>> PAYTON: Do you ever do that thing?

You know the one I'm talking about, where you are hanging out with some buddies and telling stories and maybe you just elaborate a little bit too much and embellish a few details.

And before you know it, people are traveling from around the world to see a creature you entirely made up, and it's got a legacy that's lasted for more than a century.

Yeah, me neither.

♪ Hello and welcome to "Flyover Culture," your guided tour of pop culture around the Midwest.

I'm Payton Whaley, and I'm not in Indiana right now.

In fact, I'm actually nine hours north in Rhinelander, Wisconsin.

It feels good to get out, and even better because I am here to befriend the lovable scamp behind me.

Say hello to the hodag.

♪ >> Well, a hodag is a lizard-like prehistoric creature that's covered in dark green or black shaggy fur, about 7 feet long, 300 pounds.

It has white spikes along its back, oxen-like horns, tusks for teeth.

It has little bits and parts of different animals all kind of mixed into this strange monster, this -- this creature of the pine forest of northern Wisconsin.

>> PAYTON: Other than, well, the forests, where does a cryptid like the hodag come from?

A couple theories.

>> The Native American people of the Lake Superior Region have these legends and a spirit in particular called Mishipeshu or Mishipeshi, and it's a water panther spirit.

And up on Lake Superior, there's a rock formation just north Sault Ste.

Marie called the Agawa Rock pictograph, which has a great artistic representation of Mishipeshu.

You notice that hodags have a striking resemblance.

So we like to say they're cousins.

And then you have this other story that was developed in the bunkhouses of logging camps.

You know, these lumberjacks would spend all day working in the woods.

They'd get back to the bunkhouse.

There was no TV.

There was no radio.

So they got really good at storytelling, and it became an art form.

And part of their storytelling was these tall tales, these lumberjack tall tales, like Paul Bunyan, Babe the Blue Ox, different animals that roam the forest.

And one of those animals was a hodag.

>> PAYTON: But it's not enough to have a monster.

You need to bring it into the real world.

And no one in Rhinelander knew how to do that like Gene Shepard.

>> There was a guy that lived here in the Rhinelander area in the 1890s, Eugene Simeon Shepard -- Gene Shepard -- and he was a renowned storyteller.

And he had spent a lot of time in logging camps.

He had spent a lot of time with the Anishinaabe people, or the Ojibwe Native American people here in the Northwoods, spoke their language fluently.

So I think as people often do, storytellers especially, they take bits and pieces and get inspiration from all these different stories over time.

And, you know, oftentimes they culminate into new legends and new stories.

1893 is when he wrote his first article for our local New North newspaper.

And he actually wrote it under a pen name, Snake Editor.

And he wrote this article about how him and a group of lumberjacks had gone out into the forest to try to capture a live hodag.

And the way that it's written gives you the idea that it had been being discussed.

You know, it had been a known creature in these lumber camp bunkhouses for a while.

And so they went out and they had this big fight with it.

It was like this fire-breathing creature.

It tore up a bunch of dogs.

Just this big ruckus fight with these lumberjacks, and they accidentally blew it up with dynamite.

So they brought the charred remains of the hodag back to town.

And then he had wrote another series of articles and kind of expounded upon the legends, the stories, added to that lore.

And then in 1896, the Oneida County Fair was starting its first fair here in Rhinelander in Oneida County, and they wanted a calling card for their fair that year.

They knew exactly who to go to.

And so he went out into the woods again, and this time he captured a live hodag and brought it back to town and put it on display then at the Oneida County Fair, and then proceeded to take it all over the state of Wisconsin and display it, you know, like this Phineas T. Barnum sideshow.

Before 1896, he got together with a friend of his, another logger named Luke Kearney, and he was a really good wood carver.

So they found a pine log, and they carved the best likeness of this creature that, you know, Gene had reported to have captured.

And they covered it in smelly ox hide, put ox horns on it.

You know, used a lot of real animal materials to create this, what appeared to be at the time, a real animal.

>> He wanted to put Rhinelander on the map.

He actually brought this log carving of this hodag to the Oneida County Fair, and he made it move with wires and strings and things and actually made people believing in it.

He would put on regular performances.

And he would say, you know, the beast is in a foul mood today.

He can't come out, you know.

>> The story was so believable, especially around the country where people didn't really know any better.

They read about this creature in the -- in the newspapers, and, you know, they had heard stories about it previously, but now a real hodag had been captured in the Northwoods of Wisconsin.

And for those folks around the country, from New York to California, that were reading about this, a lot of them believed it.

>> PAYTON: On one hand, all this attention was fantastic for Shepard.

And on the other, he may have girlbossed too close to the sun on that one.

>> At that time, you had other people hearing about it, like P.T.

Barnum in New York, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., and all of these kind of top minds of the era.

They heard about this and wanted to investigate more.

And that's when Gene had to, you know, kind of let the hodag out of the tent, if you will, and tell everybody that it was just a hoax.

>> PAYTON: Sure.

Just a hoax.

Or was it?

>> There's another side of the story that says that Gene did, in fact, capture a real live hodag, and because he became so, you know, enamored by this creature, he fell in love with this animal.

He wanted to protect it as an endangered species and released it back into the woods claiming it was all just a hoax to protect this animal.

>> PAYTON: Gene Shepard, animal activist icon.

Something about this story had that particular X factor that really brings a cryptid over the top for me, and that's merch.

When you are up in Rhinelander, you can't throw a cheese curd without hitting some bit of hodag iconography.

>> This town just has a lot of pride in our hodag.

And it's been our mascot since 1918.

We've been voted best mascot in America on a couple of different contests.

This town, they just love it.

They just take a lot of pride in it.

We are proud of our community.

We are proud of our heritage, and you can see that in the love for the hodag.

It's on the water tower.

It's on ambulances.

It's on fire trucks.

It's on buses.

It's everywhere.

>> PAYTON: Not just that.

Restaurants, the sidewalk, and, yes, that is a stained glass hodag in a local church.

And while it might be elusive, the hodag is no stranger to the spotlight.

Jill Kuczmarski has been writing the "Happy the Hodag" Children's Book Series since 2006.

And the Hodag Country Music Festival that brings in thousands every summer just celebrated its 45th year.

The hodag has found its way into the broader culture outside of Wisconsin as well.

>> The hodag made its way into a Scooby Doo episode.

♪ >> Like, meet the hodag.

Number one attraction of Gene Shepard's Traveling Cabinet of Curiosities.

>> The basis of the hodag's legends and lore, it attracts people.

It intrigues people to want to know more about this strange animal that lives in the Midwest in Wisconsin, in Rhinelander.

>> PAYTON: And that angry wizard lady took time from tweeting to put a hodag in one of her books.

So that's neat.

>> I get calls to our little museum here in the Northwoods every summer since that book came out from all over Europe, from different Asian countries.

All over the world where people have read about hodags and found that the museum or the chamber of commerce was a good place to get more hodag information.

And so it's really cool to see hodags, you know, venturing out into the world.

>> The hodag itself is 130 years old this year.

Recently, a couple years ago, we created the Hodag Heritage Festival, and it was to celebrate our history.

And it's amazing the people that come out and they say, I've got a book with the hodag on it.

Or I know a descendant of Gene Shepard, or you know -- and there's just so much pride in it.

>> PAYTON: Well, up in Rhinelander, there was one question that came up a few times, you going to check out the hodag store?

♪ >> I've been to my fair share of cryptid museums and gift shops, but I have never seen anything like this.

>> I started it because of the needs of my customers asking where in town do you get a hodag key chain, shirt, doodad, or something.

And after about six years, I decided to offer them a place to get some hodags.

>> PAYTON: Ben's been running the hodag store since 2018, and he tells me that by now, the store stocks around 250 different items.

That is a heck of a lot of hodag.

>> Living in Rhinelander, growing up, a lot of kids have a fascination with the hodag.

Later years, I would maybe thought this was maybe silly.

What is this green creature all over town?

And then later on, I guess when I learned the full meaning and the lore and legend of the hodag, it became quite something I'm proud of.

It's kind of like our Bigfoot, Loch Ness monster, chupacabra, hodag.

♪ >> PAYTON: But anyone can have a mascot!

Nobody's going off into the wilderness to hunt for the Indianapolis Colts or the Montgomery Biscuits.

Well, actually -- No, this is different.

Because as Kerry says, cryptids like these are essentially, well, folklore.

>> It's a really big part of North American and particularly Wisconsin and Midwest folklore.

And I've always enjoyed folklore, no matter where it comes from.

And I've always enjoyed logging and lumbering history, and those things are all intrinsically linked together.

Rhinelander has had this identity for 130 years that they've embraced, and it's just so much fun that you can't help but enjoy it, want to learn more about it.

And, you know, once you start learning the history and the legends and all this wonderful hodag heritage here in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, you know, then you want to share it with everybody you meet.

Gene was kind of a loved and hated resident of the community.

You know, nobody's single sided, and he had his many faults as well.

So there's a little bit of that love/hate relationship with Gene Shepard and the community by the time he died, but certainly his hodag legends, you know, took hold here, and he planted those seeds that have grown into this giant white pine tree of a legend.

>> PAYTON: It's that last bit that interests my next guest, namely, how does the story like the hodag take the traditions of folklore and twist it into, well, this.

>> I think the hodag is just such an amazing example of the weird journey that any piece of folklore goes through in the modern world.

As it moves from kind of the realm of kind of vernacular folklore to the realm of folk enactment and institutionalization.

>> PAYTON: Dr. Lowell Brower is on faculty at the University of Wisconsin Madison's Folklore Department.

He's also the first cryptid enthusiast I've had on the show with a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Stay in school, kids!

>> Grew up right down the road in southeastern Wisconsin, where I earned my folkloristic stripes hunting for the Beast of Bray Road, which I believe you and your audience might know something about.

I was deeply interested in other people's monsters and they were interested in mine.

>> PAYTON: Is the hodag, and by extension its American cryptid siblings, folklore?

Kind of.

The hodag, oral tradition of the Northwoods inspired by Native American legends and circulated by loggers is folklore.

The Hodag, capital T, capital H, on stickers and magnets, TM TM TM is akin to what Brower calls fakelore or the folkloresque.

>> Sometimes those weird things in the woods become the object of collective speculation, right?

That's often the wellspring of folklore.

So this, I think, is an example that early folklorists might have thought of as fakelore.

The phenomenon when people create something out of whole cloth and try to pass it off as genuine folklore.

The contemporary folklorists have developed a word, the folkloresque.

So when individuals or institutions, when business people or movie executives or authors or tricksters like Eugene Shepard realize the immense power of folklore, take inspiration from an existing folk tradition in order to attempt to imbue their own narratives, their own products or the experiences they're peddling with the aura of folklore, with the look, smell, feel and taste of folklore, despite the fact that this is an actual calculated invention.

It's not folklore.

It's based on folklore.

It couldn't exist without folklore.

It draws its power from folklore, but, like, it's a calculated invention for commercial or institutional purposes.

>> PAYTON: Here's where it gets tricky.

It's fair to say that for most people, myself included, their idea of the hodag came from Gene Shepard's vision.

That incarnation of the creature is part of the new stories they tell, the art they create, the fiction they write, not the version of the story that those loggers in the 1800s were telling over dinner in the bunkhouse.

The fakelore version becomes the new folklore, a full circle moment, a hodag eating its own tail, if you will.

>> So there's this constant feedback loop between kind of folklore and pop culture and institutional culture, where individuals and institutions appropriate folk characters or narratives or practices as fodder for more collective participatory storytelling.

When you walk down the streets of Rhinelander, you see this playing out in, like, myriad ways.

The hodag is lovingly appropriated and commercialized and institutionalized to, like, delightful and very powerful effect.

The hodag is the coming to fruition of the power of these folk narratives to kind of mesh with pop culture, and then spun all these various sorts of potential narrative and embodied aftermaths.

>> PAYTON: Look, I know it's easy to be cynical of folklore as brand, and we should be skeptical any time money starts changing hands, but there is a silver lining to all of this.

>> The hodag is built for ostension, a term that folklorists love.

Ostension is when people take action in the world, kind of based on folk narratives.

When they, like, bring legends to life.

In the case of the hodag people, from the inception of people starting -- you know, hearing about the hodag, people have gone out on legend trips to hunt for this folklore cryptid.

People are now making movies about it, putting on plays inspired by it.

People dress up like the hodag, and because of the prevalence of this narrative, people who find themselves in the woods of north Wisconsin, if they encounter something ambiguous, some ambiguous piece of evidence, a weird footprint on the ground, they hear something, they smell something weird, they then interpret it as being perhaps the hodag.

The point of this tradition is to invite participation.

>> PAYTON: As the hodag clawed its way from folklore to fakelore and back again, one thing is undeniable, the sports arena-sized paw print it has left on Rhinelander and Wisconsin at large.

>> Well, the story, you know, it starts with Gene, and he laid the foundation for it, but the beauty of the Rhinelander community is that he gave it to the city of Rhinelander to, you know, kind of use in perpetuity.

And Rhinelander really has embraced it over the many decades, and it's become a part of the fabric of this community.

>> It's more than a creature.

It's more than a mascot.

It's more than an icon for the town.

It's kind of like a way of life up here in Rhinelander.

It's something that kind of pulls the community together, and connects us all as one.

>> And once you come here to check out where the hodag roams, you find the beautiful pine forests.

You find thousands of glacial lakes.

You find these beautiful wetland areas, and you just fall in love with the Northwoods of Wisconsin.

You find a place that maybe you didn't know about before.

>> PAYTON: And what is folklore, if not the chance to keep the story alive in your own new way?

>> People are still creating.

People are still coming up with stories.

These tales, this folklore, and even though hodags are hard to find in the flesh and blood these days, hodags are alive and well in Rhinelander, Wisconsin.

♪ >> PAYTON: Now, before I saunter on back into the woods out here, I do want to give a huge thank you to Kerry, Dr. Brower, Rachel, Ben and everybody else who helped me out with this video.

And I want to thank you for watching.

And remember, the hunger for flesh may be strong, but the brand is stronger.

♪ I don't know why you all are so worried about hodags when you have, like, Jurassic Park-level mosquitoes.