Michigan Dogman

The interesting question here is not whether a bipedal dog walks the northern Michigan woods. It is narrower and answerable: was there anything at all before 7:40 a.m. on 1 April 1987? The 1887 lumberjacks are verse one of the song. They are repeated everywhere as the Dogman's first recorded encounter, usually with the specifics sanded off — two lumberjacks instead of eleven, no Garland Swamp, no logger called Johnson. We looked for a printed account of them older than the broadcast and did not find one, and Cook has never claimed one exists. Alison Hudson, writing for Skeptoid in 2015, described the machinery that produced the "history": researchers "have dug into newspaper reports, history books, and local folklore for anything that could even remotely be connected to the beast to prove that the Dogman pre-dates the song, and have cobbled together a thread of stories going back centuries." Cook's own summary, given to the Detroit Free Press on Halloween 2011 and quoted by Hudson, is blunter: "I made it up completely from my own imagination as an April Fools' prank for the radio and stumbled my way to a legend that goes back all the way to Native American times." The 1938 encounter is a 1987 document. It is usually told as a cabin story; it is not. In Cook's own encounter file, Robert Fortney was seventeen and out of work in the summer of 1938, fishing the banks of the Muskegon River near Paris, Michigan, when a pack of large feral dogs came out of the woods. He fired a shot in the air; all of them slunk back except one big black dog with blue eyes. He fired again, and the dog rose onto its hind legs. "It reared up on its hind legs and stared at me," Fortney said. "It may be that I was just scared, but I swear that dog was smiling at me." The date that matters, though, is not 1938. Cook's page states that Fortney told only a few friends and family and "kept it a secret for almost 50 years — until 1987 — when Fortney heard the song 'The Legend' on WTCM", and it attributes the quotation to "a phone interview in 1987". This is a 1987 record of a fifty-year-old memory, produced by the broadcast that also supplied its vocabulary. One detail cuts the other way and is worth keeping: 1938 fits none of the song's seventh years, and Fortney's story matches no verse in it — so he was not simply reciting the record back. But it cannot be used as evidence that the ten-year rule predates Cook, because it does not obey it. Luther, the only episode with a real paper trail, is also the least mysterious. Both 1987 papers report the same finding. The cabin's owners' first guess was a bear. DNR officers from the Baldwin field office inspected on the Friday, found damage to the screen and moulding around a door and a window, examined paw prints and the teeth marks on the moulding, and, in the Grand Rapids Press's flat wording, "the officers concluded that a dog had done the damage. The dog was never found." Conservation officer Ron McCarty was candid with the Cadillac Evening News about the limits of his own testimony — "I didn't go out there, so all my information is second hand" — and equally candid about the conclusion: "From what I've been told, there was no trouble convincing the people who own the place it was a dog." The Gable Film was a fabrication, and its maker said so on television. In 2007 an 8mm reel surfaced, silent, badly degraded, filled with family scenes dated to the 1970s, ending in a thirty-second sequence in which the camera closes on a hulking animal that charges. Cook says he was handed the film and a DVD copy by "sincere, small-town folk", produced a four-minute documentary around it, previewed it on 9 September 2007 to a discussion group founded by the author Linda Godfrey, and posted it on his own site on 23 September. Early on Saturday 29 September, members of his own video team turned up at his door. Working frame by frame at maximum contrast on half a second of the charge sequence, they had found "a human leg extending, with a foot attached. We are looking at a person moving on hands and knees, not an unknown creature preparing to attack." Cook published the flaw himself, under the title "The Gable Film – Anatomy of an Unintended Hoax", along with a long complaint about how he had been treated in the six days the film was public. His company nonetheless went on restoring the reel, releasing it under a Creative Commons licence in 2009 with the admission that it had "exhausted our limited resources to solve the mystery". It was solved on 24 March 2010, on "America's Wolfman", the last episode MonsterQuest ever aired. The producers had spent the autumn of 2009 in northern and western Michigan, interviewing Cook and Lake County sheriff's Det./Sgt. Jeff Chamberlain. On that programme Mike Agrusa, a Michigan resident and a fan of the song, admitted the film was his — made in 2007, Hudson writes, "to keep the every-decade-in-a-year-that-ends-in-seven cycle of the Dogman going". He produced for the cameras every period prop used in it, and he appears on screen in the film himself. A second film that had surfaced a year later was a hoax too. One point is genuinely unresolved: Hudson writes that Agrusa "approached the originator of the legend, Steve Cook, to help him perpetrate the deception by sharing the 'found' video on his website", and that Cook played along; Cook's 2007 page says the film came to him from a family and that he never claimed it was authentic. Both accounts cannot be right, and we cannot settle which is. What is not in dispute is that a Michigan man built the thing and confessed on camera — and that, as Hudson notes, some believers still refuse the confession. What people are seeing, when they see something. Grey wolves and coyotes both range across northern Michigan and leave the large canine tracks that get photographed and cast in plaster. Black bears stand. Photographs offered as evidence, when not simply retouched, are the same dark blur in the same foliage that Bigfoot photography has been producing for sixty years. And the accounts themselves often have the shape of stories rather than of events: Hudson picks out a Manistee County report of a couple parked in the woods, windows steamed, who wipe a patch clear to find a dogman's face looking back — and who "swore off parking from that day forward". That is the Hookman, one of the best-documented urban legends there is, with a new mask on. The person least surprised by all this is the author. "I'm tremendously skeptical," Cook has said, "because I've sort of seen the way folklore becomes built from the creation of this song to what it's turned into... but I do believe people who think they saw something really did see something. I also think the Dogman provides them with an avenue to explain what they couldn't explain for themselves." That is the honest verdict. The Michigan Dogman is not a hoax in the ordinary sense: nobody was defrauded, no evidence was faked at the start, and the author has spent forty years telling anyone who asks that he made it up over a few days in March 1987. It is something rarer — a piece of folklore whose entire manufacture is on the record, adopted anyway by the region it was written about.