Is something strange going on in Elkhorn?
With the sun shining above it and a breeze rippling through the wildflowers that grow alongside it, Bray Road — on the outskirts of Elkhorn, in Walworth County — looks like an idyllic country lane. But late at night, when it’s shrouded in thick mist and even thicker silence, it can seem downright sinister.
For decades now, many locals have believed that a wolf-like creature has been walking among them, creeping through the farms and fields surrounding the road late at night. And on Oct. 5, filmmaker Seth Breedlove intends to shine a light on the notoriously camera-shy creature by releasing a 66-minute documentary aptly titled The Bray Road Beast.
One of the co-founders of the Ohio-based production company Small Town Monsters, Breedlove has been documenting urban legends around the country since 2015, working with film crews and animators to turn mythic monsters like the Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, into the subjects of short and feature-length films. “Every town has its own legend — maybe not a well-known monster legend, but something,” Breedlove says. “Whether you believe in it is irrelevant. At the end of the day, it has an impact on the town.”
And the The Bray Road Beast has certainly had an impact on Elkhorn.
Breedlove spent the better part of a week in the town earlier this year, asking locals about their alleged run-ins with the beast and interviewing the journalist who helped popularize the story of the sightings in the first place, Linda Godfrey.
In 1991, Godfrey — who was then a cub reporter for the Walworth County Week — learned that several Elkhorn residents claimed to have seen a strange, wolf-like creature skulking around Bray Road on its hind legs. When she ventured over to the local animal control office and asked an employee she knew there whether he’d heard about any unusual animal sightings in the area, he immediately opened his desk drawer and pulled out a fat manila envelope labeled “werewolf.”
Intrigued, Godfrey began to seek out the people who’d filed the complaints. “There was a young single mom, a high school student, a farmer and some other run-of-the mill people — they didn’t seem like a group that had conspired on a hoax, and I didn’t get the sense that they were lying or crazy or anything like that,” she says. “They seemed genuinely frightened, and I started to think that maybe there was really some sort of dangerous animal on the loose.”
After interviewing several of the witnesses, Godfrey sent a story about the sightings to her editor, figuring that her readers might speculate about it for a week, or maybe two, before tiring of it. But that’s not what happened. “In two weeks,” she says, “it was national news.” TV crews flew in from out of state, and letters from other people who’d seen strange canine-like creatures — some of them hundreds of miles away — started filling Godfrey’s mailbox.
“It just kind of exploded,” she says. “I worked for the newspaper for 10 more years, and people continued to contact me, especially around Halloween, because there weren’t many people keeping track of things that looked like werewolves.”
Godfrey eventually wrote a full-length book about the creature, The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf, and her testimony features heavily in Breedlove’s documentary.
Lee Hampel, a retired math teacher who owns a farm just a stone’s throw from Bray Road, also appears in the documentary. Hampel first heard about the legend of the beast in 2013 — he’d invited two neighbors over to help him bale hay in exchange for a couple cases of beer, and while they were working one of them gestured to the fields behind Hampel’s property and told him to be careful, because the Beast of Bray Road lived out there.
Hampel didn’t know what to make of the friend’s statement, initially. But he later found out that many more of his neighbors believed in the beast, and last year he saw something strange himself.
“I was pulling out of my yard, on my way to Walmart,” he says. “It was dark. And I saw two glowing red eyes off to the side of the road. Then all of a sudden they were 15 or 20 feet further away, in the field.”
Hampel admits that he didn’t get a good look at the creature’s face, but he believes that it must have been at least 6 feet tall, and moving far faster than a dog or coyote. And he’s convinced that those ruby-bright eyes didn’t belong to any ordinary animal. “I carry a flare gun with me when I go into the field at night now,” he says.
Breedlove says he tries to approach each project with skepticism, and he isn’t as sure of the beast’s existence as some of the residents of Walworth County. But he was struck by the number of people who claimed to have seen something, and the force of their assertions. “I don’t necessarily think that a half-man half-wolf creature is wandering around the woods of Elkhorn,” he says. “But I do think something strange happened in the town, and that’s just as interesting to me.”
The Bray Road Beast will be available on Amazon, Vimeo OnDemand and VidiSpace on Oct. 5, and it will have its Wisconsin premiere at the Milwaukee Paranormal Conference on Oct. 20.
