Man says he saw Beast of Bray Road in Lyons

Area resident claims he saw the creature twice in one month

By Mike Ramczyk

Correspondent

With coronavirus affecting thousands, people afraid to leave the house and racial tensions running high in the United States, stories about werewolves can provide quite the necessary distraction.

But werewolves?

Seriously?

Around here, the Beast of Bray Road is a famous legend, known for its location on Bray Road, which starts along Highway 11 east of Elkhorn and winds west to Highway NN and I-43, just on the other side of Elkhorn Area High School.

There’s been a movie about this mythical beast, a 7-foot, hairy brown giant that has frightened locals who have claimed they saw it.

One of these locals is Lake Geneva resident Ron Rice.

Every once in awhile, Rice travels to the Town of Lyons for work, where he drops off fertilizer at a farm on Highway 36 just west of Church Road.

It’s a Burlington address, and there is a circle, gravel driveway where Rice loads up a truck with fertilizer. There are “deep woods,” according to Rice, about 150 feet away from the driveway.

Back in May, Rice was on a routine drop-off in broad daylight, sitting in his truck.

He looked into the distance, about 150 feet he thinks, and a figure caught his eye.

“This thing was huge, it was over 7-feet tall,” Rice said. “It was brown and hairy with coarse hair. It walked out and picked something up, then turned its back toward me and went back into the woods.”

Rice says the barn has a “Ye Olde Motel” sign painted on it.

When asked if he swears on his dead relatives’ lives that he saw a werewolf in real life, Rice didn’t budge.

“I guess he moved from Bray Road to Lyons,” Rice said. “It didn’t bother me at all. I was like, ‘Wow, now I know where he’s staying.’”

A second sighting

Two weeks later, Rice said, he saw the beast again, and again it walked out of the woods and quickly returned.

With a brother that lives on Bowers Road, which is near Bray Road, Rice has heard plenty of stories about the beast.

He kind of believed them, he said, but now that he’s actually seen the beast, which is bigger and hairier than he could’ve imagined, Rice will never doubt the story of the Beast of Bray Road again.

But Rice doesn’t want people to find out for themselves.

“Why would I want to do that?” he said. “I’ll leave that up to the media. We need to get a search party.”

“Find it!”

According to Wikipedia, the beast is a werewolf-like creature, and the creature was first reported in 1936.

The rash of claimed sightings in the late 1980s and early 1990s prompted a local newspaper, the Walworth County Week, to assign reporter Linda Godfrey to cover the story.

Godfrey was initially skeptical, but later became convinced of the sincerity of the witnesses. Her series of articles later became a book titled “The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf.”

The beast has been described as something resembling “Big Foot,” and it weighs anywhere from 400 to 700 pounds.

On all fours, the beast is 4 feet tall, and standing on two legs, it is as much as 7 feet, according to Godfrey’s book.

Southern Lakes Newspapers, the company that publishes this newspaper, last reported on a sighting of the beast in February 2018.

Danny Morgan reported seeing the beast about 10 p.m. Jan. 27 of that year in the Town of Spring Prairie while driving from Lake Geneva to his home in Menomonee Falls. Morgan also provided a blurry cell phone photo of the beast as it approached the road from the ditch line.