Hodag
Rhinelander, Wisconsin
A confirmed hoax of 1893, now on the water tower, the high school and the police badge.
Eugene Shepard was a timber cruiser in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, a surveyor of standing pine for the logging companies, and by every account a relentless practical joker. In 1893 he announced that he had killed a hodag: seven feet long, low to the ground, with thick short legs, two curved horns, a row of white bony spines from neck to tail, and a very wide grin. He produced a photograph of the party standing over the carcass.
Three years later he did it properly. For the 1896 Oneida County fair he exhibited a live one, in a dimly lit tent, in a pit, at a distance, where it shifted and growled. It was a carved wooden frame covered in ox hide, with horns from a bull, worked by his sons with wires from behind a screen. People paid. Crowds came from out of state.
The Smithsonian Institution announced it would send scientists to examine the specimen. Shepard admitted the hoax, and this is the point at which the story usually ends and the reason it is in this guide.
Rhinelander kept it anyway.
Reported from
- Rhinelander, Oneida County, Wisconsin. The invention, the fair, and every
subsequent appearance.
- Rhinelander High School. The teams are the Hodags. There is a statue outside
the chamber of commerce and the creature is on the city water tower and on the police department's patch.
- The lumber camps of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan. The hodag belongs to
a genuine occupational folklore, the fearsome critters, told by loggers to frighten new hands. William T. Cox collected them in Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods in 1910. The hidebehind, the squonk and the agropelter are from the same tradition.
On the record
The hodag is not a misidentified animal or an unresolved sighting. It is a known fabrication by a named man in a known year, admitted by him, and the Institute lists it that way.
What makes it worth an entry is what happened next. A town was handed incontrovertible proof that its monster was a wooden carving operated by two boys with wires, and put it on the water tower. It is on the police badge. Fifteen thousand people go to the Hodag Country Festival.
The lumber camp origin explains why it works. Fearsome critters were never meant to be believed. They were told to greenhorns by men who knew exactly what they were doing, and the pleasure was in the telling and in watching it land. Shepard did not break that tradition when he admitted the hoax. He completed it.
The only thing this animal has ever eaten is white bulldogs, and only on Sundays. It has never once been able to lie down.
Also in the guide: Mothman · Sasquatch · Chupacabra · Wendigo