The Beast of Bray Road
An American Werewolf in Wisconsin
Last year, I picked up a book called I Know What I Saw, by Linda Godfrey. It was a collection of eyewitness stories from folks who had encountered something they couldn’t explain. As you can imagine, the book was full of Bigfoot, aliens, and other modern monsters. All normal fair for this kind of collection. But also, there were lots of stories about Dogmen. Several stories. Like, half the book actually. For the unfamiliar, Dogmen are similar to Bigfoot in stature and physiology, but their features are more canine than primate. In other words, werewolves! We’re talking about werewolves.
This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Godfrey’s work. She was a journalist who broke what might be the most famous werewolf story in American history, but I’ll get to that in a moment. For now, I want to focus on Godfrey herself.
Linda Godfrey lived in Wisconsin for most of her life. She was, by all accounts, a talented artist and writer. A teacher for many years, Godfrey was also a features reporter for the Walworth County Week, a now defunct newspaper that covered Walworth County, Wisconsin. Before her death in 2022, Godfrey authored over 20 books, appeared on dozens of paranormal podcasts and tv shows, and gained a reputation as one of the most trusted field researchers in the game. According to her obituary, she was also a volunteer librarian and loved baking Christmas cookies with her grandkids.
So how did someone like Godfrey become one of the leading experts on modern werewolf sightings? To understand that, we have to go back to the halcyon days of the nineties.
A Slow News Week
The week between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day can feel like a eternity when you’re journalist. I spent almost ten years in the business and know firsthand how difficult it is to get in touch with sources during the dying days of the year. Everyone is too busy to talk to a reporter around the holidays. And honestly, I get it. Godfrey called it “the tinselly void.” It was during that week in December 1991, that she got a tip for a story that could help her fill that void. Something was stalking a lonely country road in Elkhorn, WI. Something tall, hairy, and straight out of a horror movie.
The tip came from a local freelancer who also worked part time as a school bus driver. Apparently, there were whispers among the local teens about a creature prowling the local cornfields that could only be described as a werewolf. Before following up on the lead, Godfrey asked around about the sightings. No one wants to get pranked, especially a reporter looking for a story.
“As I asked other people around town, I discovered it wasn’t just a teen wolf story. Adults were talking, too,” Godfrey wrote in her book The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf.
After getting the green light from her editor, Godfrey set out to hunt a werewolf.
The Sightings
A journalist’s first instinct is often to go straight to the source. If there were sightings of a strange animal in Walworth County, supernatural or not, they would have been reported to animal control, so she sought out officer Jon Fredrickson.
“It turned out Fredrickson has a manila folder in his files marked ‘Werewolf,’ filled with note cards detailing six or seven such ‘sightings.’ One referred to unusual tracks, another to a hairy pointy-eared creature seen chasing down a deer on two legs,” Godfrey wrote in her original creature feature.
To his credit, Fredrickson dismissed the idea that the animal was anything supernatural, noting that it was likely just a misidentified coyote or wolf. Though rare, gray wolves are not unheard of in the area.
Two witnesses were willing to go on record with Godfrey, and while both used pseudonyms back in ‘91, they’ve since felt comfortable enough to give out their real names.
Lori Endrizzi (AKA Barbara)
Known simply as “Barbara” in the original story, Lori Endrizzi described her encounter with the creature two years earlier, on a chilly fall night in 1989. She was driving home along Bray Road when something startling appeared in her headlights. It was kneeling on the side of the road, the back of its head covered with fur, two pointy, dog-like ears standing straight up in the halogen glow. It was holding something dead in its hands, tearing at the flesh. Endrizzi described it as road kill. She said the creature was roughly the size of an adult man with dark, grayish fur covering its body.
“It was night, and it was quite late, but I know what I saw,” she told Godfrey. “You don’t mistake something like that.”
In a phone interview years later, Endrizzi stuck to her story. Telling Godfrey that she believed it was something “conjured up.”
Doris Gipson (AKA Pat)
Gipson’s story began on Halloween, which immediately calls to mind the potential for costumed shenanigans. But Godfrey believed Gipson was being sincere, and why wouldn’t she be? She knew the story was strange enough that she could catch potential ridicule for telling it, and originally chose to recount her tale under a pseudonym, the same as Endrizzi.
Gipson had been driving alone, at night, along Bray Road, when she felt her front tire “lift” as though she hit something. Thinking she’d hit an animal, she stopped near the intersection of what was then Sitler (now Hospital) Road and got out of her car to check on it.
“There was nothing on the road, no blood or anything. I didn’t see anybody, and I felt like if I hit it, it should have stayed there. I walked to the end of the car, and here comes this thing, and it’s just running up at me,” Gipson said at the time. “You could see the chest of this thing because it was big, and it was hairy. It was fast, that’s for sure, because I see this thing, I get in the car, and by the time I got inside the car the thing had grabbed hold of the car.”
Needless to say, Gipson got away as quickly as she could. While she was hesitant to use the word “werewolf,” she agreed that what she saw matched the same description given by Endrizzi.
“I’d say it was a freak of nature, one of God’s mistakes,” Gipson told Godfrey.
A Legacy is Born
Godfrey had her monster, now it just needed a name. I can’t help but wonder what would have become of this story if she’d chosen something else. Would we still be talking about it over 30 years later? We’ll never know, because the name she did choose was one that people latched on to immediately: The Beast of Bray Road. That’s the kind of alliteration that writer’s dream of.
By her own account, Godfrey didn’t think the story would be much more than fodder for holiday get togethers before it was ultimately forgotten. But it wasn’t long before other media outlets picked up the story. The Beast of Bray Road had been let out of its cage, and there was no putting it back. The Associated Press picked up the story and soon reporters from TV stations across the country were descending on Elkhorn to cover this modern werewolf tale. Look, winter is a slow news time for everyone.
As it often does in these situations, the news brought more witnesses forward. Whether looking for their fifteen minutes of fame, or buoyed by the fact that somebody else had seen what they had seen, who can say. For me, I like to believe it’s the latter.
While she was surprised to see her story go viral (or at least the pre-social media version of it) Godfrey still expected the story to die off. But a year later, with werewolf fever only increasing, she started to realize that wasn’t going to happen. She had offers to write books, screenplays, go on TV and much more. The Beast of Bray Road started to take over her life and, well, the rest is history.
I mean, there’s more to the story, of course, but it would take a book of my own to chronicle the next 30 years of Godfrey’s life. Suffice it to say it was one well lived.
Do I believe?
There’s a bit of this story that I’ve left out — on purpose, mind you — because I wanted to save it for the end. Savvy readers may have already figured it out, I couldn’t resist dropping a few breadcrumbs along the way. If you’re wondering why a story about werewolves gained so much momentum so quickly in the early 90s, I’ve got two words for you: Satanic Panic.
If you’ll recall, Endrizzi claimed she thought the creature was “conjured”. A strange word to use by modern standards, perhaps, but in the late 80s and early 90s, this was a dog whistle for folks steeped in the (unfounded) fear of satanic cults secretly spreading across the United States.
Remember that freelancer? The one who tipped Godfrey off to the stories to begin with? Here’s what she had to say about them in The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf.
“There were hints that the occult might be involved, she added, but she hadn’t been successful in proving that … I told her I’d look into it. I wasn’t sure at the time if I really would, especially if it involved tracking down devil worshippers, but no reporter likes to offend a local news source.”
That freelancer wasn’t the only person in Godfrey’s story with “the occult” on the brain. Endrizzi also believed the creature might be related to some kind of Satanic activity. When she spoke with Godfrey all those years later to tell her the “conjuring” theory, here’s what she had to say.
“To this day I believe it was Satanic … It was just my feeling. I don’t really believe in werewolves per se, but I believe something could be, well, conjured up. My grandma was very religious and she believed it, too.”
And even Gipson, too, invoked religion with her description of the creature as “God’s mistake.”
Walworth County is home to Lake Geneva, the birthplace of Dungeons and Dragons, one of the Satanic Panic’s most prominent scapegoats. I don’t know what kind of conversations were happening in school busses and church halls, but my guess is many of the Elkhorn residents were aware of the stories spreading like wildfire on TV and in newspapers. Stories about satanic cults, ritual sacrifices, and demonic possession.
Do I believe that Endrizzi and Gipson saw something unexplainable on that lonely stretch of Bray Road? Yes. But I can’t discount the cultural context of the time, or the obvious bias of at least one of the original witnesses. The Beast of Bray Road may have been a wolf or coyote, as Fredrickson originally suggested…or it may have been something else entirely. But I can dismiss the notion that it was something “demonic.” However, I do believe, as Endrizzi claimed, it may have been “conjured.” Not by some satanic cult or ritual, but by the moral outrage that was churning violently at the time. A beast not made of sulfur and brimstone, but fear, prejudice, and hate.
So what do you think? Was the Beast of Bray Road a werewolf, or something more explainable? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading Monster of the Week, which is released every Tuesday (unless it isn’t) and features stories of the paranormal, the unknown, and other high strangeness. If you’d like to support me, please share this Substack with all of your friends — and your enemies. You can also follow me on Instagram @garyreddinwrites, though it’s mostly pictures of my cats.
I'm with you on the explanation: they saw something strange, but probably not a werewolf. People want to make sense of weird phenomena and the imagination takes over. And given the times (Satanic Panic) they conjured up a werewolf. Still, it's an eerie story and you told it well.
As a born Wisconsinite I am inclined to believe it was simply a large hairy drunk man stumbling home. 💜 Great read.