The Hodag: Wisconsin's Horned Beast and the Best Hoax of the Lumberjack Era

Admit it: you would have paid the dime. It is 1896, the fair has come to Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and in a dim tent a showman is warning you back from a pit where something green crouches in the shadows, horned, spiked, and moving just enough. Half the county paid. What they saw was wood, ox hide, and wire, and it became the most beloved fake animal in America.

The hodag was the invention, or at least the promotion, of Eugene Shepard, a timber cruiser, land dealer and celebrated prankster of Wisconsin's north woods. In 1893 he announced that he had encountered a horrible beast near Rhinelander: the hodag, described with a frog's grin, an elephant's face, thick short legs, a spiny back and a tail ending in spears. He claimed it had been burned to ash by a party of brave men, since only fire could stop it. Newspapers ran the story. Circulation, and Shepard, prospered.

The capture that fooled a fair

Three years later Shepard improved on himself. He announced he had taken a hodag alive, subduing it in its den with a chloroform-soaked sponge on the end of a pole, and exhibited the groggy captive at the first Oneida County fair. The beast was a carved stump dressed in ox hides, its horns borrowed from cattle, and it moved because Shepard's sons worked it with hidden wires while the showman kept the crowd at a safe, dim distance. The act toured, the story spread, and the attention grew until, by most retellings, scientists from the Smithsonian Institution announced they were coming to examine the animal. At that point Shepard cheerfully confessed. Remarkably, nobody seems to have wanted their dime back.

The folklore under the joke

Shepard did not conjure the hodag from nothing. Lumberjack camps of the era ran on tall tales, and the hodag belongs to the same bestiary of "fearsome critters" that produced the squonk, the splintercat and the rest of the menagerie loggers invented to haze greenhorns around the stove. One strand of the folklore held that the hodag rose from the ashes of cremated work oxen, the accumulated spite of every beast cursed at by its driver; that detail is pure camp mythology, and it is a better piece of satire than most of what got printed about it. The name itself likely welds "horse" and "dog" together, which tells you how seriously the inventors took their zoology.

What Rhinelander did next is the genuinely unusual part. Instead of burying the embarrassment, the city adopted it. The hodag is the mascot of Rhinelander High School, the name of the town's country music festival, and the subject of a large fiberglass statue outside the chamber of commerce that tourists photograph in numbers Shepard would have appreciated. A hoax confessed in 1896 has been civic identity for more than a century, which may be the only documented case of a cryptid holding a steady municipal job.

Every so often someone still reports a hodag in the woods, more or less with a straight face, and the town logs the claim with the good humor it deserves. Nobody has produced so much as a suspicious footprint. The hodag is folklore with a birth certificate, and Rhinelander keeps the certificate framed.

Readers have filed their own encounters with improbable beasts below, some deadpan, some dead serious, and the jury votes each one True, Fake or Not sure. Have a look and see which hodags of our own era survive the panel.

More than a century after its debut, the hodag illustrates how folklore can evolve into living culture rather than remaining a mere curiosity. Rhinelander’s embrace of the creature turned a local joke into a regional brand, long before "cryptid tourism" became a recognized phenomenon. This transformation underscores the hodag’s unique role as both a symbol of community identity and a case study in how myths can be deliberately sustained, rather than fading away. Unlike other lumberjack legends relegated to dusty pages or internet boards, the hodag thrives in public memory not by stubborn secrecy but through voluntary celebration, blurring the lines between hoax, mascot, and myth.