The St. Coletta Night Watchman and the Creature on the Burial Mound

Jefferson, Wisconsin. On the eastern edge of town stood St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children, founded in 1904 by the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi. Its grounds were set among ancient mounds. Darren Naish, citing Margo DeMello, calls the mound "Hopewell." Regional sources describe the Jefferson County mounds as Late Woodland effigy mounds from about AD 650 to 1200.

In 1936 the night watchman was Mark Schackelman. He was in his thirties. He had been a heavyweight boxer. He was a devout Catholic.

Around midnight, on patrol, he saw something on one of the mounds. By one account it first looked like a wolf on all fours, kneeling and digging into the mussed earth. Then it rose. It was a shaggy, dog-faced creature with a muscular human torso, over six feet tall and covered in thick, dark hair. It fled into nearby woods, upright on two legs.

The next morning he found the earth torn by the rake of claws. The marks looked like those of a three-fingered creature.

He came back. It was there again, hunched over, still digging. He shone his flashlight on it. It suddenly stood upright and looked straight at him. Then came the sound. A three-syllable growl, low and mean, something between human speech and animal growl. It sounded like "gadarrah." The air smelled of rotting meat. Schackelman prayed. Aloud. The creature turned and walked away. "I never saw that thing again or anything even like it," he is quoted as saying.

He told his wife and made her promise to keep it secret. In 1958 he told his son, Joe, who drew the creature while his father corrected him again and again. The sketch shows pointed ears, a row of prominent fangs and hair hanging like dark lichen. Accounts of the hands disagree. In some, two fingers seemed shrunken, so it appeared to have only three.

Mark Schackelman died in the mid-1970s. On December 29, 1991, Linda Godfrey's first article on the Beast of Bray Road ran in The Week. Joe saw her sketch on television and called her. On February 19, 1992, he published the whole account. Godfrey later reproduced his drawing in The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin's Werewolf.

There was one witness, with no photographs, casts or hair. The story surfaced about 56 years later, second hand, after the Bray Road reports were already news. Naish has suggested a black bear, noting that underweight or mangy bears can look strange and that Joe's drawing shows strongly flexed wrists and heel-down feet. He also sees the early dogman accounts as a cultural snowball. Godfrey, for her part, linked "Gadarrah" to Gadara, where in Matthew 8 Jesus casts demons out of two men.

Today St. Coletta is often named as the first chapter of the Bray Road story around Elkhorn. Loren Coleman wrote about it in Fortean Times in 1998. It remains one man's memory, carried by his family for more than half a century.