That was the caption underneath the cartoon of an upright wolf eating roadkill that ran in the December 29th, 1991 article of The Week, the local paper of the small Wisconsin city of Elkhorn. It was an article that they thought would be fun but forgotten soon after. Stories were spreading among the kids of the town that people seeing a huge dog or wolf on two legs along a rural road late at night. The original reporter, Linda Godfrey, had to fight to get the article published.

Hello, dear listener! It’s been a bit since we published a “traditional episode” of this audio podcast, and we want you to know that we’re still here and we’re still at it! This episode is a quick “hello” and a little retrospective of what has gone on in our world since the last episode was published.

Horror stories, clickbait, panic porn, your amygdala is constantly getting stimulated nowadays because the media understands that if they activate your fight or flight response, you’ll pay attention. The old saying goes “If it bleeds, it leads” and that applies now more than ever. We’re still in the middle of a pandemic that has kept most of the world inside and glued to TV and social media for two months. We’re constantly surrounded by news stories of how many people are predicted to die, how many deaths are already happening, and how quickly the disease is spreading, and how dangerous it is.

When Hollywood comes looking for a nasty monster from First Nations folklore, there’s one supernatural creature that seems to dominate the landscape. The legend of the Wendigo has inspired cinematic villains from Pet Sematary to Supernatural , Ravenous to Bone Tomahawk . From the legends of the Algonquin-speaking Great Lakes tribes in the Upper Midwest and Canada, the Wendigo is the evil spirit that transforms starving humans into a voracious cannibalistic monster after they finally succumb to their basest instincts and taste human flesh.

Millions of people have UFO stories. There is a one-hundred percent chance that you know at least one person that has a story! So, we went to our listeners and in our own archives for this episode’s tales of UFO experiences.

Everyone’s got a ghost story, from your grandma to your high school social studies teacher. In fact, some of the people that you least expect (and some skeptics as well), seem to have stories that they just can’t quite explain. One time, I remember talking to someone about ghost stories and he said, “Nothing’s really ever happened to me… well… except that time that heard my grandmother’s voice tell me to stop immediately when I was driving, and I narrowly avoided getting into a car crash that surely would have killed me.” Nope, nothing at all then.

In the wilds of western Alberta, Canada, Ken Walker lives, hunts, creates, and sings Roy Orbison tracks. He’s a world champion taxidermist who specializes in recreations of extinct animals. He’s brought back stunning versions of the Sabretooth Tiger and the Irish Elk and his work is featured in the Smithsonian Institution. He’s also a Squatcher and in 2015, he began a quest to create a perfect version of the Bigfoot from the infamous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film , a not-so-little lady he calls “Patty”.

With the world under quarantine for an indefinite amount of time and people everywhere being a little freaked out by the current circumstances of our COVID-19 isolation, we thought we’d brighten things up a little bit with some ghost stories that aren’t scary, but they’re happy!