>> From the highest point in Elkhorn, the platform around its water tower, the city seems asleep on this bleak winter's day.
>> PAYTON: In the early 1950s, the television series, "March of Time" chose to feature the city of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, during Christmastime to showcase its idyllic slice of Americana.
A few years later in 1958, Ford Motor Company commissioned watercolor artist, Cecile Johnson to create six paintings for its company magazine to capture that same hometown holiday feel in Elkhorn.
In the span of a few years, Elkhorn had made a name for itself, Christmas Card Town.
But a few decades later, the city would develop a different kind of reputation, attract a different kind of curiosity.
In the late '80s, things got a little bit hairier.
♪ >> PAYTON: Friends and folks, welcome to "Flyover Culture."
I'm Payton Knobeloch, and today's episode is my favorite psuedo-tradition for making videos.
It's our cryptids episode.
Back in 2019, for [Indi]Android, I took a trip up to Churubusco, Indiana, to get to know all about Oscar, the giant turtle that put the town on the world stage.
That was an example of a town really embracing its strange, to borrow a phrase from my guest today.
But that doesn't always happen.
Why not?
What leads towns to embrace some reputations over others?
To, well, try and find out, let's head back to 1989.
The modern incarnation of the story begins with a 24-year-old bar manager named Lori Endrizzi.
In the fall of 1989, Endrizzi was heading home after a shift, and she drove along Bray Road, not too far from Interstate 43.
She spotted some shape on the side of the road.
She slowed down to get a better look, and what she saw stuck in her mind.
Roughly five and a half feet tall, maybe 150 pounds, but covered in brownish-gray fur with fangs and claws.
And those fangs were feasting on roadkill.
For her 45-second encounter with the creature, Endrizzi wondered what this thing was, where it came from.
She wouldn't be the last to see it, but she wasn't the first either.
As for what this thing was, there are plenty of theories.
>> I think a lot of like, Occam's razor, you know?
Like, the most obvious answer is usually the right one.
So if something is looking like a wolf, that says to me maybe a wolf.
>> PAYTON: That's B.J.
Hollars, Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire and the author of "Midwestern Strange."
A book that covers a number of peculiar incidents and urban legends from around the Midwest.
If you are a subscriber -- and if you are not, why do you want to hurt me?
-- you will remember this book from my video on the Kensington Runestone.
>> There have been a lot of questions about, you know, could it be a trained animal?
Could it be a bear?
Could it be a dog that's leaping through the air a whole lot, you know?
>> PAYTON: Hollars consulted Linda Godfrey, who is the Beast of Bray Road expert.
She classifies the beast as an unknown upright canine, which she admits is not as sexy a term as werewolf.
And if pop culture taught us anything, it's that werewolves are pretty sexy.
>> Bella!
Where the hell have you been, loca?
>> PAYTON: Godfrey is a former reporter and current author who was sent to cover the Endrizzi sighting in '89.
>> The Bray Road, where this is often been sighted, is kind of, you know, on the outskirts of town.
There's some other roads nearby, Bowers Roads, these sorts of roads, where it's kind of -- the beast has allegedly been seen.
And so when I was -- when I was going on location to Bray Road with Linda Godfrey, kind of the world expert on this, and we were kind of driving around the road, we didn't see anything.
Drats!
But she brought up a good point which is, you know, bipedal werewolves probably aren't going to stick to the same road, you know?
I think it's more of like a marketing tool or a pop culture reference to make it the Beast of Bray Road.
I mean, the illiteration alone is sort of perfect.
>> PAYTON: Like I said, Endrizzi was not the first person to come face-to-gaping maw with the beast.
For that, let's head back to 1936.
33-year-old Mark Shackelman was a night watchman at the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children in Jefferson, Wisconsin.
Roughly a 45-minute drive from Elkhorn these days.
One night on his shift, he saw a hairy animal digging into a nearby Native American burial mound.
When Shackelman got close enough, the creature took notice, rose up on two legs, and fled.
The next night, he encountered it again.
The two stared at each other for a few moments, until the creature vocalized three syllables, ga da ra, and it ran off one more time.
Shackelman's wife made him promise not to tell anyone for fear of the reputation they might get.
And he didn't, at least not until seven years after her death when he recounted the story to his son Joe.
Joe Shackelman later became a newspaper editor in Kenosha and told his father's story.
He told Hollars in 2017 for the book: There have been sightings of the beast in the past few years as well.
Most recently, in July of 2020, an area man said he saw the beast near a treeline in Lyons, Wisconsin, while working a delivery in broad daylight.
And then he saw it again just two weeks later.
But the biggest new find in recent memory came from a guy named Danny Morgan in early 2018.
Morgan says he was been driving home in Spring Prairie, just a bit east of Elkhorn, when he saw a shape coming out of a cornfield and heading towards the road.
He slammed on his brakes to avoid hitting it, just to find himself within spitting distance of the beast.
But where Danny's story diverges, is that he was able to snap a couple of photos of the beast.
And the results are... just wonderful!
>> Here comes the boy!
Hello, boy!
>> PAYTON: Almost a century from when it was first spotted, we have a town that, according to B.J., still hasn't quite embraced its hairiest citizen.
I asked him why he thinks that is.
>> If you have ever lived in a small town, you know, you know if you become the guy who saw the giant turtle, you will forever be the guy who saw the giant turtle.
You can't shake that, you know?
And so these stories stick with people.
You're asking people to share about something that they may have experienced that might make them the source of ridicule or might, you know, affect their employment, in fact, or how their neighbors and friends think of them.
And so -- and I think throughout the book, I really tried to kind of defend folks as much as possible, and not necessarily to say I believed what they are saying all the time, but I do believe that they believe what they saw.
>> PAYTON: It's not that there haven't been attempts to increase the creature's cultural footprint.
2018 saw a documentary, and 2005 had a horror movie produced by the Asylum, and it's -- well, it's an Asylum movie.
>> Brea, can you not see I'm trying to get laid here?
>> PAYTON: But as we have seen in other cases, these weird, sometimes off-putting urban legends can lead to opportunity.
>> My grand theory is that the towns and the cities that embrace their strange really come out on top.
And I think too, there's sort of this, like, Midwestern -- we probably wouldn't fess up to it, but kind of a chip on our shoulder, you know?
Certainly my own, you know, where, you know, the East Coast has its stuff.
The West Coast has its stuff.
The South has got its stuff, but we have to try doubly hard to concoct or create or devise some strategy to give people a reason to see us as something more than flyover country, you know?
And that there's real lives being lived fully there, and happily, and we have a lot to share and showcase ourselves.
And if it takes a monster to kind of bring people in, so be it.
>> PAYTON: A big thank you to B.J.
Hollars for talking with me.
He's got a new book coming out next month called, "Go West, Young Man: A Father and Son Rediscover America on the Oregon Trail."
I will have a link to info on that and "Midwestern Strange" down in the description.
And if you would be so kind, please like this video and subscribe.
We've got a couple more episodes of "Flyover Culture" this season that you do not want to miss.
Thanks for watching.
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