Lore: The Horror of Southeast Wisconsin
As I said in the beginning, my Spooktacular isn’t going to be all film. Today I’m talking about the podcast Lore, specifically Episode 53: Trees and Shadows, but I’ll give the series a quick plug as well.
Lore just released its 209th episode. I used to listen to it all the time, but lost interest when the pandemic greatly reduced my commuting time. I’d still recommend checking it out though as another way to consume horror. They cover all sorts of legends and ghost stories and go into their origins and validity. It’s not a freewheeling discussion like you’d find with amateur podcasts. It’s very tightly produced with an original score and well-written scripts. Host Aaron Mahnke has a specific cadence and tone (which might not be for everyone), but, to me, it almost sounds like someone telling a ghost story. Amazon tried to adapt the audio series into a show and, from the couple episodes I caught, it sucked. So, probably steer clear of that.
For this, I wanted to focus on the aforementioned episode because of its ties to home and a legend I grew up hearing about, The Beast of Bray Road. The Beast is reported to be a giant wolf-like creature inhabiting a particular stretch of road in Elkhorn, Wisconsin — about 20 miles from where I grew up. Some people refer to it as the Wisconsin Werewolf, but, as Lore gets into, the sightings aren’t restricted to the full moon (hence my getting to this now instead of during Werewolf Week of the Spooktacular — coming October 16). The sightings over the years are your typical stuff: large furry beasts walking on their hind legs, long scratch marks left on cars, a variety of livestock and small animal mutilations. One girl was supposedly chased up a tree by the Beast. According to the podcast, many people who reported sightings were willing to take polygraphs and passed (for whatever that is worth).
Do I believe in the Beast? No, but it’s fun to have a local legend like that. The people of Elkhorn certainly embraced it and I can imagine it’s part of why sightings continued. People are just talking shit because there isn’t much else to do, or, perhaps they do really believe it and this is a case of mass hysteria.
Even one county over, its legend was well-known. In high school, I followed in the footsteps of many other bored teens and packed into a crowded car to drive down to Bray Road one chilly night. We didn’t see anything, but you probably couldn’t have gotten me to go walking around in the woods and fields.
And so I arrive at the point: driving through rural areas at night is creepy as hell. I’m sure this isn’t restricted to southeastern Wisconsin, but that’s the frame of reference that I have. As a teen coming home late at night on long stretches of country road, my imagination often ran wild about what was lurking in the dark bits of forest to either side of me. Open stretches of field weren’t much better as shadows and fog played tricks with the light of the moon. During some of these drives my paranoia was heightened…for unknown reasons…and I’d arrive at home with relief, but not before darting through the front door, never daring to look behind me.
These night drives weren’t the only occasions where my imagination got the better of me. My childhood home was on a beautiful few acres of land, but surrounded on one side by untamed woods. If I was ever out there alone, the quietness would sometimes be too much. When I did yardwork, I would often remove my headphones from an ear to better listen to anything creeping up on me. At night, we’d hear the coyotes playing and fighting and singing their chilling song and I’d sometimes dream of monsters emerging from those woods to maul me. So, it’s not like I had no reason to be vigilant, but I was probably never at any risk of real danger. Even then, I knew this, but that didn’t shake the feeling that I was sometimes being watched. So, I empathize with the citizens of Elkhorn and the people who saw something unnatural haunting Bray Road.
Is is scary? Eh. I guess we’re talking about two things here: the episode of Lore and the legend of the Beast itself. As I mentioned, Lore has a specific style to it, and that style is effectively creepy some of the time. It’s not going to seriously freak you out or anything, but it’s sufficiently spooky. The Beast of Bray Road and accounts of its sighting? Nobody is seriously harmed in these stories — though that’s not to say the fields of Elkhorn aren’t littered with the chewed bones of unloved vagrants — but each account seems to suggest some element of danger. The Beast probably isn’t real, but the conditions that produce such a creature in our imaginations are. BEWARE!
