Review: Wood Knocks – various authors

I have made my views on the creature known as Sasquatch plain in other articles for this blog. I have made it clear that I think that at least some of the giants people are seeing in the woods are kin to the Faery and do not belong completely to this world. In the parlance of modern paranormalists, I think Sasquatch is an inter-dimensional being that is capable of walking into our world and back out of it, pretty much at will.

That said, I greatly admire the work of the people who actually go into the woods looking for the creature and who spend their time talking to witnesses, setting camera traps and even flying drones hoping for a glimpse of the elusive ‘booger’. While I think that a lot of them just might be tilting at windmills, it is still admirable that they have the strength of their convictions and are willing to walk their talk.

The new anthology from Leprechaun Press, Wood Knocks, Volume 1: A Journal of Sasquatch Research is a collection of articles from the sorts of people who have devoted their lives to exploring the strange and especially to looking for cryptid creatures such as the Sasquatch. The anthology is an easy read, at just over 200 pages, so do not expect extensive or detailed articles, but it is packed with information that new and experienced Sasquatch aficionados will find interesting and informative.  In my view, the cover art by Sam Shearon is worth the price of the book, all by itself.

The meat of the book is quite good as well.  Whether we are talking Sasquatch amongst the First Nations people (David Weatherly) or hunting the Orang-Pendek in Sumatra (Richard Freeman) or talking about the presence of Sasquatch in Wisconsin and its surrounding areas (Linda Godfrey), the writing is, with one notable exception, crisp and there are cases in the book that I had not heard of, side by side, with some of the old standards. I enjoyed this chance to ‘touch base’ with the work of many authors that I admire and some that I did not know.  Freeman’s article on the Orang-Pendek made me think that the Sumatrans may have a genuine undiscovered species in their midst.

Having said that, there is one article in the anthology that is a confused, rambling mess and could have easily been cut from the line up with no damage to the work. As I noted above, readers will be able to discern this one quickly and will have to decide for themselves whether the tidbits of information in the article are worth the pain of reading the disjointed ramblings of someone with entirely too much research and not enough space to present it cogently.

I would have been quite happy if that article had been cut and the other writers given more space to present their research. I had the feeling, in several of the sections, that the authors had a lot more to say but were unable to do so due to the editorial pen or space limitations or both. This is a real shame since, as I mentioned, there is quite a lot of original research amongst the articles. I would have been particularly interested to see Micah Hanks spin his thoughts on abductions out further and Nick Redfern’s article on infrasound was interesting but too short.

Wood Knocks is noted as volume 1 of a journal of Sasquatch research. If this is going to be a continuing series of works then the series is off to a good start and, with some minor tweaks, I can see such a series becoming a respected reference amongst those Sasquatch researchers willing to flex their minds a bit and look at new ideas, even if they do not agree with them.

The Dog Headed Ones

I have theorized about the creature that Linda Godfrey calls a manwolf on a number of occasions in these pages.  In this post, I actually lay out a number of different theories about what might be responsible for these sightings.  This week, on Expanded Perspectives, Cam and Kyle talked about the upright canids in depth and even shared some of the classical historical stories of a race of dog headed beings that seemed, in the stories at least, to be quite real.  While these beings did not speak the local lingua and were deemed ‘primitive’ in that they did not cook food and seemed to survive via hunting, they were also noted as great warriors and were respected enough to be offered tribute in some of the stories.

There are a number of possible explanations for these legends, the most likely of which are that the people telling the stories were misinterpreting tales about tribes of warriors who lived apart from the people and spent their whole time training for war and surviving in harsh conditions to allow them to be ready for battle at any moment.  Think of the harsh conditions that modern day special forces troops endure and you begin to get the idea.  When you take into consideration academic papers like Kris Kershaw’s The One Eyed God: Odin and the Indo (Germanic) Mannerbunde, you will note that this is precisely how at least some Indo-European tribes initiated their warrior caste.

Despite being very aware of such academic work and accepting some of the ideas put forth by these papers, I have been conflicted intuitively.  In my Otherworld experiences, I had encountered beings that looked suspiciously like these dog headed beings from the classical legends; beings who, in fact, bore a marked resemblance to the ancient Egyptian god Anubis (actually a Greek rendering of the Egyptian name).  These beings were not humans in the homo sapiens sense but they certainly were a people.  Recently, as the result of some deep work I am doing, I have had some communication with one of these spirits and I think her words might shed light on aspects of the manwolf / dogman mystery.  Please note the material below is the result of my trance work / meditation and I make no claim to its ‘truth’ outside this realm.  

First, it was pointed out to me that the Ancient Egyptians actually had at least two canine headed gods – the one who came to be called Anubis and an older  being, more wolf like called Wepwawet in the Kemetic tongue.  Interestingly, these two gods would correspond to a couple of the types of upright canids being seen – the smooth coated, black beings that seem to pop up a lot in people’s homes and the more gray coated wolf type beings that are often confused with werewolves.

I was given to understand that these two gods were the ‘types’ for a whole group of spiritual beings who serve in the same capacity that Anubis and Wepwawet did: as guardians of specific ways through the worlds (such as those only open to the dead or shaman), as openers of those certain ways for those who pass the requisite tests, as judges of who has passed the tests, as keepers of sacred sites and as guides to both those who have died and shaman who walk in the Otherworld.

While these dog / wolf headed ones, seldom wander onto our plane; it is not beyond the realm of possibility.  In addition, my companion notes that, given their function, these canine guardians are able to project very strong psychic impressions of themselves that most humans would consider to be absolutely “real”.  She states that not all of the ‘manwolf’ incidents (she loves this term and finds it amusing) are the result of encounters with her people but that some certainly are.  She warns that humans are most likely to encounter such a being when they stray into sacred areas without the proper attention and respect.  Examples of these places would be cemeteries, First Nations mounds, intersections of what have been called ley lines, crop and stone circles and even places where unidentified aerial objects have been seen.  Her people may manifest in either their two legged guise or they may appear as overly large canids of various shades of black and gray with glowing eyes ( I see her eyes as glowing yellow or gold but there seems to be a red eyed variety as well).

My friend advises that she and her kind are not to be feared unless the human is caught in an act of desecration.  Even then, the interloper will most likely simply be run out of the area and given the scare of his or her life.  There are instances where the actions of one of these dog headed ones has resulted in human death but this is usually the result of some constitutional flaw in the human – i.e. a weak heart.  Should you encounter one of this tribe, acknowledge the being with respect and walk slowly from the area.  As with dogs and wolves, running is not advised as it kicks in the prey drive which, even with their strong intelligence, these beings find hard to quell completely.

I have found this spirit and her tribe to be good comrades in the Otherworld.  As with all spirit communication, your mileage will vary but I am putting this post up so that people will be aware that an upright canid in an area might actually be a good, or, at least, interesting sign.  My friend reminds you that not everything that looks fierce is a demon!

Hellhounds of Meridean Island

It seems that Wisconsin, Manwolf hunter Linda Godfrey’s home state, is just rife with mysterious canids. Monsters and Mysteries in America, Season 3, Episode 6, aired on 25 February 2015 and included a fascinating piece on the ‘hellhounds’ of Meridean Island in Wisconsin. I’ve done significant research on the Phantom Black Dog most commonly seen in Great Britain and found this segment, which begins around 29:00, quite fascinating.

I am not entirely happy with Monsters and Mysteries – too much effort, in my opinion, to overstate the case for the phenomenon that they cover and to be ‘spooky’– but the show has done a good job of trying to find fresh stories that may not have seen coverage in other paranormal shows. This hellhound case in Wisconsin is a good example. It seems to me that I might have run across it in some of my digging (I would have to go back and look through notes) but it is certainly not a site that I am familiar with.

The hellhound segment of the show featured two sets of witnesses: a couple, Shelly Touchstone and Chris Wiener, who were reportedly just looking for a secluded spot for some time away from the kids, and two young paranormal enthusiasts, Mike Bagozzi and Jeremy Stark, who actually went to check out the purported sightings at the boat landing on Meridean Island. Of course, we have no way of really evaluating these witnesses but, in the show, they appeared sincere and I found it telling that their stories had some striking resemblances: the fog, anxiety and the limits of the chase.

Both sets of witnesses stated that, before there was any manifestation of the devil dogs, a dense, cold fog enveloped them. I find this quite telling since fog and other suddenly occurring weather disturbances can be a signal that a door to the Otherworld has opened. I have personally stood on a hilltop while a puja (Buddhist offering rite) was in progress and watched storm clouds ‘bend’ around the area where the rite was occurring, leaving a rain free hole right above the area where we stood. In addition, I have seen fog and mist form, seemingly out of nowhere, during the invocation of certain deities and in the presence of what we might term the Faery. A cold, dense fog might certainly form naturally in the vicinity of a river but the timing of these fog event seems a little suspect given the subsequent events.

I also noted something that I have written about in another blog post – that feeling that something is amiss. I have stated before that often a gut feeling that something is wrong is a good sign that it is time to vacate the premises or, at least, be prepared for a paranormal action. In this case, both sets of witnesses had some intimation that all was not well before their encounter. The young couple, distracted as they might have been by having some alone time together, still alerted at some point before the event and began to feel anxious. Mike Bagozzi, one of the young would-be investigators, stated that he actually became anxious five miles before he and his team mate got to the boat landing. His anxiety was such that, according to him, he refused to turn their vehicle off, left the vehicle in drive and had cut the wheels so that they could make a hasty getaway if needed. Intuition is a tool that is much needed but often discounted in today’s paranormal investigation scene.

While Touchstone and Wiener never actually saw anything, only hearing the phenomenon, Bagozzi and Stark reported seeing an apparition of Mary Dean (the ghost who supposedly haunts the isle) as well as a ragged looking black dog with glowing red eyes that then gave chase. In both incidents, however, the human response was clear; both pairs of witnesses fled for their lives. Interestingly, once the witnesses had driven at ridiculous speeds up the dirt road that led to the boat landing and gotten back onto the paved road, the pursuit ceased as suddenly as it had begun. This seeming limitation on the hellhound’s range is something that we see repeatedly in the English stories of the Phantom Black Dogs (PBD) where the creature will materialize and walk alongside a wagon or vehicle from point A to a clearly defined point B, where it turns aside or simply vanishes.

The hellhounds of Meridean Island bear a strong resemblance to the classic PBD of English lore. Those who have seen them describe them as being “big as a bear” with glowing red eyes while the English stories tend to describe the PBD as the size of a calf, again, with glowing red or yellow eyes the size of saucers. Extensive folkloric examinations of the PBD have shown them to often be associated with water, such as the Chippewa River where Meridean Island is located. In addition, the lore of the PBD associates these interlopers from the Otherworld with death and the dead, a theme we see with the story of Mary Dean and reported hauntings throughout the Carysville, WI, area.

While Monsters and Mysteries in America would have us believe that the hapless witnesses would have been snacks for the terrible beasts if the humans had not gotten to their cars quickly enough, I doubt that this would have been the case. Even in cases where the PBD has caused harm, such as the incident at Bungay, it did not do so by eating its prey. The PBD, in those rare cases where it was the proximate cause of death, seems to just strike its victims dead and leave them. In most of the lore, however, the PBD is simply a spooky reminder that the Otherworld is only a coursing black dog away and, in some of the more sinister stories, may be a harbinger of death in the family of the percipient.

Thoughts on Werewolves or Bipedal Wolves?

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while knows that I have a special place in my heart for legends of werewolves and other shape shifters. I ran across the following blog from erstwhile Fortean investigator Nick Redfern on Mysterious Universe the other day. I could not, of course, resist the desire to comment (or to use this lovely picture that Mr. Redfern included with his blog).

I actually addressed the subject of werewolves back in 2013 in a post entitled Werewolves: A Magical Perspective. Reading through Mr. Redfern’s post, I had to admire his flexibility of thought. In the article that I cited for the magical perspective piece, he argues that werewolves and such like must be creatures of the Otherworld. In the recent article from Mysterious Universe, Mr. Redfern argues exactly the opposite – that there might be some animal, similar to a thylacine, indigenous to North America that is causing the Manwolf and werewolf sightings.

Now, certainly, Linda Godfrey, the well known writer on the Manwolf phenomenon, has posited that one explanation of these bipedal canid sightings might be a timber wolf mutation/adaptation that caused the animals to stand on their hind legs and adopt a bipedal gait. Anthropologists have great fun theorizing about why the first hominids decided that bipedalism was the way to go. If I really wanted to push this idea to its limits, I might theorize that one of the canid species of North America is developing human or near human (or, perhaps even greater than human) intelligence and has adapted bipedalism to provide greater visual and other sensory input for that growing brain. I will never say that something is impossible but I do feel that there are other and perhaps better solutions to this conundrum.

As interesting as such a theory might be, I am still bound to point out that there are sightings on the books that simply can not be explained by reference to a flesh and blood animal. While the thought of a cryptid canid roaming the woods of North America is enough to make me want to get out my hiking gear, such a cryptid would not account for witnesses who tell us that the creatures appear in their bedrooms (Manwolves in the Bedroom) or persons who have experienced a seeming shape shift in progress (The Creature of Mud Creek Road).

As with all things paranormal and Fortean, I think that we can not look to just one explanation for these events. We have to break out of the either/or mentality and instead espouse a both/and way of thinking. In the case of werewolf and Manwolf sightings, I think we can posit one or more of the following:

1) There is a cryptid canid loose in the forests of North America (and perhaps Europe, for the sake of the werewolf myth in the Old Country) that is bipedal and, at the very least, threatening, if not downright dangerous to humans.

2) There are creatures of the Otherworld coming through portals/window areas and some of those creatures either naturally appear as bipedal wolves or they have adapted that shape for the shock value. Remember that many Otherworld beings feed on energy and terror would certainly be a potent food source.

3) There is the possibility that First People, desiring to protect some of their sacred sites created these beings (thought forms) or summoned them from the Otherworld as guardians of their respective areas. Thought forms are notorious for going off on their own if not given a proper dissolution date or if the creator of the thought form dies before dissolving his or her creation.

4) There are magicians in the world capable of forming an etheric shell that could be made to resemble a wolf or Manwolf. Sighting of someone working this type of rare magic would likely result in a report of seeing a human shift into something other.

5) There are magic workers in the world as well as Faerie beings who can use the power of glamour to make a human being see whatever the worker wants them to see.

6) Finally, there is also the remote possibility that there are actually people in the world who are capable of making a real, physical transition from one form to another. As I have said many times before in these pages, I feel that the power outlay for such a transformation would require the assistance of a Major Being (god, archangel, etc.) but I could be wrong and I do not want to take this completely off the table. As Linda Godfrey says, though, I am waiting for someone to demonstrate.

I have not even listed the cases of mistaken identity, mental illness, willful deceit and what I call “I want to believe” syndrome where the person sees something mundane and translates it, in their mind, into a paranormal event. If we set aside the skepdebunker mindset, which longs for an easy, ‘reasonable’ explanation, then we are forced to admit that the issue is enormously complex and that we have to take a multifaceted approach to it. As with all things paranormal, I don’t think that we are ever going to see a Unified Field Theory. Instead, what I hope for, is more researchers who are willing to say, “well, it could be this but it could also be that and, if we think on this, we have to consider X as well . . .”

So, I say to Nick Redfern and Linda Godfrey and all the others out there researching this phenomenon and others, keep those theories coming! Half the fun of looking at the things that go bump in the night is seeing researchers think outside the box.

The Spirit of the Wolf

I do not remember exactly where this notification came from, Twitter perhaps, but I recently saw this story from the amusingly titled Who Forted blog. As anyone who has been reading for a while knows, I have a soft spot for stories of werewolves and Black Dogs and the recurrent reports of manwolves throughout the US (and now, per Linda Godfrey, the world) make my ears perk up, so to speak.

As manwolf stories go, this one is pretty typical. A night shift worker has not one, but two, encounters with creatures that appeared to be bipedal and wolf-like. Interestingly, both times, the beings seemed to be moving in groups and the witness did note several color variations. The author of the blog post, Ken Summers, also noted that Linda Godfrey had reported a manwolf incident in the same area in her book Real Wolfmen. Mr. Summers goes on to note a possible mountain lion sighting in the area – unusual since mountain lions are supposed to have been killed off in this region.

Mr. Summers closes out his article with these words which really got me thinking:

Silver Creek is a tributary for the aptly named Wolf Creek. Long ago, Timber Wolves were common across Ohio, though as farming developed among early settlers, these furry canines became less of an accepted part of the wilderness and more of a nuisance as the animals hunted and killed many sheep. Thousands of Ohio wolves were hunted, trapped, and poisoned in an effort to eradicate them from the area. 1842 marked the final killing of a wolf in Ohio and the end of the wolf’s presence here. While wolves have been driven from Ohio, perhaps something far more frightening has replaced them.

Silver Creek is in Ohio, home of a number of mounds left behind by early indigenous peoples. I’ve theorized, in past blogs, that the manwolf might, in some cases, be a sort of materialized guardian left in place by the medicine people of those early tribes to protect the mounds and burial sites of their people. Reading Mr. Summers’ piece, though, another thought occurred to me.

Anyone who has taken even a cursory look at the new shamanism, as proposed by people like Michael Harner and Sandra Ingerman, will be familiar with the concept of a power animal – a spirit, in animal form, that serves as your guide during shamanic journeys in particular areas. Some people confuse the power animal with a totem animal – a spirit, sometimes in animal form, that has allied itself to a particular group of people. The totem ranges across all of human culture from the varying societies with animal totems in the Native American traditions (the Cherokee and Iroquois had clans that were aligned to various animals) to the wolf and bear warriors of the ancient Norse who actually took on the traits of their totem in battle.

A totem animal is a powerful spirit in its own right and, with the attention and offerings of a group of people, it only becomes more powerful. As with any relationship with spirit, one has to approach an animal totem with respect in order to avoid any negative repercussions and one would never harm the totem’s representative animal unless given specific permission from the spirit to do so (as in those Native and Norse folk who wore the skins of their totem for certain occasions).

Harming of the totem’s representative animal can result in harm to the person who causes that injury and, in extreme cases, even death, if one violates a taboo laid by or about the totem. I am minded of the Celtic warrior Cuchulain (the hound of Chulain) who was forbidden to eat dog meat as a part of the relationship with his totem. Cuchulain was killed in battle after being tricked into eating the flesh of a dog by an enemy.

So, what has this to do with our manwolves? Simply, the wolf is a common totem amongst Native people. It is admired for its hunting ability and for its structured, efficient and loving pack life. We know that the European settlers regarded the wolf with fear and loathing. Once they had driven the Native people from Ohio, settling them in out of the way places or killing them, they turned their hand immediately to what they knew best – farming and livestock husbandry. Wolves and other apex predators went from being respected representatives of their totems to wicked slayers of sheep and other livestock, good only when they were dead.

As the article notes, by 1842, the settlers had managed to wipe out the wolf population in Ohio. I doubt that the wolf totem, the powerful spirit of the wolf, simply skulked off to hide on the reservations or disappeared into what woodland was left. Mr. Summers says, “While wolves have been driven from Ohio, perhaps something far more frightening has replaced them.”

I admit that my thinking is pure conjecture. I’ve not done any journey work to test this theory. It simply makes intuitive sense to me that the spirit of the wolf might want to periodically remind the ancestors of those rapacious settlers that they are not the apex predators that they think they are. The manwolves could be something like a tulpa created by the spirit of the wolf or they could be the spirits of those who walked with wolf skins on when they were alive and who have become a part of the spirit of the wolf in death.

While I have heard of no serious injuries in manwolf reports, the creatures certainly scare the life out of most who see them and many witnesses report the strong feeling that the creatures would and could do them harm. Maybe, just maybe, the physical wolves are gone and have been replaced by representatives from Wolf itself.

The Next Big (Bird) Thing

It really irritates me when I know that I have written something in the past and, because of all the blog posts I have written, I am unable to find that post. Not even sure what word to search for . . .

Ah well, such is life, I suppose. In any event, I recall that, at some point during the life of this blog, I heard a podcast where someone mentioned that it seemed as though paranormal episodes and sightings were down, as though the Otherside were taking a little break. Whoever I was listening to conjectured that whatever is responsible for paranormal activity in the broadest sense (everything from UFO’s to ghosts and monsters) was getting bored with us and that, maybe, activity was just petering out. My comment at the time was something along the line of there being no folkloric support for the Otherside walking away from humans and that I suspected that those powers were simply cooking up something new to “mess with us”.

Well, it seems that, rather than cooking up something new, the Otherworld has simply rotated its stock and suddenly, we are seeing an influx of sightings of what some call Thunderbirds and, better yet, living pterosaurs. Linda Godfrey, best known for her Dogman/Manwolf research, has commented on social media that she is getting more big bird sightings than anything else since the publication of her recent book, American Monsters: A History of Monster Lore, Legends and Sightings in North America and I’ve noticed a distinct uptick in winged creature sightings on Lon Strickler’s Phantoms and Monsters. Mr. Strickler has also been tracking sightings of a something that distinctly resembles a glowing, flying manta ray. He is not even sure whether he should call it a UFO or a cryptic. It seems that monster hunters are going to have to join the UFO community in keeping an eye on the sky.

Now, it is my usual custom on this blog to present a phenomenon and then try to offer a magical explanation for that phenomenon. There are some phenomena though that make this extremely difficult since said phenomena are manifesting in different ways and require multiple explanations. A good example of this is the cattle mutilation phenomenon. In my review of a recent book on those incidents, I stated flatly that no one magical explanation seemed to fit the facts in these cases and that the obvious imposition of human agencies into the events made interpretation fraught with peril. I see much the same thing with the recent wave of flying creatures and I return to my theory that certain agencies in the Otherworld are seeking to “mess with us”. By presenting us with multi-layered phenomena, these agencies are preventing human beings from coming up with any sort of universal field theory of the paranormal.

I will say this about some of the broad categories of winged creatures though:

1) Thunderbirds – I will define these as abnormally large birds (many times described as the size of a small airplane) that often seem to resemble raptors or very large crows or ravens. These creatures seem to be something that the Native people of this country recognize (much as they recognize Sasquatch) so, were I a field investigator, I would turn to the Native peoples for their thoughts on these giant birds. I will also note that everything that exists in our world or has existed still exists in the Other but the translation from one world to the next can result in interesting variations in size. Thus the stories of little people, just like ourselves only much tinier, and, perhaps, the sightings of giant birds in our world.

2) Pterosaurs – we have a fossil record of this creature but it is supposed to have been extinct for millions of years, in this world. Again, everything that exists in this world or has existed still exists in the Otherworld, including dinosaurs, saber toothed cats and even mammoths. Time has no meaning for the Otherside so, again, it is quite possible that specific window areas are intersecting with places in the Otherworld where these critters exist and, viola’, modern day pterosaur sightings. The TV show Primeval, with its anomalies, is, I suspect, not that far off the mark.

3) Winged humanoids – I rather suspect that these beings may be spirits who have manifested on this plane. Remember that it is quite possible for a being, if it can develop sufficient energy and skill, to manifest from the astral, through the etheric, where it takes on a form of sorts, and into our world. Given the general creepiness associated with most flying humanoid sightings, I would place these creatures in the strong and intelligent parasite realm and suspect that they are feeding off the emotional responses they engender.

I do not claim that any of these remarks are definitive. A thunderbird could be a manifesting spirit and a flying humanoid could be a failed evolutionary experiment from an alternate human time line. Any of these beings could be artificially created entities constructed by magicians on this plane or in the Otherworld.

I wonder, too, if some of the Powers That Be are not simply putting these things in our path to keep us from getting too complacent in our little scientific, materialist world view.

A New Manwolf Sighting

Linda Godfrey, the noted writer on all things werewolf/manwolf/dogman, posted this excellent sighting to her blog on 24 July. This report has it all: a midnight encounter with something unknown, a subsequent call to the police who not only believed the witness but advised her to be careful (with the unspoken implication that there had been other sightings) and footprint evidence that indicated a pattern of the creature “hanging out” around this home. Ms. Godfrey even included a witness sketch that will, if you are not a complete skepdebunker, raise the hair on your arms and the back of your neck.

One of the things that struck me about this sighting was this paragraph:

They (deeply impressed canid footprints) were also very evident in the mulch around her house, especially under several windows. One of the windows belonged to the couple’s young teen, who has a special needs disorder. The teen had been telling the woman that there was a “monster” peering into the window almost every night for a month, she said, but it was never there by the time she got to the room, so she thought the teen was imagining things. She does not think that any more, she added.

So, this ‘critter’ has enough juice to give itself physical substance and has made itself known to the lady of the house, in the middle of the night, resulting in the woman’s complete lack of sleep that night. Additionally, the creature has been playing peek-a-boo with the above-mentioned teen, disappearing before anyone, other than the child, could see it. I think we can safely assume that the woman’s inability to doze off that night and the child’s reference to the ‘critter’ as a monster places this being firmly in the ranks of the Intruders. This one, like so many of its kind, seems to feed off fear and it has had an open season food source with the developmentally disabled teen (and now the mother). I’d love to see someone place a circle of rock salt mixed with some silver shavings around that house (both etheric repellents), give it a good strong magical charge and see what our midnight visitor had to say then.

Now, there are a subset of people who have suggested that the manwolf/dogman is a tulpa – a thought form – created by ancient shaman or other magicians to guard certain sacred sites. Given the behavior of some of these beings, I think this is a valid assumption. I am thinking, for example, of the 1950’s sighting in one of Ms. Godfrey’s books, where a gentleman is confronted by a manwolf standing on top of an Indian mound (if I recall correctly) and actually growling something that sounded like words. The witness got the message and backed off and there was no further interaction with the beast. Such an encounter clearly marks the actions of a magical guardian.

I do not think, though, that we can use this thought as a universal field theory of big hairy monsters. The behavior of some manwolves is entirely reminiscent of the Phantom Black Dogs of the UK, for example, in that they seem to favor cemeteries and other burial sites. Given that these creatures are often described as black or dark gray, I have been given to wonder if they are not an American iteration of the PBD, perhaps bent into a slightly different shape by the energies of this land. PBD’s, while sometimes scary to the percipient, do not usually cause harm (yes, I am aware of the very notable exceptions) and may, in some cases actually act as way-faring guardians, especially to women wandering alone at night. The PDB is strongly associated with death and, in some counties of the UK, the lore indicates that to see one portends a death in the family. I have not noted any such correlation amongst the manwolves here.

Coming back to our witness in Hartland, though, I do not see this ‘critter’ being a guardian. First of all, a thought form requires a lot of energy and concentration to form and then maintain. While the thought form of a skilled magician can certainly seem as real as the person sitting next to you, very rarely would one become powerful enough to actually clothe itself in etheric substance so that it could have the mass to make the paw prints seen at the scene. Essentially, we would be talking about a thought form that had escaped the control of its maker, developed a way to feed itself energy and eventually became strong enough to take on etheric substance. It is unlikely almost to the level of impossible for all three things to come together and stay together for this long.

In addition, if this were a programmed magical guardian, it would not be peeping in windows and startling people in the middle of the night. It would be responding to its programming, appearing when the humans breached its perimeter (wherever that might be) and doing its level best to either scare them off or do damage to keep them away. That damage might range from manipulating energies in the area to cause psychic anxiety all the up to physical harm (usually done by effecting the etheric body of the person). If this were a guardian that these people had accidentally provoked, I think they would know it.

As I said above, I think that this is one of the Intruders who is projecting a form that is guaranteed to give it plenty of fear energy to feed on.

The Wolf Pack: Another Early Warning Sign

I have periods of time in my work where I am tasked with doing a very necessary chore but one that does not require a great deal of brain power. I use those times to catch up on various paranormal podcasts (with headphones on, of course). Recently, I caught Linda Godfrey, the noted bipedal canid researcher, on Beyond the Edge Radio and she was talking about an episode of the TV show Paranormal Witness that was based on a sighting report contained in one of her many books.

“The Wolf Pack” is the story of a family who encountered not one or two but five upright bipedal canids on their property in Maine. The three people in the home at the time were literally kept from leaving during an entire night, despite the father’s best attempts to reach either his vehicle or his guns. While the TV episode does its best to make this scenario even more creepy and atmospheric than it already is, the bare facts of the case are enough to give one pause and to give us further cause to consider some of the signs that surround the opening of an access point between the worlds.

First of all, as I have mentioned before, I do not think that what Ms. Godfrey calls a manwolf or a dogman is the same thing as a werewolf. In magical terms, a werewolf would be a human being who seems to be capable of accessing wolf energy (or perhaps their own predatory shadow) and generating an etheric shell which resembles either a quadruped wolf or some hybrid thereof. It appears that the creatures Ms. Godfrey is studying are something “other” – either an unlikely canine mutation or beings of the Otherworld who sometimes cross over into our dimension for purposes that we can not entirely ascertain.

I talked in my last article about the Silence as an early warning sign for the opening of access points from one world to another. That was certainly the case in this occurrence. There were two times when the witnesses noted that the forest around their home had gone dead silent. In the first instance, they noted that deathly stillness on the night when they saw the lights in the woods that seemed to be a precursor to the wolf pack event. The second instance of the Silence happened right before the creatures were actually spotted.

One of the reasons that I do not think the manwolf is a canine mutation (and that Sasquatch is not a bipedal giant ape) is this phenomenon of the Silence. If the manwolf were a physical world predator, then you might see a localized area of silence in its immediate vicinity but chances are that other animals in the woods would make the beast’s presence known. This is why predators are not always successful when they hunt; other animals, if they detect the predator, will alert. When the Silence descends though, it is just that, a silence that is undisturbed by any movement or sound in the wood. To say that this is not natural is an understatement. To my knowledge, the only source of the Silence is an incursion from the Otherworld and, since we see this phenomenon associated with both the manwolf and Sasquatch, this leads me, again, to the conclusion that these creatures (and many other strange things reported) are just visiting this realm.

We see another warning sign of Otherworld intrusion cropping up in this incident: the lights that were seen in the forest some time before the manwolf event manifested. While some might instantly jump to UFO’s as an explanation (and technically, since these lights were flying and were unidentified, I suppose they were UFO’s), I am inclined to view these lights more along the lines of the legendary ghost lights seen in areas across the country. What many UFO researchers do not take into account is that there is a long history of association with these floating points of light and spirits, mostly of the dead or the Faerie. In other words, the ghost lights appear to be “lightweight” manifestations from the Otherworld.

In my view, the ghost lights might be the first signs of manifestation around an access point or the first beings able to make it through a portal that is not fully open yet. People who have had close contact with these lights often note that they seem to be sentient and will actively avoid people or play a sort of hide and seek game with humans, moving off to a distance and encouraging following, only to move off when the person gets too close. The concept of being Faerie-led into a bog or other dangerous place derives from these will-o-the-wisp type of lights. I have seen lights or so called orbs manifest in and around the circles used by magicians although I think that these may simply be signs of the gathering energy in a working. Perhaps these lights draw energy from the opening portal in much the same manner.

So, now we have identified two phenomenon that seem to accompany openings of access points from the Otherworld into this one and subsequent high strangeness. I am going to be considering other early warning signs that one might use to predict or at least recognize an outbreak of high strangeness and I will write about those in future blogs.

Back to the . . . past?

What is one to make of a sighting like this one made by cryptozoologist JC Johnson in the Four Corners area? I find this sighting particularly interesting since there are multiple witnesses, a fact that helps to cut down on the possibility of mis-identification (at least in my view, skeptics would of course fall back on the tattered mass hallucination ‘explanation’ if they did not boldly assert that this experienced outdoorsman had seen a bear and mis-dentified it.) While I am not at all sure what this group saw, I am convinced that they saw something quite unusual.

Now, the article is titled “Relict Dire Wolf Sighting” and I am able to accept the possibility that JC Johnson and his fellow paddlers actually saw an extant example of a supposedly extinct species. They were in fairly deep wilderness after all and, as much as we would like to believe otherwise, humans do not have a complete catalog of all the interesting critters running around this planet. Personally, I would not be at all surprised if the thylacine actually survived its alleged extinction and it would not surprise me to find that the dire wolf had been pronounced extinct prematurely. If the coelacanth can come back from its Mezozoic extinction then anything is fair game in my book.

When we look at the sightings of things that look like dire wolves, though, we also have to consider witnesses who claim to have seen everything from mammoths to sabre-toothed tigers. Any aficionado of Nick Redfern’s books will have come across some interesting tales about sightings of prehistoric creatures. If I recall, Redfern’s book Monster Diary actually had a whole chapter on sightings of prehistoric beasts that appeared to the witnesses to be ghosts or specters of some sort. I am minded, too, of the work of Linda Godfrey where, in her discussion of manwolves, she also reports on encounters with what she calls bearwolves and relates them to the prehistoric amphycyon.

So, in some cases, like the one we are looking at, the witnesses seem to see a solid flesh and blood animal while in other instances, the creature appears more spectral in nature. Sounds suspiciously like the Phantom Black Dogs of British fame – sometimes appearing as a dog so real one could reach out and pet it and at other times only manifesting as the sound of a dog trailing the witness or as a ghost hound that could be seen through. PBD’s are, very obviously, creatures of the Otherside but a wooly mammoth or a dire wolf?

As I said, I am not ready to say with certainty that these sightings are not examples of relict populations of some of these species but I would like to propose an alternative solution. Does anyone recall the BBC science fiction series Primeval? In that show, a series of anomalies opened throughout the British Isles (and later throughout the world) allowing creatures from both the past and future to access our time. While the show is pure fiction, we have talked enough about the premise of portals to the Otherside in these pages to look at the idea that portals might just be admitting more than the Intruders and other spiritual beings.

One of the things one learns very quickly, in doing magic, is that time is actually quite relative. I can not count the number of times that I have been in meditation or ritual and felt that I had been there for hours only to discover that only a few minutes had passed. Conversely, I have had the experience of thinking I was only spending a few minutes working an exercise only to discover that an hour or more had passed. Spirits are notorious for not “grokking” human time schedules – one of many reasons why you have to be very specific with spirits about the time frame for a working while at the same time using time referents they understand such as sun and moon phases or other natural cycles.

So, time has little meaning on the Otherside. In addition, you have to remember that almost all magicians are agreed that anything that has existed at any time has imprinted its energy on the “astral” somewhere – thus the talk about things like the Akashic records where all human actions are supposedly recorded. So, let’s take a look at a couple of scenarios . . .

Let’s say that Jane Doe is out for her morning run in Seattle. She is traveling along a marked path that leads through some dense brush. The run is going well, her body is flooded with endorphins and the rhythmic motion of her movement is putting her into a trance-like state. What Jane does not know is that she has a touch of clairvoyance from her Irish grandmother. As she sinks into a trance her inner vision opens – just a little – and she looks straight into the astral and sees what appears to be the shade of a saber tooth tiger, stalking through the brush. She is fully locked into the vision at this point, can actually “hear” the creature crunching through the brush and perhaps even smell it. Viola’, strange sighting report and very frightened witness.

In the case of JC Johnson, we have someone who is traveling along a river that has known Anasazi sites. These people were a mystery themselves since they seemingly vanished in a short period of time. There seems to be a good correlation between portals and Native American sites, particularly the prehistoric sites such as Anasazi ruins or the Midwestern mounds. We do not know, really, what triggers some of these portals or why they manifest certain creatures (stuff for serious magical research, actually) but, in this case, the portal in the area coughs up the fully manifest (i.e. it looks like a physical animal) dire wolf. Note that in the sighting, the dire wolf seemed to follow the paddlers for a while and then was lost to sight. Perhaps it went back to the portal, or perhaps, it simply lost congruence and disappeared.

Now, please remember this is wild conjecture on my part. I have never heard of any magician summoning a prehistoric animal into manifestation. But given all the strangeness out there, if we really stop to look, this idea of portals or window areas carries a lot of weight, especially when it is coupled with magical theory.

The Michigan Dogman

The Michigan Dogman: Werewolves and Other Unknown Canines Across the U.S.

Author: Linda S Godfrey
ISBN: 978-0-9798822-6-5
Publisher: Unexplained Research LLC

I am just back from my moving adventure and trying to get back into the swing of things again so I thought I would post a book review that I actually posted to another source back in 2012. Not to beat around the bush, I highly recommend this title.

If you are at all interested in the manwolf/dogman phenomenon, werewolves, phantom black dogs or any other sort of canid cryptid, go buy this book. In fact, if you simply enjoy a good story that will send shivers up your spine, go buy this book.

I have actually been waiting to read this work for a couple of years. I have consumed, and thoroughly enjoyed, Ms. Godfrey’s previous offerings, The Beast of Bray Road and Hunting the American Werewolf. I have found both books to be packed with information, presented in a wonderful, wry manner and those who read this blog regularly will know that I refer to them on occasion. Ms. Godfrey obviously does not take herself too seriously even though she is now a nationally recognized expert on this phenomenon.

I only wish that this author’s publisher would see fit to put her books out on Kindle since some of us have very limited shelf space for real world books. I waited for some time, in hopes that the book would come out in an e-version, and finally gave up and purchased a paper copy. Despite this small peeve, the book was well worth the wait. In Hunting the American Werewolf, Ms. Godfrey extended the reach of her research from her local Wisconsin/Michigan area to other parts of the country, as she received more and more reports from people across the U.S. The Michigan Dogman, despite its somewhat misleading title, continues this trend and the largest portion of the book is taken up with witness reports from across the United States. There is even a report from Canada included in the very last section of sightings.

One of the things that I love about Ms. Godfrey’s work is her willingness to let the witnesses speak for themselves and not try to jam their reports into preconceived categories. Ms. Godfrey relays the sightings in straightforward and clear terms and does not fail to report details that are, decidedly, strange (for example, witnesses that had UFO phenomenon happening in an area before or after a sighting or testimony that the creature simply vanished into thin air or seemed incorporeal). What emerges is a ménage of high strangeness and it is only at the end of the book, when the witnesses have had their say, that Godfrey presents some of the many competing theories about the nature of the manwolf/dogman.

I enjoyed the last section of the book as much as the sighting information. Ms. Godfrey covers some of the same thoughts and theories that I have touched on here in the blog and does so in a concise fashion that allows the reader to acquaint him or herself with the subject without being overwhelming. Godfrey includes a reasonably extensive bibliography for those who are interested in pursuing subjects further and makes recommendations for books in the text.

All of Linda Godfrey’s books are must reads for those interested in the subject matter of this blog or even those who are simply interested in strange phenomenon. Her sometimes humorous and always balanced approach to the subject makes for a quick, smooth read and her cartoon illustrations had this folklore geek laughing out loud (see the Black Dog illustration on p. 191 as a wonderful example). I’ve seen and heard Ms. Godfrey in interviews and she has consistently stated that she really has no idea what the manwolf/dogman is. It is the rare researcher who does not have a “pet” theory or who is willing to say that A, B and C (and maybe even D, E, F . . . ) might be true. Ms. Godfrey is such a researcher and I hope that she continues to be the nexus for reports of this kind.