By Linda Godfrey and Richard Hendricks
It’s something that cannot be, and yet, there it stands. The paradox quickly overwhelms any rational mind.
A quick drubbing of two heavy feet on the pavement behind you, an impossible movement of hairy limbs to one side, and suddenly two lemon eyes fearlessly search your own with uncanny, brazen mockery. You’re transfixed, chilled, and completely bewildered. Once those eyes have owned you with their cogent stare for a few eternal moments, the creature’s head snaps away, fangs glinting, leaving you dazed as its hulking form leaps into the bramble or hurdles a stone fence to drop twenty feet onto a creek bed. After a parting glimpse of matted, dark fur, all you want is to be anywhere else. As your foot jams the accelerator or you stumble into a run, willing the lead from your legs so they will move in the opposite direction, you are desperately grateful to have survived this unholy meeting of strangers in the night.
And the night really is stranger, if you live in Walworth or Jefferson County.

The dark hours, the witching hours, are when the creature dubbed “The Beast of Bray Road” most often shows itself. The enigmatic “thing,” as most witnesses tend to call it, was christened for the country lane east of Elkhorn where it was seen by the first witnesses to go public. Over the past six decades it has shocked as many as three dozen area residents with its sudden, sporadic appearances.
The first known sighting was in 1936, when a security watchman at a convent and home for the developmentally disabled in Jefferson County made an unsettling discovery one evening as the clock neared midnight. Straining to see in the shadows, Mark Schackelman thought he made out something digging on an old Native American burial mound behind the main building. Thinking it must be a dog, he trained his flashlight on the animal. With a shock, he realized that it was no dog standing transfixed in the yellow glare, but a man-sized, shaggy creature with pointed ears and three long claws on each hand. In later years, he told his son, Joseph, he considered it a “demon from hell.”
Other sightings occurred through the 60s, 70s and 80s in the Jefferson and Walworth County area, with puzzled and frightened witnesses sometimes calling local police in an effort to find out what exactly they had seen. Unbeknown to one another, surrounding communities whispered for years about a creature known by its local names, “Bluff Monster” or “The Eddy.”
TThe witnesses, with one or two exceptions, seemed trustworthy. Most were reluctant, and many still felt fear when recalling their encounters. None had anything apparent to gain, and all faced ridicule from their family, friends, and neighbors. There was no single “type” of witness, either. They ranged from children to elderly, white-collar to blue-collar, male and female, local folk and those just passing through. Almost all of them said something like, “I know what I saw and nothing is going to change that.”
The descriptions stayed within a fairly close range: Height between five and seven feet; hair described as shaggy and often extremely “wild.” Coloration was usually said to be dark brown, sometimes with gray or silver streaks or tips. Those who had a good look at the head usually reported it to be like that of a wolf or German shepherd, with pointy ears, although some have claimed the head to be apelike. The creature was sometimes seen on two feet, other times on all fours. The most compelling characteristic, however, was the creature’s aggressive stare.

One witness, Williams Bay businessman Marvin Kirschnik, who came forward in 2003, was able to corroborate the other sightings with one of his own in 1981. His was unusual in that it happened in broad daylight, on an August afternoon. Driving along Highway 11 near Bray Road, Kirschnik became aware of a creature standing and staring at him from behind a fallen tree not far from the ditch. He pulled over and scrutinized it from the window of his van for a good minute, he estimated, as the creature returned his gaze. Finally, totally unnerved by its stare and by his inability to identify it, he sped off. But he made a drawing as soon as he got home. Its resemblance to those of the other witnesses is remarkable, although Kirschnik’s was made ten years before the newspaper story broke.
Does the Beast still prowl? Stories keep rolling in. However, most of the recent sightings have been in places other than Bray Road, which hasn’t had a report since the early 90s. A woman saw it in Washington County in the summer of 2003, and a Madison man saw a strange dog/ape type of creature prowling a sidewalk about 1 A.M. on a dimly lit residential street in May 2004. Some Illinois residents have also reported seeing it in four different places in recent months.
One woman who saw the Bluff Monster regularly while growing up in southern Jefferson County gave a description that sounds more like bigfoot than a wolfman, and there have been other witnesses who also felt the creature bore yeti-like traits. A professional couple from Kenosha both saw a seven-foot tall, almost classic Sasquatch-type creature hurdle a bridge rail at Honey Lake in eastern Walworth. Some cryptozoologists, those who study unknown animals, have speculated that the Beast may indeed be a smaller species of bigfoot.
Other popular theories are that it is a hybrid wolf-dog, a bear, a large wolf, a denizen of another dimension (either conjured up or visiting on its own), a true lycanthrope or shapeshifting werewolf, a hoax by someone with a very determined and decades-long obsession, and even a hold-over carnivore from the Ice Age, perhaps some sort of indigenous dogman. The creature seems to circulate around the Kettle Moraine State Forest, a strangely landscaped natural area with dense forests. Could something ancient have survived and reproduced here, venturing into civilization to harvest roadkill wherever cover is handy?
There have been other sightings of bipedal canines around the world and the United States, including the Michigan Dog Man flap in the mid-1980s. But the Beast of Bray Road remains unique for the number of sightings and the worldwide attention it has received. As to the true nature of the Beast, probably only time and perhaps a lucky capture or video will be able to solve the mystery to everyone’s satisfaction.