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Michael Jackson trumped by Dogman, at least in paranormal news reports
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Lon Strickler was just enjoying his morning cup of coffee when suddenly the phone starting ring off the hook and his server was so busy with emails that it nearly exploded. Strickler, who stays 
awfully busy with a host of different hobbies, including collecting and selling autographed merchandise is probably most well known in the paranormal world for running the Phantoms and Monsters website.
The website itself isn't the greatest as far as maneuverability goes, but the content is unparalleled. On the site there is a search engine but you really have to know what you're looking for to view all the past reports which are stacked vertically on the home page. But that's beside the point because people usually end up on the site after reading a paranormal report somewhere else which was backlinked to Phantoms & Monsters. Once there, you can sign up to become a subscriber to the daily email alerts - and I imagine most do because the readership had grown leaps and bounds.
The blog has only been up for a few years, but it has almost a cult-like following and it's easy to understand why. The site and updates are straightforward and reliable, and you never have to worry about popups ads interrupting your moments of sheer horror, total disgust or true amazement while reading the latest "weird news."
The latest was Tuesday's report about a recent sighting of the Michigan dogman in Baraga County located in the upper peninsula of the state, and there was no way to prepare for the amount of interest Strickler would be dealing with. In fact, this story got even more hits than the previous stories about the spirit of Michael Jackson being sighted on news reels, or even, I'm a little embarrassed to admit, a recent story about the Coast to Coast AM show which aired a psychic channeling the singer just two days after his death, and some of the predictions have actually come to pass such as the secret family trust and oxygen tanks in the house.
Why this particular story has created so much excitement is a mystery, and I would be wrong to suggest that it was the Michael Jackson stories that were the precursor to this unexpected attention that the Phantoms and Monsters website has been getting. For those of you who are old enough to remember, sightings of the dogman in both Wisconsin and Michigan have been numerous and persuasive enough to warrant extensive media coverage over the years, including numerous TV specials, newspaper reports and a movie called The Beast of Bray Road and a book by Linda Godfrey entitled Hunting the American werewolf.
Dogman is described as an unusually large and intelligent creature, bear-like in resemblance and is often compared to Bigfoot or the movie version of a werewolf who walks upright, on its hind legs. Although dogman has not been known to transform from one species to another, it has been .jpg)
mislabed as a werewolf in the past in newspaper and online articles, but we know better than to make that same mistake here. The TV series Monsterquest, returning next season, aired an investigation in which the witnesses agreed to take lie detector tests, and according to the episode summary, "the polygraph administrator was hard pressed to find any indication that the witnesses weren't telling the truth." Translation-- they all passed with flying colors.
So, while Strickler admits that being too busy is never a bad problem, it has left him scratching his head in wonderment as to why the dogman story is resurfacing suddenly, and why there is so much public interest over it. When I reached him last night, he was working on tomorrow's story, and while he normally doesn't spill the beans ahead of time, I was able to get this much of him.
"I got a call from a guy who's daughter has been seeing apparitions all her life, but it wasn't until she started taking pictures with her cell phone that he finally believed her," Strickler told me. He went on to describe one of the spectres to me, and it did sound pretty creepy. I repeated the description to Strickler, just to make sure I got it down. "Images of a ghostly bodies hanging from the ceiling with one eye popping out?" I repeated, to which he replied "Noose.. with a noose too."
While I'm not sure if this particular ghost story will be popular enough to kick dogman out of its top position, all that's really important is that readers have something to pacify them when stopping by the site for their daily monster fix. And there's no shortage of archives either going back at least three years, so if we never see dogman again, I feel pretty confident we'll be hearing from Strickler for a long time coming, if record paranormal reports nationwide are an accurate yardstick.
If you want to read more about the Michigan dogman, our Grand Rapids new age examiner Pamela Grunda has some stories you might enjoy, so check out these links. You can also find past reports on my bio page, or simply become a subscriber to be alerted to new story postings. If you have a story you'd like to share with a paranormal edge, email me with the words "story suggestion" in the subject line and provide a brief description of the event or sighting in your email to seattle.beat@gmail.com.
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