Weird Things Culture Researcher Matt Finaly takes a weekly look into the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

photo credit: tvol

Werewolves and Wisconsin have shared an epic, decades-long romance that’s spanned forests, farmland and highways. The bipedal lupine beasts have been sighted horking down road kill and lumbering at locals throughout the southern region of the state for over 70 years. It all started one night in 1936 when a lone man driving down a dark stretch of US 18, just east of Jefferson City, saw a strange, hairy creature that stood at least six feet high and had a canine muzzle and strange three-fingered hands.

The beast was digging up one of the many Native American burial mounds that dapple Wisconsin’s countryside. The witness, a local named Mark Schackelman, drove on, but returned the next night to see if he could find evidence of the creature. Schackelman reports walking over to the mound, only to find the man-wolf standing there, stinking of decaying meat and growling a strange, three-syllable word that sounded like “Gadara.” The witness goes on to report that, understanding the creature to be some agent of evil, he began praying and slowly backing away until he reached his car and was able to escape.

In the ensuing years, more and more reports of werewolf encounters began circulating the state, culminating in the 1990s, when, with dozens of sightings and an investigative book penned by a local journalist, the so-called Bbecame a fixture of Wisconsin’s popular urban lore. Looking back at the sighting that started it all, one has to wonder what truths can be excavated from Mark Schackelman’s bizarre report of his initial visual confrontation, his puzzling late-night return to the site and the talkative monster that he subsequently found there. A Federal program dedicated to the mass poisoning of wolves, religious fervor and wild talk of cannibalized human remains buried deep beneath an ancient city are just the tip of this hairy, snarling, depression-era iceberg.

Wisconsin may be lousy with wolfmen, but during most of the 20th century, the state was almost entirely bereft of wolves. Through the mid 1800s, the animals had flourished throughout the northern United States. Once cattlemen and livestock herders began moving into the Midwest and outlying western regions, however, the beef-coveting predators came to be regarded as little more than mammalian locusts, and organized extermination campaigns were initiated. In 1865, the State of Wisconsin began offering a bounty for executed wolves, and in 1915, the federal government began its own national mass poisoning program. Wisconsin’s expanses of green pastures and sprawling wilderness became a perilous landscape of steel traps, baited trip lines rigged to shotgun triggers and great stinking slabs of raw beef, marinated in cyanide and placed upwind of known hunting grounds. By 1936, any wolf encounter, especially one as far South and as close to a large town as the supposed werewolf sighting reported by Mark Schakelton, would have been rare and shocking, both because of the animals’ scarcity and in light of the spurious media-spun reputation of the creatures as ferocious, blood-thirsty enemies of man.

(Note that the Wisconsin wolf population boom that finally occurred in the 1980s and ‘90s, thanks to conservationists and nature-conscious legislators, coincided exactly with the sudden increase in werewolf sightings throughout the state.)

If there’s one biographical factor that must be considered in accurately reshaping the lens through which Mark Schackelton viewed this terrifying beastie, it’s the witness’ devout Christianity, which Mark himself mentioned in his account, and which was later confirmed by his son, who was interviewed about his father’s experience more than a decade later for a newspaper article about Wisconsin werewolves. “Gadara,” the name of the city in which Jesus cast thousands of demons out of a single man and into a herd of swine, is the word that Schackleton heard rasped out into the night air on the hot, feral breath of some hulking anonymous nocturne.

Clearly, Schackleton not only had such (at least subconscious) familiarity with the New Testament as to know the proper names of locations associated with Jesus’ miraculous acts, but also some larger, penetrating fear that lead him to hear the name of that place – a place of demons – sounded out by a snarl in the darkness. The bible is rife with passages that use the wolf as an analog for all things sly, deceptive and traitorous, portraying the carnivore as a savage fiend that feeds on the weak and ignorant; a person with a deep knowledge of, and respect for, scripture might, in coming face to face with a wolf or other wild canine, feel a spiritual dread that reaches even deeper than the inevitable primal pangs of the fight/flight dilemma. But if man of faith turned irrational, demon-haunted coward seems a bit too pat, consider the larger backdrop of Southern Wisconsin, a place with myriad legends of things prone to bumping long and loud in the night.

After all, amidst the fevered prayer and talking animals, it’s easy to forget the third major player in Schackleton’s account: a Native American burial mound. Jefferson, Wisconsin, is situated just to the North of the area where, sometime around 800 BC, the Woodland people began building giant effigy mounds in the shape of various animals (including wolf-like water spirits), and just south of the ancient city of Aztalan, which was built circa 900 AD by a large group of mound-building Middle Mississippians who migrated from farther south. Since archeological digs began in 1919, Aztalan has provided Wisconsin folk legend with some of its most enduring tales. Though scientists were mainly concerned with studying the mound architecture, pottery remnants and trading materials found at the site, unsubstantiated rumors of fragmented human bones, split for easy marrow consumption and riddled with teeth marks, quickly began spreading among the area’s citizenry.

Even before the archeologists arrived, eerie whisperings about Aztalan’s founders began circulating when, in 1900, people reported seeing giant underwater pyramids at the bottom of Rock Lake, just three miles from the borders of the ancient city. The existence of the mysterious stone piles wasn’t confirmed until an official diving expedition was made in 1937, during a dry summer when the water level was at a record low. Once they were investigated, it became clear that, at the time the structures were built, the lake was either non-existent or in the earliest stages of formation. At the time of Schackleton’s encounter, however, the tales of local cannibalism were accompanied by stories of the odd sub-surface structures and the strange, unnatural secrets that no doubt lay drowned and buried, entombed in ancient stone at the bottom of Rock Lake.

The notion that the very essence of the region – the amniotic fluid upon which Wisconsin’s fetal history fed – was formed out of flesh eating, ritual sacrifice and inhuman constructions led to further gossip and campfire stories, until people began saying that all of Aztalan was cloaked in some invisible pall that found visitors to the area afflicted with goosebumps, raised neck hair, irrational paranoia and a pervasive sense of inexplicable dread. Morris Pratt even chose Whitewater, Wisconsin, a town just 30 miles south of Aztalan that was rumored to house a sizeable coven of witches, as the site of the Morris Pratt Institute (locally knows as the spook temple), a school of spiritualism that trained mediums and taught the art of the séance (interestingly, the school had just re-opened in 1935 after a few dormant years due to the depression). As this sensationalist folklore dispersed, it became common knowledge that the wind on the long dark roads and the silent air around the looming mounds was tainted with treachery and magnetic with ghosts.

In the summer of 1936, a record heat wave plopped its scorched, muggy weight down onto North America. In Southern Wisconsin, a lone man left his car and walked cautiously out toward a burial mound that sloped high and dark against the blanched, milky light of the moon. Though it’s uncertain what he saw their, hunched and digging through the hot, heavy dirt, something in the scene before him coaxed the word “Gadara” out of his mind and appended it to the whispered growl of the animal. And in the quiet presence of dark specters in the still breeze, amidst the cold rattle of molar-scarred bones vibrating up through his feet and just out of earshot of the low, ebbing hum of ancient magic vibrating out from below the still surface of Rock Lake, the man prayed low to himself, until he cut through the oppressive exhalations of the night with the loud, coughing roar of his car engine and the comforting certainty of headlights. And whether the lone animal digging around the layers of ancient clay found stone tools and pottery shards or a poison-drenched government flank steak, we’ll never know.

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