The Luther "Dogman" cabin attack

April 1, 1987. Traverse City, Michigan. On WTCM-FM, DJ Steve Cook and his colleague Jack O'Malley put a new song on the air. It was called "The Legend." It was an April Fools' prank.

"I made it up completely from my own imagination as an April Fools' prank for the radio and stumbled my way to a legend that goes back all the way to Native American times," Cook said later. It became the station's most requested song. The Michigan Dogman had been born.

Mid July 1987. Near Luther, a small village in Lake County, south of Cadillac, something came to a home. The front door screen was ripped apart. Molding was torn from the door and one window, and the door frame was chewed. The resident first believed a bear had made the marks, though accounts still disagree on whether the place was a vacant cabin or a lived-in home.

Lake County Sheriff's Deputy Jeff Chamberlain answered the call, which went down as malicious destruction of property. Twenty years later, he still remembered. "I was there. I actually still have a piece of the wood from the house. There was slobbering across the windows, and the doors and the frame were all chewed up."

Then the detail that stayed with him. "The slobbers were six and one-half to seven feet tall across the back of the window. You could see little bits of hair from where the mouth was." Nobody saw the animal.

Conservation officers from the Michigan DNR came out too. Chuck Turk and Ron McCarty found paw prints nearby and dog bite marks on the molding. Turk had seen damage like this before, from upset dogs left in cars or houses. "What it appeared to me to be was they put the dog outside and the dog wanted to get into the house," he said. McCarty agreed that it was the family dog.

On July 16, 1987, the Cadillac Evening News reported the work of a "mystery dog," and The Grand Rapids Press followed the next day. Other papers reached for the song. The Jackson Citizen Patriot ran the headline "Attack on cabin kindling fears of the dogman." In Luther, Joyce's Tavern bartender Ann Cavender said, "Some people think maybe it's true. You have a lot of people who are superstitious, and your mind can work strange ways on you."

The officials had their answer, but Chamberlain was not so sure. "I believe in UFOs so I guess I must believe in this," he said in 2007. He still tells the story to visitors. Sceptics note that the drool height rests on one officer's memory, two decades on. The Dogman link came from the press and the song's popularity, not from the investigators.

Cook, the man who invented the creature, calls himself "tremendously skeptical… but I do believe people who think they saw something really did see something." His own summary of Luther is simple. "The only footprints they could find were of a dog. The sheriff's deputy believes to this day that it was the Dogman."

In 1997, Cook re-recorded "The Legend" and added verses after hearing about an unknown canid breaking into a cabin in Luther. The legend kept growing. It reached MonsterQuest, Monsters and Mysteries in America, Rich Brauer's 2011 film Dogman, and Linda S. Godfrey's The Beast of Bray Road. In 2024, Discovery's Expedition X filmed in Luther itself. A chewed door frame is still often described as the only physical evidence the Dogman legend has.