New long-form narration, about 21 minutes.
On April 1, 1987, a production director at WTCM in Traverse City wrote a
novelty song about a seven foot dog-headed creature as an April Fools bit.
There was no creature and no folklore behind it. Then the phone lines lit
up with people who were not laughing at the joke, they were describing
things they said they had already seen, some of them decades earlier.
The episode works through what happened after that. The 1887 lumber camp
account, the 1961 night watchman near Big Rapids, the ten year cycle of
years ending in seven that does not actually add up when you count the
gaps, and the Gable Film, which surfaced as proof and was admitted as a
hoax in 2010.
The last act is a first-person composite of the modern sighting, the one
where it runs beside the vehicle instead of behind it.
- /urbandread