John Peace was spending the day fishing off the coast of Stronsay in the Orkney islands. It was September 25, 1808. He noticed that a number of sea birds were gathering over a strange shape on the rocks. His curiosity peaked, he went to investigate.
Turning his little boat, and watched by another Stronsay man, George Sherar, Peace made his way to the carcass. What he saw was unlike anything else he had seen before. Lying in amongst the rocks were the remains of a strange serpent-like creature. It had a long neck and three pairs of limbs.
The area was pretty inaccessible and people has to wait a full 10 days before the carcass was washed ashore by the notorious Orkney winds.
Sherar was one of the first on the scene and meticulously examined and measured the strange corpse. He ‘monster’ measured exactly 55 feet in length and had a neck measuring 10 feet and 3 inches long. He described the head as looking like that of a sheep with big eyes reminiscent of a seal’s. The grey skin was also mysterious. When stroked from the head down the back, it was as smooth as velvet, but stroking it the other way it felt rough.
It was 4 feet wide and had a circumference of approximately 10 feet, and when they examined the stomach contents, they found it to be red in colour.
As Peace has mentioned, there were three pairs of ‘limbs’ extending from the body and what looked like a bristly mane of long, wiry hair growing from the shoulders to the end of the tail. It is said that these hairs glowed in the dark.
The Orcadian newspaper reported:
“Its flesh was described as being like ‘coarse, ill-coloured beef, entirely covered with fat and tallow and without the least resemblance or affinity to fish’. The skin, which was grey coloured and had an elastic texture was said to be about two inches thick in parts.”
Bu the end of September the corpse had pretty much rotted away. Peace, Sherar and two other men who had first seen the creature were taken to the city of Kirkwall to swear before a magistrate that what they reported was the truth. Continue reading »
Bray Road is a quiet country road near the community of Elkhirm, Wisconsin. Nothing much ever happened there, that is until the late 1980′s and early 1990′s. Reports of strange encounters with a unknown beast began to emerge.
The story received media attention when Linda Godfrey, a writer and cartoonist for a weekly newspaper called The Week, started collecting eyewitness testimonies and writing about them. Articles also appeared in Strange magazine. Sightings have been reported in a much wider geographical area, even as far away as Milwaukee.
Godfrey has written a book on the sightings, The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf, published by Prairie Oak Press in 2003.
However the story of the beast goes back much further. One of the earliest recorded encounters happened in 1936. Mark Schackelman was a night watchman at a Catholic convent, St. Colleta, near Jefferson, Wisconsin.
One night, about midnight, while doing his rounds, he noticed something standing on top of a Native American burial mound.Looking closer he saw that the creature was clawing at the burial mound, as if it wanted to get in. He shouted out and started to move towards it. The creature looked at him startled and turned and fled into the darkness.
The following night at about the same time, Mark was again near the mound. Once more he saw the creature clawing at the gravesite. This time he crept closer, making sure to keep quiet. Suddenly the creature stopped what it was doing and looked around. Seeing Mark, it stood up and faced him.
The human-like beast was over six feet tall and was covered in dark hair. It had a muzzle like a wolf, with big prominent fangs. Its ears were pointed and on the top of its head. The creature growled at him and Mark could smell a horrible smell, like rotten meat.
By now Mark was terrified. He had expected the creature to be nothing more than grave-robbers or teenagers. After what felt like an eternity, the beast made a gutteral sound and turned and walked away.
Not much else was heard about the beast over the next few decades, save for rumour and speculation. It wasn’t until 1989 that a young woman, Lorianne Endrizzi, got a saw the Beast while driving on Bray Road at about 1:30 a.m.
At first she thought that she saw a person hunched over on the side of the road. Slowing down to see if all was well, she was shocked to see that this thing was no person. The thing was part human and part wolf!
The creature stared at her as she drove past and she got a good look at it. Continue reading »
