The Lawton Wolfman
Oklahoma's most misunderstood monster
I was born in Lawton, OK — okay technically it was Fort Sill. But, Lawton is where I got my undergrad degree, and the place I cut my teeth as a journalist. As with any city that adjoins a military base, it’s got a rough reputation. But from the time I spent there I can tell you that it’s a lot nicer than it gets credit for. For all its flaws, Lawton is home to some of the kindest, most talented people I’ve ever had the pleasure of writing about.
But there is another side to the city.
From UFOs to “haunted” forests— Lawton and it’s surrounding county hold their share of secrets. One of which is a monster straight out of folklore. A snarling demon that haunts our collective subconscious.
My first encounter with the “Lawton Werewolf” was a very, very brief mention in a book about North American monsters. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the book. Which I suppose is just as well, because it was…bad. Just really poorly researched. For one, it claimed Lawton was a small town in Texas. When it is, in fact, the third largest city in Oklahoma. Sadly, poor research and misinformation seem to be a hallmark of this story. After combing the internet, and reading the few articles that have been written, I’ve got some big disappointed dad energy. No one out there gets the story straight! And what’s worse, no one seems to care. There are no citations. No links to credible sources. Nothing.
This isn’t new to me. Part of the reason I left this world behind was due to how inundated it had become with sensationalism, bad faith writing, and poor research. But something about seeing it done to what is essentially my hometown monster is especially painful. So I’m decided to set the record straight.
‘A horribly distorted face’
My research into this story began about six years ago, when I was still working as a journalist for The Lawton Constitution. The plan was to write up a feature article for a slow news day. That day never came. But I did save all of my work — including copies of every article the paper published about the Wolfman. I’m using Wolfman here in deference to the original reports. The most popular online stories call it the Lawton Werewolf. I’ve also seen one or two people try and get the alliterative Lawton Lycanthrope to stick. But I’ll be keeping to the original Wolfman label.
In February, 1971, between the 26th and 27th (Friday and Saturday respectively) the Lawton Wolfman was sighted no less than four times. The eye witnesses gave similar descriptions of the creature. It was tall, wearing pants that seemed too short, a red and black checkered jacket or shirt, with long hair on its head and a “horribly distorted face,” with one witness even stating that it looked like a burn victim.
A few things about this description stand out immediately. The first is that, by all accounts, it matches the platonic image of a werewolf a lot of us have in our heads thanks to pop culture.
I mean, literally, it’s this.
The other detail is the distorted or disfigured face. Something that will come into play later on in the story. It’s also worth noting that the name “Wolfman” came from the Lawton Police Department — not the witnesses. Those that actually saw the creature, compared it to an altogether different animal.
The first sighting
Police received the first reported sighting of the “creature” around 10: 45 pm on Friday, Feb. 26th. The witness reported seeing someone “who appeared to be wearing a mask,” that looked like an ape (importantly not like a wolf) in the 2000 block of Lake Ave. At the time, Lake Ave was considered an area of west Lawton, but rapid westward expansion over the next 50 years would make it a part of east Lawton. Which is neither here nor there really. I just found it interesting that the original report placed the creature in “west” Lawton. Anyway. The witness told police that the “creature” was hiding in bushes and then running around in the street dodging cars.
The second sighting
The next report came in twenty minutes later and five blocks away, in the 2100 block of B Ave. A man, identified as C. Edward Green, and his wife, Reba, had just returned home when they spotted someone — or something — outside their second floor apartment. Mr. Green pulled back the curtains and saw what looked like a person perched on an outside railing “like some monkey or ape.”
The next bit comes from the responding officer, Harry Ezell. According to Ezell, Green thought it might have been a practical joke until the creature turned around and he saw it’s weirdly distorted face. It then jumped off the balcony railing — falling about 15 feet — before taking off an all fours like some kind of animal.
Ezell told the Constitution that Green reported being too scared to leave his apartment after his encounter.
The third sighting
This one is the most underreported and poorly documented of the four sightings. It happened roughly 15 minutes after Green saw the creature leap from his balcony. The report claims that a group of soldiers leaving a grocery store in the 2300 block of Gore Blvd. were frightened by something that fit the description of the creature from the other two sightings. Gore is directly between Lake and B, about equidistance from both. Though it’s not mentioned in the article, the soldiers were almost certainly from Fort Sill.
The fourth sighting
The fourth — and most well documented — sighting of the Lawton Wolfman wouldn’t come until 24-hours later. On Saturday night, around 11 pm, a 36-year-old man named Donald Childs encountered the creature in his front yard — about 14 blocks south of the original sighting.
Childs had opened his front door to find the creature crouching at a concrete pond in his front yard.
“I was only about 15 feet from him and he leaped from a crouched position clear into the driveway south of us. It was about a 16-foot leap, I’d say, something I’ve never seen a human do. When he landed from the leap he bounded towards the alley running on his feet but all hunched over like he was some kind of animal,” Childs told the Constitution.
Whatever he saw, it was enough to give poor Childs a heart attack — literally. Childs, who told the paper he’d had heart problems in the past, was so surprised he experienced a “heart seizure.”
But, Childs also told the paper that he didn’t believe it was anything more than a flesh and blood person. Describing the creature as “…someone mentally sick who thinks he’s an animal.”
A mystery swiftly solved
The first article about the Wolfman appeared in the Lawton Constitution three days after the final sighting. The official statement from Maj. Clarence Hill was this: “We know someone is out there and about all we can do now is wait for another report to come in.”
Hill told the Constitution that he had alerted all patrol to be on the lookout for what he dubbed “The Wolfman,” and hoped to bring whoever it was into custody.
He would not have to wait long.
The same day the Constitution article was published, police received an anonymous tip that led to the discovery of a rubber mask that closely fit the description of the “Wolfman.” It was found by officer Delous Allen in the 2000 block of Lake Ave — the location of the first reported sighting.
Even in grainy black and white the mask resembles the “distorted” face reported by the witnesses.
Three teenagers were questioned about the mask and later confessed to juvenile authorities that on Friday they had been “playing as apes” in the area of the Lake Ave. sighting. Case closed? Well…sort of.
See, the boys confessed to the, well, non-crime as it were, but they denied being at the scene of the other three Wolfman sightings that weekend. Of course, it’s more than feasible that they could have been. All of the Friday sightings were in walking distance of the spot the boys were playing. And even the Saturday sighting was less than a half-mile away.
The Occam’s Razor of it all points to the boys half-confessing, perhaps worried they might be charged with a crime since Childs did suffer a mild heart seizure.
Ultimately, the teens were let go and no charges were filed. Aside from a very brief mention a few weeks later of a Fort Sill woman calling into the post to report a “wolfman hiding in her bushes,” that was the end of the Lawton Wolfman saga.
However, one witness held firm that what he had seen was no hoax. No teenager in a mask. But something inhuman and otherworldly.
Discrepancies emerge
You’ll recall in my recounting of the second sighting above, that I cited the responding officer, Harry Ezell, not the witness, C. Edward Green. In fact, the only witness to be quoted in the first article was Childs.
Which has created a discrepancy in the reporting.
In the first article, published March 2, Ezell claimed that Green called the police after seeing the “creature” jump from his balcony. But in the follow-up published the next day, Green gave the paper a personal interview insisting that what he had seen was real. And his statement seems to contradict Ezell’s report to the paper.
Green claims that he and his wife called the police 15 minutes before he saw the creature on his balcony. They had first sighted it wandering through yards as they were coming home. Which prompted the call.
“He was crouched in bushes and ambling through yards and walking like a gorilla. He looked very hairy and appeared to have more beard than an average person,” Green told the Constitution. “About 15 minutes [after the call to police] we heard a siren and thought the police had caught him so I was going to look outside the window. I opened the curtains and there he was again on the walkway outside the window. He turned in a crouched position and looked at me. His face, which was something out of a low-budget horror movie, had a wild appearance. His eyes looked frightened and scared. His hair was very black and bushy and his face jutted out at the jaw […] he looked like a good sized man and was definitely not just some kid. There was no mask that I could see.”
It’s hard to say why this distinction between officer Ezell’s story and Green’s emerged. Or which is the true account of that original report. Is this just an odd anomaly in what is an otherwise open and shut case? Perhaps. Afterall, Green’s description of the creature matches up with the other reported sightings pretty closely, from the distorted face to the odd, ape like movements.
Or perhaps there was something else stalking streets of Lawton that night?
Connections to another crazy cryptid?
The Lawton Wolfman was reported to police on Feb. 26th and 27th. On March 2nd, the Constitution ran it’s first story about the creature. But between those dates, another monster appeared in the pages of the paper.
On Feb 28th, the Constitution ran an an article from the Associated Press titled, well, see for yourself…
Oklahoma’s Abominable Chicken Man.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my research of the weird, it’s that the 70s in particular were a great time for strange monsters.
The coincidence of near back-to-back reports about “strange creatures” was not lost on the Constitution’s reporter, who mentioned that the Wolfman sightings pre-dated the appearance of the Chicken Man article in the paper by two days.
The article detailed a report out of El Reno, OK. Which, for those of you not in the know, is about 90 miles northeast of Lawton. The report was from December, 1970, about two and a half month’s prior to the article’s appearance in the Constitution.
An unnamed El Reno farmer had called into the State Game Warden’s office after discovering one of his chicken coop’s had been, for lack of a better word, violated. Something had ripped the door off the coop, leaving behind strange foot and hand prints. Neither the farmer or the game warden had ever seen anything like the prints before, so they passed the case along to Lawrence Curtis, who was the then director of the Oklahoma City Zoo.
Curtis identified the prints as belonging to a primate, noting that the thumb was particularly strange in that it crooked inward.
“It resembles a gorilla, but it’s more like a man,” Curtis told the AP. “We’ve shown it to several mammologists and several wildlife experts in Oklahoma, and some passing through. All agree it is a primate.”
According to the report, after receiving the original prints from El Reno, Curtis had been sent similar ones from McAlester and Stillwater (other nearby cities in Oklahoma).
Though not mentioned in the original article, I dug up a report from the North American Wood Ape Conservancy that seems to line up with the Chicken Man sighting.
In the report, a witness claimed to have seen “something” large with glowing red eyes moving through the woods while hunting in Canadian County, about five miles from El Reno.
Below is an excerpt of the most important details. You can read the full report for yourself here.
”The witness recalled that the eyes appeared red (possibly red reflex from the dome light of the vehicle?). The subject, observed from a distance of about 25 yards, was said to be black or very dark in color and quite tall, perhaps as tall as eight feet or more, with a wide, thick-looking body. The witness was startled by the apparent great speed demonstrated by the subject ("It was moving damn fast") as it fled up the sandy riverbed of the North Canadian River, which is normally shallow. The witness noted that the subject appeared to zigzag as it ran. As the witness recalled, the estimated time of observation was less than 30 seconds.”
Do I believe?
Eye witnesses are consistently unreliable, even though we still base most of our criminal justice system on them. But psychologists agree that human memory is biased. This is especially true when recounting details to the police, who are trained to use leading questions in order to narrow down identification markers.
What I find interesting is that, in this particular case, we have multiple witnesses who describe…essentially the same thing… but whose belief about what they saw diverges.
The original sighting of the Lawton Wolfman on Lake Ave has the tell-tale signs of a hoax. The witness even told police that it “looked like someone in a mask.” This is the sighting that the boys confessed to.
But what of the other three?
The third sighting is so sparsely detailed that I can’t even form an opinion on it. A group of soldiers were “frightened” by something matching the description of the Wolfman at a grocery store. Not much to go on. So I’ll set this one aside.
Childs was so scared of what he saw that he basically had a heart attack. Granted, he admitted to having heart issues already. But the creature he described was much larger than a teenager. He is quoted as saying it was over six-and-a-half feet in the original article. And that it “leapt” over 16-feet to his driveway. That’s…impressive…even for someone on the varsity track squad. But Childs also described it as a man who “thought” he was an animal.
Then there’s Green, whose direct interview with the paper contradicts what officer Ezell claimed in the original. Green arguably got the closest look at the creature and claimed there was “no mask” in sight. And, like Childs, he observed it performing a pretty impressive leap — this time from his second floor balcony.
Finally, it’s fascinating to me that — despite all of the witnesses referring to the creature as ape-like — the police chose to label it a “Wolfman”. Something that has undeniably biased all future stories about the sightings.
So what do I make of all these accounts?
Well, unless there is a direct and obvious reason for a person to lie about what they have seen, or some undue outside pressure, I try and give them grace when it comes to these kinds of sightings. After all, memory is reconstruction. We do not snap photos with our eyes perfectly preserving the thing we saw. But rather, we recall, we recollect, we take pieces of the past and puzzle them back together in a way that makes sense to us. Creating an image that most closely aligns with what we believe to be reality. Each of the witnesses did that in their initial reports, and those reports were then filtered to us through other people: the police, the news, etc. Only they can know what they really saw that night.
But for me, the Lawton Wolfman exists in the same way that all werewolves have existed throughout history. As a story. Other writers have taken that story and broken it apart into pieces that fit their narratives. But take it from someone that knows the place and the people. There is no Lawton Wolfman. But at the same time, there will always be a Lawton Wolfman — so long as his story is kept alive.
Oklahoma’s Abominable Chicken Man on the other hand…well that’s a monster for another day.
So what do you think? Was there really a werewolf running around the streets of Lawton? Was is truly a hoax? Did Chicken Man set these teens up to take the fall? Let me know in the comments!
Hey! If you’ve been enjoying Monster of the Week, could you do me a favor? Click the share button below, you’ll have my eternal gratitude! Well, eternal is a strong word…you’ll have my temporal gratitude!
Thanks for reading Monster of the Week, which is released every week (unless it isn’t) and features stories of the paranormal, the unknown, and other high strangeness. If you’d like to support me, please consider subscribing — it’s free.
If there is no physical evidence such as hair, a foot cast etc, then it would be hard to prove the creature is real. It could just be a hoax.