Bray Road is a short rural road in Walworth County, a few miles from Elkhorn, running between fields. Linda Godfrey, a reporter and cartoonist at The Week, heard that people there had been talking for about two years about a wolfish creature that ran on two legs, took chickens, and ate roadkill. She did not want the word werewolf. She named it the Beast of Bray Road and drew the picture that ran with the story: a kneeling animal with a piece of meat. The picture is her drawing from a witness’s words.

The first driver, called Barbara in the paper and later named as Lorianne Endrizzi, was 26. She said the animal was kneeling on the curve before the Bray farm, back toward her, elbows up, long claws turned out, holding whatever it was eating palms up. It looked at her and did not run. Brownish-gray, pointed ears, a long nose, big teeth. She put it at about five foot seven and 150 pounds, the size of an average man. The eyes shone. She said that was probably her headlights. After she heard of the second incident she found a werewolf picture in a library book and said it matched. She stopped taking Bray Road in the dark.

The second driver, called Pat and later named as Doris Gipson, was in high school. Halloween 1991 was foggy. Her front tire lifted. She thought she had hit a small animal, drove fifty or sixty feet, and got out near Sitler Road. There was nothing on the pavement and no blood. Then, in her words, “here comes this thing,” running at her. The chest was large, hairy, and easy to see, which is why she said it could have been on two legs. She got in and it reached the car before she could pull away. The nails hit the trunk and scratched down the wet paint. Bigger than the family’s Rottweiler, long straight brown hair, not black. She had seen a coyote and said coyotes do not get that big. Someone at home said bear. She said it was not that big either. She would not call it a werewolf. She called it a freak of nature. Later that night, driving an 11-year-old girl back from trick-or-treating, the girl saw something kneeling and said, “Look at that thing.” Gipson drove on.

A third account in the same article is not on Bray Road. Karen Bowey, on Bowers Road, said her daughter Heather, then 11, had come home frightened about two years earlier. Heather thought it was a big dog until it stood. Silver fur with brown, a coyote-shaped face, heavy back legs. It looked at the children, ran after them with long leaps, got halfway to the house, and turned back into the cornfield.

Fredrickson, the humane officer, showed Godfrey a manila folder marked “Werewolf,” six or seven note cards. One mentioned tracks. One mentioned a hairy, pointy-eared creature chasing a deer on two legs. One was a Burger King employee who, in mid-November, said he had seen a manlike creature run. Fredrickson’s own reading was a coyote or a wolf. He said either animal, at the instant it springs, can look as if it is standing. He had no specimen. He said a lot of people believed they had seen something out of the ordinary, and that he did not know what to make of it.

The paper’s date is 29 December 1991. Within a few days the Janesville Gazette recapped it and the Associated Press moved the recap. The Week sold shirts of Godfrey’s drawing. On 2 March 1992 police found Jose Contreras sitting in a driveway on Bray Road that was not his, with a handgun and fifty rounds. He told them he had read the articles and was carrying the gun for the werewolf. The officer noted that, on the phone to his wife from the squad room, Contreras said there was no werewolf. That winter, people with flashlights were already on other people’s land along the road. A 12 January 1992 letter to The Week objected that printing the exact spots would draw hunters.

The 1936 date is not a Walworth County file from that year. On 19 February 1992, Joe Schackelman published a story he said came from his father, Mark, a night watchman at the St. Coletta school on the edge of Jefferson, about forty miles from Bray Road. The father was dead. The son said that in 1936 Mark had seen a tall, dark-haired animal digging on the school grounds, and that it stood, smelled of dead meat, and seemed short two fingers. Joe said he called Godfrey because her kneeling sketch matched a drawing he already had. That is a 1992 telling of a 1936 night. It is not the animal Endrizzi described, and it was not on Bray Road.

Godfrey’s book The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf (Prairie Oak Press, 2003) gathers the later calls. In it, and in the books after it, the name spreads well past Elkhorn. Those later reports are her collection. They are not in the 1991 article.