🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº6501 ACTIVE

Hodag

Hodag is a cryptid — a creature whose existence is unconfirmed by science — with reported sightings near Rhinelander, Wisconsin, US. This file collects the accounts and folklore surrounding it.

Where and when was Hodag sighted?

Location: Rhinelander, Wisconsin, US
Date sighted: Unknown
Coordinates: 45.64, -89.41
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

What is Hodag?

The Hodag is a squat, spiny beast from Wisconsin lumberjack folklore, described as having the head of a frog, the face of an elephant-like grin full of large teeth, thick horns, a row of sharp spikes down its back, and short stocky legs ending in claws. It is closely tied to the logging camps around Rhinelander in northern Wisconsin, where 19th-century timber workers passed around tall tales of a beast said to be born from the ashes of cremated oxen, cursed by their years of hard labor and abuse. The creature's fame exploded in 1893 when local prankster and lumberman Eugene Shepard claimed to have captured a live Hodag, staging a photograph of a horned, spiked wooden creation billed in newspapers as "the strangest animal ever captured alive" and displaying it to a credulous public before eventually admitting the whole affair was a hoax. Far from fading away, the confessed prank turned into a beloved civic mascot, and today the Hodag is embraced good-naturedly by Rhinelander as a piece of tongue-in-cheek regional heritage rather than a creature anyone seriously believes stalks the woods, making it one of the most openly acknowledged hoax-origin cryptids in American folklore.

Hodag — illustration — Image: Unknown author · Public domain

What is the history of Hodag?

Very few cryptids have a named inventor, a documented method and a surviving confession. The Hodag has all three — and a town that decided to keep the monster anyway. The inventor was Eugene Simeon Shepard (1854-1923), a land surveyor and timber cruiser who had settled in Rhinelander, in the pine country of northern Wisconsin, and who was known locally as a humorist and practical joker. His trade took him alone into logging country for weeks at a time; his hobby was persuading other people to believe things. The Hodag first appeared in print in Rhinelander's own newspaper, The New North, on 28 October 1893, under the heading "Capture of a Hodag, By the Snake Editor". It is not a news report — it is a comic column, and it reads like one. "Since the Hodag was seen the other day there has been considerable many hunters out all aspiring to capture one", it begins. Men from the "poverty hill and log town districts" go into a tamarack swamp with rifles and a "large bore squirt loaded with poisonous water"; the enraged beast starts "slashing down the timber which was falling in every direction"; dynamite and fire finish the job, and the hunters then need nine hours "to put a quietus on the muscular action of their dangerous tails". This is logging-camp humour written for men who would recognise every joke in it. Three years later Shepard produced the animal itself. In an account he signed from his Rhinelander home, "The Pines", under the title "Capture of the Black Hodag and His Mate", he calls the creature the Bovine Spirituallis, "identified by Prof. Jones of Philadelphia and classified as one of a prehistoric race of animals". He describes finding it near Rice Creek, photographing the old male while it foraged for water snakes and mud turtles, blocking the entrance to its den, working in a sponge saturated with chloroform, roping the unconscious beast and hauling it back to Rhinelander in a cage. In 1896 the Oneida County Agricultural Society staged the county's first fair, and the Hodag was its main attraction — the first time, as the local historians put it, that a Hodag was something you could go and stand in front of. It was shown in a darkened enclosure. Visitors were admitted only briefly, ostensibly for their own safety. The thing growled, and it moved. Admission was ten cents. Kerry Bloedorn, who runs the Pioneer Park Historical Complex in Rhinelander, puts the takings at more than 500 dollars over the first weekend — several thousand dimes, in a lumber town of a few thousand people. How exactly the exhibit ended is the part of the story everyone repeats and nobody documents; it is dealt with below. What is not in dispute is that Shepard eventually conceded the point. In the Rhinelander Chamber of Commerce's own summary, he "admitted that the Hodag was something of a hoax, and that the beast in the photograph was really just made of wood and ox hides". The extraordinary part is what happened next: nothing was retracted, because nobody wanted it retracted. Shepard himself framed the whole business as advertising rather than fraud — thousands of people came to see the Hodag, he wrote, "and not one of them went away without having learned a little more about north Wisconsin". Rhinelander agreed. By the 1940s the county fair was widely known as the Hodag Fair. In 1978 the town launched the Hodag Country Festival, now one of the largest outdoor country music events in the United States. The high school teams are the Hodags; in 2022 they were voted the best high-school mascot in America. And in October 2019, when Algoma Township in Michigan announced a hodag festival of its own, Rhinelander's Common Council spent an evening debating whether the town could trademark a beast that had never existed. A confessed fraud had become municipal property.

Timeline: the documented record of Hodag

28 October 1893 The New North of Rhinelander publishes "Capture of a Hodag, By the Snake Editor", a comic column describing a hunting party that kills the beast in a tamarack swamp with rifles, a squirt gun loaded with poisoned water, dynamite and fire. It is the Hodag's first appearance in print.
1896 — the capture Eugene Shepard circulates a signed account, "Capture of the Black Hodag and His Mate", claiming to have found the animal near Rice Creek, photographed it, sealed its den and subdued it with a chloroform-soaked sponge before caging it and bringing it to Rhinelander.
1896 — the Oneida County Fair The Hodag is exhibited at the county's first fair in a darkened enclosure, moved by hidden wires and growling thanks to Shepard's sons. Admission is ten cents; Pioneer Park director Kerry Bloedorn puts the first weekend's takings above 500 dollars.
1910 William T. Cox, Minnesota's first state forester, includes the Hodag in Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods — but describes a rhinoceros-sized, hairless porcupine-hunter with a spade-shaped nose, nothing like Shepard's spiked lizard. The name belonged to the logging camps before it belonged to Rhinelander.
1923 Eugene Simeon Shepard dies at 69. His biographer Kurt Kortenhof records his own verdict on the affair: thousands came to view the Hodag "and not one of them went away without having learned a little more about north Wisconsin".
1928 Luke Sylvester "Lake Shore" Kearney, a Rhinelander man, publishes The Hodag and Other Tales of the Logging Camps in Madison — the creature's transition from local prank to written folklore.
1940s-1950s The Oneida County Fair becomes widely known as the "Hodag Fair". Half a century after the confession, the hoax has become the county's own brand.
4-6 August 1978 The first Hodag Country Festival is held, headlined by Freddy Fender, with around 500 people attending. It now draws over 25,000 a day and reached its 49th edition in 2026.
1984 Wisconsin governor Tony Earl jokingly threatens to have the hodag declared an endangered species if Michigan keeps "trying to kidnap it" — the first public skirmish over ownership of a creature that does not exist.
29 October 2019 After Algoma Township, Michigan, announces its own hodag festival, Rhinelander's Common Council debates trademarking the beast. City attorney Steve Sorenson warns that prior users could keep using it and that national registration "is not cheap"; the council opts for cooperation instead of a legal fight. The Chamber of Commerce holds the mark on the current design, and a state registration sits with Downtown Rhinelander, Inc.
November 2022 The Rhinelander Hodags are voted best high-school mascot in America in a national poll run by Scorebook Live, taking 183,455 of more than 291,000 votes. A confessed 19th-century fraud wins a 21st-century popularity contest.

Is there a rational explanation for Hodag?

There is nothing to explain away here: the Hodag of 1896 was a made object, and its maker said so. The accounts agree on the construction. The body was carved wood — a shaped stump — covered with an ox hide. The horns along its back and the fangs in its mouth came from oxen and cattle. It did not walk; it was worked from outside with wires, which is why viewers were kept at a distance, in the dark, and only for a moment "for their own safety". The growling was supplied by Shepard's sons, hidden out of sight. Every element of the illusion depends on controlling how long and how well you are allowed to look — the oldest principle in sideshow work. Shepard's own written account contains the tell. The animal is authenticated by "Prof. Jones of Philadelphia", an authority with the commonest surname in the English language, no institution and no first name. Invented experts are a standard device of nineteenth-century hoaxes, and Shepard, writing for a readership that enjoyed the game, did not work hard to hide it. The famous ending deserves more caution than it usually gets. The story told everywhere — including by the Rhinelander Chamber of Commerce and by the University of Wisconsin's public-history project — is that scientists from the Smithsonian Institution announced they were coming to examine the specimen, and that Shepard confessed rather than face them. We could not verify it. There is no contemporary newspaper account, no Smithsonian record and no 1890s document naming the institution in any source we could reach; the versions in circulation either cite one another or rest on secondary works published a century after the fact. It may well be true. It should be read as tradition, not as documented history, and the date of Shepard's admission is likewise unfixed. The wider point is that Shepard did not invent the Hodag from nothing. Fearsome critters — invented animals used to entertain the camp and to haze new hands — were a standing genre in the logging woods of the Great Lakes. The name was already loose in that tradition and did not belong to Shepard's model. In 1910 William T. Cox, Minnesota's first state forester, published Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods and gave the Hodag an entry describing a completely different animal: rhinoceros-sized, hairless, mottled and striped, with a spade-shaped bony growth on its nose instead of a horn, slow and deliberate but intelligent, which hunts porcupines by uprooting the trees they sit in and which coats itself in pine pitch and dead leaves to overwinter. Luke Sylvester "Lake Shore" Kearney, another Rhinelander man, published a whole book of such logging-camp tales in 1928 with the Hodag at the front of it. And the incentive is not hidden. Rhinelander in the 1890s was a lumber town on a resource that was visibly running out. The Hodag brought newspapers, visitors and, at ten cents a look, money. Shepard's defence was that the fraud was a form of advertising for northern Wisconsin — and on that specific charge, a hundred and thirty years of Hodag tourism suggest he was right.

Can you visit Hodag?

Rhinelander, Oneida County, is the only place on earth where the Hodag is municipal infrastructure, and it is easy to visit. The town sits at the junction of US-8 and US-51 in northern Wisconsin, roughly four hours' drive north of Milwaukee or Madison. Rhinelander-Oneida County Airport (RHI), at 3375 Airport Road, has year-round Delta Connection service to Minneapolis-St. Paul and seasonal summer United Express flights to Chicago O'Hare, both operated by SkyWest. The obligatory photograph is the large fibreglass Hodag on the lawn of the Rhinelander Area Chamber of Commerce, 450 W. Kemp Street. It is free, outdoors and available at any hour. From there, Downtown Rhinelander's "Hodags on Parade" scatters dozens of individually painted Hodag statues across the town's businesses and streets; the Chamber and the town's tourism site publish a map to hunt them down. For the history rather than the merchandise, go to the Pioneer Park Historical Complex on Martin Lynch Drive, which holds the town's Hodag displays alongside what it describes as the oldest logging museum of its kind in the country. Admission is free, donations welcome. It opens from the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend to the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, Tuesday to Saturday 10:00-17:00 and Sunday 12:00-16:00, closed Mondays, with the same hours on September weekends. Telephone (715) 369-5004. Two festivals bracket the season. The Hodag Heritage Festival is held at Pioneer Park in May and is the historically minded one: pancake breakfast, a Hodag calling contest, history bus tours, talks and a re-enactment of Shepard's sideshow. The Hodag Country Festival, founded in 1978 and held on riverside grounds outside town in the second week of July, is the opposite in scale — a four-day country music festival that draws over 25,000 people a day and reached its 49th edition in 2026. Tickets and camping sell out well in advance and go on sale the previous autumn. One thing you cannot see: Shepard's original 1896 Hodag. It has not survived. What survives is the idea, which the town has been maintaining, without embarrassment, for well over a century.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-07-29 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas

Hodag

Where and when was Hodag sighted?

What is Hodag?

What is the history of Hodag?

Timeline: the documented record of Hodag

Is there a rational explanation for Hodag?

Can you visit Hodag?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

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Hodag

Where and when was Hodag sighted?

What is Hodag?

What is the history of Hodag?

Timeline: the documented record of Hodag

Is there a rational explanation for Hodag?

Can you visit Hodag?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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