The following is an excerpt from Richard Estep’s latest book , published March 10, 2026, by Visible Ink Press. Available in hardcover, paperback, and eBook. 304 pages, $22.95 (paperback). Available where books are sold, or online at: Amazon, Amazon.ca, Barnes and Noble, and Books-a-Million.
HUNTING HODAG
On the morning of September 26, 1918, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Deming “Dick” Bronson shrugged off wounds that had just been inflicted by a detonating hand grenade and led his men in storming a fortified German position. Later that afternoon, he took a bullet in his left arm. Bronson refused to let this wound stop him either. The next day he led another assault on a machine gun nest. For this exceptional heroism, and his other gallant actions during World War I, Dick Bronson was awarded the Medal of Honor.
Yet he’s still not the most famous name associated with Rhinelander, Wisconsin. That title falls to the Hodag, arguably the state of Wisconsin’s most famous exotic beast.
In 1893, the town of Rhinelander was both smaller and far more rural than it is today. It was home to many lumberjacks, or as they were more commonly referred to in the 19th century, loggers. Spending countless hours in the deep, dark woods, loggers loved to tell stories — particularly monster stories. One popular creature was the Hodag, which was basically the zombified, reanimated remains of a dead ox. According to an October 22, 1893, newspaper article printed in the Leader Telegram of Eau Claire, Wisconsin,
it is generally well understood among all kinds of lumber jacks that when an ox is butchered or accidentally killed in the woods that its immortal constitution turns into a hodag, and the hodag thus formed assumes the same color as the respective ox that he came out of, and he roams about the country formerly occupied by the ox in his summer outings.
The article goes on to state that the Hodag is the most feared of all animals because it is essentially superpowered, possessing “the strength of the ox, the ferocity of a bear, the cunning of the fox, and the sagacity of a Merrill lumberman.” A formidable adversary indeed, although the pen-and-ink drawing that accompanies these words looks more like a startled kangaroo with horns than it does a terrifying monster. The image was intended to represent a Hodag encounter that took place the day before the newspaper went to press, in which the beast was found lying atop a log in the midst of a torrential thunderstorm.
More remarkable still, the Hodag actually spoke, saying that its name was Berry and claiming to have once been the property of a lumber enterprise based in Rhinelander. The company had branded its initials, B.B. (short for Browns Brothers), into the Hodag’s horns. The beast was described as having eyes that were “blood red with yellow eyeballs.”
Once the newspaper went into circulation, every wannabe hunter for miles headed out into the woods, determined to capture or kill one at any cost. On October 28, a Rhinelander-based newspaper named The New North reported in an article titled “Capture of a Hodag” that the hunting parties were armed with not just rifles but also squirt guns filled with toxic water, which were presumably intended to poison the Hodag into submission.
A group of hunters cornered the 185-pound Hodag in a swamp. Hunting dogs were unleashed, which proved to be a mistake; the horn-headed, hook-tailed Hodag reduced them to mincemeat. Taking aim, the hunters let loose with a fusillade of small arms fire, shooting again and again until “their guns got too hot to longer hold in their hands.” Their firearms now all but useless, the hunters switched to a combination of knives and dynamite, then followed up by attempting to set the beast on fire.
The Hodag fought back, tearing into the tree limbs and trunks as if they were matchwood. It belched out clouds of black, tarry smoke. Ultimately, the hunters won, burning the cornered Hodag to death and putting its corpse on public display.
The genesis of the Hodag stories can be found with a trapper named Eugene Shepard, who went public with what he said was a Hodag that he had managed to capture in the wild. Scores of credulous customers paid good money to see the creature. The creature was actually carved from wood and covered in an animal pelt. Showing a streak of ingenuity that would have made the Disney Imagineers proud, Shepard even ran wires to the dummy Hodag’s limbs in order to make the legs move when they were pulled. It was the closest thing to animatronics in its day.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the nature of the rather tall story, no convincing photograph exists of the purported Hodag. (A staged picture of a mob of hunters standing around a replica Hodag, which in turn looked as if was about to pounce on a defenseless child, doesn’t count.)
Shepard finally came clean about the hoax once his claims drew widespread attention and inevitable closer scrutiny. Yet belief in the beast remained widespread, particularly in the more rural parts of Wisconsin, and its existence was treated as a matter of fact by many Wisconsinites. Two months after the epic showdown, the December 17 edition of the Leader Telegram blithely announced that an Eau Claire barber named John Hurt had left town and ventured out into the woods “to trap hodags.” One can only imagine what we would make of such a story today: “Man quits cutting hair in order to go monster hunting.”
In 1894, newspapers reported that a trapper named Mike Ryan lost an ox when it fell into a watering hole and was unable to extricate itself before it drowned. Would the creature remain dead, the paper wondered, or would it return in the form of a fearsome Hodag?
The Hodag legend shares commonalities with much older oral stories told by the indigenous people of Wisconsin, fireside tales of fierce beasts emerging from the water to wreak havoc before returning to the depths once more. It is likely that the trappers who invented the Hodag appropriated elements of those stories and simply added their own spin.
Today the Hodag is more popular than ever. There is an annual Hodag music festival and a country festival. In popular culture, it has made appearances in the worlds of Harry Potter and Scooby Doo. Sports teams have been named after it. It is also a boon to tourism, bringing an influx of Hodag enthusiasts into Rhinelander each year . . . all with their eyes peeled, on the lookout for Wisconsin’s most popular (and elusive) fantastic beast.