Case file · Cryptid
The Michigan Dogman song
On 1 April 1987 Traverse City disc jockey Steve Cook of WTCM-FM played 'The Legend', a song he wrote about a dog-headed man said to appear in Michigan every seven years; listeners began calling in with their own encounters.
1987 CE · 44.76, -85.62 · status: legend
The account
The song became the station's most-requested track. Later retellings claim older sightings, including two lumberjacks in Wexford County in 1887, and link the creature to the Manistee River.
The sceptical view
Cook says he invented the creature and is 'tremendously skeptical', though he believes witnesses saw something; the older dates are cited only from secondary sources written after the song.