So, back in November I moved back to northern Wisconsin after living in Minnesota for 13 years. During that time, there’s something that I’ve been wondering: does Wisconsin have any local cryptids?

I looked it up, and the answer turned out to be several. Let’s talk about one of those today:the hodag.

The hodag is a giant green monstrosity with bull’s horns and a taste for meat. Apparently they’re supposed to come from the ashes of mistreated and slaughtered oxen. They’re associated with two things: early Paul Bunyan stories, and the city of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. It’s that latter bit we’re mostly going to talk about today.

To begin the story of the Rhinelander hodag, we have to start with a dude named Eugene Shepard. Eugene Shepard was a land surveyor with a bit of a penchant for tall tales.

In 1893 he gave an account of an encounter with one, where he described the hodag as having “the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears at the end.” Eventually, he gathered a bunch of other dudes to go out and try to hunt it. He then claimed that they managed to kill the beast with dynamite.

Three years later, in 1896, he claims to have captured one alive by putting it to sleep with chloroform. There’s actually a picture of it, and it’s less than convincing:

Yeah, that looks very much like a toy.

Anyway, this story actually started to hit newspapers outside of Rhinelander, and even the state. It eventually got to the point where the Smithsonian Institute actually sent scientists out to verify Shepard’s claims. This basically forced our good friend Eugene to come clean that he was talking out of his ass, and that the whole thing was a hoax.

This didn’t stop the hodag from becoming the de facto mascot of Rhinelander, though. There are hodags all over the place up there. It’s the high school’s mascot, there’s a country music festival named for it, and there’s a giant statue in front of the chamber of commerce (which is pictured above).

So those are definitely some things to check out if you ever find yourself in northern Wisconsin.

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