Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town. Wednesday we learned how one man created his own lake monster sham.

Maybe it’s because we’re at a century’s distance with only selective research sources left to go by, but I feel like there’s respectable, genteel nobility behind both the Hodag hoax and the Lake George Monster prank. I say this in light of the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco, which mirrored modern film and record promotion campaigns far more than it did the homegrown ingenuity of yesteryear’s cryptid shenanigans. At the same token, it’s difficult, in the case of the Sasquatch carcass thimblerig, to figure out exactly where the wild dream logic and delightful homespun madness ended and where the frustrating dishonesty and grubby-handed cash pawing began.

It’s easy to point fingers at Carmine Thomas Biscardi, the Las Vegas promoter and notorious Bigfoot hoaxer, who teamed up with the two Georgia pranksters after they had already set their small-scale practical joke in motion… easy because he’s obviously guilty, and by far the least sympathetic party involved. In 2005, Biscardi went on Coast to Coast AM to brag about a live Bigfoot specimen that everybody could watch and enjoy via live webcam feed… for a subscription fee of $14. The surprise here isn’t that there wasn’t actually a captive Sasquatch pacing circles in front of the camera lens, but rather that there was nothing pacing anything anywhere; Biscardi didn’t even try to fake a spectacle. After announcing that there was never a live specimen and claiming that he, too, had been ripped off by the people in possession of the non-existent Bigfoot, Biscardi took the webcam money and ran. (To his dubious credit, he did refund all post-prank-revelation subscription orders.) The refusal to present even the drunkest of vagrants in the nattiest of Gorilla Grodd costumes clearly crosses the line between hoax and scam.

So after Biscardi jumped on the bandwagon-cum-Yeti-hearse of the Georgian sheriff’s deputy and his used car salesman buddy, it was really tempting to cite him as the reason that the hoax felt less like a harmless, misguided jape than a carefully orchestrated deception. After all, Biscardi’s the one who called down the media frenzy, and who organized the ridiculous live press conference, and who, at the outset, before pictures of the so-called corpse were released on the Internet, charged folks $2 a pop for cadaver photos. On the other hand, Biscardi didn’t start the hoax. He didn’t author the boys’ tale of hiking through the woods and finding the 7’ 7” fur-covered body amid a gathering of three similar living creatures. He even joined up after the first YouTube video was filmed. Biscardi is just a savvy, opportunistic mooch, the crooked conductor of a runaway train built by Deputy Matthew Whiton and Rick Dyer.

Get the rest of the story AFTER THE JUMP…

Dyer and Whiton are harder to pin down. It takes very specific sort of f***-all enthusiasm to dash out into the world claiming to have found the bloating corpse of a monster. Still, a century before, Eugene Shepard ran into Rhinelander, Wisconsin with not only the faked corpse of a monster, but also an epic tale detailing how he and a lumberjack posse had killed the beast with dynamite. In both cases a false cadaver was created, and advertised as the genuine artifact. I haven’t found anything to indicate that Shepard charged anyone to take a look-see at the immolated Hodag, but neither is it clear what sort of monetary designs Dyer and Whiton did or didn’t have before Biscardi joined up (though the ease with which the Vegas promoter convinced them that their bizarre animal was, in actuality, a cash cow doesn’t speak well of their intentions). “But,” you point out, “Shepard did charge people a dime to see the supposed live Hodag at the County Fair.” And here, again, we are walking the high wire between hoax and scam.

Even disregarding the fact that’s Shepard’s Hodag wasn’t presented in a cultural vacuum – patrons were almost certainly familiar with sideshows and similar humbugs that offered creative, entertaining, but generally obvious, deceptions for a minimal fee – the lurching automaton voiced by Shepard’s son and accompanied by Shepard’s own manic, silver-tongued narration provided enough of a spectacle to justify the minimal price of admission. And it’s hard to tell whether or not Dyer and Whiton possess whatever unnamable compulsion drives people to rig up robot monsters or add a set of blue ears to a painted, pulley-rigged stick. They certainly aren’t like Biscardi, who uses big talk and empty promises to pocket fat stacks of money for nothing. At the same time, they seemed to lack the joyfulness and enthusiasm that both Shepard and Watrous felt for their respective creations. Despite their commitment to creating an ad hoc monster body, they seemed more obsessed with the publicity and cultural caché than with the actual source of attention – Bigfoot remains. Seriously low rent Bigfoot remains.
And for me, that was what ultimately made the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco seem so disingenuous. Initially, the whole business had me really excited – not because I believed the body was real, but because I wanted to see how far they would take it. How much effort they would put into the spectacle. Whether or not, like Shepard and Watrous, they would show us something that, while false according to its supposed identity, was real in its creativity and craftsmanship. I was hoping for a fully autopsy-ready body, with layers of correctly placed viscera, a stomach rife with clues pointing to the identity of its last meal, and maybe even a couple ridiculous, but no less entertaining, physiological revelations (Bigfoot has two hearts! Bigfoot has an artificial hip, indicating that Sasquatches have surprisingly advanced medical capabilities!) So when word came out that it was just an ape suit stuffed with hotdog ingredients, I was more than a little chagrined.

I don’t know where this leaves us. It’s seems reductive to blame Dyer and Whiton’s misguided bottom-shelf prankery on new media and a reality show culture that promise fame to the commoner and increasingly value the frenzied swapping of digital information over a tangible engagement with a physical product, though I’m sure once Biscardi was involved he convinced the boys that, these days, a ridiculously low investment often yields high temporary returns. After all, the hoax was never meant to go undetected forever… just long enough for the three yeti coroners to fill their coffers through the exploitation of Bigfoot enthusiasts and cryptid research groups. Then again, in this day and age, even a well-intentioned prankster with boundless integrity would be remiss to entirely forego a Web presence in favor of some falsely idealized “old fashioned” route.

No, I think the problem with all of this – the thing that made Dyer and Whiton’s Bigfoot prank feel dire and witless – was the pranksters seeming lack of fun. Imagine a grinning Eugene Shepard storming out of the woods with his carbonized Hodag, or a giggling Harry Watrous hiding in some shrubs, waiting to loose his hippogriff upon a hapless boater. These locally performed stunts were just that – performed, with the jerry-rigged monsters taking center stage as their creators MC’d or crouched behind an azalea bush. A snarling Hodag. A blue-eared hippogriff. A hypothetical surgically enhanced dual-hearted Bigfoot. These pranks are attractive because they seek to knit our dreams and nightmares from the mundane yarn of the everyday – to bring us as close as we’ll ever come to actual monsters. What the Dyer and Whiton did was mug for the camera, all the while taunting us with a shi**y cat’s cradle strung between 10 middle fingers.

It’s happening again… again. Give it up for Bloody Mary.

You have already been acquainted with the drill: I look up a popular American cryptid/folktale (e.g., Bloody Mary) on three foreign language Wikipedia pages and summarize the results (including the requisite [sic]-implied Google Translate nuggets).

You try to match each of the three versions to the Wikipedia site on which you believe it have originated.

If you want to. Otherwise, proceed straight to the answers. There’s no reward for right answers, creative problem solving techniques or subtle attempts at blackmail. And if there were, it would be something plagued by poorly welded corner seams and filled with molten lava, and nobody would want it.

If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the general ghost-in-the-mirror slumber party exploits of Bloody Mary, read this English-language Wikipedia article

As David Bowie once crooned, “Let’s dance!”:

Your Language Choices:
a.) Italian
b.) Japanese
c.) German

Bloody Mary:

1. This language’s Bloody Mary entry is little more than a single-paragraph blurb that identifies the ritual as a courage test, mentions the optional use of candles and explains that the ghost is often summoned via the “rearview mirror of a car where there was associated in his lifetime, in which case at least one person has walked up it turned out to talk with her, but once.” The related links, however, guide readers to a page about a different legend – the legend of “Anne toilet.” According to the story, Anne was a young woman who was killed in the bathroom of her school and subsequently began haunting other school bathrooms. Supposedly, “in a certain school toilets should not everyone in a certain way and call Anne [ reply comes back from the shot. ‘ Wearing a red skirt , the most famous figure of the girl bobbed hair.”

2. On this language’s Wikipedia, the legend behind the familiar sleepover game goes thusly: there was a girl of 14 who died in an unspecified, but almost certainly tragic, accident. Her mother went so insane in the grief-coping center of her membrane that she “attacked on his arm a wire connected to a bell outside the coffin and the ground.” Mary’s mother swore she could hear the bell jingling, over and over again, resounding in her skull like some horrific parody of Christmas. Finally, she persuaded her already devestated husband to dig up their daughter’s coffin. “As soon as it was opened in horror as their parents saw that Mary had tried to open the coffin and had pulled all the nails against the wall to exit. But now Mary had died and the parents went mad with grief that he killed their daughter.” The page goes on to explain that in America, Bloody Mary is usually described as a girl killed in a car accident or “a girl buried alive by his own beliefs are so many parents.”

3. This language’s Wikipedia site doesn’t even have a page for Bloody Mary, but instead, after automatically sending users to a page about the cocktail, redirects folklore researchers to a catch-all page about Bogey figures throughout the world. Aside from an easily missed nod to Bloody M., the page features descriptions of Hakemann, “A hybrid of man and fish. Attracts swimmers children drown in water with a hook to it and be eaten by him,“ Schneider with the Shear, “which cuts the disobedient child,“ and Stranger, “a bright green pants and a black coat in appearance.“

Answers:

Description 1.) was found on b.), the Japanese Wikipedia
Description 2.) was found on a.), the Italian Wikipedia
Description 3.) was, therefore, found on c.), the German Wikipedia

Thanks for playing. Let’s do this again some time! I think I almost learned something.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town.

The Lake George Monster never saved a town. It didn’t herald a tourism boom or lure swarms of industrialists to the shores of Hague Bay. It doesn’t funky chicken around the sidelines of any public school basketball courts. And Lake George isn’t known as “Home of the Lake George Monster,” but rather as “Gateway to the Adirondacks.” Credit where credit is due, though, the Lake George Monster is probably the most extreme point (short of boat murder) to which a friendly fishing contest has ever escalated.
In 1904, Harry Watrous, a professional painter, made a bet with his friend, Colonel William Mann, the editor of an infamous gossip rag, over who could reel in a larger trout. And so it began. The men fished on the lake, often in sight of each other, each one determined to fish better, harder, faster than the other. In retrospect, that Mann decided to cheat shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

The paper the Colonel edited, “Town Topics,” once a respectable arts and leisure magazine, had, under Mann, become an inky mire of high society gossip and scandal-mongering. Mann’s ploy to avoid libel charges? Print standard, sometimes even complimentary, articles about known New York society members on the front of a page, then, on the flip side, directly lined up with the corresponding fluff pieces, run scandalous news about the same individuals, sans identification. Anyone who knew how to read the paper – and anyone who was anyone did – could easily match the public figures to the defaming rumors. “Town Topics,” of course, stayed in business by collecting bribes from guilty parties who wished to keep their faux pas private. Still, when Watrous finally identified the hulking monster of a trout that Mann casually held up from inside his own fishing craft, and later, in a ridiculous display of bravado, exhibited in his house, as a sculpted and painted hunk of wood, he swore revenge.

Like the Rhinelander Hodag, the Lake George Monster began life as a chunk of wood (specifically, a cedar log). Using bits of glass, metal and wood, Watrous affixed eyes, ears and a toothy snout to the 10-foot-long log, which he then painted in alternating yellow and black stripes. Also, white teeth, red mouth, red nostrils, and blue (yes, blue) ears. (Later, Watrous would repeatedly refer to his creation as a “Hippogriff”- the mythical offspring of a griffin and a mare, and noble companion to the Boy Who Lived – but I’m not seeing it.) He rowed out to an area of the lake frequented by his friend and nemesis, and rigged up the creature to a simple pulley system – a 100-foot-rope anchored to a rock on the shore.

Then he waited.

MUCH MORE… AFTER THE JUMP

Mann, who floated by sometime later, was accompanied by several guests, including one Mr. Davies and one Mrs. Bates. Watrous loosed his Hippogriff. I’ll let the monster’s creator describe the ensuing scene as he related it years later to the New York “Evening Sun”:
“Mr. Davies, who had a rather high pitched voice, uttered a scream that must have been heard as far away as Burlington, Vt. Mrs. Bates, a very intrepid lady, of Milesian extraction, stood on a seat in the boat and beat the water with her parasol, shouting indistinguishable sentences in her native tongue. Col. Mann shouted, ‘Good God, what is it?’ through his whiskers and kept repeating his query as long as the boat was in sight.”
Soon, rumors of the Lake George Monster began spreading throughout the town. Needless to say, Watrous was overjoyed. Ecstatic. So entirely freaking jazzed that he proceeded to systematically move his wood beast around the lake, setting it up near dock- and shore-side attractions, including the Lake View Restaurant and the Island Harbour House hotel, so that he could confound and terrify locals and tourists alike. It’s not known exactly how long Watrous kept up this game, but season after season, talk of a strange monster trolling the waters of Hague Bay persisted. While Eugene Shepard’s outsized promotion of his captive Rhinelander Hodag attracted scads of curious out-of-towners, Watrous’ unrestrained hippogriff had little effect on the Lake George Area (though some hotel owners supposedly feared that tales of a ferocious, unpredictable lake beast might actually hurt the tourist industry), and soon, the inventor of the world’s first functioning blue-eared DIY hippogriff packed away his hobby and moved on with his life.

30 years after the fearsome Lake George Monster delivered the winning punch in a rousing, street-rules fishing contest, Harry Watrous, who by this time was known locally as the master of the bygone beast, was asked to resurrect his monster one last time for a surprise cameo at a local Independence Day festival. During one of the day’s many aquatic events, Watrous pulled the rope and, to the shock and delight of the celebrating crowds, gave his creation life.

Despite the fact that Lake George never immortalized its monster in statue form nor baptized an amateur sports team “The Hague Bay Hippogriffs,” one can still see Watrous’ original monster at the Lake George Historical Association Museum. It’s a bit banged up, missing its marvelous blue ears and layered with the chipping evidence of repeated repaintings, but research done by Joe Nickell, an investigator for the “Skeptical Inquirer,” confirms that it is most likely the authentic object.

After basking in the triumph of the Hodag, it’s almost disheartening to read about the Lake George Monster, which, outside a small community of hoax groupies and cryptid enthusiasts has been nearly forgotten. But put it into perspective – the hostage Hodag was created to save a town, while the hippogriff was built to win a derailed fishing contest. And then there’s the joy the creature brought to its creator: “I spoofed the world once with the horrendous beast; and I spoofed it again this afternoon.” These were the words spoken by George Watrous after he loosed his creation upon a lake full of revelers on July 4th, 1934, and they speak a wonderful truth – inauthentic though it might be, any successful hoax is a marvelous falsehood joined on either end by evident creativity and unfeigned triumph.

I finally watched “The Poughkeepsie Tapes.” And I say Booo! I’m not gonna dress this post up in some florid over-long introduction and frilly poetical conclusion just so I can puke up all over it after the dance. The movie is no good.

For those of you who don’t obsessively track the misadventures of distributionless horror movies: “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” is a 2007 serial killer flick, filmed documentary style, about a mass murderer in Poughkeepsie, New York, who videotaped his numerous hellacious homicides. Written, produced and directed by the Brothers Dowdle, the film kicked around the festival circuit, got bought by MGM, was scheduled for a tentative, ultimately cancelled, 2009 theatrical release, and then just sort of faded away. (You can dig it up online in all of the places you’re already thinking to check.)

Dance time.

AFTER THE JUMP…
The movie cuts between two different formats – talking head-style interviews with cops, FBI agents, members of the victim’s families, etc., and grainy footage from the titular video cassettes made by the killer.

As for the interviews, even the ones that aren’t poorly acted feel overly scripted, making the characters about as believable as the sultry, coifed astrophysicist of every-action-movie fame. I know. The problem with my critique, at least in terms of the “overly scripted” allegation, is that it hinges on the essential notion that the filmmakers’ goal was either to fool the viewer into watching the film as an actual journalistic document, or to deconstruct the broader nature of documentary film via seamless facsimile. “The Poughkeepsie Tapes,” however, seems happy to use “documentary” as a broad structural guide to aid in crafting a budget-conscious, requisitely twisty Hollywood serial killer romp.

So, fine, I can’t rightfully bitch about the part where an FBI film analyst tells a story about how his wife saw a half-hour of one tape and was so traumatized that she wouldn’t let him touch her for a year. But my acting gripe stands. Even if the performer doesn’t have to convince me that he’s an actual FBI forensic technician in real life, he at least has to be a convincing FBI forensic technician in the film’s internal reality. And that shouldn’t be too hard… it’s a reality where a murderer amasses hundreds upon hundreds of videotapes detailing his crimes, and none of the police ever think to hit up local electronic stores for security footage that might reveal one creepy dude, perhaps even with a camera (I mean f***, the guy seems to record everything else he does) consistently purchasing blank tapes.

That’s another thing – ignoring all the procedural gaffs committed by the police and g-men who the killer manages to outsmart at every turn, the killer’s procedures are ludicrous. He constantly switches up his murder weapons, his victim profiles and his body disposal methods. He holds one random victim hostage for years, but kills everyone else. From quick and easy to horrifically slow and muffled by animal feces, this guy does it all. To the cops in the film, this unpredictable versatility makes him the most brilliant serial killer ever in the entire history of wild, blood-drenched maniacs. Every character goes on ad nauseam about how smart and savvy he is, and each promising forensic lead gives way to another complex and nefarious psyche out orchestrated by a man who we’re meant to believe is sadistic, emotionally disturbed, misogynistic, bloodthirsty, violent… and somehow also completely capable and sane. Again, one could argue that the movie is no less realistic than a movie like “Se7en,” and that I’m allowing the film’s superficial usage of documentary techniques to cloud my assessment – which is true – but maybe that points to a larger truth. Maybe documentary – a style deeply immersed in the notion of authenticity or the subversion thereof – wasn’t the most efficient medium through which to narrate this boilerplate cat-and-mouse gore thriller.

The early introduction of the tapes into the film isn’t bad. Short clips are shown in the context of expert commentary and the testimony of victims’ acquaintances. We catch blurry glimpses of gruesome dismemberments and see a few longer sequences in which the killer captures victims, all the while letting the camera roll. As the film moves on, though, the talking head testimonies and tape commentaries become sparser, and long segments of tape are just allowed to roll, uninterrupted. The masked killer takes his aforementioned hostage. We watch as he dominates and abuses her. More bodies pile up. Plot twists get increasingly nutty. Soon, it almost feels as if the filmmakers settled on the documentary style as a compromise after realizing the infeasibility of shooting an entire killer-centric first-person, Blair Witch-style venture without finding some way to show things from the perspective of the law enforcement officers who their brilliant antagonist is repeatedly punking (note that the Brothers Dowdle did, in fact, go on to make a first-person POV horror film – “Quarantine,” the inferior American remake of the brilliant Spanish movie, “[REC]”).
In the end, the worst use of the “found footage” also offers one of the film’s most uniquely creepy images: a terrified, lingerie-clad woman being ordered from off camera to inflate and bounce atop a giant balloon. The scene escalates into a twisted nightmare of Lynchian proportions as the still-off-camera killer begins screaming “Now pop it! Pop it!” Out of context, it’s a fittingly creepy scene, but in the film, it’s squandered. The FBI video analyst explains that there’s over 100 hours of weird balloon footage, but we’re only shown the single minute-long sequence before the movie lopes away into familiar hack-and-slash territory. Balloons are never mentioned again.

Cinematical’s review of “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” briefly suggests that, through the footage, which represents the killer’s own voyeuristic fetishization of his murders, the film engages viewers to consider their own voyeuristic fascination with violent cinematic imagery. And maybe for some folks it does. Me? I just wondered why even America’s independent horror directors are content to recycle the same violent imagery, repackaged though it might be.

BARF!

I can only go so many consecutive weeks ascribing deep cultural significance to the folkloric capers of cryptozoological second stringers before I start getting a bit antsy. Sure, it’s interesting to think about that aspect of the human condition that abets our collective addiction to narrative and ordered fictions by sticking its fingers in its ears and humming away every time Bigfoot or Nessie or fear Liath is heartily debunked… to think about the way we happily allow stories to fool us. But what are stories? They’re motiveless, elusory things.

If you can identify authorship, though, you can find the meat and bone and beating heart behind the ghostly, transient words. Demystifying? Yeah. But there are more than enough legends packed with mystique. The Jersey Devil. Black dogs. Bloody Mary. One reason they’re so effective, evocative and widespread is that, though they’re myths, they’re dressed in the guise of collective knowledge. Unsourcable, voiceless echoes resounding through time
But what about a fiction that has an identifiable and outspoken (some might even say over-spoken) author? A story that’s obviously invented – that everyone knows is invented – but that’s embraced anyway. What about the story of the Rhinelander Hodag?

When rifles, hunting dogs and poison-filled water guns all failed to fell the fearsome Hodag, Eugene Shepard and his posse of Wisconsinite lumberjacks were forced to resort to sticks of dynamite, which they bravely lobbed at the slavering beast. The Hodag was 200 odd pounds of flame-spewing, black-furred muscle and lizard skin, complete with various spikes, claws and horns. The ever-quotable Shepard described the animal as smelling like “a combination of buzzard meat and skunk perfume.” Even as the creature’s crispy remains were triumphantly carted back to Rhinelander to be put on display, Shepard was bemoaning his inability to capture the Hodag alive.

In name, the Hodag already existed as a fixture of local folklore – a vengeful spirit that rose from the ashes of cremated lumber oxen. Though a popular bedtime story among the loggers and woodsmen who collectively shouldered the economy of the rural Wisconsin town, Shepard was the first man to see, describe and kill one of these ferocious monsters. (Later, Shepard imbued his Hodag with a less industry-specific back story – as a “remnant of the rehistoric dinasaures.”) And three years later, during the fall of 1896, he would become, along with another band of artillery-laden locals, the first – and, to this day, only – man to trap a live specimen. This triumph for humanity, which was immortalized in the aptly-titled photograph “The Hodag Capture” (in reality, taken three years after the “actual” event), found Shepard and his men equipped with both standard-issue angry mob accessories (pitchforks, shotguns, etc.) and long wooden sticks topped with chloroform-soaked rags. Needless to say, the still-breathing Hodag timbered like a Douglas Fir.

The twitching, growling monster that Shepard subsequently displayed for 10 cents a gander at the first-ever Oneida County Fair was actually a carved-out stump, covered in ox hide and cattle bones, and brought to marvelous, shuttering life by a simple electrical system. The coup de grace – it’s ferocious, inhuman roar – was provided by Shepard’s young son. Accounts vary as to whether a majority of fairgoers actually believed the hoax, or simply appreciated it as a harmless, clever caprice, but, either way, the dimes poured in and people from all over the state flocked to the exhibit in order to lay eyes on the hostage monstrosity.
But the Hodag is remembered as more than just a money-grubbing prank perpetrated by a known practical jokester (even before Hodag-mania, Eugene Shepard was infamous for organizing entertaining shenanigans). At the time of the county fair, Rhinelander was a dying town. In less than two decades, the booming logging industry had sawed and chopped its way through a majority of the surrounding pine forests (which might account for all the downtime Shepard had to rig up mechanical dinasaures). While other local communities flourished via long-standing livestock and farming businesses, Rhinelander struggled to gain a foothold in either industry. In fact, the Oneida County Fair was conceived as a means by which to promote Northern Wisconsin, and bring tourism and industry to the struggling region. Without an impressive gallery of crops and livestock to display, the Hodag tent was actually born out of a request by city officials, who asked Eugene Shepard, showman that he was, to find some way to draw in out-of-towners. One almost has to wonder if they were implicitly begging him to revisit his Hodag antics.

Though Shepard’s modest bid to save his town – a bundle of skin, bones and wires – was ultimately destroyed in a fire, both the memory of the Hodag, and the city of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, now unofficially known as Hodag City, live on. A giant fiberglass Hodag adorns the lawn of Rhinelander’s Chamber of Commerce. The local high school’s mascot is a roof-raising Hodag. Even the town’s website proudly identifies Rhinelander as the Home of the Hodag.
It would be reductive to claim that Eugene Shepard single-hodaggedly saved his town, but even Shepard himself wasn’t shy about acknowledging that he’d played a part: “Not only hundreds but thousands of people came to view the Hodag… and not one of them went away without having learned a little more about northern Wisconsin…”

Whether by luck or by skill, Shepard managed to author a tale that was remembered as much for the story as it was for the story of the story. The Hodag, as imagined and built by Eugene Shepard, became as important as the details of the hoax itself. Other merry pranksters haven’t fared nearly as well…

Wednesday: The Lake George Monster

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Rougarou. Monday we looked at the origin story, Wednesday we explored the byzantine rules that come along with the curse.

We’ve heard almost too many stories of white colonists co-opting and literalizing indigenous folklore. Starting with Lake Champlain’s Champ and moving westward, plenty of the classic American lake monster tales started when some eager fishermen heard about, or saw a native drawing of, a serpentine lake spirit and took it as a warning of tangible aquatic horror. Aboriginal bunyip legends found British interlopers tramping through the Australian brush, rifles raised and taxidermists on call. More recently, American Indian Skinwalker legends were dumped into the boiling, paranoid slurry of UFOs, portals, cryptoeverythingology and government conspiracy theories. So it’s kinda nice to know that the Rougarou legend cross-pollinated in the opposite direction.
The Rugaru of Chippewa and Ojibwa legend isn’t the wolf-headed antagonist that bullied the French, nor does it adhere to that monster’s seasonal schedule or incomprehensible 101-day statute of limitations. So what is it? That, my buddies, is a source of some contention. While scholars know for a fact that the word “Rugaru” isn’t derived from any Native American language – meaning it’s almost certainly a bastardized version of either the Cajun term “Rougarou” or the French “Loup Garou” – it’s not entirely clear as to how various tribes and groups applied the word to their established mythologies.

It’s clear that the native Rugaru was a mysterious hairy humanoid who lived out in the forest. Some researchers suggest that tribes began using the term “Rugaru” in relation to their already-extant Sasquatch equivalents (not actually Sasquatch, but rather a physically similar entity with the same Type B personality). And that makes sense. If you aren’t Catholic, haven’t been raised in constant aural proximity to European werewolf stories and can already account for your own packed pantheon of culturally loaded monstrosities, it jibes that, when French traders start going off about some sort of animal guy hiding out in the wilderness, your mind turns immediately to the one animal guy hiding out in the wilderness that you’re already hip to. In this way, this native Rugaru is loosely comparable to our modern Bigfoot – a lumbering mascot for the enduring connection between nature and man, and an animal that couldn’t give two bunyips whether or not you eat a cheeseburger on Good Friday.

(Interestingly, the only other version of the Rougarou legend that portrays the monster in a positive light is that of the uber-devout Catholics, who saw him as a wolf-headed murderer, but regarded the murders as a form of holy cleansing. To them, the Rougarou was protecting the salvation of mankind by eviscerating those who undermined the divine word.)

The other native re-contextualization of the Rougarou isn’t as favorable. Remember the Wendigo? It was that voraciously hungry human-eating monster that the snowed-in Algonquian chapter of Cannibals Anonymous used to deter their people from eating their people, claiming that a man who eats the flesh of another man becomes a wandering, insatiable beast? Well, most tribes had a Wendigo figure, but, as not all tribes faced the harsh meteorological conditions that had occasionally found the Algonquians seeing each other as giant, storytelling turkey legs, not all Wendigo transformation stories hinged on an act of cannibalism. The Wendigo itself was always eatin’ folks and snarfing down children like so many mini-quiches, but the mechanism for transformation differed. Many groups in the Dakota Territory – the area where the Ojibwa and Chippewa tribes most likely picked up the Rougarou story from French traders and missionaries – for example, believed that a man who so much as looked upon a Wendigo subsequently became one. It’s these rules and conventions that were sometimes synonymously applied to the Ruguru.

This understanding of the French bogeyman not only takes into account the hairy, forest-dwelling monster, but also that monster’s former identity as a human who was cruelly transfigured. The Indians most likely heard the tale and, ignoring the leaden complexities of the French version, immediately related it to their own Wendigo story. (I’d be curious to know if the Rugaru legend served to strengthen tribal belief in the Wendigo, as it seems to provide corroborating evidence of the creature’s existence, or if the existence of said creature was already taken as a given and the French tale merely resulted in a minor, if striking, lexicographical addition to the oral tradition.)

Interestingly, it was a variation of this second version that appeared on the CW’s “Supernatural” – in the fourth-season episode “metamorphosis, the brawny, homophobic Winchester boys go up against a Rougarou, which, according to the show’s mythology, is a person who turns into a voracious cannibalistic monstrosity due to a rare genetic disorder.

So the Europeans took indigenous tales of sacred beings and phantasmagoric threats and recontextualized them to fit the demon-haunted landscape of the Western theology; the Native Americans took the evil grotesqueries of the guilt-stricken Christian world and built them into broader figures that prowled outside the boundaries of culture, working their teeth into the most basic, elemental foundations of both nature and humanity. “Supernatural” demonstrates that, even today, we continue to borrow from borrowed legends, copying copies of copies. The Rougarou was born of the Loup Garou and the Rugaru was born of the Rougarou. And all of them want nothing more than to remind us of the hungry, lonely animal inside us all.

I’ve been reading the 1980 Arkham House anthology “New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,” in which 9 Lovecraft-lovin’ fiction authors were given the opportunity to trifle in the late horror master’s occult, cosmic sandbox, and it’s made me realize how easy it is to reduce Lovecraft’s time- and dimension-spanning vision to a stock set of props. That’s not a shot at the book, the contributors to which are, generally speaking, immensely imaginative in their takes on all things eldritch, stygian and squamish (if you can find it online, check out Basil Copper’s moody and frightening entry, “Shaft Number 247”).

Aside from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lovecraft is probably the inspiration behind the largest quantity of published fanfic. It just occurs to me that, given the current uptick in Lovecraft’s cultural stock value – Cthulhu plush dolls consorting among the superhero maquettes in so many comic stores, the continuous rumors surrounding Guillermo Del Toro’s never-gonna-happen “At The Mountains of Madness” adaptation, the recent DVD release of the documentary “Strange Tales – The Weird Life of H. P. Lovecraft” – it’s easy to get caught up in the physical landmarks of the author’s fiction while still ignoring their path, and that path’s downward trajectory into an insanity that transcends the clichéd jabbering symptoms of the stock lunatic, and defies the single crisp snap of the mind that is too often ascribed to the boundary between lucidity and madness.

Devil’s advocate, though – if you’re intent on adding to the bevy of lazy Lovecraft-inspired tales that, together, read like the Taco Bell menu, with each uniquely named product comprising the same dependable set of tired ingredients, here’s what you might want to include:

Giant, Really, Really Old Books of the Occult

The tomes are always heavy and dusty, with brittle, yellowed pages and a voluminous quantity of forbidden information regarding alchemy and the summoning of ancient powers. Sometimes they are written in archaic, forgotten languages, but, for the multilingual late bloomer, the library at Miskatonic University usually has the last existing translation. Someone’s always searching for these volumes so they can discover wild, pseudo-scientific secrets, but then they just end up summoning Nyarlathotep or a bunch of Shoggoths. Note to Hollywood: Please make a “NeverEnding Story” remake in which the kindly book dealer gives Bastian the Necronomicon. Lots of times, these books are owned by…

Find out AFTER THE JUMP!

Nutty Cult Members

These guys are crazy, but also crazy dedicated to one of the Elder Gods. Sometimes they’re bookish, lonely, quietly sinister and waiting patiently for the inevitable return of their sacred destroyer. These ones are usually old white guys. Other times, they’re crazy, and naked and killing people and actively trying to call an Old One down out of the void. These ones are usually young, black guys. (I would like to note that, despite Lovecraft’s well-documented racial prejudices, it hardly seems offensive to suggest that black people are proactive.) Either they’ll meet a main character and pull him into their twisted sacrificial and/or library-smelling web, or just sort of wander through the background, serving as silent portents of the Old One-fueled madness to come. Some of these cult guys have…

Ancient Stones/Statuettes/Obelisks/Pendants Covered with Frightening, Cryptic, Yet Macabrely Curious, Etchings/Pictographs/Runes

Lovecraft’s works are replete with bizarre monoliths, mysterious carved stones and horrific figurines, all of which tend to be rendered from some indestructible, unearthly and usually kinda green rock substance. Generally, they hold dark sway over the mind of their owners and, as such, lead hapless beachcombers, archaeologists, artists and everymen to dark, mind destroying dreams and revelations about the Old Ones and the ultimate fate of humanity. A great way to start even the palest Lovecraft imitation is to have someone find one of these objects. Ancient cave, ocean floor, paleontological dig, a bowl of Wendy’s chili (actually, that’d be a good idea for a combo corporate lawsuit drama, cosmic horror epic)… it doesn’t really matter where a character finds the evil chunk of crazy, just so long as it perverts mortal souls and molests reader expectations. Usually, these relics depict the Old Ones, which are…

Crazy, Indescribable Monsters That Make You Go Insane If You Even Just Look At Them

This is the easiest element to execute poorly because you don’t actually have to describe them. Just talk about tentacles and giant eyes and lobster claws and snouts, maybe a hoof here or a creepy ear way over there, all glanced fleetingly through black fog, a patina of fear and the swiftly descending venetian blind of insanity. Personally, I like to picture a half-zebra, two-thirds praying mantis with an anus where its everything should be. These guys appear around…

Cosmic/Dimensional Thin Spots

The Elder Gods are like the velociraptors in “Jurassic Park.” They’re testing our universe systematically for weakness. They remember. There are places where the border between the horrific parallel cosmos of the Old Ones and our Team Edward-rooting home sweet home is rubbing thin, and where, at times, the two co-mingle. This device is always a great way to explain why the nutty cult members are sacrificing folks at [remote location], or to explain why [miscellaneous creepiness] is occurring in [otherwise peaceful small town]. Probably a main character ends up travelling along the borders of two realities. Familiar things become monstrous. The sky darkens. The streets fill with unrecognizable refuse and eerie biological waste. Crazy, giant cathedrals appear in the distance. McDonald’s is called G’trn-ekny’s. One mark of the Old Things’ world is…

Wild, Geometrically Impossible Architecture

Like the creatures themselves, this Lovecraftian standby is great for the amateur scribe because, by definition, one can’t describe the indescribable. Ultimately, you probably just end up talking about how all the angles are impossible and how the sky is a color that isn’t actually a color. Probably also the sun is black and there are staircases set at impossible angles and the buildings have an infinite number of sides. Maybe the toilet seats are square. Definitely there aren’t any wheelchair ramps.

I’m going to shimmy out to the end of a limb and guess that most of you aren’t chomping your nails to the quick in fearful expectation of Lent 2011 and its supernatural enforcer, the Rougarou. Maybe it’s because you aren’t Catholic, you don’t live in Louisiana or you own an elephant gun. Maybe it’s because you are the Rougarou (in which case, stop Googling yourself). The point is, a monster that’s only on duty for 1/11 of the year and only kills people of one religion in one state doesn’t have the scare potential of, say, Bloody Mary, who only requires a mirror and mood lighting.

Fortunately, as Cajun culture began expanding to include not only those of Acadian decent, but also miscellaneous immigrants who fully embraced the local lifestyle, the Rougarou legend expanded as well, metastasizing into an equal opportunity nightmare.

Many believe the Rougarou to be a transfigured human, cursed or infected, double-crossed in a deal with the devil or otherwise debased by some catch-all evil contagion. Louisiana’s Caribbean population even threw some voodoo witch doctor malpractice into the mix. Aside from the standard threat to children –eat your greens, take your bath, go to bed or get Rougaroued – the most prevalent of these stories holds that a person, once transformed into the wolf-headed monster, hungers for human meat treats and stalks the bayous and swamps. In some versions, he seeks out victims and attacks without mercy; in others, he hides in the shadows, travels by night and invests all his energy in resisting the urge to draw blood.
Additionally, there’s a 101-day clause that appears consistently throughout these stories, though the specifics of it differ.

A few of the rules to Rougarou-ship AFTER THE JUMP…

Wikipedia claims that the Rougarou is a blood sucker, and that the creature is “under the spell for 101 days. After that time, the curse is transferred from person to person when the rougarou draws another human’s blood.” This information is suspect and unhelpful for two reasons:

1.) Worded as it is, it’s kinda confusing. Is the Rougarou a monster for 101 days, but doesn’t draw blood until the 101st, at which point the next unwitting sap is grandmonstered in? Does it mean that every person he drinks from becomes a Rougarou, but only after the attacking Rougarou’s 101-day contract ends? Shrugs all around. The article does, at least, confirm that, once re-humanized after 101 days, the former Rougarou retains full memory of his horrific misdeeds.

2.) Every other popular Rougarou article simply cut and pasted this inane phrase (sometimes with hilariously lackluster edits straight out of the Lazy High School Plagiarist’s Handbook – “Afterwards, the spell was passed on to another person when the Rougarou drank the new victim’s blood”). Of course, this means that, even if it wasn’t a legitimately popular version of legend before, it definitely is now. Presumably, the Rougarou understands it.
After some poking around, I came up with a separate version of the 101-day itch, this one being far more coherent and a tad more interesting:

So, you’re walking through a swamp, going like, “doo doo doo,” minding your own beeswax, when all of a sudden, a wolf-headed maniac comes rushing out of the trees, eyes like aerial views down active volcanoes and clawed hands snicker-snacking like dual Vorpal blades. Fortunately, you’re awesome and you stomp the end of a fallen branch so that it flips up into your hand, and you just totally wail the ad hoc cudgel across the wolfman’s goofy face. It draws blood. Suddenly, the Rougarou transforms back to human form. It’s your high school history teacher, Mr. Shoner. You used to sing a song about him, and how he was stupid and bald. And how he can’t get a boner. He looks up at you with those big, watery, Unit-3-The-Phoenicians eyes. When you get back to town, Do you tell everyone that Mr. Shoner (smells like an armpit / can’t get a boner) is a Rougarou? Perhaps this will inform your decision – legend has it that a person who unmasks a Rougarou must wait at least 101 days before publicly revealing the monster’s identity (presumably to give the former killer time to process his crimes, take a shower and make his own confession). If the witness does not wait to gab, he or she becomes a Rougarou. Many Louisianan suicides, it is said, are a result of a chatty Cathy’s inability to deal with the gossip-initiated transformation from blabbermouth to wolf face.
I like this version. It doesn’t indict the Rougarou for being a beast, but rather the man for not taking responsibility for his actions (supernaturally motivated though they were) and the victim for prematurely robbing someone of his rightful shot at redemption. Incidentally, I also read that the Rougarou can be killed by jamming a wooden stick through its chest, so if you’d been just a tad more aggressive in fending off Mr. Shoner (gut like a beach ball / butt plug owner), you wouldn’t have had to worry about any of this.

Now, if you’ve been thinking, “blood sucking? Sharp hunk of wood through the chest? Sounds kinda vampirey, no?” I’m right there with you. A huge vampire scare swept Europe (including France) during the 1700s. French theologian Dom Augustine Calmet even penned one of the era’s seminal works on the existence (or, perhaps, non-existence – his studies were inconclusive) of vampires. It’s possible that, while the French colonists and criminals who settled Louisiana and built New Orleans were familiar with stories of the walking, seducing, violin-playing undead, the emigrating Acadians were more accustomed to the older Loup Garou legends. Perhaps, as the Rougarou stories evolved throughout the Cajun community, they came to incorporate aspects of popular European vampire tales.

Friday: Rougarou, Injuns and the CW

Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Fever

Zeus’ Toolbox

You will need: 1 THUNDER AXE (Symmetrical Double-Headed Axe)
Instructions: Use THUNDER AXE
Note: Use caution when operating THUNDER AXE

From The Country That Gave You The Blood Of Kali…

You will need: Water; Dirt Collected From Tomb Of St. Thomas In Chennai, India
Instructions: Mix water and holy grave dirt; Drink

Neptune’s Formalwear Accessory

You will need: 1 Seahorse (fresh or dried)
Instructions: Fasten seahorse to left arm
Note: If you think it looks weird having a seahorse attached to only one of you arms, use THUNDER AXE to remove other arm

Sweet, Merciful Oats

You will need: 1 Pious Neighbor; 1 Dish; Grain
Instructions: Place grain in dish; Instruct pious neighbor to pray over grain
Note: Works best for fevers caused by “ill wishers”

The Cure Is Worse Than The Disease (9 End Pieces Worse)

You will need: 9 Loaves of Bread
Instructions: Eat first slice from each loaf

Repentance Of The Drunken Steel (Preventative)

You will need: 1 Wine-Soaked Sword Formerly Used To Decapitate A Man
Instructions: Touch sword
Note: If you don’t have such a sword, make one! All you need is a regular sword, a man, a steady arm and wine

Audubon’s Last Resort

You will need: 1 Bag; 1 String; 1 Tub of Cold Water; 1 Live Eagle
Instructions: Clip nails; Place clippings in bag; Tie bag around eagle’s neck; Hold eagle in tub of water; When eagle becomes sick, fever will dissipate

3k Exorcism Dash

You will need: 1 Garter; 1 Koorsboom Tree
Instructions: Compel fever spirits to leave body and enter garter;
Tie garter around Koorsboom tree; run from Koorsboom tree without once looking back
Note: fever can also be driven into a Fedora, which should then be placed on a baby bear

Woah! Shell Shock!

You will need: 1 Live Turtle; Pepper; Incense
Instructions: Cut open live turtle; Rub insides with pepper and incense; Apply to feet
Note: Cure is most likely to work if selected turtle’s demeanor is cool, but also rude

Larva THIS, Buttface! (Preventative)

You will need: 1 Righteous Loogie; 1 Hairy Caterpillar
Instructions: Spit on caterpillar; Say, “Take that!” (optional)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Rougarou. Come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

The Protestants have always seemed happy with limiting the fate of sinners to eternal suffering in a big torture cave filled with fire and basically every type of snake. Leave it to the Catholics to throw an Earth-dwelling, flesh-eating mutant into the mix.

The French emigrates of the Cajun community had it pretty lousy even before the bloodthirsty, wolf-headed Rougarou shambled out of the swamps all parched and grumpy. A cultural casualty of the French and Indian War, the Cajuns (then known as Acadians, Acadia being the ye olde moniker for the eastern coast of Canada and northern tip of Maine) were ousted by the British. Some were returned to sender on French-bound ships, while others found themselves scurrying southward in search of a replacement home. French-speaking and accustomed to a maritime lifestyle, the Canada-forsaken exiles headed southward through the states, wending their way to the coast of Louisiana, where they could comfortably re-settle along the waters of the Gulf, in a region owned and operated by the French government. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the wandering Acadians, France had recently signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which, among other things, ceded control and ownership of Louisiana to the Spanish government. Sácre bleu!

Fortunately, both the newly empowered Spaniards and the hang-dog former French Canadians were fervent Roman Catholics, and got along well enough that the Cajuns were allowed to hang out and roll how they rolled. After the Revolutionary War (in which many land-snatching-limey-despising Acadians fought with gusto), thousands of Cajuns returned to New Orleans and Southern Louisiana, some arriving haggard and powder-stained from the battlefront, and others showing up nauseous and gaunt after government-authorized emigrations from France. Resettled and reunited, the former Acadians started a new life amid the swamps, bayous and prairies of Louisiana, where, every spring, the Rougarou lifts his nose and sniffs the air, canvassing the ether for the acrid hint of sin. Upon finding it, he narrows his eyes and bounds onward toward the smell, goaded onward by the promise of struggling, guilty meat, and the colorful warning mess it will leave on the ground.

Click AFTER THE JUMP to find out how even you could become a Rougarou!
Similar to “Wodewose,” the word “Rougarou” is but one of the linguistic variations used to encapsulate this chomp-happy lupine monster man, whose other dialect-variant labels include Roux-Ga-Roux, Rugeroo, Rugaru and, occasionally, Loup-garou. That latter term – “Loup-garou” – is, in all probability, the word from which all of the other spellings and pronunciations derive. Also, it’s French for “werewolf.” And in the same way that the word “Rougarou” riffs on the term “Loup-garou,” so too does the Rougarou legend use European werewolf lore as the pentatonic scale for its terrifying, Catholic jazz variations.

For example: the Rougarou is part man and part wolf, but the parts aren’t all mashed up together in a bipedal hairball of teeth and halitosis – Human body. Wolf head.

The Rougarou isn’t erratic or wild. It doesn’t commit the kinds of savage, random assaults in which traditional werewolves (rooted as their lore was in stories of serial murderers, rapists and the rabid) specialized. The Rougarou kills sinners, especially those who fail to observe the traditions of Lent – a 40-day period, ending with Easter, during which many Christians sects, including the Catholics, pray a whole bunch and give up various Earthly indulgences (alcohol, coffee, drunken barista pornography, etc.) in order to prepare for the anniversary of Christ’s death and resurrection.

The notion of a religiously sponsored werewolf isn’t entirely unique to the Rougarou, either. Back in France, some Catholics had already popularized a version of the secular (a loaded word when used in this decidedly supernatural context) Loup-garou legend in which transformation from human sinner to murderous beast occurred automatically after an individual’s seventh consecutive unobserved lent (still, the resulting monster killed in typical indiscriminate rampage fashion).

Having been raised Catholic myself, I’m all too familiar with the sometimes antic lengths to which the religion’s pedagogues will go to guilt kids into ritualistic piousness. I specify kids because I’m assuming it’s largely these hyperactive, overly curious, free-thinking wastrels that constitute the Rougarou’s key demo. Adults – directly bound to their mortality by sick relatives, dying acquaintances and their own creeping physical ailments – have hell to fear. It’s the children – optimistic, unselfconscious rascals who bask in a false sense of immortality as tragedy after tragedy roll off them like a boulder down a chute trying to kill Indiana Jones – who need a more immediate reason to mind their Ps and sacred religious traditions.
At the same time, the Rougarou doesn’t limit itself to Catholic killings and Lenten justice. That would be inefficient.

Wednesday: Non-Denominational Werewolf