Michigan Dogman

 

     This year, along with family history, I’m going to include a few interesting tales and some Michigan lore. I hope these stories will make you ponder and question what you are so very sure about.

     Several years ago, I penned a blog entry called, “A Matter of Perspective.” In a way, this is an extension of that post. I’ll be putting myself in the first person as the character Debbie, but this is not my account. It was originally conceived as a Halloween Story based on actual witness testimony, but I never entered it on this blog since at that time, I was helping my boss close out her business.

 

 

In college, I used to live west of Grand Rapids. My friend Jean and I often walked before twilight. Some evenings we’d go to the edge of the state park so our friend Pat could join us. Pat was one of the security guards for the golf course that bordered the park and would routinely take a smoke break right about 8:30 pm. In autumn that was full dark.

     Jean and Pat and I were well acquainted with the path, rain or snow or dry conditions. The only time we wouldn’t walk it was during a windstorm because a branch could blow down and cause one of us to trip.

     This night Pat was about to light up when we heard a cracking sound, kind of like a pick-up truck driving through cornfields, but we were far from the road and nobody was allowed to drive in the woods. The only alternative was someone tearing up the turf at the course, but we could see no headlights. We heard no engine gunning for us.

     Then silence. Too quiet. Pat lit a cigarette.

     Jean joked that the sound might be the Michigan Dogman lurking nearby, and told a story about someone’s great grandfather seeing a dogman at his uncle’s hunting camp. Family lore said that the natives had reported them to the French and British all the way back a couple hundred years. Then Jean started talking about skinwalkers. The conversation faded since Pat and I were not buying it.

     We walked for another five minutes, maybe less, in silence. Then we heard an exhale. Loud. So powerful that it made the leaves and small branches beside us rattle!

     Pat hastily shone a flashlight where the state park and golf course fence met, about fifteen feet from us. Expecting a dog, maybe even a bear, at first the light was pointed close to the ground. We saw, long spindly legs, like a Barbie Doll’s, skinny but covered in dark brown fur. Pat’s beam traveled upwards to what could have been a hairy chest. The direct light illuminated what might have appeared to be a canine face, partially hidden behind pine boughs. Its hands, if you could call them that, were raised above its head, the fingers spread.

     Jean and I muttered, “Bigfoot,” under our breath but this beast was taller, maybe ten feet. Again it made a whooshing sound, exhaling at us menacingly.

     Pat dropped the cigarette and we high-tailed it to the guard building the moment the creature charged toward us. We could hear the monster’s footfalls on the pavement behind our backsides, gaining ground on our human bodies, weak compared to the lean, muscular, upright animal that we were now fleeing.

     We made it to the structure. Jean tripped over some decorative pumpkins left over from an earlier activity, falling hard on the inclined drive. I helped my friend up and we stumbled in through the doorway after Pat. Once inside the other guard, an older man close to retirement, yelled, “You’re late, where—”

     The man’s voice trailed off when he saw two more people with Pat. The old man looked angrier as we slammed the door behind us. “What the devil is going on?!”

     “It’s after us!” whispered Jean. We crouched down, the old man hunching over as he saw how visibly frightened we were.

     “What is after you? A coyote?” The old man sounded doubtful that this was anything more than college-aged students terrified of a puppy. Despite the radio being tuned into music from like thirty years ago, we heard heavy footsteps as something or someone brushed against the hedges near the front windows, crunching, chewing, and snorting its way around to the back as it searched for weaknesses in the shack’s clapboard walls. The old guard, no longer “the tough-guy,” suddenly realized the serious nature of our narrow escape, clutched his little transistor radio from another era, and fell into a chair in the corner.

     Muffled between the man's fingers, we hears the radio. A disc jockey asked listeners to call in to make a request or to share how their evening was coming along. He repeated the studio's number twice. I couldn’t remember my mother’s phone number. I couldn’t dial simple numbers like 911 or even zero! Despite my shaking hands and fingers that felt like deep-fried smelt, I grabbed the shack’s old yellow rotary phone and began to dial 2 3 1. . .

     “Hello, you are on the air, who am I speaking to?”

     “Dah, Duh,” I took a deep breath. “Debbie!”

     “. . . and how is your night, Debbie—are you spending this evening with your lover, or getting ready for Hal—”

     “We’re calling because, I think we just saw the Michigan Dogman!” I passed the phone around to my friends as we huddled beside the desk, telling him why we were calling.

     The DJ asked us a few questions and went along with us for a while, but then said, “You kids are great, you sure can tell a great Halloween story—”

     Jean fumbled for a PallMall in the almost empty pack, and flicked a lighter.

     “—Before I hang up, is there a song you’d like to request?”

     I dropped the phone on the floor. We all screamed. In the glow of Jean’s Bic, out the back window of the shed, on the low side that dropped off away from the parking lot, the dog-faced creature’s eyes glowed. It was tall enough to look into what could arguably be considered a second story! It was drooling.

     One of the dogman’s raised hands brushed the window as if to shatter it. Jean dropped the lighter. Its flame extinguished.

     The old man in the corner sobbed. “I seen it! I seen it! I seen it!”

     We waited in the darkness for the shattering of glass. After a couple songs, other listeners were calling in, saying what we saw was no joke, that the dogman was in some tales of the Odawa and from journals of old French traders in Ontario, Wisconsin and here in Michigan. One caller said that dogmen hadn’t been seen in nearly a hundred years but since the mid-90s more people were reporting them again in increasing numbers.

     The large footsteps crunched on the fallen leaves and gravel, fading farther and farther away. That’s when Pat screamed, “Run for the car!”

     The three of us scrambled for the door, shot out onto the drive, and dashed to the lot adjacent to the shack. Without looking back, we drove off, deserting the old guard. I think we busted a gate on the way out. Pat did not collect the last paycheck and we never spoke of it again. In fact, we never even went walking again, and within the year life took us down diverging paths.

     Decades later, after I moved to Indiana and married, then divorced and moved back, I took my kids and some of their cousins to the Upper Peninsula to camp. I told this story to my family around the campfire just as the sun went down. My oldest kid’s face was buried in his cell phone. Branches snapped in the woods behind me, dredging up that night from my memories.

     “Yeah, it was tall, and thin. Not like Bigfoot. Some say Sasquatch is maybe seven or eight feet tall. This dogman was maybe ten to twelve feet tall. It had upraised arms and its fingers spread out, like it wanted to grab one of us.”  I demonstrated with my arms in the air.

     My oldest let out a big sigh and turned his phone slightly toward the woods, “You mean something like this?” I figured he was going to show me his hasty Google search. Instead, his flashlight app was on and the beam shot toward the trees where more branches were crunching under the weight of something heavy.

     We all saw it: a tall, long legged, lean snarling beast, drooling as if it wanted to taste our blood; it’s arms, outstretched  in the dim light. My son sat still. I clutched my young daughter to my chest and she whimpered. My other children and their cousins began to cry and scream, and the dogman turned. It shifted before our eyes. The spindly, grasping man became a large, long, horizontal-presenting body, maybe six feet in length as it lumbered away from our fire.

     I know what my children and their cousins and I saw was exactly what my friends and I faced close to thirty-some years ago.

     Later in the month, I contacted Jean on Facebook and I was informed that Pat had died in Afghanistan. When I talked about old times and what happened the last time we took a walk together, Jean swore what we saw was a dogman, refusing to believe what else I wanted to say. Unsatisfied, I contacted the old guard. He was still alive. As it turns out, he’d co-authored a book about Michigan’s Dogman (which is how I located and identified him). He also confirmed Jean’s words, and said what we saw was not what I now speculated the brute to be.

     You see, that night around the fire, as the brown creature turned to amble off, my son told me something that changed my perspective. “Mom, what you saw was a moose.” He repeated his words, “A MOOSE!”

#Odawa #MichiganLore #Dogman #MichiganDogman

 

(This post is a compilation of witness narratives from encounters with the Michigan Dogman. At the end, my theory of the creature actually being a moose is revealed. Royalty free images have been used purely for demonstrational purposes.)