The Michigan Dogman

This one has a birth certificate. On April Fools’ Day 1987 a disc jockey at a Traverse City station wrote and aired a song about a seven-foot upright dog stalking northern Michigan, invented whole, as a joke. The station was then buried in calls from listeners who said they had seen exactly that, some of them describing encounters from decades earlier. Whatever people are meeting in the Manistee and Wexford woods, the legend itself started as a novelty record, which makes it one of the best-documented cases anywhere of a folk monster being born on a known date.