The Hodag is the most famous fake monster in American history, and one of the most loved. In 1893 a Rhinelander, Wisconsin, timber cruiser and practical joker named Eugene Shepard announced that he and a group of lumbermen had killed a ferocious beast in the Northwoods. Three years later he “captured” a live one and put it on show. It was a wooden model worked by wires, with his sons hidden inside as puppeteers. The hoax collapsed when scientists from the Smithsonian said they were coming to look, but the Hodag never went away. Today it is Rhinelander’s official symbol, its high school mascot and the namesake of a long-running country music festival.[1][2][3]
| Location | Rhinelander, Oneida County, northern Wisconsin |
|---|---|
| Creator | Eugene S. Shepard (1854–1923), surveyor, timber cruiser and humorist |
| First announced | October 1893, in a Rhinelander newspaper, with a staged photograph |
| “Captured” | 1896; exhibited at the first Oneida County Fair |
| What it really was | A carved wooden model with wires, operated by Shepard’s sons |
| Status | A confirmed hoax and a beloved civic mascot |
| Belongs to | The “fearsome critters” of American lumber-camp humor |
Eugene Shepard, the man behind the monster
Eugene Simeon Shepard was born in Green Bay in 1854, grew up around New London, and moved to Rhinelander in 1885. He worked as a surveyor and timber cruiser, walking the forests to estimate standing timber for lumber companies, and he drew a plat book for Oneida and Vilas counties. He also had a well-earned reputation as a humorist and practical joker. He retold Paul Bunyan stories, and his comic sketches of the logging legend circulated widely. Later in life he ran a resort near Rhinelander. The Wisconsin Historical Society, which holds his papers, credits his Hodag hoax with helping turn Oneida County into a tourist destination.[2][4]
The first Hodag, 1893
In October 1893 Shepard published a sensational account in Rhinelander’s newspaper. He and a group of workers, he said, had come across a hodag in the forest: a bear-sized beast with fangs, horns, and spikes down its back, which fed on white bulldogs. Rifles had failed to stop it, and poisoned water had not worked either. In the end the men blew it up with dynamite. Conveniently, they had photographed it alive first, and the picture ran with the article.[1][5]
That photograph, a staged scene of armed men surrounding the creature, survives in the collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society. Shepard himself stands at the far right, holding a stick. To modern eyes it is plainly a set-up, but in the 1890s it gave the story a wonderful air of authority.[2]
What the Hodag looked like
Shepard’s 1893 reports gave the Hodag a gloriously mixed-up anatomy: “the head of a frog,” “the grinning face of a giant elephant,” thick short legs with huge claws, a back like a dinosaur’s lined with thick, curved spines, bull’s horns, and a long tail tipped with spears. Later local lore fixed its size at about 30 inches tall and 7 feet long. Its diet of white bulldogs was part of the joke, and the story went that the hodag died out when white bulldogs became scarce in the area.[1][8]
Every detail was designed to be ridiculous to anyone in on the joke and just plausible enough to an outsider reading about the remote Northwoods. That double audience, locals who knew and visitors who wondered, is what kept the hoax going.
The live Hodag, 1896
Three years later Shepard announced an even better catch. According to a second newspaper story, he and his companions had trapped a hodag in its den by blocking it with stones and then subdued it with chloroform on the end of a long pole. The creature was to be shown at the first Oneida County Fair, an event meant to promote Rhinelander as a place for business and farming.[1][5]
The exhibit was a masterpiece of small-town showmanship. The Hodag was kept in a dimly lit shed attached to Shepard’s house, and visitors could see it only through a knot-hole. It was a large model carved from wood by Shepard’s friend Luke Kearney, fitted with fine wires so it could move. Shepard’s sons, Claude and Layton, worked the wires from hiding. When a boy prodded the beast with a stick, a hidden dog supplied the growl, and old hides from the local tannery provided a convincing smell. Thousands of people came to look.[1][5]
The Smithsonian calls Shepard’s bluff
The joke ended when word arrived that scientists from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington planned to come and examine the animal. Shepard confessed that the Hodag was a hoax. Remarkably, the confession did not end the story; if anything, the Hodag became more popular as “the beast that hoodwinked the nation.” Shepard’s own reputation suffered more. According to Karl Shuker’s history of the hoax, his pranks made him widely disliked locally, and when he died in March 1923 he was estranged from much of his family and many former friends. His reputation has since been largely rehabilitated by the town that now celebrates his creation.[3][5]
Kearney’s book and the “fearsome critters”
In 1928 Luke Kearney, the man who had carved the Hodag, published The Hodag and Other Tales of the Logging Camps. The book added a mock natural history, including the claim that hodags arose from the spirits of mistreated oxen, an idea drawn from lumber-camp humor.[1]
Kearney’s book is the source of many of the Hodag’s most absurd “facts.” A hodag, he explained, rose from the ashes of a cremated ox that had been cursed at by its teamsters all its working life, the embodiment of all that abuse, though only after a waiting period of seven years. Shepard, he said, had classified it as the missing link between the ichthyosaur and the giant ground sloth Mylodon, and had learned its original name, the “Selblatkey,” on a visit to King Tutankhamun’s tomb, a joke that only works because Tut’s tomb had been opened just a few years before the book appeared.[1]
The Hodag fits a whole tradition of American “fearsome critters,” the joke animals that loggers invented to tease newcomers and pass long winter nights. William T. Cox collected many of them in Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (1910), and Henry Tryon followed with Fearsome Critters (1939). They include the lopsided sidehill gouger, which has legs shorter on one side so it can only walk around hills one way; the hidebehind, which is always behind you; and the squonk, which dissolves into tears when caught. The Hodag is the best known of them because, unlike the others, someone actually built one.[1][6]
Rhinelander’s mascot
- Official symbol. Rhinelander adopted the Hodag as its city symbol. Local businesses, events and teams use the name, and more than a dozen Hodag sculptures stand around the area.[8][1]
- The Rhinelander Hodags. Rhinelander High School’s sports teams are the Hodags, one of the most distinctive mascots in American high school sport.[3]
- The statue. A large fiberglass Hodag by a local artist stands on the lawn of the Rhinelander Area Chamber of Commerce visitor center on West Kemp Street. It is spotlit at night, and visitors are asked not to climb on it.[7]
- Hodag Country Festival. Held near Rhinelander every July since 1978, it has hosted country stars including Garth Brooks and Toby Keith.[3]
- Famous fans. In 1959 Rhinelander’s community leaders gave a small Hodag to Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife. Kennedy wrote back calling it “a very provocative conversation piece.”[5][8]
- Wider fame. The Hodag appears in Paul Bunyan stories and even in J. K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.[3]
Why the Hodag matters
The Hodag sits a little oddly in an index of cryptids, because there was never any question of a real animal. That is exactly what makes it useful. It shows, in a fully documented case, how a hoax works: a sensational newspaper story, a staged photograph, a dramatic “capture,” a carefully controlled viewing, and a confession only when experts threaten to look closely. Many later monster stories have followed parts of the same pattern, from the leopard-skin skull of the Beast of Bodmin Moor to the papier-mâché carcass of the Altamaha-ha.
It also shows how a community can make a monster its own. Rhinelander does not pretend the Hodag is real. It celebrates it as a joke the whole town is in on, and as a link to the logging camps where the region’s history began. For another invented creature turned local mascot, see the Snallygaster.
References
- “Hodag,” Wikipedia.
- “Shepard, Eugene S. 1854–1923,” Wisconsin Historical Society; and “Hodag” image record, Wisconsin Historical Society, citing the Rhinelander New North (1923).
- Kristine Hansen, “What Is a Hodag?” Milwaukee Magazine (29 June 2017); Sophie Mullen, “The Myth of the Hodag in Rhinelander,” Wisconsin 101, University of Wisconsin–Madison (May 2023).
- Eugene Simeon Shepard Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society Archives.
- Karl Shuker, “The Hideous Hodag – History of a Hoax,” ShukerNature (20 January 2024).
- William T. Cox, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, with a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts (Washington, DC: Judd & Detweiler, 1910); Henry H. Tryon, Fearsome Critters (Cornwall, NY: Idlewild Press, 1939).
- “World’s Largest Hodag Statue,” Travel Wisconsin.
- “The Hodag,” Atlas Obscura.
Correction note (October 2026): This entry was rewritten from historical sources. An earlier version described the Hodag’s appearance as though it were a reported animal and repeated details of the legend without sources. It now explains the documented history of the hoax. The illustration above is an artistic impression.