Doug Moe: Internet helps revive story of Lake Superior creature

Doug Moe  —  12/14/2007 12:47 pm

IF YOU are feeling lonely and would like to start hearing from people in China, Russia and New Zealand, get word out on the Internet that you have seen a monster.

Randy Braun, 55, of Middleton, says he saw a monster 30 years ago in Lake Superior. He took its picture.

In the old days he might have hauled out a scrapbook once in a while, maybe on the anniversary of his sighting, but this is not the old days. Whatever Braun saw over the Memorial Day weekend in 1977 in Lake Superior is loose in cyberspace, and now everyone wants to talk to him.

"The attention is unbelievable," Braun was saying Thursday. He has heard from authors, journalists, investigators and skeptics in all the above countries, and many more.

He sounds surprised, but I'm not. I remember about five years ago I considered trying to stop publication on a book I had written about Madison developer Marshall Erdman so I could get a werewolf into the manuscript.

That was after I had interviewed Madison native and Elkhorn resident Linda S. Godfrey, who had written a book titled "The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin's Werewolf."

Godfrey's story had begun in the early 1990s as a slow-news-day piece for a little Walworth County weekly called The Week. As Godfrey noted later in her book, someone had "tipped me off to the unsettling rumor that the cornfields surrounding the city of Elkhorn were being stalked by a shaggy, howling, silver bullet-worthy werewolf."

Godfrey's story in the weekly was picked up by the Janesville Gazette, and the Gazette's story went on the national wire, and soon Godfrey was fielding interview requests from all over the world.

My favorite, which she recounted in her book, involved an assignment by the National Examiner for Godfrey and a photographer to spend the night on Bray Road, near the spot of the werewolf sightings. "We were instructed," Godfrey wrote, "to buy a supermarket chicken and place it by the road, keeping a close watch on whatever might come to snatch it."

Nothing did, but that didn't stop the Examiner from changing Godfrey's story and adding the last line: "THE CHICKEN WAS GONE!"

Randy Braun's monster is not a werewolf, but a serpent. A Beaver Dam native who has lived in the Madison area for the past seven years, Braun was hiking in Wildnerness State Park in the Porcupine Mountains north of Ironwood, Mich. when he saw the monster.

He was on a rugged section of the Lake Superior shore where the spring ice melt had left considerable debris. Braun said he initially spotted two dark bumps some 1,000 feet out from shore. He thought at first they might be diving ducks. But when the bumps began moving rapidly toward shore it became apparent it was a creature of some sort. It ended up stopping maybe 20 yards from Braun. Its shining eyes and snout were out of the water and he'd spotted its hindquarters, too, wide as a Volkswagon.

"What were you feeling?" Braun was asked.

"Fear," he said.

But he managed to take a photo with his 35 millimeter camera before the creature headed out for deeper water, eventually submerging.

Braun mentioned it to a park ranger, who said it might have been a sturgeon. No way, Braun thought. He didn't pursue it any further until coming across an article in Yankee magazine about a similar creature in a lake in the Northeast. Braun wrote the author of that piece, who wrote back, and eventually Braun got an account of his sighting up on the Internet, which opened the floodgates.

He has heard from believers and non-believers, people who have seen similar sights and people who ask if he was drunk. In 2005 Braun went back up to Lake Superior with his son-in-law and together they made a video near the spot of his adventure.

Braun said he has learned that nearly every lake of any size has had some kind of creature sighting.

Lake Mendota in Madison, for instance.

Jay Rath, who wrote a book on unexplained phenomena in Wisconsin, reported that in 1917 a fisherman on Picnic Point reported seeing in Lake Mendota "a large snake-like head, with large jaws and blazing eyes."

It sounds remarkably similar to what Braun said he saw 60 years later, hundreds of miles to the north.

I can't explain it, but I have the headline for anyone who tries: "Separated at birth?"

Heard something Moe should know? Call 252-6446, write P.O. Box 8060, Madison, WI 53708, or e-mail dmoe@madison.com

Doug Moe  —  12/14/2007 12:47 pm