Folklore in the making (part 1)

 

So I looked into Dogman...again. It seems the skeptics are mostly right about this one. While strange reports of doglike creatures are as old as civilization, the modern Dogman seems to be a piece of emerging folklore which can be traced back to an April Fool´s Joke in 1987 (Michigan) and to Linda Godfrey´s article on the Beast of Bray Road in 1991 (Wisconsin). Godfrey´s subsequent book (published in 2003) plus the Internet popularized the Dogman and also "streamlined" him. 

Previously, there wasn´t really a single Dogman phenomenon. Now, there is. The creature is virtually always depicted as large, bipedal, intelligent, extremely dangerous and obviously canid. It´s also a flesh-and-blood creature. Finally, note the difference between Dogman and werewolves: the latter are said to be humans who can shape-shift into standard quadrupedal wolves.

Of course, a paranormal explanation is also possible, and the Dogmen would then be fairies taking whatever form we expect them to...

Can you look specifically at the earliest Bray Road reports and list what each witness actually said about whether the creature was walking on two or four legs?

Yes. I went back specifically to the earliest material, rather than relying on later Dogman summaries. The picture is actually more nuanced than I suggested before: some of the earliest Bray Road-area reports explicitly involve four-legged movement, while others involve upright movement or a transition between the two.

The most important source is Linda Godfrey's contemporary December 29, 1991 article in The Week, because it records testimony and the Humane Officer's files at the time, rather than decades later.

Earliest reports, approximately 1989–1991

Witness/report	Approx. date	What was actually reported about locomotion
Lorianne Endrizzi ("Barbara")	1989	Kneeling, not simply standing. She saw the creature beside Bray Road eating roadkill. Its knees were bent "like a human would do"; elbows were up and it held the food in its hands/paws. She did not actually describe seeing it walk on two legs.
Scott Bray	~1989	Reported a very large dog/wolf-like animal. Later accounts describe it principally as quadrupedal. The available contemporary 1991 article does not give a detailed locomotion account for his sighting.
Russell Gest / Heather Bowey group	~1990	This is particularly interesting. Heather and the other children initially thought they were looking at a large dog. It then stood up, and subsequently ran toward them "kind of like a dog," with bigger leaps. Thus this account explicitly contains both four-legged and upright behavior.
Mike Etten	~1990	Reported seeing a large animal sitting on its haunches, holding roadkill. This is not necessarily evidence of habitual bipedalism; the posture could be interpreted as a quadruped sitting upright.
Doris Gipson (Pat in the original article)	Oct. 31, 1991	Saw the creature running toward her after she got out of her car. She specifically qualified her interpretation: "you could suggest that it was on two legs," because she could see its chest so clearly. Thus probably bipedal, but she herself expressed some uncertainty.
Other reports in Jon Fredrickson's "Werewolf" file	pre-Dec. 1991	At least one report involved a hairy, pointed-eared creature chasing a deer on two legs. Another involved a fast "man-like" creature. These were already in the Humane Officer's files before Godfrey's article.
Robert Bushman and wife	reported as 1991 in later chronologies	Four-legged animal, described as running/chasing a deer. This is consistent with the quadrupedal strand of the reports.

The Endrizzi report is especially revealing

This is the famous image that essentially became the visual prototype of the Beast of Bray Road.

Endrizzi did not see a seven-foot humanoid walking down the road.

She saw something kneeling beside the road, with its back toward her, eating something. Its elbows were raised and its claws/forepaws were turned outward. When she drove past, it turned its head toward her but didn't flee. She estimated it at about 5'7" and 150 lb.

Godfrey's original sketch consequently depicted a kneeling canine humanoid, rather than a conventional upright Dogman.

That is an important distinction.

And the children give us perhaps the clearest "shapeshifting" locomotion

The Heather Bowey account is particularly interesting because the creature apparently looked like a large dog while on four legs, then stood up, and later ran back toward the house in a dog-like manner.

Godfrey's 1991 article records Bowey saying:

"When it stood up, they looked bigger than a dog's or coyote's..."

And then:

"I looked back and saw it running toward us kind of like a dog would run but with bigger leaps."

So this isn't merely a later embellishment that somebody "couldn't tell whether it had two or four legs." The original 1991 reporting already contains an animal that alternates between the two modes of locomotion.

Gipson is somewhat different

Doris Gipson's Halloween 1991 encounter is probably the strongest early apparently bipedal report.

She saw the creature charging her after she had gotten out of her car. She could see its large, hairy chest and described its movement as extremely powerful. But importantly, she didn't say categorically, "It was running on two legs."

She said that one could suggest that it was on two legs because she could see its chest so clearly.

That's a useful piece of evidential caution that often disappears in later retellings, where the account becomes simply:

"Doris saw a seven-foot Dogman running upright."

The original account is more qualified.

So your original impression was correct

Looking specifically at the early evidence, I'd characterize the phenomenon this way:

1989–91 Bray Road reports were not consistently of a permanently bipedal humanoid.

Instead, there were several morphological/locomotive patterns:

quadruped → large wolf/dog-like animal

crouching/kneeling → Endrizzi

sitting on haunches → Etten

stands upright → Bowey group

moves on four legs, then stands → Bowey group

apparently runs upright → Gipson

explicitly runs on two legs → one of the reports in Fredrickson's file

That is considerably more interesting than the later standardized "Dogman" description.

One further wrinkle: pre-1991 reports

Godfrey herself later said that when her December 1991 article appeared, people came forward with additional accounts and told her that some sightings had occurred as much as ten years earlier. She also mentions a possibly related 1936 incident in Jefferson County, roughly 40 miles away.

So there really are two separate questions:

1. Was the Beast of Bray Road originally reported as a biped?
   Yes, unequivocally.
2. Was it originally reported exclusively as a bipedal Dogman?
   No. The earliest material contains a mixture of quadrupedal, crouching, sitting, transitional and apparently bipedal behavior.

And I think this is relevant to our previous discussion about the pre-1987 Dogman reports. The Bray Road material doesn't look like a simple case of people copying a pre-existing "Dogman = seven-foot wolf-man" template. The earliest witnesses were actually describing something considerably more ambiguous: a strange, unusually large canid that could apparently behave like an ordinary quadruped but sometimes adopted a remarkably human-like posture.

That makes the locomotion itself one of the most intriguing features of the case..