Are There Werewolves on Martha's Vineyard?

This is a question that arises every Halloween season. Actually, it doesn’t. More awareness has always been raised for vampires, witches, and spooks in general, so werewolves get the short end of the stick; probably just a case of bad PR.

But as all Islanders know, as we head back into dreaded winter, we’ll see—or imagine we see—strange things down dark roads.

Here’s an actual message emailed to me last year by a guy I met, an entrepreneur up from Philly and renting a cottage in Aquinnah: “It was after a really long day when I got up @ 5 am. I was in meetings until 9 PM. Then I drove up Island, tired and hungry. As I turned onto my private road, a premonition of caution became so strong that I stopped the truck and thought, ‘Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts before going up to the house.’. I put the truck in park, and just sat there focusing on my 'happy thoughts’. 

“I sat in the truck in the road, then proceeded about 20 yards. Out of the corner of my right eye I detected movement. A creature appeared to the right of the truck. 

“It was half-human, half huge dog, with black shiny hair. The rear legs were much longer then the front by twice in length. Then the fright of what I was seeing hit me. The thing had a snout like that of a possum with teeth that over-hung like a wild boar. Its face was contorted in rage.”

He knew instinctively it wanted to kill him. 

“I hit the gas & punted it up to the house. It charged into the shrubbery to my left & disappeared. I saw the bushes sway in its path for several yards. It never returned.”

Whew!

But if that story weren’t bad enough, another one came across the transom around the same time that was twice as frightening. A woman with an old house in Chilmark lay in bed one night, and heard growling sounds coming from downstairs. She came out to the landing and gazed down the winding staircase. She saw a beast-like figure hunkered below in the darkness of the foyer. A blast of demonic energy, like steam rising from an industrial vent, shot up the stairway. The hot wind blew her backwards into her bedroom where she recovered her balance and shut the door.

Her small dog, it should be noted, a Wheaton Terrier, had kept up a steady high-pitched bark where it could do no good whatsoever—from the bed.

The woman pulled the covers over her head and her dog’s, and prayed for the forces of good to eliminate the crouching demon downstairs.

Now here’s the part that gets the little hairs on the back of your neck standing up: In the morning, the woman came downstairs to find a splash of blood across the bottom steps. She called the Chilmark police to investigate, so some kind of record of this event exists on official ledgers. One can only speculate how it was notated:

“Unidentified blood, not human, swabbed from staircase. Werewolf activity suspected. Contact FBI, then burn this page.” Now that’s one for the Roswell folk!

More likely the authorities wrote, “Hysterical woman requires extra attention: psychiatry recommended. Blood left on stairs (origins unknown) to back up assertions. We all got a good laugh out of this one back at the station.”

If you look it up on HowStuffWorks.com you’ll find out that most historical reports of lycanthropy (you know this term from the werewolf movies) relate real life cases to several conditions. One is a rare disorder called hypertrichosis, meaning a spread of thick hair over faces and bodies. Well, we know in the winter, some of our men suffer from this, but it has more to do with errant grooming than extra genetic information in a set of chromosomes.

Rabies has caused wolves and dogs to go wild and attack people, creating suspicions of werewolves. We apparently have no actual wolves, although some of our big hybrid dogs look like they’ve got a werewolf in the woodpile. And eyewitness accounts of a coyote have come down the pipe in recent times, its tracks and spoor confirmed by wildlife expert Gus Ben David. Could also be a werewolf.

Don’t think about this when riding down a long dark road.

Collective hysteria has also been blamed for werewolf scares. God knows we’ve got the hysteria in spades, but there simply aren’t enough of us in the off-off season to get anything collective going.

Finally, humans with advanced senses of smell have been confused with werewolves, particularly if they’re possessed of bad haircuts. If you wish to scare yourself silly on a silent winter’s night, watch the 2006 movie Perfume starring Alan Rickman and Dustin Hoffman. I believe this story is based on an actual French peasant, Jean Grenier, who committed a series of murders and was convicted as a werewolf in 1603. He was pronounced insane and packed off to a monastery, presumably to cull the monk population.