LIVING HERE
Humans love horror, fantasy, and the mystery of the unknown and with that the Halloween season has already begun.
It is that love of fear (not based on real terror) that drives us to dig deeper into the myths, theories, and legends of the unknown. It’s the fascination that leads us in search of ghosts and abandoned houses and towns. We want to know if there is a beyond, and we want to know how fearless we can be from what might be imagined coming from it. Monsters, ghosts, creatures, and the rest of the paranormal world; we want to know it deeply. We want to feel our heartbeat quicken as we wander dark forests at night or visit haunted attractions the same way our hearts beat on a roller coaster or during skydiving, facing our fears head on. We love the adrenaline rush and feeling of being scared in the moment. It is this curiosity and fear that has led us to where a mysterious beast has allegedly been sighted in our own communities.
It’s called the Beast of Bray Road. Through the rural part of Elkhorn runs Bray Road, a 17-mile stretch of a back road dating back to colonial times when it was known as the King’s Highway. The first sighting of what would come to be known as the Beast of Bray Road occurred in 1936 when a night watchman for the nearby St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children was crossing the fields. Enter Mark Shackleman, the night watchman at a Catholic convent known as St. Coletta, the very same St. Coletta where Rosemary Kennedy was housed after her father Joseph Kennedy had her lobotomized. Shackleman would come to describe his experience with the beast, gauging that it was standing between six and seven feet tall before him, resembling a part human and part wolf or bear, covered with thick coarse black or brown hair. Its speech was half-beast, half-human and seemed to be wandering the night in search of its next meal.
Mark Shackleman was in his mid-30s, a strong and well-respected man, a former heavyweight boxer, but the encounter made the hairs on his neck stand on end. The watchman never saw the creature again, but the experience stuck with him for the rest of his life. Nearly 50 years after Shackleman’s encounter, stories of the creature once again began to resurface. Mostly seen in Elkhorn throughout the ’80s and ’90s, sightings of the Bray Road Beast rose in prominence. The first of these recent encounters with the beast occurred in the fall of 1989. Around 1:30 a.m., Lori Endrizzi was driving home along Bray Road and there off to the side of the road she saw a massive creature kneeling with long claws holding some roadkill. Unlike many animals, which would turn and run when headlights were aimed at them, this creature instead turned and stared at her. Daytime sightings have also occurred. Some witnesses say they saw the wolf-like man running on all fours through fields, sometimes in pursuit of deer.
This wolfman, or dogman, is usually spotted scavenging or eating. People who believe in him think he only appears when he is hunting but for the most part, sightings of the Wisconsin Werewolf have dropped off since the ’90s with sightings far more spread out. Some still believe the creature lurks in the brush along Bray Road and wonder if he will be out this Halloween season.
