The Turner Mystery Beast (Androscoggin Creature), Maine, 2006

For about 15 years, people around Turner, Maine, had talked about something in the woods. Glowing eyes. Chilling, monstrous cries. The stories spread through Litchfield, Sabattus, Greene, Lewiston, Auburn and Wales. Some blamed it for killing a Doberman in Wales in 2004 and a Rottweiler in Greene in 2005.

Early August 2006. Michelle O'Donnell lived on Route 4 in Turner, Androscoggin County. Near her yard, she saw an animal she could not place. "We locked eyes for a few seconds and then it took off." She called it a "hybrid mutant of something." The look stayed with her. So did the smell. "It was evil, evil-looking. And it had a horrible stench I will never forget."

Saturday 12 August. Neighbours found the body of a strange dark grey animal along the power lines off Route 4. They believed a car had struck it while it was chasing a cat across the street. Accounts differ on whose cat.

Mike O'Donnell studied the remains. Charcoal grey. Forty to 50 pounds. A bushy tail, short ears, an "extremely short snout" and "curled fangs hanging over the lips." To him it was "half-rodent, half-dog," "something out of a Stephen King story." Michelle photographed it and called the Sun Journal. On 16 August, Mark LaFlamme's story ran as "Mysterious Beast." The Associated Press took it national, then international.

The state game warden declined to inspect it. Officials said the time and fuel would cost more than it was worth. Animal Control Officer Wendell Strout was blunt. "It was a dog." Trapper Dana Johnson saw "a black coyote with abnormal features."

By Tuesday, vultures had eaten most of it. Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman came from Portland to look. "The skull is gone. The haunches and all the internal organs, too. The only fleshy parts left are the paws. It's got some extra claws that I find interesting. They're sticking up like the horns of a devil." At first he raised the idea of a wolf-dog hybrid. The long, unworn dew claws changed his mind. A feral chow or chow mix, he decided, then likely an Akita or Akita cross. Still, Coleman kept the older reports apart. "I think there is a mystery beast out there in the woods around Turner."

The Sun Journal paid for DNA tests. Dr. Irv Kornfield of the University of Maine found a male dog, with a dog mother and probably a dog father. "Not surprisingly, it has all the indicators to link it to being from canis, a dog." In Toronto, Dr. Yuri Melekhovets of HealthGene Corp. called it "100 percent dog," possibly with Eurasier ancestry.

Before the results, theories had run from coydog, hyena and fisher to chupacabra, werewolf and extraterrestrial. UPI floated a "wendigo." In May 2007, Doreen Madden of St. Petersburg, Florida, said it was her runaway chow, Woolfie. But Woolfie was female. The DNA showed a male. Benjamin Radford saw a textbook case of how cryptid sightings happen. A person meets an animal they do not recognise, and decides it is unknown.

On 5 December 2007, MonsterQuest put Turner at the centre of its episode "Mutant Canines." Cryptomundo ranked the case among its top stories of 2006. The carcass was a dog. The glowing eyes and the chilling cries, as Coleman saw it, were another matter.