Cynocephali, the Dog Headed Men

Men with the heads of dogs have been reported since ancient times. Cynocephali were supposed to be a race living in Africa, who cannibalized humans. Seeing such beings in modern times would seem incredible, yet bizarrely, there have been increasing modern reports of these creatures.

The Cynocephali have existed in the mythology of Europe, India and China. The legends of all three of these cultures originally said that the Cynocephali resided somewhere in the wild lands west of Tibet and north of Persia (modern-day Iran). The European legends later began placing Cynocephali in all unexplored regions. In Europe, they were described as dog-headed people, sometimes as dog-headed hairy giants that have something in common with hairy humanoids. In the legends from India and China, the Cynocephali were described as shapeshifters who could change from human to dog, but who always retained some animal features when they became human again.

It should be noted that in these references these are not werewolves, but animals or gods with the heads of dogs on fully human bodies.

Probably the earliest example is the Egyptian god Anubis. This god is depicted with the body of a man but with the head of a jackal. Anubis was a god of death and the underworld, and paintings of Anubis can be found throughout Egypt’s ancient sites.

Worth mentioning is that Cynocephalus is a Greek word for a sacred Egyptian baboon with the face of a dog. The name Kynokephalos means dog-headed, from “kuôn,” a dog, and “kephalos,” head.

While the Greeks may not have had dog-headed gods, they knew of places where dog-headed creatures purportedly existed. As far back as the fifth century BCE, a Greek doctor wrote about dog-headed men that could be found in India. Later, a Greek explorer described dog-headed men (kynokephaloi), also in India, who spoke to each other by barking and were primitive savages by nature.  They were also referred to as the creatures that lived in “India beyond the Ganges” (which we now call Southeast Asia).

Herodotus, Histories 4. 191. 3 (trans. Godley) (Greek historian C5th B.C.) :
“For the eastern region of Libya, which the Nomads inhabit, is low-lying and sandy as far as the Triton river; but the land west of this, where the farmers live, is exceedingly mountainous and wooded and full of wild beasts. In that country are the huge snakes and the lions, and the elephants and bears and asps, the horned asses, the Kunokephaloi (Cynocephali) (Dog-Headed) and the Headless Men that have their eyes in their chests, as the Libyans say, and the wild men and women, besides many other creatures not fabulous.”

In the medieval mappaemundi, lurking at the edges of the world were monstrous races. The text contains the description of some of these species and most importantly included reference to the Cynocephali (Cynocephales, “Dog-heads”), one of the best-known monstrous races at the time. According to Pliny, they lived in caves, wore animal skins, hunted very succesfully, and used javelins, bows, and swords. Other sources that circulated in the middle ages picture the Cynocephali much more frighteningly, with enormous teeth and breathing fire. Several sources make them cannibals. All sources emphasize that they combine the natures of man and beast.  The Pygmei seem to even include  creatures with long hanging ears that droop to the ground, who evoke the earlier *Panotii*. [An inventory of these and other monstrous creatures from the *Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493*.]



Centuries later, even the elders of the Catholic Church believed such beings existed. Saint Augustine pondered in his writings if dog-headed men were held to the same moral laws as humankind and if they could be saved.



But Augustine was not Christianity’s only delving into the subject. Very bizarrely, some ancient icons of Saint Christopher depict him as having a dog’s head. The story goes that he led a sinful life in this form, but when he reformed and was baptized he was transformed into a man having a human head.



Even King Arthur gets into the picture when he and his army allegedly defeated a band of dog-headed soldiers in the mountains surrounding Edinburgh.

And although he never claimed to encounter them personally, Marco Polo reported that dog-headed men lived on an island off the coast of Myanmar.



If real Cynocephali exist, it is difficult to determine just what sort of animal they might be. Some of these legends might be garbled accounts of baboons, monkeys with dog-like snouts. Today, this explanation has been mostly dropped. Further studies have suggested that the Cynocephali tales are actually based on dog ancestor origin myths from tribes who were considered filthy barbarians by more “civilized” writers in India and China. According to these writers, whole races of people were deliberately killed because they weren’t human, they were “really” monsters. When these myths were imported to Europe, they became even further changed from the originals. The European Cynocephali is often quite different than the creature of the original legends.

But - the tales are not all ancient. Current sightings of what are claimed to be humans with dog heads have happened in Michigan, Wisconsin, and even the Shetland Islands.

Researcher and author Linda Godfrey has been reporting on sightings of an unknown upright-walking canine known as the ‘Manwolf’ or ‘Dogman’ for many years. Witnesses describe these creatures as 5 to 7 feet tall, extremely muscular, covered in fur, with large fangs, the head of a wolf or German Shepherd.

The tales of dog-headed creatures, including the Dogman of Michigan, and the wolf-like Beast of Bray Road of Wisconsin are accounted in several of Godfrey’s dogmen books and  with the numerous amounts of reasonable eyewitness reports, the dogheads are very much alive in modern culture.

Obviously there have been no skeletons of dog-headed humans ever found to back up these tales and most scientists ignore the modern sightings but for the few who do pay attention to them, the Cynocephali could be viewed as either some kind of hairy humanoid or as a cryptid canine of some sort. One thing is for certain - the widespread myths do make one wonder where all these stories came from and if these tales are just remnants of an earlier long-lost global myth that later developed their own flavors within different cultures or if there really are dog-headed men that have been living with us ever since ancient times.

Sources: gods-and-monsters.com/cynocephalus.html, cryptidz.wikia.com/wiki/Cynocephali, historicmysteries.com/dog-headed-men, columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/munster/india/aa_india.html, newanimal.org/cyno.htm

Cryptid Chronicles readers, what do YOU think??

To discover more cryptids and mysterious creatures please follow us at cryptidchronicles.tumblr.com

Legend of The Dwayyo

The Dwayyo or Dewayo is a mammalian said to be hairy, have a bushy tail, and is sometimes bipedal. At times it has features similar to a wolf but with the arms, stance and stature of a human. The first mention of the name ‘Dwayyo’ comes from a sighting in 1944 from an area in Carroll County, Maryland. Witnesses heard the creature make ‘frightful screams’ and there were footprints attesting to the claims of the sighting.

The creature had first come to prominence after a story ran in the Fredrick News Post in November of 1965. Reporter George May wrote in the article, “Mysterious Dwayyo Loose in County” that a young man, named anonymously as ‘John Becker’ heard a strange noise in his backyard which was situated on the outskirts of Gambrill State Park. Upon going out to investigate the noise he initially saw nothing, so he headed back in. It was then that he caught site of the creature. Something was moving toward him in the dark, Becker was quoted that “It was as big as a bear, had long black hair, a bushy tail, and growled like a wolf or dog in anger.” The thing quickly moved toward him on its hind legs and began to attack him. He fought off the creature and drove it back into the woods, later calling police to report the incident.

In the summer of 1966, the creature was again sighted on the outskirts of Gambrill State Park. A man only referred to as ‘Jim A.’ encountered the Dwayyo as he was heading toward a camp site. It was described as a shaggy two legged creature the size of a deer that had a triangle shaped head with pointed ears and chin. It was dark brown in color and when approached it made a horrid scream and backed away from the man. Jim described it as having an odd walk as it retreated, it’s legs, “stuck out from the side of the trunk of the body making its movements appear almost spider-like as it backed away”.



In the Fall of 1976 another sighting of the Dwayyo took place in Fredrick County near Thurmont, between Cunningham Falls State Park and Catoctin Mountain National Park. Two men drove off route 77 and unto a private road so they could ‘spot deer’ by their headlights in order to see how thick the native population had become before deer season. To their surprise, they did not catch a deer in their lights but instead a large animal ran across the front of their car. They described the creature as, “at least 6 ft tall but inclined forward since it was moving quickly. Its head was fairly large and similar to the profile of a wolf. The body was covered in brown or brindle colored fur but the lower half had a striped pattern of noticeable darker and lighter banding. The forelegs (or arms) were slimmer and held out in front as it moved. The back legs were very muscled and thick similar to perhaps a kangaroo. This was not a hominid type creature; it did not have the characteristics of an ape. It was much more similar to a wolf or ferocious dog however it was definitely moving upright and appeared to be adapted for that type of mobility. I was particularly impressed by the size and strength of the back legs, the stripes on the lower half of the body and the canine-wolf-like head.” - from The Michigan Dogman: Werewolves and Other Unknown Canines Across the U.S.A.

Later in 1978 two park rangers were near the Cunningham Falls area when they encountered “a large hairy creature running on two legs”.

Paranormalist Robin Swope relates an anecdote from a witness who says she was driving on Coxey Brown Road near Myersville, Maryland late in the summer of 2009 when she had an strange feeling. It was as if she was being watched. The road was lined with trees, she was on the outer edge of Gambrill State Park, and the forest was beginning to grow thicker. According to her, as she turned on Hawbottom Road, where her friend lived, the feeling became overwhelming. The hairs on the back of her neck rose in terror as she sensed the unseen eyes upon her. She wanted to stop the car and take her breath, she was afraid that she would veer off the road and hit a tree because she her nerves were getting so unsteady that she began to shake. But she knew that whatever was watching her, and following her was out there, and she took what little comfort she had by being safer inside her rust rotted car. Still, to prevent a wreck, she slowed down as she headed south, and that was when she saw the creature.

At first it was a blur to the right of her periphery vision. Something that was moving through the trees, a shadow that flickered as it went in and out of sight on the edge of her vision. It was a brown smear of color that popped out in contrast to the dull dark grey trees that she passed.

Whatever it was, it bobbed through the underbrush and between the trees to keep pace with her car. She thinks at the time, she was going around 25 miles per hour. She then slowed down once more to take a good look to her right, and make sure that she was not seeing things. As her car slowed to a crawl, the brown blurry smear of color seemed to bound out of the woods closer to the road. With a massive leap the hazy color became flesh as a huge dog-like animal on two legs emerged from the foliage.

The fangs are burned into her memory. Huge fangs from a mouth grimaced in anger and hate. She could feel the fangs as if they were ripping her skin while the creature stood there panting on the side of the road. Drool dripped from its huge mouth as she heard a loud growl, and she looked into the dark eyes. Darkness took up its entire eye, there was no white at all. It was if she was staring death and hell head on in dizzying madness.

Then it leaped, arms outstretched with claws grasping the wind. Instinctively she stepped on her gas pedal with all her might. The squeal of her tires seemed as if her car too was screaming in horror at the thing that emerged from the dark looming forest.

She did not look back. She didn’t want to know if the thing was following her. She didn’t feel the eyes upon her anymore. She was too shaken to really feel anything at all. When she made it to her friends house, she sat in the driveway shaking as she looked around to make sure the creature had not followed her there. The house was also in the woods, at the opposite side of the State Park. When she felt safe, she made a mad dash for her friend’s door, and banged on it frantically.

He did not know what to make of her story. The witness knew he did not believe her. He had lived in the woods all his life, and had never encountered what she had seen. He assured her that it must have just been a dog, perhaps a rabid one at that. Her mind was playing tricks on her. But the young woman knew what she had seen that late summer day. It was no dog. It was something out of a horror movie come to life before her eyes. Though she told nobody what she felt it really was, she called it a werewolf. That is until after she did some research in the local college library and came up with the name that others had called it when they too saw the forest come alive. She had encountered the Dwayyo.

Sources naturalplane.blogspot.com/2011/09/dwayyo-maryland-dogman.html,
examiner.com - Pastor Robin Swope

Cryptid Chronicles readers, please share your thoughts!

More werewolf posts here! To discover more cryptids and mysterious creatures please follow us at cryptidchronicles.tumblr.com

Werewolf Sightings

1 - SHAPESHIFTING WEREWOLF OF TEXAS

Mrs. Delburt Gregg of Greggton, Texas, told of her encounter with a shapeshifting creature in the 1960 issue of Fate. The other surveyed sightings below are of creatures that looked like man-wolves but no one have seen one becoming another. Mrs. Gregg did not see a man turn into a wolf but she has actually came closer then anyone else in telling a tale that sounds like a chapter from a werewolf novel than a real life experience.

Mrs. Gregg said that one night in 1958 when her husband was on a business trip, she moved her bed close to a screen window hoping to catch some cool breeze from a thunderstorm brewing on the south western horizon. She heard a scratching sound from the window shortly after she fell asleep. In a flash of a lightning, she saw a huge, shaggy, wolf-like creature clawing at the screen and staring at her with baleful, glowing, slitted eyes. She saw its bared white fangs.

The creature fled from the yard into a clump of bushes as she leaped from her bed to grab a flash light. Mrs. Gregg said “I watched for the animal to come out of the bushes, but after a short time, instead of a great shaggy wolf running out, the figure of an extremely tall man suddenly parted the thick foliage and walked hurriedly down the road, disappearing into the darkness.”


2 - WISCONSIN WEREWOLF SIGHTING

Mark Schackelman was driving east of highway 18 near Jefferson, in southeastern Wisconsin on an evening in 1936 when he saw a figure digging in an Indian mound. He saw a hair covered creature that is over six feet tall with both ape-like and dog-like features with pointed ears standing erect. Its hands have shriveled thumb and a forefinger on each and also three fully formed fingers.

Schackelman went back to the sighting the next evening hoping to see the creature again and he did. The creature was making “neo-human” sounds with a three syllable growling. Years later, his son who is a Kenosha newspaper editor, wrote that his “father’s first thought was that it must be something satanic.” (In southeastern Wisconsin, several decades later, equally enigmatic beast would figure in a host of reports as described below).

3 - WEREWOLF CREATURE IN OHIO

Between July and October 1972, a number of residents of Ohio allegedly saw a werewolf-like creature. Some people reported encountering a six to eight-foot tall creature that a witness described as “human, with an oversized, wolf-like head, and an elongated nose.” Another said it “had huge, hairy feet, fangs, and it ran from side to side, like a caveman in the movies.”

4 - WEREWOLF ATTACK REPORTED IN NEW MEXICO

Four Gallup, New Mexico, youths allegedly encountered a “werewolf” along the side of a road near Whitewater one day in January 1970. One witness reported “It was about five feet seven, and I was surprised it could go so fast. At first I thought my friends were playing a joke on me, but when I found out they weren’t, I was scared! We rolled up the windows real fast and lock the doors of the cars. I started driving faster, about 60, but it was hard because that highway had a lot of sharp turns. Someone finally got a gun out and shot it. I know it got hit and fell down, but there was no blood. I know it couldn’t be a person because people cannot move that fast.”

5 - NAVAJO SKIN-WALKER

Skin-walker is another name for a werewolf that the Navahos of the southwest. In 1936, in Yale Publications in Anthropology, anthropologist William Morgan recounted an interview with a Navaho identified only as Hahago. Hahago said of skin-walker “They go very fast.They can go to Albuquerque in an hour and a half” - a four-hour trip by automobile, according to Morgan.

6 - RED EYED WEREWOLVES OF PENNSYLVANIA

In the fall of 1973 western Pennsylvania played host to dozens of reports of strange apelike creatures, sometimes seen in association with UFOS, said to have (in one witness’s words) “fire red eyes that glow in darkness.” To be seven to eight feet tall, and gives off a strong unpleasant odor. “Another type of creature” investigator Stan Gordon noted, “was said to be between five and six feet tall. It was described as looking just like an extremely muscular man with a covering of thick dark hair. Again in these reports, the arms were very long and hung down past the knees. This creature appeared to have superior agility exceeding that of a deer. From footprints discovered, the stride of creatures varies between 52 and 57 inches. In these reports there was no indication of odors.”

7 - WISCONSIN WEREWOLF ATTACK

On October 31, 1991 at 8:30pm, a woman drove on Bray Road near Delavan, Wisconsin which is approximately thirty miles south-southeast of Jefferson (site of Schackelman encounter in 1936), felt her right front tire jump off the pavements if it had hit something. The woman stopped her car and looked into the misty darkness and saw a dark hairy creature with a bulked-out chest racing towards her. She went back into her car and tried to speed away when the creature leaped onto her trunk. The creature eventually fell off from the trunk because the trunk was too wet to have a firm grip. Later, the woman returned with a friend and they had a glimpsed of a big form rising from the side of the road.

8 - WISCONSIN WEREWOLF ENCOUNTER

Lorianne Endrizzi had a similar encounter as above in the fall of 1989. She was driving on Bray Road, a half a mile away from the above encounter, where she thought it was a person kneeling in a haunched position at the edge of the road. She slowed down and to her surprise, the figure stared at her at no more then six feet across the passenger side of the car. The figure was covered with grayish brown hair, with big fangs and pointed ears. “His face was long and had a snout, like a wolf.” She told reporter Scarlett Sankay. The figure’s eyes glowed in the darkness and they were a yellowish-gold color. ‘The arms were really a kind of strange; jointed like a man or woman would be,” she said. “He was holding his hands with his palms upward. The arms were muscular ‘like a man who had worked out a little bit.” The backed legs looked like they were behind him, like a person kneeling.” The sighting lasted about 45 seconds and she had no idea what the creature could have been until she saw an illustration at the library of a werewolf.

9 - WEREWOLF SIGHTING

Around that same time as above in Elkhorn, near Delevan, a dairy farmer named Scott Bray saw a “strange looking dog” along his pasture on Bray Road. It was bigger and taller than a German shepherd, it had pointed ears and hairy tail, with long, scraggly grayish black hair. It is “built heavy in front - a real strong chest.” In the soft soil nearby he found enormous footprints which is four to five inches in diameter.

Cryptid Chronicles readers, what do YOU think??

Hey Cryptid Fans & CC Readers — WE ARE APPROACHING OUR
★★★ 200th Post Giveaway! ★★★ YOU STILL HAVE TIME TO PARTICIPATE AND YOU COULD WIN!! DON’T MISS OUT!! RE-BLOG TO WIN!

To discover more cryptids and mysterious creatures please follow us at cryptidchronicles.tumblr.com or on twitter @cryptidfans
More werewolf posts here!

Bipedal Canine Cryptid Reported Near Taylors Falls, Minnesota

I hope that someday Cryptid Chronicles will be so popular that people send me classic Dogman/Manwolf sighting reports like this one sent to Lon Strickler for his Phantoms and Monsters blog, which I am a huge fan of.

Anyway, here is the report:

I received this email last night. It was forwarded by a witness in Minnesota who describes a bipedal canine cryptid. I have not discussed this incident with the witness so I’m presenting the sighting ‘as is’:

Hello - I was steered to you by a man I know up north from here. He said that you are interested in these things so I figured I’d send an email.

I live in Taylors Falls, Minnesota and I was driving north on Wild Mountain Rd. around 7 am. on Jan 2nd. I was heading for the ski area when I saw some kind of animal running in the field towards the river. I pulled off the road and grabbed my binoculars. It looked like a large wolf but it was different. By that time some guy in a truck pulled up and was wondering what I was looking at. I told him that I think there is a large wolf in the field. He got out of the truck and asked to use the binoculars. He said he didn’t think it was a wolf and that it looked like it was chasing something.

We stood for a few minutes watching. It would run into the woods then pop back into the field for a bit. The light was getting better so I grabbed my parka and started to walk closer to get a better look. The other guy said he had to leave but did say again that he didn’t think it was a wolf.

I was about a 1/2 mile from the ski area near one of the trail roads. I started to walk towards the river. I was about 100 ft from where I saw the animal from the road when I heard an owl screech coming from the woods to my right. On the edge of the woods this huge dog came running out of the trees. The best way to describe it was that it looked like a big hyena but it ran on two back legs and bent over. It had wooly black hair all over it’s body and a long thick tail. It must have weighed 200 lbs or more. I’ve been in the woods all my life and have never seen anything like this. It looked over at me but continued to run from right to left in front of me. It also made a steady loud panting sound as it ran.

I turned on a pivot and ran out of there hoping this animal wasn’t going to chase me. When I got to the car an old man had pulled off and standing there watching me. He wondered what I was doing. I yelled at him to “get the hell out of there” and said that a monster dog was out there. I think he believed me because the look on his face showed fear like he knew something was really out there.





I didn’t go to the ski area, instead I went back home all shook up and asking myself what I saw.

I read the stories about the Michigan dogman and something you had about one being seen in Wisconsin. What do you think this was? It was no wolf or any other animal native to the area.

Please don’t use my name if you pass this along. This is my work email, I can send you another later.

The guy who sent me your email address told me that there was a sighting last year just west of Duluth. He said it was a hunter that came across it while tracking a deer he had shot. I don’t know the details but if it looked like the animal I saw I’m sure he got the hell out of there.

Posted by Lon Strickler for Phantoms and Monsters Jan. 12, 2012

Cryptid Chronicles readers, what do YOU think??
Have any of you ever had a similar sighting??

★★★ Cryptid Fans — Don’t miss our 200th post giveaway! ★★★

ARTISTS » Enter our Cryptid Chronicles 1st Annual Fan Art Competition!

You may also be interested in

Dogman & Werewolves

The Legend of the Michigan Dogman

Strong, lean muscles strain under dark fur. Teeth and fangs flash beneath demonic eyes. A growl emerges as he rises to stand on his hind legs, stretching to more than 7 feet tall.

He is the Dogman, a legend of the vast Michigan woods, described with remarkable consistency by hunters, farmers and even the occasional motorist in reported encounters that date back centuries.

Dogman may not be as well-known as some other hairy, scary creatures likely to be represented in Halloween costumes, but he is pure Michigan and will soon be coming alive on the silver screen.

The cryptozoological beast, a creepy combination of the two species that gives the Dogman his name, is the subject of a made-in-Michigan movie coming in 2012 titled “Dogman.” It stars former “According to Jim” star and Cadillac native Larry Joe Campbell.

“Because Michigan is largely rural and there’s a lot of wide open spaces and people tend to spend a lot of time communing with the outdoors, it gives rise to these kinds of legends and stories, just because of the connection people have to their natural surroundings,” said Steve Cook, production director of WTCM-FM (103) and —AM (580) radio in Traverse City, and an expert on the Dogman.

The 52-year-old Traverse City resident also is the modern-day father of the creature.

In 1987, Cook wrote a song about the legend to play for listeners on April Fools’ Day. But when it aired, Cook’s half-fact, half-fiction ditty was no joke to many who heard it. Calls and letters began pouring in, as listeners shared stories of their encounters with a similar beast — Michigan’s Bigfoot, the Wolverine State’s Chupacabra.

One of them was Robert Fortney, who said he saw it in the 1930s while fishing the Muskegon River near Paris. When a pack of wild dogs approached him on the bank, Fortney fired a shot from his .22-caliber hunting rifle to scare them away.

“All the dogs scattered out of the way, except a very large black dog with blue eyes. It stood and looked at him for two minutes. He was amazed by fact this thing was standing there looking at him on two legs,” Cook said of Fortney’s account. “He claimed he never told anyone in his family or friends about it, because he thought he was crazy. When he heard the song, he thought, ‘Wow, there’s really something to this, I really saw what I saw.’ He claimed (it) up until the day he died. That was the first of a more or less avalanche of reports we’ve received over the years.”

Until that point, Dogman had been local folklore.

The Odawa called him Wendigo and the French explorers, a loup-garou, according to a documentary Cook later made after collecting material that included this diary entry by a Comstock resident in 1857: “Near the barn, it stood as if a man, yet it bore the countenance of a grey wolf.”

More modern accounts include that by a vanload of hippies who said they were harassed by the Dogman near Cross Village in 1967.

Police took an incident report in 1987 from people who said they saw such a creature in Luther. There are photos of something from the U.P.’s Garden Peninsula in 1968 and Onaway in 2004 and unexplained tracks discovered in the Waterloo Recreation Area in Chelsea in the late 1980s.

“I made it up completely from my own imagination as an April Fools’ prank for the radio and stumbled my way to a legend that goes back all the way to Native American times,” Cook said.

The song now goes into the station’s play rotation every year around mid-September and also has been aired as far away as Arizona and Tennessee and on Armed Forces radio in Japan and Germany.

Cook said profits of almost $60,000 generated by his song and documentary have been donated to animal rescue charities.

“I’m tremendously skeptical,” Cook said of the legend, “because I’ve sort of seen the way folklore becomes built from the creation of this song to what it’s turned into … but I do believe people who think they saw something really did see something. I also think the Dogman provides them with an avenue to explain what they couldn’t explain for themselves.”

Filmmaker and Ann Arbor native Rich Brauer, 57, who finished shooting “Dogman” in September, said: “Every culture has a mythical woodland creature that they blame stuff on. I don’t know what it is about people that they want to blame stuff on something like that. There’s an inherent imagination that people have, especially when they go in the woods and start to hear things and their hair stands up on the back of their head. … It might turn out to be a chickadee on a stick, but up until that moment, it was something huge.”

Janet Langlois, a folklore expert at Wayne State University, said that as far back as Greek mythology humans have been drawn to tales about “people who cross boundaries, like centaurs. We’re drawn to them and frightened by them. It points out how complicated the relationship humans have with other nonhuman animals or creatures. We’re always fascinated by creatures.”

Big picture, she sees a larger purpose in such legends that cross cultures and time periods.

“It can range from simple entertainment to other complex, philosophical ideas about the universe,” Langlois said. “I tend to think stories, even though they’re simple and incredible, are building blocks of thinking about the nature of the universe.”

Story by Zlati Meyer Detroit Free Press Staff Writer

Top Illustration: © Brian Rosinski’s imagining of Dogman
Second Illustration: © ERIC MILLIKIN/DFP

Want to know more about the Dogman Legend? Check out The Michigan Dogman: Werewolves and Other Unknown Canines Across the U.S.A. by Linda S. Godfrey and Hunting the American Werewolf By Linda S. Godfrey

Don’t miss out on our 200th post giveaway! Win cryptid stuff!

What Cryptid do you most believe in/find plausible?
Take part in our Cryptid Chronicles Poll!