nearing an intersection, her headlights revealed a huge creature kneeling by the side of the road. She thought it was a person at first, until she saw it had the head of a wolf. The creature seemed to be holding a dead deer in its 'hands.' The creature froze when her headlights hit it, and Diane could see 'a long muzzle, dark, shaggy fur, and 'mean' looking eyes.' She got the feeling that the creature didn't want her around, and she quickly left. I bet she started locking her doors when she drove down Bray Road after that encounter."
This post is excerpted from my book Cryptid U.S.: Tales of Bigfoot, Lake Monsters, and More From Across America, which is available on Amazon.com.