Monster week: hodag

It was 1893 when a new beast began to spread its terror through Wisconsin.

They called it the hodag. No ordinary beast, this preternatural creature was born from the ashes of burnt oxen and was driven by the cruelties they had suffered in life. It moved from one farm to another, killing white bulldogs and feasting on their remains.

Deliverance came from Eugene Shephard, a land surveyor from Rhinelander, Wisc., who took monster week almost as seriously as the rest of us. Shepard made newspaper headlines in 1893 when he gathered a posse from Rhinelander, Wisc., and together they captured a hodag.

It was a terrifying chimera, with the head of a frog, and the face of a giant elephant, but with a terrible grin. It walked on thick, short legs set with huge claws. It had spikes along its back like a dinosaur, and it brandished a long tail that ended in spearlike barbs. Shephard’s crew needed dynamite to fell the creature.

When they had finished, they sent a picture of the vanquished beast, with them poised triumphantly around its remains, to the local paper. The editor promptly used it to fill a vexatious hole at the back of the weekend shopper, and the notoriety was established of both the hodag and its conquerors.

Three years later, Shephard announced he had caught a live hodag, by affixing rags steeped in chloroform to the ends of long sticks and pushing them into a cave where the hodag had made its lair. What’s more, he was willing to let people see the beast in person for a modest fee, first at the Oneida County Fair and then in a cage he had set up at his house.

It was a frightening spectacle to behold even when Shephard did not provoke it. When he did, with the wires he had attached to its body, the hodag would move and the spectators would quickly withdrew to a safe distance.

Reports eventually reached the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., which announced it was sending naturalists to study the hodag. The game over, Shephard announced that it was all a hoax, an elaborate prank. There was no hodag and never had been, and there really was no need to tar and feather him. He’d be happy to repay anyone who had fallen for the joke, provided they still had a receipt, and geez, he already said he was sorry, what more do you want?

And that was that, until twenty years after Shephard’s death, when something began killing white bulldogs in the area and eating their carcasses. Police investigating the incidents reported that the animal responsible left tracks that indicated four large claws and a long tail with spikes at the end like spears.

The people of Rhinelander didn’t need to read more to know that the unseen animal had the head of a frog, the face of an elephant and an evil grin.

They had left their fears of the hodag behind once they had learned the truth of Shephard’s prank, and they had forgotten all about it. But it hadn’t forgotten them.

Instead it had waited, as monsters do, for  a chance to return. As more farmers mistreated their livestock and burned their remains, the hodag saw its opportunity and it returned.

It’s roamed through Wisconsin ever since.

 

Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.