Of Church Dogma and the Dogman

It hasn’t escaped consideration that two of our favored topics here – high strangeness and demonology – might incline those of a more secular Modernist bent to dismiss the whole blog as unserious. To them I’d point out that a worldview based on empirical positivism is hardly the default baseline of reality. In fact, scientism has its own peculiarities and relies on its own arbitrary assumptions. Falsifiability is unfalsifiable, after all.

The reality that even reductionist materialists can’t dispute is that empirical science doesn’t even pretend to arrive at certain, ultimate truth. Instead, it starts with systematic doubt and from that position sets out to disprove every premise.

So the only sure source of objective truth obtainable by men is theology, which is the only real science when you get right down to it.

That preamble paves the way for today’s post – an account of high strangeness involving werewolves. Or alpha sasquatch. Or demons.

Whatever these cryptids are, they’re best known by the popular term of art Dogmen.

Meet Matt Emch, a rather ordinary guy with perhaps the most extraordinary cryptid account I’ve yet come across.

Matt grew up in the rust belt town of Youngstown, Ohio. His weird experience occurred back in 1987, when he and his high school freshman-aged friends were hanging out in an abandoned steel mill.

The area already had an unsavory reputation for playing host to feral dog packs, drunken hobos, small-time drug dealers, and even local mobsters who allegedly used the site as a body dumping ground. Matt and his pals shrugged off these quite tangible threats, only to come face to face with a much less well-known, much more dangerous quantity late one summer night.

Bedtime Stories produced a pretty chilling episode based on Matt’s account. Watch it here:

If you want the full version, including the really paranoia-inducing details Bedtime Stories admitted they didn’t have time to cover, see this interview Matt gave to What Lurks Beneath.

Watch it now:

Setting aside the rather corny production values (in the WLB video, not Bedtime Stories‘) and the host’s tendency to ask rambling, dead-end questions, it’s quite an evocative interview.

If you don’t have two hours to spare, the gist of Matt’s account is this:

• In July of 1987, Matt and his friends were hanging out in an old steel mill where they’d lit a bonfire and built makeshift partitions from old steel sheets.
• That night, they heard a pack of wild dogs fighting with something on the other side of a big coal pile.
• Two of the dogs were thrown bodily over the hill; one died, and one got away with serious wounds.
• The thing that most likely fought with the dogs crested the coal heap. Matt describes it as a ten-foot creature with rippling muscles covered in inch-long dark hair with freakishly long forelegs, raccoon hands, and a wolf’s head with self-luminous amber eyes. Notably, it seemed just as capable on two legs as on four.
• One of Matt’s friends knocked over a piece of sheet metal, alerting the dogman to their presence.
• The dogman entered the building and went up to the third floor, where the boys were effectively trapped.
• Strangest of all, the creature displayed seemingly unnatural ways of appearing and disappearing; morphing into a shadow and turning partly or wholly invisible like the alien from the movie Predator.
• Matt is convinced the dogman was about to kill him and his friends, when a train passing the mill blew its whistle, driving the beast away.

As if that wasn’t intense enough, Matt’s recounting of the incident’s aftermath adds potentially preternatural and conspiratorial dimensions to the events.

1. The boys agreed not to tell their parents until they could call a meeting and tell them all at once. Matt’s mom didn’t believe him. His dad seemed to believe him but suggested he might have misidentified a black bear or a large dog.
2. Matt’s priest straight up believed him, counseling the traumatized lad that evil things sometimes make their way into this world.
3. Another boy’s father, a ranking local official, also seemed to believe them – to the extent of intimidating Matt’s dad into forbidding him from visiting the mill again on pain of being denied admission to the local Catholic school, getting banned from playing high school football, and being branded a laughingstock for life.
4. According to Matt, the son of that town official later confided that the authorities knew the creature existed and considered it the prime suspect in a pair of hobo murders. The stated reason for strong-arming the boys into keeping quiet was to prevent curious classmates from being drawn to the mill, thus increasing the likelihood of further injuries or even deaths.
5. Even more intriguing, the son of the public official indicated that not only did the cops know that the beast existed, they knew what it was.
6. For his part, Matt is pretty sure the creature he encountered was demonic, and that the train’s timely intervention was an act of divine intervention that saved his life.

What to make of these wild-sounding claims?

First, it should go without saying but is worth repeating that demons exist.

That’s not speculation. It’s Catholic Church dogma, which is more certain than any expert study or peer-reviewed paper.

The next logical question would be “Was the Youngstown dogman a demon that took a wolf-like shape?

It’s possible. At least, there’s nothing in classical demonology to prevent it. The Scholastics said that demons were properly incorporeal but could assume temporary bodies to interact with the material world.

Applying discernment of spirits yields inconclusive results. The dogman encounter has left Matt terrorized to this day, which could be consistent with demonic activity. Then again, it had the effect of cementing his faith, though he admits he’s not the best Catholic.

Maybe it’s the story gamer in me, but details of Matt’s story kept echoing aspects of the tabletop role playing game Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

First and foremost, his description of the dogman sounds a lot like a garou in Crinos form.

Another similarity is the creature’s apparent interest in keeping its activities and its very presence secret. Matt speculated that the dogman may have sought to kill them because it wanted to get rid of witnesses.

And while I find dreams to be some of the least credible evidence on their own, the sequence of events as a whole merits mention of a dream Matt had years after the encounter. Describing the nightmare as super-realistic, he related it as including the same dogman he saw in July of 87, and specified that in this dream the beast chased him, pinned him down, and tried to intimidate him. The dream-beast could communicate with Matt, and it told him that he’d said too much about it, that it was looking for him, and that it would be seeing him again.

For the sake of those who engage in healthier pastimes, every type of mythical beast in the World of Darkness setting has a code of omerta that forbids revealing themselves to humans and prescribes rather severe measures for dealing with breaches of secrecy. Up to and including disposing of unauthorized witnesses with extreme prejudice.

Is that to suggest Matt invented his story, drawing on TTRPG lore to embellish it or even create it from whole cloth?

Not necessarily. One obstacle to that explanation is that Werewolf wasn’t published until 1992, five years after Matt’s purported dogman encounter.

But that’s only a problem if we take him at his word that the incident occurred in 1987. Maybe it happened later, and his memory is just foggy. To my knowledge, there’s no hard evidence establishing that he first reported his account before 1992.

In the final analysis, we weren’t there that night, so we can’t say for sure what happened.

However, we can also say with a high degree of certainty that nothing Matt reported is inherently impossible.

And if there’s one salutary lesson we can learn by lending his account some credence, it’s that God keeps demons on a short leash, and He only allows evil to the extent that it can enable even greater good than if it hadn’t happened.

In simpler terms, if you ever come up against a demonic, or any other, spiritual peril, always turn to God.

Because for Him it’s  as easy to save you from your sins as it is to save kids from a werewolf.

 

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