The Eureka Werewolf
Eureka, California 1951.
A family had spent two weeks camping above the town of Eureka, near the edge of the Eel river. Their time in the area had been quiet and they had been fishing on the river. While they’d had poor luck catching fish, they were still enjoying the beauty and peace of the location.
The reporting witness, a girl, was ten years old at the time of the incident and was reportedly fascinated with the natural world. While the family camped in the area, the girl developed a habit of taking a walk before breakfast. There was a pretty meadow between one and two miles from the camp and the girl would walk through the area watching the mist rise off the grass.
Around ten o’clock one morning, the girl entered the meadow and started walking across it. She was headed for a small knoll located on the opposite side of the field. As she reached the foot of the knoll, she heard the distinct sound of someone walking nearby. She believed her little brother had followed her and was hiding close by, intending to jump out to try to scare her.
Thinking she would preempt his attempt, she called out, “All right, I know you’re there.”
To her surprise, it wasn’t her little brother who appeared.
The girl watched as a strange creature stepped out from behind the bushes and came into view. She froze in her tracks and looked at the thing. She described it as about 7 ½ to 8 feet tall standing on two legs. The creature was brown in color, but the covering didn’t look like normal fur, rather, it seemed more like a soft down. The being had small eyes set close together and the witness stated they had a ‘red look’ about them. The thing’s nose was very large and flat against its face. The mouth was large with ‘strange looking fangs.’
The creature was human in form with hands and feet of large size. As if the thing’s features weren’t unsettling enough, the witness reported the strangest aspect of the sighting—the creature was wearing clothes. Or at least, the remnants of clothes. The garments were tattered and torn and barely covered the thing, but they were there, nonetheless.
As the girl stood there, the beast made a terrible growling sound that terrified her. At the sound, she ran from the scene as quickly as she could. She reached her family’s camp winded and frightened. In fact, the witness reports that she remained scared the rest of the time they were at the location.
Betty Allen, journalist for The Times of Eureka collected the report and it was logged into the database of cryptid researcher Bobbie Short.
Obviously, the description of the creature sounds similar to the classic werewolf of popular films, complete with tattered clothing as if it had transformed from normal human form into the strange bipedal creature the witness reported.
Was the sighting merely the figment of a young girl’s imagination or something much, much stranger? Like many puzzling cryptid cases, we may never have the answer.
No follow up reports of the creature surfaced but in recent years the account has become part of the growing database of “dogman” sightings that have been collected from around the country.