"Darling it is no joke, this is lycanthropy" - Shakira, "She Wolf"

A strange creature has been sighted in Wisconsin, and the number of sightings has been steadily rising for the last 20 years.  The beast involved is sometimes described as being like Sasquatch, and sometimes more like the old 1940s movie era Lon Cheney werewolf.

Dubbed "The Beast of Bray Road" by one researching author because of the vicinity in which it is most frequently sighted, the cryptid has (naturally) eluded pursuit and frightened hunters for years.  Because of its resemblance to Lon Cheney's werewolf, it is often referred to as a "werewolf."  Many sightings report a canid-looking animal, like a Sasquatch descended from dogs instead of apes.

(If you ask me the more interesting question has apparently never been asked.  If the Wisconsin monster is a werewolf, then who is the man he turns into?)

I recently watched the MonsterQuest episode on this topic, and it made two excellent points, both for the Wisconsin Werewolf and for cryptozoology at large:

1.    A woman described a huge beast that lumbered around on the roof of her house, scaring the wits out of her before leaping off and running into the woods.  It left behind a tuft of hair which caught on the edge of the roof when it lept.

MonsterQuest sent this hair to a lab for analysis.  The results came back conclusively proving that the sample belonged to: a domestic cat.

It's important to keep in mind that regular old everyday people, while normally intelligent and well-respected and reasonably observant with regards to the world around them, can sometimes lose their s**t.  And for example confuse a cat on the roof with a six foot tall werewolf-like man beast.  

Just something to keep in mind when you're evaluating witness reports.

2.    At the end, MonsterQuest talked a little bit more to a psychiatrist who had used hypnotic regression to tease out a better witness report.  The psychiatrist made the point that a lot of our current monster stories originated in medieval times, when people needed to find a reason behind bad events.  

When cattle went missing, pregnant women miscarried, or a serial killer moved through the area, an answer had to be presented.  Often that answer became "a monster."

The same thing happens today.  We always need something to blame, a coherent story behind a string of bad events.  Just look at the "rules" about three celebrity deaths in a row, or "mercury in retrograde."  It terrifies us to think that we live in a random universe, so we string together a narrative to explain what happened.

If one thing is clear from the witness accounts of the Wisconsin Dog Man, it's that someone in Wisconsin owns a Sasquatch Halloween costume, and has a somewhat sadistic sense of humor.  If a perfectly normal person can mistake a cat for Sasquatch, and in the absence of any evidence beyond witness reports, can we really speculate any further?