Michigan Dogman | The Prank That Became a Legend

The Michigan Dogman has claw marks, a police report, grainy film footage, and decades of eyewitness accounts. It also has a birth certificate: April 1, 1987. This week Shane brings the gang a mystery about how legends get made, and a radio prank that refused to stay a joke.

Steve Cook, a DJ and production man at WTCM in Traverse City, needed an April Fools bit. So he wrote "The Legend, " a spoken-word song over a cheap keyboard, credited to a singer who did not exist named Bob Farley. Morning host Jack O'Malley slipped it into rotation with no setup and no warning. Within an hour, the phone lines lit up. Listeners were not calling to laugh. They were calling to report their own encounters, including one man who swore he had seen the creature back in 1937 while fishing the Muskegon River and had never told a soul. Cook later admitted to the Detroit Free Press that he made the whole thing up from his own imagination. It did not matter. "The Legend" became the station's most requested song within a month, and Cook eventually cataloged more than one hundred reports, selling the song on cassette and donating the money to animal shelters.

The detail Shane could not shake: the song invented its own history. It placed the first sighting in 1887, exactly one hundred years before it aired, with eleven lumberjacks at a Wexford County logging camp, and it set a pattern of sightings in years ending in seven. Yet no newspaper, diary, or logging camp record from before 1987 describing a Michigan dog man has ever surfaced. Not from believers, not from skeptics, not from anyone.

The gang investigates what grew around the prank: Robert Fortney's black dog with blue eyes near Paris, Michigan, a story whose date drifts between 1937 and 1938 depending on the telling; the July 1987 cabin near Luther, Michigan, clawed up badly enough that DNR officers and the county sheriff investigated and Paul Harvey carried the story nationally; and the infamous Gable Film, the shaky footage that anchored MonsterQuest's series finale until a man named Mike confessed on camera, ghillie suit, coat-hanger ears, and all.

So, case closed? Not quite. Josh wants to know what separates a dogman from a werewolf, and Shane plays devil's advocate: maybe a Dogman really is out there, and the timing is one strange coincidence. Black dog legends reach back through Scottish and Irish lore, and truckers still trade their own versions. Why does this one keep finding believers?

Also in the bunker: a snack box from Thailand turns chaotic the moment the gang meets durian, a fruit so foul that some hotels in Thailand ban it outright. Zoinks. Kim tastes it anyway, and the bunker may never smell the same.

What you'll hear in this episode:

How a 1987 WTCM radio prank invented the Michigan Dogman

The Luther cabin attack that made the papers and a police report

The Gable Film hoax and the on-camera confession that ended it

A durian wafer taste test that nearly cleared the bunker

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