Show Notes
On Halloween night in 1991, eighteen-year-old Doris Gipson was driving along a rural road outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin, when she struck something with her car.
She stopped to investigate.
There was nothing in the road.
Then she saw something running toward her on two legs.
Within months, reports of a strange, upright, wolf-like creature had turned an ordinary Wisconsin farm road into the center of one of America's most famous cryptid mysteries.
They called it the Beast of Bray Road.
But America's werewolf stories didn't begin in Wisconsin.
From the rougarou of Louisiana's bayous to the mysterious Michigan Dogman, a creature whose legend began as an April Fools' Day radio prank, stories of people becoming wolves have followed Americans for centuries.
And somewhere along the way, Hollywood helped convince us what a werewolf was supposed to look like.
Tonight, we're following the strange history of America's werewolves, the witnesses who claimed to encounter them, and the Halloween night that put Bray Road on the map.
Welcome to Day Ten of 31 Days of Halloween.
More from Haunted American History
In the winter of 1590, an elderly Scottish healer named Agnes Sampson was brought before King James VI of Scotland.
In 1967, the RMS Queen Mary arrived in Long Beach, California, after more than three decades crossing the Atlantic.
In Savannah, Georgia, ghost stories are everywhere.
On November 13, 1974, a young man ran into a bar in Amityville, New York, shouting that his parents had been shot.
In 1907, a wealthy Boston businessman named Thomas Lawson published a novel called Friday, the Thirteenth.