a-WOO, Werewolves of London!
Or, rather, of Cannock Chase:
On April 26, 2007, the Stafford Post newspaper (which covers the area in question) stated the following: “A rash of sightings of a ‘werewolf’ type creature prowling around the outskirts of Stafford have prompted a respected Midlands paranormal group to investigate. West Midlands Ghost Club says they have been contacted by a number of shocked residents who saw what they claimed to be a `hairy wolf-type creature’ walking on its hind legs around the German War Cemetery, just off Camp Road, in between Stafford and Cannock. Several of them claim the creature sprang up on its hind legs and ran into the nearby bushes when it was spotted.”
“Nick Duffy, of West Midlands Ghost Club, said the stories of werewolf sightings in Chase area were something that he had encountered before. He said: ‘The first person to contact us was a postman, who told us he had seen what he thought was a werewolf on the German War Cemetery site. He said he was over there on a motorbike and saw what he believed was a large dog. When he got closer, the creature got on his hind legs and ran away.’”
Yikes! This brings to mind a few things. The first, and most probably the most obvious, is the Skinwalker Ranch wolf:
On the day the Gormans moved their furnishings onto the property, they had their first foreshadowing of the events that would follow. They spotted an extremely large wolf out in the pasture. The wolf cautiously made its way across the field, and, to the surprise of everyone, sidled up to the family, acting like it was a familiar pet. It had rained that day, and the family remembers the wolf smelled like a wet dog as they were petting it.After a few minutes, the wolf strolled over to the corral and grabbed a calf by its snout, attempting to pull it through the corral bars. Gorman and his father began beating on the wolf’s back with sticks but it wouldn’t release the calf. Gorman grabbed a .357 Magnum from his truck and shot the wolf at point-blank range. The slug had no noticeable effect.
Gorman pumped another bullet into the wolf, which then let go of the calf but stood looking at the family as if nothing had happened. Gorman shot it two more times with the powerful handgun. The big animal backed off a bit, but showed no signs of distress, not even any blood.
The mystified rancher retrieved a hunting rifle and shot the wolf again, once more at close range. Gorman is not only an experienced marksman but a big-game hunter of considerable repute. Five slugs should have been enough to bring down an elk, let alone a wolf. The fifth shot caused a chunk of hair and flesh to fly off the wolf, but it still didn’t seem fazed. After a sixth shot, the wolf casually trotted across the field into a muddy thicket. Gorman and his father tracked the beast for about a mile, following its pawprints through the mud, but the tracks suddenly ended, as if the wolf had simply vanished into thin air.
Returning to the corral area, Gorman examined the chunk of wolf flesh and says it looked and smelled like rotten meat. He made inquiries among his neighbors, but no one seemed to know anything about any tame, over-sized wolves in the area. A few weeks later, Mrs. Gorman encountered a wolf that was so large, its back was parallel with the top of her window as it stood beside her car. The wolf was accompanied by a dog-like animal that she couldn’t identify.
In the American South, of course, these weird creatures are as common as Orcas in Puget Sound. On fantastic planet, we coined the term “Fort Dogs” to refer to the buggers, and collected a good number of accounts. Here are some highlights:
January, 2006:
This weekend, two brothers were out hunting squirrels when they were surprised by a very similar animal. The brothers shot it and killed it. It has leathery skin, long teeth, and hind legs longer than its front legs. One of the brothers, Kolby Russell, said this isn’t his first run in with the creature. “I had chased it a couple times earlier, about a month ago, and my friends didn’t believe me, I finally showed them and they did.” So is it just a mangy dog?
“I’ve seen mange before and he has a body kind of built like a coyote, but he’s real skinny”, says the other brother, Coty Russell.
March 8, 2005:
“Looks like a hyena or a greyhound, a messed up dog, ohh a horrible dog,” says TJC Student Lyndon Gilford.
A man in Harrison County snapped this picture a few days ago. We showed it to you on a recent news cast and hundreds of you logged online to tell us what you thought it was. Answers varied, everything from a Peruvian hairless dog, to a naked fox, to an Australian dingo. Today, we got a similar reaction when we showed passersby the picture.
“I would say a cross between a jackal and a grey hound,” said one woman.
“An ugly animal, I don’t know a horse,” says another man.
“It looks kind of messed up,” said yet another.
June, 2004:
First of all, this is a real newspaper, not a grocery-store tabloid.
So, the story you’re about to read is true.
It starts with Bill and Gayle Kurdian throwing out dried corn for the wildlife in their neck of the woods in eastern Randolph County, and an odd-looking creature taking them up on their hospitality early last winter.
“What in the world?” Bill Kurdian asked himself when he saw the animal for the first time.
About the size of a fox, but with short brown hair and a long cat-like tail, it looked more like an animal in a National Geographic spread out of Africa than any critter native to the woods of central North Carolina.
And, just for fun, here’s another account from England with an artist’s depiction that brings to mind the giant rabbit from Donnie Darko:
Dubbed The Beast of Green Drive, the mysterious creature has been spotted roaming in thick woodland at a beauty spot.
About as tall as a collie dog but with huge ears, a large mouth and a lolloping gait, the peculiar animal has caused a frenzy of chatter in the normally sedate Lytham St Anne’s, Lancashire.
The creature, according to witnesses, is seen mainly in the largely wooded area of Green Drive, where there is plenty of brush and scrub to conceal a large animal.
Mysterious canids about!
The most intriguing synaptic connection my brain makes concerning this latest Mystery Canid comes from this next article quoted in the original post:
The newspapers elaborated further: “The strangest rumour has come from a senior local resident who believes the mysterious intruders to be subterranean,” he told us. “The creatures have made their way to the surface via old earthworks to hunt, for example, local deer.”
And, on the surface, the far-fetched tale could be easily dismissed. However, the Post’s source added: “It’s a fact that there has been significant mining activity under Cannock Chase for centuries. And it’s a fact there is a high rate of domestic pet disappearance in the area - especially dogs off the lead…just ask anyone who walks their dog near the German War Cemetery…”
Strange canid creatures who dwell underneath cemetaries and walk on two legs or four may be familiar to fans of H.P. Lovecraft, as this description is identical to Lovecraft’s “ghoul.” Vide especially the short story Pickman’s Model:
The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground- for Pickman’s morbid art was pre-eminently one of demoniac portraiture. These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness. Ugh! I can see them now! Their occupations - well, don’t ask me to be too precise. They were usually feeding- I won’t say on what. They were sometimes shown in groups in cemeteries or underground passages, and often appeared to be in battle over their prey- or rather, their treasure-trove. And what damnable expressiveness Pickman sometimes gave the sightless faces of this charnel booty! Occasionally the things were shown leaping through open windows at night, or squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying at their throats. One canvas showed a ring of them baying about a hanged witch on Gallows Hill, whose dead face held a close kinship to theirs.
But don’t get the idea that it was all this hideous business of theme and setting which struck me faint. I’m not a three-year-old kid, and I’d seen much like this before. It was the faces, Eliot, those accursed faces, that leered and slavered out of the canvas with the very breath of life! By God, man, I verily believe they were alive! That nauseous wizard had waked the fires of hell in pigment, and his brush had been a nightmare-spawning wand. Give me that decanter, Eliot!
There was one thing called ‘The Lesson’- Heaven pity me, that I ever saw it! Listen- can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose- you know the old myth about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was showing what happens to those stolen babes- how they grow up- and then I began to see a hideous relationship in the faces of the human and non-human figures. He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly non-human and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!
Regular readers of Rigorous Intuition are probably getting the willies about this one, what with the changeling reference which ties together werewolves, ghouls, “fairie” and UFO lore, etc. so well. One wonders whether Lovecraft somehow “dreamt” the weird parallel reality holes of the all-too-real Skinwalker Ranch and its ilk, using them in his fiction years before the fact. The ghouls are also described in further detail in “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” (my personal fave), and it’s worth noting that they’re never really portrayed as “evil” in Lovecraft’s works, just as denizens of a different reality-structure with different mores and norms than the rest of us.
So we’ve made the connection– partly “fictional,” of course– between werewolves, UFOs, abduction accounts, etc. And we didn’t even begin to get into the Black Dog phenomenon, which has plagued lonesome travellers in Europe and South America. Of especial interest in this post is a reference to winged dogs. In H.P. Lovecraft’s tale “The Hound,” the protagonists are hunted down by a terrifying winged hound after stealing a copy of the Necronomicon (the first mention of that tome in any of HPL’s work). Note also the following:
And ten years ago or more, I listened intently to a chap named Nigel Lea relate details to me of his own encounter with such a beast while driving through Britain’s sprawling Cannock Chase forest (which is only a stone’s throw from where I used to live in the old country) one night in the early 1970s. In Lea’s case the dog had literally manifested in the middle of the road directly after a small, aerial blue ball of light had slammed into the tarmac - amid a torrent of sparks - a couple of hundred yards ahead of his car.
Cannock Chase forest is, of course, the location of the werewolf sightings that initiated this long and rambling post.
There’s no real “point” to making these connections, of course, except that once again we’re struck by just how homogenous “paranormal” events are when you scratch beneath the surface. We’ve mentioned before, on fantastic planet, that UFOs, cryptids, spooks, abductions, fairie tales, and even appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) all share similar characteristics. It’s our humble opinion that this is because on a very deep level they are indeed the same event, an inbreaking into our world of
There’s something about the half-human, half-animal that really rings an instinctive bell in the human psyche. When that animal is a canid of some kind, be it wolf or dog, it’s a double betrayal. This is, after all, the most singular of domesticated animals, the creature that has shared home and hearth with humankind for about 100,000 years. The idea that
I’ve had my own experience with some kind of mysterious creature in the woods. Back in North Florida, when I was but a young lad of high school age, some friends and I were camping one summer night back on some logging roads. During a late-night game of capture the flag, two friends and I watched an overly large figure skulk towards us about 50 feet away. It was definitely human-ish– not a bear. It took us a moment to realize that it was far too tall to be someone else from our group, and then the figure silently but swiftly crouched onto all fours and loped into the woods. Upon further investigation the next day, we found rather distinct animal tracks in the ground cover of the woods where the thing entered, which we followed to a muddy ditch, in which were fairly clear human footprints. Alas, for a camera.
These Florida woods were indeed a kind of “Skinwalker Woods” of their own. Over the next month, we experienced a plethora of weirdness– everything from strange lights, to moving trees, to nasty smells, to the sound of windchimes in the middle of a forest. We even had a case of possible possession. Of course, this is neither here nor there, except as another case study in our absolute inability to categorize every strange phenomenon. Was my encounter, for instance, with a cryptid? How would that explain the weird lights? Perhaps a spook of some kind? Then what about the odd animal tracks?
The evidence, to me, speaks volumes even in its obscurity. If we want to begin understanding paranormal phenomena, be they run-of-the-mill flying saucers or EVP or BVM sightings or visits from the Fouke Monster, we have to take them as a whole instead of as isolated incidents. When we can draw lines between werewolf sightings in British cemetaries, the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, black dogs, fort dogs and UFOs, we need to spend more time on the lines we’ve drawn and less time on the items they connect.
So, if you enjoyed this post, then hang onto your hats– there’s more to come, and we’re back in action!
