Loading this page…
Return homePlease wait while the next page arrives.
Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesThe Hodag haunts northwoods lumber tales as a tree-uprooting beast or an ox reborn from ashes, with horns, claws and an appetite for trouble.
Also recorded as Rhinelander Hodag
The pit is ready, the ox is on the trail, and the man leading it has been chosen for his speed. Behind them comes the Hodag, tearing through trees and underbrush. In Lake Shore Kearney’s tale, the trap will work only if the bait can get out of its way. [2]
Read the manuscriptThe Hodag’s name holds together creatures that would scarcely recognize one another. William T. Cox’s 1910 Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods favours a slow, intelligent animal roughly the size of a rhinoceros. Lake Shore Kearney’s 1928 The Hodag and Other Tales of the Logging Camps gives it a violent beginning, a chase and a business prospect. Both writers speak with assurance. Neither allows another storyteller’s anatomy to get in the way of a good account. [1][2]
Cox places the competing descriptions among Wisconsin and Minnesota woodsmen. Kearney begins farther inside their working day: an ox drags great logs through underbrush and pine needles towards a stream. Its drivers encourage it with a long goad and a supply of curses in several languages. Kearney has little doubt which party deserves sympathy. When he compares the intelligence of ox and driver, the animal comes out ahead. The setting supplies more than an atmospheric forest. Hauling, swearing, brush fires and the strength needed to move a tree all find their way into the creature’s life. [1][2]
Kearney’s origin begins when an overworked ox dies. The woodsmen build a brush fire around its body, intending to burn away all the profanity it has absorbed. That takes seven years. They keep adding fuel as the blaze rises and dwindles. At the end of the seventh year, the ashes yield something the drivers did not have to contend with while the animal was alive: the Hodag. The patience with which the ox endured its working life has not survived the fire. [2]
One twilight, the story’s Eugene Shepherd follows a familiar forest trail and notices a terrible smell. Through the foliage he sees the green-eyed creature. Kearney presents him as a formidable student of woodland life, yet this animal leaves him trembling and unable to speak. When he recovers, he goes to the nearby village and the tent of the Ancient Order of the Reveeting Society. Behind its closed flap he tells men whose courage, the narrator assures us, is beyond question. They would throw aside gun and knife before wrestling a bear, rather than take an unfair advantage. [2]
While the capture is being planned, Shepherd considers the beast’s ancestry. He proposes a link between an ichthyosaurus and a creature he calls the mylodoan. His ichthyosaurus is a hundred feet long and twenty feet high, with an adjustable eye and a diet of blue mud. It can eat a hillside in a week. The mylodoan supplies another useful ancestral habit: pulling down trees to eat their foliage. This pedigree makes the new forest animal sound almost modest. An alleged parchment from King Tut’s sarcophagus lends further authority. Fortunately, a reporter from the local New North can translate its supposedly ancient word: it means Hodag. The explanation proceeds with the same confidence as the capture preparations, carrying the reader from northwoods brush to Egyptian royalty without pausing for an objection. [2]
The plan itself is impressively large. Men dig a pit fifty feet across and thirty feet deep, several miles from the place of discovery. Poles span its opening; branches and grass hide them. Shepherd then selects a runner celebrated for marathon feats and ski jumping. Kearney declines to give his name, explaining that the hero’s modesty equals his bravery. Since the Hodag prefers live beef, another ox is brought forward. Its task is to attract the monster and keep moving until the trap lies between them.
Kearney’s Hodag has a back like a dinosaur’s and a long tail ending in a spear point. Spines stand along its back; short, massive legs carry thick curved claws. Two horns rise from a shaggy forehead, and bright teeth project from its mouth. Its green eyes glow, its nostrils appear fiery, and its breath announces it at a distance. Kearney gives the heavy body startling speed. Even its tail makes the ground shake. This is the beast a runner must lead towards a hole without being overtaken. [2]
Cox’s quieter Hodag faces a different practical problem: it can see only upwards. A large bony growth, shaped like a spade, rises from its nose in front of its eyes. It therefore moves slowly through the spruce woods, searching overhead for the animal it can catch. A porcupine curled in the branches appears to be safely out of reach. The Hodag begins blinking, licking its lips and digging around the roots. [1]
It does not climb. It brings down the entire tree. The fall knocks the breath out of the porcupine, and the Hodag straddles the trunk, crushes its prey with its front feet and swallows it headfirst. Cox’s explanation has the tidy sequence of a naturalist describing a feeding habit: an unusual organ, a restricted field of vision, a particular diet and a successful method of obtaining it. The creature’s nose is a piece of forestry equipment attached to an animal that has no intention of going hungry. [1]
Cox’s Hodag also prepares its own winter coat. Its bare skin is patterned in mottles, stripes and checks resembling the heavy Mackinaw clothing worn in the woods. When autumn comes, it strips bark from spruce or pine, covers itself in sticky pitch and finds a patch of hardwood forest thick with fallen leaves. Rolling there builds a warm covering around its body. The shift between trees matters: one supplies the adhesive, another the leaves. Winter clothing is assembled from the forest rather than grown as fur. [1]
Henry H. Tryon’s 1939 Fearsome Critters introduces another unhappy Hodag. It knows how ugly it is and often weeps. The narrator says he once possessed crystallized tears; a woman took them for amber and had them made into a necklace. A spilled Tom Collins dissolved the treasure because it contained lemon. The same weakness makes citrus a defence against the creature. Its small front teeth, Tryon adds, were once used for umbrella handles. Even an animal equipped with horns, claws and a hooked tail can furnish something to carry politely in the rain. Tryon gives this portrait a mock scientific name, Deformis corniger lacrimans, and a narrator whose rare specimen has conveniently ceased to exist. [3]
The ox survives Kearney’s chase, and that small kindness changes the ending. The first animal’s years of work lead to fire and a monster; the second finishes its dangerous assignment with food and rest. The men receive credit for courage, but the narration also remembers the creature they used as bait. The story’s outrage begins with what people demand of a working animal. Its reward is suitably plain: after all the roars, measurements and learned speculation, someone finally feeds the ox. [2]
The Wisconsin Historical Society traces Eugene Shepard’s illustrated newspaper claim to 1893. For the 1896 Oneida County fair, he and Luke Kearney made an animal from carved wood, hide and horns. Curtains and darkness limited the view; hidden strings produced movement, while frightening noises completed the encounter. The Society also identifies printed uses of the name before Shepard’s performance. His contribution was to give an existing forest monster a body that visitors could pay to approach. [4]
Hodag Press’s local history places the exhibition within a larger effort to promote Rhinelander as its supply of lumber declined. The fair needed attractions; the town wanted visitors and new forms of business. In that account, the monster’s attention value was part of its purpose. The essay describes a dim tent where paying spectators watched movement and heard growls at a safe distance. Knowledge of the construction did not end the attraction. People still wanted to see the ingenuity that had fooled others. A supposed discovery could become a shared pleasure in the town’s performance. By the 1920s, a postcard of the supposed capture was circulating. The monster could travel farther on paper than the constructed animal ever needed to move inside its tent. [5]
Shepard admitted the deception before 1900, according to the Historical Society, yet visitors continued coming. Rhinelander adopted the Hodag as a mascot. The exhibit’s material construction explains the capture claim; it does not give us the first telling of every forest version. The public animal outlasted its claim to secrecy. [4]
Cox, Kearney and Tryon supply the three authored portraits. The Wisconsin Historical Society follows the constructed exhibit. Hodag Press offers a local interpretation of its promotional purpose. Kearney’s complete opening chapter ends with the offer of eggs. [1][2][3][4][5]
William T. Cox · Judd & Detweiler / Lumberwoods transcription · 1910 · English
The Hodag (Nasobatilus hystrivoratus)
Checked 2026-10-10
Luke Sylvester “Lake Shore” Kearney · Democrat Printing Company / Lumberwoods transcription · 1928 · English
Complete opening chapter The Hodag, including Mike Essex egg-shipment ending
Checked 2026-10-11
Henry H. Tryon · Idlewild Press / Lumberwoods transcription · 1939 · English
The Hodag (Deformis corniger lacrimans)
Checked 2026-10-10
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-11. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑The runner leads the ox through the trees. When the Hodag sees them, its growl shakes leaves and limbs from the forest. The frightened ox is driven along the marked trail, with the creature crashing after it through heavy undergrowth and tearing gashes in the earth. The distance closes from a hundred yards to forty, then twenty. Its jaws snap within hearing. At the last moment the leader guides the ox around the opening. The Hodag’s momentum carries it straight through the covering and into the pit. [2]
Its roar travels for miles as it struggles to escape. The men lead the runner away, and the exhausted ox gets a good bed and plenty to eat. The society returns to its private tent to consult Arthur Koenitzer, the member credited with knowing how to exhibit the captive safely. Kearney does not leave the reader with a sealed-off adventure. Anyone who wants eggs can contact Mike Essex of Siberia, Wisconsin. His hillside establishment has the necessary equipment: a powerful derrick to lift them. The capture has opened a trade. [2]
Wisconsin Historical Society education team · Wisconsin Historical Society
Educational narrative PDF p.2; companion institutional history CS2321
The suggested Indigenous connection is not tied here to a specific community’s account.
Checked 2026-10-10
Hodag Press editorial team; page has no individual byline · Hodag Press
Sections fabrication, fair and civic promotion
Earlier newspaper passages are encountered through this local history.
Checked 2026-10-10