When Wolves Walk Upright
Werewolf and Dogman Encounters from Southern Ontario
In my neck of the woods we are well and truly into the dog days of summer now. The dog days owe their name to Sirius, the luminous Dog Star of Canis Major. When the star climbed into the dawn sky alongside the rising Sun, the ancient Egyptians believed it fused with the Sun and created the fiercest heat of the year. In their cosmology, Sirius was more than a celestial marker; it was a herald of transformation, announcing the arrival of the most scorching days of the summer. So in honour of the dog days of Summer this post is dedicated to the Dogmen, Werewolves and the people who have encountered them.
During my research for ParaResearchers of Ontario I received a number of reports of what can only be described as Dogmen or Werewolves. Are these beings paranormal, are they cryptids or are they something else? Maybe a case of misidentifying a known animal? I will let you decide. I will include some of the reports people sent in and others that I found during my research.
It Stood on Two Legs
I received the following report of a possible Dogman creature encounter in April 2012, but the actual incident occurred in the late 1960’s in the Niagara region.
The witness writes:
“I will try to describe what happened as briefly as possible; it was in the late spring or early summer and my boyfriend at the time, and 2 of my closest friends were driving through Cooks Mills, this area has now been incorporated into part of Niagara Falls. It was evening and it was a dark country road with a lot of fields and bush area. I wasn’t paying attention to the road until I heard the others yelling about something. I looked through the windshield and saw what looked like a large wolf standing in the middle of the road…and by standing I mean upright or bi-pedal.
This creature was framed in the car headlights and looked to me to have been in the process of running across the road. It stood perfectly still but slowly turned it’s head to stare at us…after about 5 to 10 seconds, it turned it’s head back and ran across the road and into the bush on the other side.
It ran on it’s hind legs only as if that were natural. The males in the car wanted to get out and chase it…while my girlfriend and I were locking the doors and rolling up the windows. We told them if they got out of the car we would drive off and leave them there…so we continued on to the falls.
Here are a few facts I observed during this brief period;
1- the creature looked to be the size of an average wolf if it were standing upright…maybe a bit taller
2-although it made no aggressive move toward us…I had the distinct feeling that it was thinking about coming over and decided not to
3- the eyes were intelligent and they had an almost amused look in them…as if it knew we were scared and found it amusing
4- I had the impression it could see us in the car even though it was dark and our headlights would have made it impossible to see in
5- I was extremely grateful that it decided not to investigate us”
My deepest gratitude goes out to the witness who asked to remain anonymous if I shared her report online.
The witness made inquiries with someone who lived on the road at the time, and although he said he hadn’t seen anything like what they had witnessed, there were times when he was a kid and riding his bike back home from one of his friends homes he could hear something keeping pace with him in the bush, but he never saw what it was.
The description of the creature sounds very similar to those reports of a Michigan and Wisconsin Dogman which were very well researched by my late friend and fellow researcher author Linda Godfrey in her book The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf. A must-read for anyone interested in these types of encounters.
Another report I am aware of for Southern Ontario came from the witness’ own research and it happened around late 70’s to early 80’s on the QEW southbound towards Niagara just before the skyway. A similar creature ran across the Queen E very late at night…actually around 3-4 am. It was spotted by a person on their way home from work.
The Smithville Beast
This report comes from my dear friend Albert S. Rosales and considering the timing and location I wonder if it is somehow related to the report above? This happened in Smithville Ontario during the night of August 9th 1965 and was reported in the local news the following week.
The Hamilton Spectator reported on August 16 1965 that a truck driver from Lakeview claimed to have seen a half-human, half-animal beast, six or seven feet tall, on a side road near Smithville. The man estimated it weighed 500 pounds. A secondary source reports that it was covered with hairs, had powerful shoulders, a head that seemed too small for its body, and inordinately long arms. The truck driver went back to look for tracks but found none.
The Burlington Werewolf
The witness writes:
“Hello, I was reading an article on your website about a Dogman sighting near Niagara Falls that was posted in 2012 from the 1960s. I saw a request from you guys asking about related sightings, I am not sure if it is related, but my Mom, brother and I all saw a very large wolf thing off Upper Middle Road in Burlington in the early 90s, 92 or 93 and about 10 years later when I was working in Burlington there was a fair bit of talk about a werewolf stalking the escarpment region between Waterdown and Acton. The werewolf stories are pure heresy as I never saw anything myself, but if your interested, well here goes.
Back in 92-93 My mom was driving my brother and I home from school in Oakville, we had just moved to Burlington and settled into the Headon Forest community. We were driving along Upper Middle Road, back then it was still mostly farmer’s fields and forest up there. It was approximately 4pm on a bright sunny June day. There was an old house in bad repair along there and it was just off to the side of the driveway that I noticed something big black and weird looking. It was maybe 100 feet (not metres) away from us. It looked like a very large wolf, it was standing in a funny way, its front legs were up as if it’s front paws were on a large rock, there was tall grass where it was standing so I couldn’t see why it looked that way, only that it did. I exclaimed to my Mom “what’s that?!”and pointed, she slowed the car down too look, the wolf’s head kept pace with the car, watching us. I swear it wasn’t seeing the car but was looking at us in the car. We couldn’t get over the sheer size of this thing, it was about the size of a large Black Bear but very much wolf or dog like in it’s head, it had long black/greyish fur
.It wasn’t in the shadows, we were seeing it clearly, my mom said it was a large wolf, but we were in the city and that was just crazy. We all had Goose bumps from looking at it look at us.
The whole encounter was maybe 10-15 seconds long, but we were really scared, it looked like it was thinking about charging us, sort of mid pounce, my Mom started driving faster and didn’t stop till we were at home, not bothering to do the groceries after all, she was really shaken up. After that my mom refused to drive along Upper Middle Road for nearly a month. When my dad got home from work we told him about the large wolf we had seen, he thought we were just joking around but after talking to my Mom and seeing how shook up she was he decided he would go see for himself although he didn’t tell us this until the following day.
So my dad apparently decided to stop at the house we described to him on his way home from work the following day, he told us this when he got home. He said that he had parked along side the road and walked down the driveway. He said he got all the way to the house but saw the windows boarded up and told us no one lived there and there was no dog in the yard. I think to this day my dad thinks we made it all up.
I have had many encounters with ghosts and other supernatural things over the years, enough to write a book about, I believe in Sasquatch and lake monsters but I am not 100% sure on Werewolves. I suspect a lot of that is people misidentifying bears and Sasquatch or just watching too many horror movies before going for a late night walk/drive. If someone were to ask me what I saw that day definitively, I would have to say the closest I could come up with, would be a Dire wolf. I know they’re supposed to be extinct but the sheer size of this thing just makes me say no to dogs and the head was wrong for a bear.
The second bit here is something that was told to me, I did not experience it myself so I cannot say it is a sure thing.
Back in the early 2000’s I guess about 2003 I was working security at a residential complex in Burlington and I started overhearing talk of a Werewolf sighting up near Acton. I didn’t think much of it at first but as the nights passed more and more people were talking about more sightings, people were getting afraid to go out at night even in town. I mentioned this to some friends that worked at another Building across town and they said they had heard it too and that they had spoken to someone that had, had an encounter with something outside Waterdown along the escarpment. A couple weeks later 3 more friends called me up to say that something had kept pace with them along King’s Road while they walked back to Burlington from Waterdown the night before. They said they heard heavy panting and growling. They were terrified and refused to walk or bike along that part of King Rd. again for as long as I knew them.
After about 3 weeks the stories all died off and no one mentioned it again, to this day I have no idea if there was anything too the stories or if it was just people scaring people with urban myths and such. As the years passed I would hear strange tales of something stalking the Bruce Trail and also the Hydro fields that cross the Bruce Trail but no one could ever give any definitive answers, it was always the “someone heard it from someone else’s sort of nonsense.
With how much of Southern Ontario is built up I highly doubt anything large such as either a Werewolf or Sasquatch could possibly travel unnoticed. On the other hand cougars have made it back into Ontario and I myself have seen packs of Coyotes travelling down King Road all the way to the lake so who knows maybe there is something out there stalking the forests of the Bruce Trail.
In my 36 years of life these are the only remotely wolf like encounters I have heard of from around my hometown area, I am sure further north there could be more.”
My many thanks goes out to the witness who shared their encounters and knowledge with me. Have you had a similar encounter? Can you add to these reports? Please share in the comments.
In my home province Ontario, the Great Lakes, the forests, escarpments and lonely back roads have inspired a multitude of paranormal stories for generations. Indigenous traditions speak of powerful beings who dwell beyond the boundaries of ordinary human experience. The European colonists then imported their own stories of werewolves, ghostly black dogs, and other strange creatures that walk between our worlds. Separated by cultures, but united by a common geography these traditions remind us that the wilderness has long been regarded as a place where unexpected encounters with the deeply weird are possible.
Perhaps the Dogman is simply the latest name we have given to an ancient mystery?
The witnesses I have presented here were not cryptozoologists or seeking encounters. Most were driving home, returning from work, or travelling familiar roads when, for a few moments, they found themselves face to face with something that seemed to possess not only an animal form, but an uncanny intelligence.
Whatever they encountered it remains a mystery for us to ponder.
Thank you for reading Out Of My Mind’s Eye! I’ll be back in a week or two with more high strangeness and mysteries for us to ponder.
Blessed Be xx
More Online Discussion and Research:
I highly recommend starting with Linda Godfrey’s books as an excellent resource on this topic
Werewolves, Dogmen and Lycanthropy on the 6 Degrees Of John Keel podcast with Barbara Fisher and Steve Ward
The Hexham Hirsute Humanoid – Paranormal Werewolf Encounter – Zelia Edgar Just Another Tin Foil Hat Youtube channel
Two UK Families Stalked by Mysterious ‘Werewolves’ – A True 70s Horror Story Peter Laws’ brilliant Into The Fog
Back East they are dog men. Out here in the West they are skin walkers. The skull of an unknown species of wolf was found on Skinwalker Ranch that had a jaw resembling that of a dire wolf. Its DNA could not be identified but had both wolf and extinct dire wolf properties.
Another amazing article. Thanks for posting these incredible encounters.