MICHIGAN DOGMAN

Opening

At 7:40 a.m. on 1 April 1987, WTCM in Traverse City, Michigan, played an April Fool's song called The Legend. Production director Steve Cook wrote and recorded it over a Casio keyboard and credited it to "Bob Farley", one of his on-air characters. It tells of an upright dog-like creature first met by lumberjacks in Wexford County and seen again every ten years, in each year ending in seven.

Within a month it was the station's most requested song. That July, when a cabin near Luther was found clawed and chewed, regional papers and the wire services reached for the song's creature. Cook has said he made the whole story up. Older accounts, such as Robert Fortney's story of wild dogs in 1937, surfaced only after the song.

Timeline

March 1987Morning host Jack O'Malley and Cook come up with the idea for an April Fool's feature. Cook writes the verses.

1 April 1987, 7:40 a.mThe Legend airs for the first time on WTCM. The station plays it until 15 June.

April 1987It becomes WTCM's most requested song within the month.

July 1987A cabin near Luther is found with clawed and chewed wood around the door. A forest ranger calls the damage "obviously a dog." Mark Marentette covers it in the Cadillac Evening News on 12 July and Jim Mencarelli in the Grand Rapids Press on 17 July. AP, USA Today and Paul Harvey pick it up.

Summer and autumn 1987Cook makes a second recording, and the first 500 cassettes sell out in 12 days at $3 each. Proceeds go to the Cherryland Humane Society, which receives $2,500 that autumn.

1989A sequel, The Legend II: The Sigma Story, is released.

1 April 1997"The Legend '97" is released, with a new final verse Cook wrote in late 1996 about the 1987 Luther cabin.

2 April 2007A new version featuring Don Julin on three mandolin parts debuts.

2007-2010A video called the Gable Film circulates as dogman footage. Cook helps spread it. In 2010 the TV series MonsterQuest reveals it as a hoax made by Mike Agrusa.

2011Cook tells the Detroit Free Press he invented the creature.

Key figures

Steve Cook wrote the song, performed it under the Bob Farley name, rerecorded it in 1987, 1997 and 2007, and has said plainly that it came from his imagination. He also ran a website on the dogman's history and promoted later footage, so he is both the creator and one of the legend's main archivists.

Jack O'Malley, WTCM's morning host, shared the original idea.

The Luther cabin owners and the reporters who covered them gave the song its first real-world echo. The ranger's verdict was that a dog did the damage.

Robert Fortney said he was attacked by five wild dogs near the Muskegon River at Paris, Michigan, at 17, in 1937 (some versions say 1938). He told the story only after hearing the song, according to a 2008 mlive report.

Linda Godfrey, a Wisconsin author, collected dogman and upright-canine reports in several books and widened the legend beyond Michigan.

Physical and documentary trail

The record starts with the song itself, its broadcast dates and the cassette releases. Cook's own published history of the song, with the March 1987 planning, the air dates, the sales figures and the charity donations, is the main source for the radio side. The Luther incident is documented in the Cadillac and Grand Rapids papers of July 1987.

No physical evidence has been tested and published as an unknown animal. The Luther damage was examined at the time and put down to a dog. No pre-1987 newspaper story matching the song's sequence of sightings has been found. An earlier version of this report mentioned two men on a road near Sparta. I could not trace that account to any source, so it has been dropped.

I made it up completely from my own imagination as an April Fools' prank for the radio

Things you might not know

• The seven-year cycle has a TV source. Cook took the idea of a recurring cycle from The Night Stalker and said he picked the seventh year "simply because it happened to be 1987."
• The song gives a height. In its 1957 verse, claw marks on a church door mean the dog would have had to stand seven foot four.
• The song had a 1937 verse before Fortney spoke. It places a pack of wild dogs at Bowers Harbor in '37. Fortney's own 1937 wild-dog story came out after the song.
• The cassette began as a fundraiser. The first 500 copies sold out in 12 days at $3, and later sales supported AC Paw.
• The Luther verse came ten years late. The 1987 cabin attack was added only in the 1997 version, so the song now sings about an event it helped make news.
• The most famous dogman video was a hoax. The Gable Film was made by Mike Agrusa and exposed on MonsterQuest in 2010.

Competing explanations

A real upright canine that the song happened to name. Supporters point to Fortney and to the many reports collected since 1987. The difficulty is that the earliest accounts known today came out after the broadcast, and no specimen, body or tested trace exists.

A radio invention that collected real experiences. On this reading, people who had seen strange dogs, or something they could not name in the woods, found a ready label in the song. The timing of the Luther coverage and the Fortney account fits this pattern, and Cook's own statements support it.

Misidentified dogs, wolves or coyotes, plus a few hoaxes. The Luther ranger's verdict and the Gable Film show both at work. This explains individual cases well but does not account for every report gathered since.

Later life of the case

The dogman has outgrown its song. It appears in Godfrey's books, cryptid television and a long run of online sighting collections, and it has spread well beyond Michigan. Cook kept the story going with new recordings in 1997 and 2007 and stayed open about its origins, an unusual case of a legend's author also writing its history.

Finding

The Michigan Dogman as a named creature started with a radio song written for 1 April 1987 by a man who says he invented it. That part is settled by Cook's own account and the broadcast record. What the song did next is the real story: it gave a name to the Luther cabin damage within months, drew out older memories such as Fortney's, and set the frame for decades of reports. The best reading is modern folklore with a known author.

What still will not resolve: what some individual witnesses saw. The song accounts for the name and the pattern, but not for every encounter people have described since.