Bray Road

Multiple witnesses in the late 1980s and early 1990s described a six-to-seven-foot creature with wolf features, human-like arms, and glowing yellow eyes along this rural farm road near Elkhorn. Reporter Linda Godfrey's coverage launched a cryptid legend, and the earliest documented sighting traces back to 1936 when a night watchman heard a creature vocalize "gadarrah" while digging near a Native American burial mound.

Lori Endrizzi was driving home along Bray Road around 1:30 AM in the fall of 1989 when she saw what she first thought was a person kneeling on the roadside. It wasn't. The creature had gray-brown fur, fangs, pointed ears, a long wolfish snout, and glowing yellow eyes that weren't reflecting her headlights. Its arms were jointed like a human's, elbows raised, claws facing outward, apparently holding roadkill. Its palms faced upward. Endrizzi managed a bar called The Jury Room in Elkhorn. She wasn't the type to make things up. When she later found an illustration in The Golden Book of the Mysterious, she said it matched exactly what she'd seen.

That same year, farmer Scott Bray found large footprints and drag marks in the snow-covered fields along the road that bears his family's name.

On Halloween night 1991, Doristine Gipson hit something on the road. When she stopped, a creature burst from the woods running toward her car at inhuman speed. A friend spotted it again later that same evening. When Gipson checked her blue Plymouth Sundance afterward, she found claw marks scratched into the trunk. She called the thing "a freak of nature, one of God's mistakes."

The Walworth County Week, a supplement to The Janesville Gazette, assigned reporter Linda S. Godfrey to cover the accumulating sightings in 1991. Godfrey was skeptical. She published the Endrizzi and Gipson accounts, and the floodgates opened. More witnesses came forward. The creature was described with striking agreement across accounts: six to seven feet tall, humanoid body covered in fur, capable of moving on both two legs and four. Sightings spread across Walworth, Racine, and Jefferson counties, but Bray Road remained the geographic center.

The earliest documented sighting actually predates the modern legend by over 50 years. In 1936, Mark Shackleman, a night watchman at St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children near Jefferson, saw a creature standing nearly seven feet tall on two consecutive nights. It was covered in dark hair, emitted what Shackleman described as "a bad, bad odor, like long-dead meat," and produced a three-syllable vocalization he wrote down as "gadarrah." The thing was digging near a Native American burial mound on the school grounds. Shackleman found raking marks in the dirt the next day and noticed the creature's thumbs and pinky fingers appeared shorter than its other digits.

Godfrey's initial assignment became her life's work. Her articles evolved into The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin's Werewolf, and she eventually published more than 20 books on cryptozoology, true crime, and paranormal investigation. She suggested the phenomenon might be more complicated than a single explanation, noting that different witnesses might be describing biological animals, phantoms, or hoaxes. She died on November 27, 2022 at age 71 at Agrace Hospital in Janesville.

Skeptics maintain the creature is probably misidentified gray wolves or a mangy American black bear. The legend inspired a 2005 horror film and a 2018 documentary. Sightings dropped off significantly after the 1990s. The road is still there, a nondescript stretch of Walworth County farmland that tells you nothing about its reputation unless you're driving it after dark.