New England Folkways - Werewolves and Dogmen

Since March is my birth month (shout out to all the March babies reading this), I thought it was the perfect time to focus on one of my favorite subjects: werewolves. One could argue that there is no one on Earth that loves werewolves more than I (and I will argue). I’ve wanted to be a werewolf since I was a little kid - very openly so, mind you! Anyone that knew me as a kid (or knows me now) has likely seen me howling at the moon at one time or another. Now, after nearly two decades of neurodivergence-fueled lycanthropic study, I’d like to think that I’ve accomplished that goal (at least in the general understanding of lycanthropy in my own sorcerous circles). While most people associate March with early springtime, up here in the North it’s still frigid and snowy. Winter still has its claws sunk into our slowly thawing soil, its winds whipping about the snowy peaks of the White Mountains.

Wintertime, especially February, is chock full of wolf and werewolf lore. In Gaelic, February is known as Faoilleach (Wolf-month). In Scottish folklore, the entirety of winter was believed to be ruled over by An Cailleach, who is sometimes described as having wolves or hounds accompanying her. On February 15th, the Romans would celebrate Lupercalia, a fertility festival said to have been celebrated at the Lupercal, where the she-wolf Lupa nursed Romulus and Remus. Midwinter in general has been regarded as a time where wolves run wild, their ephemeral howls echoing on the unforgiving winter winds. 

Here in New England, we don’t have wolves anymore. They were driven to extinction in this region by colonists, hunters, and loggers. This is a fact that distressed my younger self greatly. It still distresses me now, if I’m honest. Yet even while the animal itself is absent (at least according to state governments - more on that later), the spirit of the wolf remains so deeply intertwined with the land - a belief I have carried with me since childhood despite not having any evidence. To the delight of my younger self, I have learned that New England has our own fair share of werewolf folklore, which feels to me to be a confirmation of that belief. While I won’t be able to share the breadth of the lore in one entry, I thought I’d highlight a few of my favorite stories.

Our first werewolf tale actually originates from Québec, where a portion of my maternal ancestors immigrated from. One can assume this tale was brought into New England by Québécois immigrants. It’s titled The Devil and the Loups-Garous. According to this, a man named Jean Dubroise sold his soul to the Devil and was rewarded with twenty loups-garous (werewolves) that the Devil would bring to his farm in a flying canoe every night. The loups-garous were “...living men who, for not having attended to their religious duties, were compelled to leave their human form at stated intervals and do as the Devil directs them…”. A classic case of non-consensual lycanthropy! The moral of the story? Don’t shirk your religious duties, lest ye be forced to till the fields of thy soulless neighbor in a lupine guise. 

Our next tale comes from a most aptly-named location: Dogtown. A now-abandoned village in the area of Gloucester, Massachusetts, it was first settled in 1623 under the name of Commons Settlement. It didn’t last very long, with many of the village’s men dying at sea or in the Revolutionary War leaving most of the women widowed. People left the Commons Settlement in favor of other areas that were better for logging and farming, leaving only what the Gloucester’s government site (gloucester-ma.gov) describes as “...the widows, the elderly, and the people that wanted to be left alone were left in Dogtown”. The name “Dogtown” only came about in the 1900s, allegedly due to the wild dogs that lived there ferociously protecting their mysterious owners.

Local folklore says that Dogtown was inhabited by witches, both benevolent and malefic. These ladies, while fascinating, will have to be addressed in a future post. We’re talking about werewolves here, folks! But the presence of witches and sorcery in Dogtown is important to the picture here. Witches and werewolves have long been seen as allies - a relationship likely rooted in the ancient relationship between the magical worker and the wolf. This is a big theme in Nordic folklore and a focal point of my personal work. Witches and giantesses were said to ride upon the backs of wolves, and later folklore describes a figure known as Vargamor, or “wolf-mother”, who watches over forests and turns wrong-doers into wolves as punishment. 

And the Dogtown witches were not alone. Rumors of a werewolf haunting the region date back over a hundred years. A woman named Sarah Emery shared an account in her 1879 book Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian from a laborer who worked for her father. Allegedly, he encountered a mysterious creature. His description describes it as “a terrible big critter… its eyes were like fire coals, and it ran past me through the bushes, about a rod from the road, with every hair whistling like a bell”. In this account, Pillsbury believes the creature to be a wolverine. Author Peter Muise states in a blog post addressing the Dogtown werewolf that the term wolverine in this context refers to a wolfish creature rather than the animal we know today as a wolverine. 

In more recent history, there might’ve been a possible sighting of the mysterious werewolf. In 1984, a man named David Myska claimed to see some manner of large animal wandering about Crane Beach in Ipswich, which is only a few miles from Dogtown. It was seen again in Rowley, and perhaps a third time by two Gloucester teens that described it as a “gray, monstrous dog-like animal… it had big teeth and was foaming at the mouth”. There was also a deer killing in the area where the creature was initially sighted, yet the deer itself was not predated on, only slaughtered, which would be abnormal behavior for a healthy canid or wolf.

There’s a lot more that could be said about the Dogtown werewolf, but it’s high time we address my favorite piece of New England werewolf folklore so far: The Dogman! While the most famous of their kind is believed to dwell in Michigan, Dogmen have been sighted all around the world. Whether an unknown species of animal, a werewolf, or a dimension-traveling Sasquatch-esque being, no one rightly knows. We in New Hampshire have had our own rash of Dogman sightings, though they’re hard to confirm. Someone in Hillsborough County allegedly saw one in 2017, at least according to dogmanencounters.com. I saw another person claim that the Dogman has been haunting the mountains for hundreds of years, though much to my chagrin they provided no evidence. I’ve found a smattering of other supposed encounters online on defunct blogs and old Reddit threads, most of them describing roughly the same creature: a six to eight foot tall dog-headed creature with a humanoid body. Whether these are genuine or not I couldn’t say, but they’re interesting to note all the same. 

I’ve loved Dogmen since I first discovered cryptozoology as a little kid - in the library of a Christian elementary school of all places - so I was delighted to find that New Hampshire has our own, even if its existence is lacking in solid evidence. These days, this story faintly echoes about the train tracks at Clark’s Bears, where a man dressed up in furs and a raccoon tail hat known only as the Wolfman chases people along on their train tours. It’s a bit hokey for sure, but it’s fun to wonder if the Clark’s Wolfman character has anything to do with the Dogman sightings. There’s also the matter of the New Hampshire Wood Devil and possible connections therein, but we’ll save that for another day. 

Witches, werewolves, and dogmen, oh my! While these fantastical stories are delightful in their own right, I can’t help but ruminate on the driving force behind these tales. Though the wolf was driven from New England, I truly believe that its spirit remains interwoven with the land. In my personal cosmology and magical practice, the wolf acts as an emissary of the land (and thus spirit). Wolf is also a protector of the natural balance and functions as an intermediary between humans and nature. It is an animal that embodies the ethereality of the dark forest and all the unknown wonders and horrors therein. With that in mind, I must wonder if these lupine beings are spirits rather than monsters or cryptids. Perhaps some of the spirits who protect these old woods have maintained the guise of the wolf even in the absence of the animal. 

But are they really absent? While it is true that the wolf population of New England has been extinguished for about a century, there is evidence to the contrary. Such evidence has been put forward by the Maine Wolf Coalition, a citizen-led organization in Maine centered around the documentation and preservation of the wolves that may be slowly repopulating Maine’s forests. Through genetic testing, trail cameras, and photography, they have documented canids inhabiting and breeding in Maine that don’t resemble the coyotes and coywolves we’re used to in the area. I’m no wildlife biologist, but some of the photos they’ve shared… they look pretty damn wolfy to me. 

These canids may be the result of wolves interbreeding with local coyote and coywolf populations, or from wolves migrating southward from Canada and taking up residence in northern Maine. New Hampshirites have reported sightings of wolves in the northern part of the state as well, though so far they have only been seen as visitors and not residents. None of the New England state governments currently acknowledge the presence of wolves in the region, though citizens and scientists alike seem to have hope for the wolf’s eventual return. These animals are known to be a keystone species in their environments. We know from the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park that the presence of wolves can transform the world around them. Their presence in Yellowstone transformed local ecology to the benefit of many other species, both plant and animal, healing and nourishing the land.

Whether wolves are returning to New England or not, I am not qualified to say, nor do I have any concrete evidence of werewolves or dogmen in the region. Yet nonetheless I can’t deny that there’s something deeply compelling in these stories that encourages me to dive even deeper. It reminds me of a night many years ago. I was in my early teens, lying aimlessly in bed as I waited (and failed) to let sleep come over me. There, in the silence of the cold night, a piercing howl rang out. I do not know what sort of creature made the sound. What I do know is that it was alone, and that it did not sound like a coyote, nor a fisher, nor any other animal I knew that dwelled in the forest I called home. It was deep and lonely, as if calling out for kin it did not know. I felt at that moment that it was calling out to me, urging me to come and find it. I’ve yet to discover what had made that sound, but I know that it waits for me in the folklore and the forests of this place. If it was indeed a wolf that I heard, I hope that call was the victory trumpet announcing their eventual return. I am curious to see how their presence might transform and heal this land they once called home, and those of us who dwell here. 

Further Reading/Citations:

Botkin, Benjamin Albert. A Treasury of New England Folklore. New York : Crown, 1947.

Muise, Peter. Legends and Lore of the North Shore. Charleston, Sc, The History Press, 2014.