THC 106: Linda Godfrey | Canine Cryptids, Paranormal Creatures, & The Poison Widow

00:04 In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the Fireside Chats. His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times but we're far from 1930 and I deal with a different kind of fire For a new era of worldly frustration We offer a fresh conversation! I'm Greg Carlwood These are The Hireside Chats How the hell are you higher side chatters? Drinking a little drink, smoking a little smoke. Enjoying a sunny San Diego day I'm Greg Carlwood and after a solid string of heavy conspiracy shows dealing with the multitude of damage done by the well-oiled manipulation machine we call reality... ...I thought it would be good to get back into a fun weird and kind of creepy cryptid topic And Linda Godfrey today's guest is the queen bee when it comes to canine style wolfish man creature sightings

01:00 And I really love this show. It's a little less controversial than the last with Jordan Maxwell, and we know how that went! But I know not everyone is going to like every guest, but I hope that you like the way I do things here enough that even on a show that might not be your favorite topic or guest we keep it interesting enough for you get through it. At least thats my goal! But I received so much mail about the Jordan Maxwell episode and his personal legal situation So many people have linked me to other guys side of this story And I really wish people would utilize the subreddit instead of just emailing me because then we can get a thread going where we really look at both sides and discuss some of the controversy as a group. Then it's not so dead end, but consider that if you have something to say about an episode try starting in a thread on the subreddit or the Hireside Chats Facebook page if your not quite as familiar with Reddit and how it works. Then we can all get involved talking about some of these shows there is alot of content in them

02:01 I feel like that aspect of the show is kind of missing. So, that's my suggestions for that but all I really wanted to say about the Jordan Maxwell thing is yes maybe Jordan Maxwell isn't his given name Maybe he signed a business deal that didn't go well But everyone knows who he is and even if it's stage name we have a situation where there is someone else selling his books at jordanmaxwell.com soliciting donations at jordanmaxwell.com And the man we all know as Jordan Maxwell sees none of it That's wrong. That's fucked up I don't know if he got tricked into signing it away or what happened, but just those simple facts aren't right It's dishonest to represent yourself as someone else and regardless of anything else no one should be doing that Go write ten conspiracy books of your own and do a thousand of your own lectures instead of swindling away from someone who did

02:53 Regardless of what's on paper just doesn't seem right, but I love the way Jordan breaks down language and either way That's why had him on the show. I wish the man in the best That said, most people who have been riding the THC train for a while know that I try to avoid or correct a lot of the issues found in podcasting. Poor quality, poor preparation, lack of editing drawn out repetitive ads meandering intros like this one and i think i do okay We have a few ads here and there but they're all show related and I try to jazz them up a bit I move them around, I try not to use them for every episode But another issue I find with shows I like is their release schedule

03:31 Shows just sort of come out randomly and I'm gonna try something different. I'm gonna try to commit to a new THC on the first, fifth, tenth, fifteenth, twentieth and twenty-fifth of each month so a new show every five days And you should know when they're coming out But I still like to keep the guests as surprise for the most part because i just think it's more fun that way So let's just get to it. No need for the ads today, there is a new option for the Money Bomb though that I will mention where you can make a $5, 10 or 20 automatic monthly donation which is great for me because I like to know how much money I have coming in and a little more of a consistent fashion than it has been and you get put into every Money Bomb automatically which usually happens every twenty days or so. You're really getting into

04:14 a few without putting in money. So think of it as a good compromise if you want to support the show regularly and might want to win some money back, and you don't want to have to continually re-donate every round which is something people have complained about. It's so tough! It's tough out there... Who has got the time? But that's about all that's new from me. Let's dive into the wild world of wolfmen canine cryptids and other paranormal creatures right now with Linda Godfrey Thanks everybody What are we doing today? Yeah, I say give me something that says... I get up every morning at 5.30 and commute for an hour-and-a-half to some bullshit job where my jag off boss expects me kiss his balls all day just so i can afford to keep my ungrateful screaming kids decked out in door the explorer shit of my wife under her fat ass and self help videos until the day I get up encouraged to put a shotgun on my mouth Right here! Yeah thats it thats the one

05:15 Alright people, we know the world is much weirder than it appears on the surface and today we're taking a microscope to one slice of the paranormal pie. And that's these legends sightings and encounters with strange unknown canines dogmen werewolves or whatever other name you want to give to these elusive entities And we have a guest today who is undoubtedly the leading author and investigator into these creatures as well as several other paranormal and strange topics which I'm sure will touch on, as well. Her name is Linda Godfrey out of her many books several focus on these wolfmen beings including Hunting the American Werewolf Real Wolf Men True Encounters in Modern America The Michigan Dog Man and the one that got the ball rolling The Beast of Bray Road It's gonna be a wild ride now psyched to be on it! Linda welcome to THC

05:59 Thanks so much for having me, Greg. Yeah I'm excited for this thanks for being here! My pleasure I'm always looking for fringe topics to cover on this show and i like each episode to be kind of wildly different from the next. And, I had a listener suggest that I have you on and I honestly thought the topic of werewolves in the like was a little too goofy to be taken seriously although I'm definitely a fan of cryptids in general but as I dug into the reports up upright walking canine encounters they found that there's a lot more meat on these bones than I would've thought. I'm sure you had similar feelings when you started out but Now it seems like you're the go-to researcher for these types of sightings. So, was this something you always took seriously or was it more a process?

06:42 Oh no, I mean it was...I've always had some interest in things like UFOs and you know when I was a kid I was out always glued to my fairy tale books. You know so it.. I've had an interest in otherworldly things all my life but I had never honestly given a thought to werewolves until it just so happened that I was working as a newspaper reporter in Walworth County, Wisconsin for a county-wide weekly and heard these rumors that people in my own hometown of Elkhorn were reporting seeing something that they described for lack of a better word as a werewolf out along this two mile stretch of country road. And you know I thought it was funny but just for fun kind of checked into it a little bit and discovered that indeed people were talking about it and not only that

07:36 our county animal control officer actually had a file folder marked werewolf, which is news in itself. I went in to see him and he showed it to me and it was full of the names and addresses and reports from people who had been calling him and basically saying, I saw this thing, I don't know what it is but if there was such a thing as a werewolf you know this would be it! And he was of course skeptical himself too but he couldn't come up with any explanation And that made me really start thinking, well you know if this was just a joke or some hoaxer. I mean even knew one or two of the people in there, I knew they were just regular people around the town and thought, people who are perpetrating a hoax don't really call the authorities and give them all their contact information. You know so that was one little red flag at the beginning

08:29 And then I thought, well you know even if it's just some sort of dangerous unidentifiable predator that surround people certainly have a right to know that if its true. And if it is just some weird folklore well you know I'll write it up and it will be some sorta maybe local legend but we'll never probably go any farther. I remember the editor and I saying that and nothing was ever farther from the truth because once it came out It went national, much to our shock and surprise in about two weeks. And I started hearing from people all over the country telling me that they had the same thing in their area even if it was sometimes known by a different name but I soon recognized that everyone

09:13 was talking basically about the same creature, the same modus... mode of operating the same behavior and they just didn't know that other people had it or that anyone else had seen in many cases. And I realized it was quite a bigger thing and felt sort of obligated to keep track of it you know because it didn't seem like anyone else was paying attention to this phenomena and you know, it was openly scoffed at by many people right from the beginning because it just sounds outrageous. You know I mean werewolves? It doesn't sound like a real thing." Well, I never-I say in all my books and I still say that I don't believe in actual traditional werewolves where there's like Lon Chaney sprouting whiskers turning all of his bones and muscles from human into a canine. You know, I just don't believe that

10:11 Honestly, in most cases somewhere in the high 90s and mind you it's over 20 years later and I'm still getting an average of one to three a week from all over the place. Most cases report nothing that couldn't be a natural animal behaving weirdly. There is nothing supernatural about any canine walking on its hind legs they just don't normally do it because Their skeletal and muscular structures aren't really designed well for it, but they can. You can go on YouTube and search for dancing dog or running dog and find all kinds of great examples where they do it but normally they don't unless

10:53 People have either trained and motivated them or in the wild perhaps they've missed, they're missing a forelimb or something. And nobody's ever reported one missing a forelimb that was walking so the great question that still drives me is why do people keep seeing this? The secondary one probably just as equally important is you know why did there seem to be large canine type creatures walking around on their hind legs when there's no real scientific record or fossil record for anything like this. Wow, I mean that's pretty interesting. So you've been looking at this for over 20 years? With so many cases that people come to you with what is consistent about the appearance and the behavior moreso than behavior is kind of what I'm interested in but um What do you see happening time and time again? Is it people being attacked or are they running away from humans?

11:51 In over 20 years, I've never had anyone other than one man who was scratched and he feels it was accidentally up in Canada. Nobody even when they feel that they were in imminent danger of being eaten was ever actually even harmed in the slightest way. The creature intimidates almost acts like territorial aggression Sometimes people feel they're getting strange messages from it, like stay away or I'm superior to you that kind of thing. It intimidates people but it doesn't hurt them as far as any examples that I know off and That's you know that's kind of unusual in itself But it's also explainable by You know predator defending its territory and wanting wanting its privacy for some reason? It's just that there is

12:41 Again, with the behavior people will say things to me like I felt like it was angry that I saw it. You know? I felt that it was telling me you could jump on my car if it wanted to now how often do you ever hear somebody who's reporting seeing a bear in the wild? I've seen bears and the ditches, you know northern Wisconsin that kind of thing. I can't imagine saying to somebody I felt the bear was angry that I saw it or I thought the bear was sending me this message did it wanted to jump on my car And yet I hear that time and time, or people will say you know it's-I felt its eyes were boring right through me. You know that kind of thing there seems to be this kind of secondary psychoactive

13:22 element to many of the sightings. That's just, that's weird and the other thing is the behavior of it always... It'll run right at someone or chase someone or look fierce and then at the last second it runs into whatever cover there is. It's almost always seen near some type of either a cornfield or woods or something that it can jump into and hide So that's what really consistent. And in appearance, that also is strangely consistent The appearance will vary about the same that you'd expect to see within a natural wolf pack or between certain large dog breeds. You know, the fur is usually described as dark brown shaggy is the most common but sometimes it's gray and a little closer cut people will normally describe the head as very like a German shepherd or a wolf with upright triangular ears

14:23 A long muzzle, fangs if they can see the mouth at all. They usually describe fangs They describe claws and paws, not hands. You know it's very different from Bigfoot especially in that way often there is sort of a rough on the back of the neck or tail. They'll say things like its legs... It was running really well on its hind legs but the legs were bent backwards and by that I know what they mean. The dog... Well they call it... Dog specialists would call it a hawk but we would call it the ankle and heel bone joint area.

14:57 We expect that to be on the ground, but in a canine they run on their toe pads So it's actually up in the air where we're expecting to see a knee bending forward Right. You know It's it's a different part of their anatomy there so that's why it always looks like they're running with legs bent backwards and and that's what I hear over And over and the other thing is Unless it's one of the very small percentage that fall into what I call the supernatural range, you know and it's not a large number at all. They exhibit the normal eye shine for canine which is yellow green gold

15:34 So, in every way it's not like they have human faces or you know if you killed one it would look part human or anything like that. If you did kill one I think it would just look like a big strange wolf or wolf-dog hybrid and they may well be wolf dog hybrids there is a lot of evidence in the reports to my mind for that possibility. But, you know it's just so odd that I mean I've talked to wolf experts and scientists and no one has ever been able to give me an answer as why a natural wolf would or wolf dog would adapt itself to run upright. You know, why there are no proven examples of this in scientific lore? So that's the big question you know and then there is another paradigm completely when I interview Native Americans about it they say oh yes this animal is known to our ancestors the walking upright

16:34 wolf-like creature, and it's actually partly physical and partly in the spirit world. And it can go back and forth between them. And they believe the same thing about Bigfoot you know? And actually would explain a lot of things about both creatures. So I just try to report everything and keep an open mind personally. Just when I think that evidence has gone over one side or another, I'll learn something different that will make me Hmm, well maybe not you know and the other thing is I like to keep an open mind because I think that as soon as You declare unless you've got really good evidence for it. And I still never had one in front of me To say this with any certainty But as soon as you declare that it's for sure natural or for sure a spirit animal you're not investigating anymore then you're just working into confirm your own biases

17:31 And I try to keep my reporter hat on as best I can and kind of not succumb to that line of thinking. Right, and that's why like your approach to it because i've heard you talk about the Native American side of it a couple times before and that is really interesting to me. I've always enjoyed looking into any kind of folklore that's been around for a long time, you know. We have... Europeans have a history of wiping that stuff away as soon as they take over an area but it seems like all the other cultures in the world have those long standing stories of kinda paranormal stuff so I thought that was a pretty interesting element and it also kinda is in line with what you got from a government trained remote viewer one time isn't?

18:20 Well, sort of. He's got a different tack and this was a man who was employed at one time by the government as a remote viewer and still works in some freelance capacities for them and he went in and did remote viewing based on a sketch that I made that is kind of composite witness sketch that appears in several my books And what he came up with was that they were actually extraterrestrial in origin, and that the ones scattered over the planet Earth that are here now were left millennia ago as sort of

19:01 ranging scouts for whatever civilization this is and that, you know, that's why they're not really supposed to be seen and why they don't want to be seen. And why they're held back from hurting people but that they are just kind of waiting for their civilization to come back one of these days so I am I don't know what to think of that. He did stop viewing because he kind of felt they were sort of reverse-viewing him after a while, and that he was discovered and got very nervous and wouldn't view them anymore

19:40 That's weird, but I mean to me ETs and spiritual beings and these guardians they're all kind of the same. At least I kinda categorize them as similar Yeah many similarities right? Mm-hmm. I mean when people take ayahuasca or certain psychedelics there They see human animal hybrids as well So I wonder if that doesn't open up a doorway to make you more able to see these kind of things but maybe they show up in our waking life once in a while or maybe uh some people's brains release the right chemicals naturally and uh... the stars align and they can see through to with some other dimension they see a wolfman yeah I you know, don't know what it is. I do ask most witnesses are many of them volunteer you know as too

20:26 their sobriety level and almost to a person, you know with very few exceptions. They will say they were driving or whatever they were perfectly sober they don't drink they don't take drugs So, that's really the predominant. The one guy who said yes I'd been drinking when I was on my way home but when I saw that I sobered up really fast you know and why if you think about it there are many people who have had the experience of having had too much to drink did you see walking wolves? You know its not what happens normally when you get drunk

21:04 And there aren't too many people walking around America on ayahuasca. That's kind of a, you know... I know some people who have traveled you know, to Central and South America and gone through the procedure. And it's really kind of a long drawn out unpleasant thing you know? It's not something you do for social recreation. Especially not in the US so I can't blame it on anything like that many times there is more than one witness. You know there will be car driving past with several people in it or couple people out hiking or hunting or whatever

21:43 and they see the same thing, you know. So it's not like a singular hallucination I don't believe that in most cases a mass hallucination would be applicable It's not the same thing as where you have a mass crowd thats somewhere for a worshipful purpose and they all are staring into the sun and all see something In most cases these are just normal great people going about their lives And they see this thing and it kind of changes their worldview forever. Yeah, it makes it even more interesting that they're not expecting to look for anything. They're not hunting anything. It just kind of shows up but can you recount some of the details of maybe an encounter or two that you found to be really intriguing?

22:35 Well, you know they're almost all intriguing to me. I mean each one's a little bit different. A lot of them do happen when people are driving at night and they see it by the roadside and it either stands up on... It's either crouching and then stands up and sometimes runs after them or the opposite. It'll be running along on its hind legs and then drop down to all fours when it knows it's being observed but one of the most spectacular is recounted in my book, Real Wolfman True Encounters in Modern America. And although they don't give credit, the sci-fi show Paranormal Witness actually did an episode on that called The Maine Wolf Pack which was my title. Yeah you won't know from watching the TV show and the TV show was sensationalized. Yeah they all are kind of it's unfortunate! Yeah I've gotten very jaded about both the TV shows about this subject but in this occurrence there was a very nice

23:39 middle-aged professional couple sitting on the front porch of this farmhouse that they rented. You know, very just nice salt of the earth people I've gotten. I've talked many many times with these witnesses and they're just great people. They're sitting on the front porch it was their habit to sit out and have a late night cup of coffee They would keep a kind of floodlight slash flashlight on the porch next to them because there was a pond and they liked to shine it down there once in awhile and see the deer that would come drinking at the pond. Well, they're sitting there and they both just got this ominous dread feeling and they shone the flashlight out in the yard and saw three upright dog or wolf-like creatures that they could tell were at least seven feet tall

24:30 creeping toward them on their hind legs. And they shone it in a different direction and there were two more, so there were total of five of these things silently sneaking up on them on the front porch and when they shine the light that creatures stopped and kind of backed up and they we're able to get into the house The man's guns were locked up in outdoor utility building And so he didn't really have any weapons. They called 911, although we've never been able to get the 911 call released. The TV show tried, we tried they tried but they did call 9-1-1. 9-1-1 told them to call the local game warden and the game warden told him just stay in the house and shut the doors. And neither one ever came out to investigate

25:20 And they did find, they were up all night. Their daughter was asleep upstairs and the TV show it shows them sleeping with axes and knives you know? They didn't do that but they were pretty terrified. Then they found, the next morning they found these large impressions in the grass where the creatures had walked on the TV show it shows perfect footprints in mud but it wasn't like that. That was a lot more than they had But that was a pretty amazing thing. The creatures stayed there all night too, because every once in awhile Shelly and Eric would look out and see that they were still there you know? They'd shine the light out and they get all these pairs of eyes looking back at them. And they slunk away sometime when it started getting light out

26:09 Yeah, that's a really good one because usually with cryptids you only see one and that's kind of been my... One of my beefs with the whole field is if they're animals. You'd think you would see families or young ones here and there but it really always just seems to be one that shows up in town for couple years maybe or couple months then it just disappears but to see three at once that is pretty interesting Actually, that was five and there was another. I've had as many as four before. That's the record. There is another woman who passed a lie detector test of very stringently applied polygraph expert gave the test

26:51 It was on the first MonsterQuest episode on this. And she saw one by itself and then she and her friends, she was with three other friends they all saw it, drove away from there and then encountered three more that were drinking at a stream And I've had people in upstate New York see two of them jogging along a highway. There was an incident down in the southern part of the country where somebody observed a female and three little ones crossing a road, all upright even the little ones. I've had other small ones observed by themselves

27:30 So it does sort of indicate that there's a breeding population. Right, so there you go I don't hear about that as much especially with other cryptids But that's pretty compelling that you found that and another thing I noticed while looking into this preparing for the show is there seems to be some cases of people who have like lifelong continued sightings though the way that UFO abductees claim that it happens over and over again And there are some people that have these reoccurring sightings of wolf men Have you found that at all? Yeah, there are some. And it's odd because people who go out looking and hunting for it almost never see it but the ones who do see it seem to be the few that will run into it again and again or may habituate if they have a farm or rural area especially I've had several situations like this one in Ohio one in northern Wisconsin where

28:28 It seems to hang around for years and kind of just worries that the chickens and the livestock, they can hear it walking around at night. Might be scratching the siding you know that kinda thing but never leaves anything really concrete enough for proof. They do seem to react to floodlights particularly and a lot people have tried things like religious blessings either Christians leaving holy oil or water crosses marking all the doorways, or the Native American sage ceremonies. They do seem to get some relief from these too which makes you wonder if they're natural animals why would that help? You know and maybe it's coincidental maybe things are just ready to go anyway but

29:17 Having floodlights or something like that does definitely seem to help. Yeah, I guess the there's a wide range of opinions on if these are more intelligent beings or alien guardians or animals but the thing you said about people having a feeling That it was upset that it was seen...that's super interesting to me It's almost in line with some type of telepathic communication But has anyone Described it to you that way or is it more or less just a fleeting feeling? No, they'll they will say You know They won't really say they'll say that I felt this was what it was telling me not in words but you know just in a specific message and

30:05 that I certainly understood, you know. And they'll say, I thought I was crazy telling myself to get a grip on it one recent woman that wrote was telling me that she was saying to herself get a grip don't talk about it um... You know don't tell anybody That kind of thing but They don't say it was a message in the King's English It was a specific impression that was imparted to them and usually very threatening and I've heard that Bigfoot witnesses will sometimes say the same things but they're usually not so aggressively threatening as the ones from The Dog Man. So, and I've speculated that perhaps if you are in a moment of fear or panic that I guess it's possible people could be

30:53 reading the body language and sort of getting an impression that way. But those that I've spoken to, you know when I've said to the witnesses well how about this? They'll say no it wasn't like that at all. I really felt I was getting this direct mental message of some kind and even though it felt crazy that's what I thought it was. Right, it is possible people are projecting that but it does seem consistent with reports of other types of beings in this realm of cryptozoology and paranormal that it's a consistent type

31:30 communication, the way they describe it. Yeah of course it's not in English but it's more of just overarching feelings or emotions that are kind of transferred It's interesting! There is a weird dynamic to it and makes me think that there might be something more to them than just animals because animals you know... Animals are not quite as elusive as some of these cryptids seem to be No, and the longer that I study them the more I kind of lean that way. Sure they don't do anything overtly than a natural animal couldn't do but it's these

32:08 impressions of the witnesses and the oddity of them, and their behavior that is just really out-of-the box. You know that makes me just wonder if they have some other element to them that we perhaps haven't even guessed at yet you know it's hard to say because some of the messages are quite specific there was one woman who felt it was saying to her, I know where you live and if you tell anyone about me, I will come and get you. And she was so terrified that she didn't tell her husband for like three days. When I came to interview a week later, she was still shaking and started crying when she told about it. The effect was that strong upon her or another woman said, I was driving by and saw it looked in my eyes and I felt it was saying, I could jump on your car right now if I wanted too

33:00 Huh, man. Yeah that's freaky stuff You know when is the last time you heard somebody say well I saw a coyote and thought it was saying to me I could dance on your head or whatever if i liked It just...I see alot of animals in the wild and I've never even thought of something like that Even when people have been scared My husband's a hunter, he's had a bear come up to his tree blind and that kind of thing. He just thought oh there's a bear you know? It's not the sort of thing, you don't feel like getting impressed messages from them. It seems pretty clear that the people who see these things it isn't like seeing an animal they're hit with a wave of emotion, a wave of feelings and its seems clear on the onset that they're seeing something special something thats weird

33:49 They recognize it, yeah. They recognize it as something special. You know, something to definitely make note of. But to take this into a weirder direction I mean lately i've had A few guests on and done a few shows about occult magic and Alistair Crowley And you hear about these guys summoning demons and conjuring up entities Of one type or another and I get a little skeptical of that stuff because We don't have monsters running in the streets Or stage shows where demons are summoned up but Have you ever given any thought To some of these wolfmen sightings being related to conjuring at all? Well, you know there are several different supernatural possibilities. A conjuring type of thing is one of them an offshoot to that would be like the Native American skinwalker where medicine men can project and astral or spirit double body that either goes out from them and mimics a creature like that or sort of covers them like a spirit suit

34:46 But I don't think there is enough of that activity going on to account for all of the sightings that I see. And normally, you know if people report a creature that has hands instead of paws or red eyes, you know are there several other markers? That it just may not have a tail or it might have more of man-like body with actual shoulders rather than just well developed upper forelimbs Those are the kind of markers and they're again, it's maybe probably less than 5% of the ones that I get but taken together. I think there they're sort of a second subset of sightings. That makes sense But they can't explain all of them by any means you know Now are there any interesting commonalities between the hot spots that these things are sited at or does it seem just to be kind of random wooded areas?

35:46 Well, they can appear in... They're not always wooded areas. Sometimes they are seen in fairly urban places it's surprising there are some commonalities and the interesting thing is that a lot of them are the same sorts of places that in Europe are considered haunted places or places where phantom black dogs or other creatures are seen and these include crossroads, cemeteries. In lieu of crossroads sometimes these days I'm getting more and more reports of them being seen on freeway overpasses or cloverleafs churchyards military areas especially any old sacred places but beyond that also there's almost always water a lot of water source

36:42 some kind of cover for the dog men. And usually there's some sort of prey that they're after, either farm animals or deer. A lot of times they've been seen and reported running away carrying a haunch of a deer or small animal or something like that. I had some ladies in Northern Illinois hear their cat screaming one night and it had been outside and they went to the patio door and saw this six foot tall dog or wolf like creatures standing there on its hind legs with their cat in its mouth. Oh no, I love cats! Well this has a happy ending they startled it so much by screaming and pounding on the glass that it dropped the cat and ran off. Oh man... well that's good at least Yeah yeah

37:31 So I guess one of my big issues with cryptids in general is that all the stories I hear are generally from the past and, I was wondering is there anything that people are reporting to you now? That like pockets of weird sightings that maybe you've heard about in the past year or two. It doesn't even have to be In the canine family but just any kind of weird entity that people are reporting to you recently Oh sure these things go on all the time and they they go up to present. I had...my last sighting of something not on Bray Road, but in that vicinity was February 20th from a really reliable area resident. And kind of an amazing sighting yeah he saw it at 3am chasing a coyote through a field

38:17 Wow, well there's your contrast. There is clearly what a coyote looks like and then here is this thing... Exactly! There was no comparison and he was non-believer total skeptic until that happened I've got a new book coming out in August called American Monsters History of the Sightings Lore and Legends of Monsters in America a really amazing huge bird sighting that happened, you know within uh- A few years ago in northern Wisconsin that hasn't been published anywhere else. That I think will surprise people a lot One thing i discovered when I was researching that book is that there are a lot more sightings of weird huge

39:02 flying things than you'd imagine. Whether they look like the ancient pterosaurs or they look like some kind of furry thing with bat wings, that's usually called Bat Squatcher I've had one called Man-Bat that I call man-bat or whether they're just like the impossibly huge stork or condor, like you know feathered birds. There's more than you would think I was absolutely stunned at how many i came up with Yeah, that's definitely my favorite area of cryptids. The flying ones and the ones that are in the water because both those areas like we don't know as much about the creatures that live in them you know it seems kind weird. Especially especially the water creatures I've written a whole book on...I've got a book called Lake and Sea Monsters with Chelsea House Press but I had to look up a lot of those too and the thing is you start realizing

40:01 But there are these really deep areas of the ocean that, you know, we just haven't been able to penetrate and we really don't know what's down there. You know? It turns out there are squid, huge squid so much bigger than any scientist ever predicted and that were scoffed at and not believed until, you know, we're able to start recognizing and retrieving carcasses when they washed up. Yeah, giant squids are super interesting also of course Loch Ness monster type beings is not just in Loch Ness but apparently these things are sighted in areas all over the place even in Lake Tahoe supposedly Right yeah I mean they're just so common lake monsters are everywhere it makes me sometimes wonder if

40:45 Either these are also, you know the spirit animals coming back and forth. Native Americans believed that any body of water a river or lake with freshwater springs those springs were the doors back and forth to the spirit world. Or is it that there are well hidden subterranean underwater passages between them? You know connecting them to larger bodies of water or out to the ocean or whatever Right, yeah. That's also a possibility They're crazy But I wanted to ask you about a little bit more of your other work because it sounds right up my alley I live in San Diego now but I grew up in st Louis Missouri and I've taken trips all over the Midwest and I saw A few years ago that she wrote weird Michigan and weird Wisconsin their travel guides the areas local legends and best-kept secrets And a couple of other books on various strange stuff in those two states

41:39 And I hoped you could give us an interesting anecdote or two about some of the other stuff you've looked into. What other kinds of weirdness have you found interesting in those Midwest states? Oh, those books were just so much fun! They got me into so many different areas for one thing They have a lot on outsider artists, visionary artists which is really one of my top favorite subjects. And so you get to go interview these really interesting people who've just turned their entire lawns and acreages into outdoor museums full of these crazy sculptures and things that they put together but I also because the topics were sort of preordained with those books

42:23 I had to do a lot of ghost investigations, which wasn't something... it's not really my big thing. I'm not super into the ghost huntings and I didn't really expect to see anything. Frankly, I've had some experiences as a child that left me a little bit scared of these things and once in Michigan and once in Wisconsin, I actually saw a ghostly figure and I don't know...I'm hesitant to call them ghosts in the traditional sense of you know are these roaming dead people spirits because I do not what they are? They could be strange manifestations of electromagnetic energy interacting with

43:03 the person's consciousness, they could be who knows what. You know strange other forms of life I don't know what they are but in one case I was probably the weirder of the two tails. I was in Manistee Michigan and investigating a place I had just learned about that day. I'd gone to visit the town's historian, he said oh yeah go down the block and there is this brick building that used to be this German tavern and they've got this ghost named Basement Billy And so I went down there and it turned out it was now offices but at one time this big German family had built it They had a tavern on the main floor They had an apartment upstairs

43:48 where two of the daughters lived and the whole place was supposed to be incredibly haunted. And the owner, who had no idea I was coming or that really anybody even ever knew about it, was there, was very gracious about it and she took me into the basement to meet Basement Billy who supposedly was a young son of that family who had died of typhoid when he was a young teenager quite the act of poltergeist, you know unscrewing light bulbs and he used to swipe would swipe all the glassware off of an antique store shelf when there was a store in antique store in there during the night while it was locked that kind of thing. And people would sometimes see him dressed as a young man in early turn-of-the century clothing

44:36 just outside of the building. So we're down in this big basement and I said, well let's just turn the lights off and see if anything shows up. I had no big hopes for anything, I just really needed some pictures you know for the book. And there was almost nothing in there it was a gigantic space, any of the ductwork was covered by brown paper so there was no reflective surface There was one little bare light bulb behind us and one at the other end of this basement, and that was it. And she turned them off and it was pitch black literally couldn't see anything. We stood there a couple minutes and I was just about to say we'll turn the lights back on when all of a sudden this round

45:16 light, light-like orb. And I say light like because it wasn't emitting light it was sort of like drawing in light if that makes any sense? It was about the size of a basketball. It was just below the seven foot ceiling maybe about eight feet away from me and had some little projections on the sides of it and I had this feeling that it was curious or sentient you know, that it has some sort intelligence to it. And I was so shocked, my eyes were playing tricks this is crazy! I looked away shut my eyes look back and it was still there kind of hanging there like no I'm here

45:56 And I was so shocked by the time, my camera was hanging around my neck. By the time I pulled it up into position to take a picture then it faded away. And I've heard that before too! Yeah yeah... It's a typical thing and The interesting thing about that is that you know I heard the owner kind of gasp she also saw but she thought as the fully dressed entity that people expect to see, the young man. Now that made me think why would I who had no preconceptions and wasn't expecting anything saw it as sort of a raw pure form of energy whereas she saw it as the fully articulated

46:41 young man. So it makes me wonder if it is some sort of energy that does interact with our consciousness, you know? And partly fills our expectations. Yeah I'm with you on that. That's an interesting thread to these types of sightings. I would love to see something like that but... It just hasn't happened. I've actually took the show on a ghost hunt in one of the first attempts at doing like a video-in-the field episode and It went all night to like four in the morning and nothing. I saw nothing of course the people I was with they felt like they saw some things and heard some things and wondered why didn't do this show, and I was like well there's nothing to do I could either over sensationalize it like they do on television or I could just put out a bunch

47:28 night vision shots of nothing for an hour and see how interesting that is. Right, yeah it's very... my friends who are ghost hunters say that's how it normally is And their joke is if you want to see a ghost don't stand next to a ghost hunter because they'll never see one so I went in awful lot of other haunted places and that..I just had the two experiences but It is a good question of why and it's the same thing with the creatures. People who go hunting for them don't normally run into them, it's kind of a conundrum

48:05 Yeah, well we are getting pretty deep into this interview and I was hoping you could give the people a little bit of information about your first book The Poisoned Widow because i actually know someone who told me about this book a couple of years ago and the story kind of stuck with me because it's pretty creepy but It wasn't until We had already had this interview scheduled that I found out that you wrote that book And that is was your first book so thats kinda synchronistic But um can you tell the people a little bit about her story? Yeah, it's called The Poisoned Widow a true story of sin, strychnine and murder. And it is the story of

48:42 This petite, attractive little woman named Myrtle Schauder who was married to the pillar of the local Methodist church in Whitewater Wisconsin. He was a milkman had little dairy they had four beautiful wonderful children and they started taking in boarders from the nearby... They called it normal school now at UW-Whitewater And she started, she had an affair with one of these student boarders and between the two of them they killed her husband with strychnine. She would have gotten away with it except then he wasn't so keen on having the ready-made family and so... She tried to kill her four children as well. Then things just went really crazily awry. It's just this…it ends up just nutty I did six years of research on it and I discovered that

49:35 She sort of wheedled her way out of prison and got out and had a whole another family who didn't have the slightest idea who she was or what she had done until I tracked them down. And basically said, I know what your granny did last century. Yeah that is so interesting like you did it yourself like man that's powerful Well, you know I just really wanted to know how a woman like her who I could find nothing in her background. You know she grew up in this happy close-knit farm family with strong church ties other than the fact that at age 17 she married a 34 year old man so there was kind of an and he was sort of authoritarian but well liked and well respected man

50:22 I couldn't find any big thing in her history to suggest why she might turn out like this. And, and I wanted to know what happened to her and where she went that nobody seemed to know so I just took it upon myself to keep researching that Yeah, there's still really no rhyme or reason. One of the interesting things though is that I discovered almost every place connected with where she lived has now some haunted aspect or some weird legend with it. Oh! That's interesting The part of the case that really stuck with me was hearing the way she tried to get rid of her four kids. I mean, didn't she bake them some treats and just put them in a car and hoped that they would all die on the ride?

51:12 Well, yeah. Actually she went downtown Whitewater and bought some four beautiful big chocolate bonbons that were with a filling because strychnine is very bitter you have to put it in something really sweet to disguise it. She'd given it to her husband in prune juice but the kids weren't going to drink that So, she got these wonderful treats and back in the 20s you know it wasn't like today's kids were candies on hand all the time. These were really special and the oldest boy 16 Ralph was going to drive and her plan was that they would she told them not to eat the candy until they were out in the country. She sent them out to buy potatoes

51:52 And of course, her plan was that they would crash the car and they would all get killed by the Strychnine but people would think it was the car crash that killed them. She didn't even use their own cars! She didn't want her car to get wrecked so she pretended hers were in a garage and asked a professor who lived next door if they could use his car. So I mean you can see just how calculating she was And the only trouble was being kids and being so excited to have this wonderful candy, they all immediately started eating it. And the little ones bit into it and they all started spitting it out except for a teenager being a teenager gulped the whole thing down.

52:33 And she still let them go. I guess she thought, well he's driving and he'll probably crash the car. You know maybe they'll all be dead anyway was probably what she was thinking so she let them go and sure enough he started convulsing. The 13 year old managed to commandeer the steering wheel get back to town to the doctors and luckily the children were all saved but And that brought in the district attorney who again, synchronistically happened to be related to my husband's family. Yeah it was kind of a weird thing and she told him that this candy lady from Milwaukee sold her the bonbons and so there was this multi-county wide manhunt for this evil poison candy lady

53:23 Yeah, and nobody else had seen her. And so you know that she Myrtle finally broke down and confessed and that's when things went right? Yeah I could not imagine You know some woman coming to my door and being like hey This is the backstory for your grandmother because I'd be like wow she's made a lot of food that I've eaten That was exactly what they said, you know it was like because she had been sort of the they had a family business and Her job was to sort of stay home and do all the cooking. And they said, oh all those meals we ate! And the weirdest thing was They said she would watch them sometimes when She would introduce a new dish or whatever...she'd watch them eating it and be saying is it good? Is it gooood?? Like that so I mean there's a lot more to this story than that It's an incredible story

54:17 I think would have been far more deserving of a movie or TV show than the Beast of Bray Road movie that's out there. It has already got all the horror and intrigue just intrinsic to it, you wouldn't need to make up a horror slasher film. Yeah, that is pretty creepy. But I guess on that uplifting and positive note it has been a great time talking to you Linda! A lot of interesting stuff You've definitely gotten me to take these wolfman encounters a little more seriously Would you like to give the people a little bit info about your website or tell them about anything else? You're currently working on and they already talked to us about your new monster book coming out

54:59 Right, that's coming out in August. You can go to LyndaGodfrey.com I have a WordPress blog and you can read my blog there is a bio page...I'm in the process of updating my calendar for the year where I am going to be speaking and making appearances There are books pages, books & bio where you can see a list of all the books My first fantasy novel out, it's out as an e-book. You can get it on Kindle or Kobo or Smashwords or Barnes and Noble any of those. And that's called God Johnson the Unforgiven Diary and there is a whole page for at my blog at LyndaGodfrey.com and you can find out all about that where to download it. It's only $2.99!

55:40 And it's got 12 pretty good reviews on Amazon right now and seems to be picking up some steam. So if you like paranormal fantasy, not werewolves... It's not about werewolves! It's about a whole different subject but if you like paranormal fantasy, you might enjoy that Right on. You're all over the map, but that's awesome you got a lot of work out there Well thanks so much for being here Linda Take care and be careful out there in your research And I would wish the same for you and all of our listeners All right well take care thanks again Your welcome There we have it people, keep your eyes open for the mysterious and elusive cryptids of the world and always let your siblings eat grandma's brownies first or if you're like me you get your brownies from a reputable medical establishment so... You know it's nothing but the sweet sweet medicine to the gods. Please share this show and review where you can reviews help with exposure It's a whole

56:32 I don't want to bore you with it. Life has never been better if you have a shitty job, I understand But if you're not working on an exit strategy Nobody else will so keep your chin up some beer in the cup and we're gonna make it through this me and You This is not the greatest podcast in the world This is just a tribute CN5 glorious days with another THC be there Take care At first I was afraid, I was petrified. I kept thinking I could never live without you by my side But then I spent so many nights just thinking how you'd done me wrong. I grew strong, I learned how to get along and soon

57:13 Back from outer space I just walked in to find you here without that look upon your face. I should have changed my fucking life I would have made you leave your key if I'd known for just one second You've been back to bother me Now go walk out the door, just turn around. Now you're not welcome anymore! Weren't you the one who tried to break me with desire? Did ya think I'd crumble? Did ya think I'd lay a will of fire?! Yeah as long as I know how to love, I know i'll be alive

58:03 I've got my life to live, I've got all my love to give. It took all the strength I had just not to fall apart. I'm trying hard to mend the pieces of my broken heart and i've spent oh so many nights just feeling sorry for myself, I used to cry but now I hold my head up high

59:13 You see me with somebody new I'm not that stupid little person still in love with you And so you thought you'd just drop by and expect me to be free But now I'm saving, loving for someone who's loving Now go walk out the door, just turn around. Now you're not welcome anymore! Weren't you the one who tried to break me with desire? Did ya think I'd leave and die? Who else survived here as long as I know how to love again?

1:00:01 I've got all my love to give. you