Steve Cook
Appearances
Otherworld
Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
My name is Steve Cook. I am the former production director at WTCM Radio in Traverse City, Michigan. And I am the author and performer of the song, The Legend of the Michigan Dogman.
Otherworld
Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
It waxes and wanes. I would say... This is probably the third or fourth call this year.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Yeah, it is January. Yeah. Oh, well, OK. In the last 12 months, it's just one of those things where people are finding it harder to track me down, I guess.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Well, in the radio business, particularly at the station where I worked, we had a group of people that were all right around the same age. And the morning man and I were born just a couple of months apart back in the late 50s. And so we came up through the 1980s, the same time that the guys like Howard Stern and Opie and Anthony and those terrestrial radio characters were
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
coming out with their morning zoo shows. And it became quite a tradition on April Fools to just pull something, just do something and try to put on a nice April Fools prank. And we always tried to do something that was not going to obviously put anybody in jeopardy or anything like that. But we often did some pretty crazy stunts on April Fools. And this particular year, which was 1987,
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Jack O'Malley, the morning man came to me and said, you know, we haven't planned anything yet. Do you have anything in mind? And I said, you know, I've had kind of had this weird song or poem rolling around in my head for a long time. Let me see what I can do with that. So I put this, uh, basically a poem together and in four, four meter and, um,
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Then I laid down a drum track using an old $100 Casio keyboard and came up with a little instrumental riff, a little melody riff for it. I told the story of this creature in the counties that were within our radio station listening area that appeared every 10 years. He was a half-man, half-dog creature.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Um, it took me about literally about 20 minutes to write the whole song and maybe another hour to put it together, uh, with the intent that it was just going to be a one day April fools. Uh, the morning man was going to just slip it into the music rotation and just let it play. And we would just gauge how successful it was by the reaction that it got.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
I've always had sort of a fascination with, um, I didn't even know what a crypto creature was at the time, but I've always had a fascination with that genre, the Bigfoots and the Loch Ness Monsters and things like that. And so I just thought it was maybe a good time to develop some sort of a, of a mythical mystery, mystical creature for Northern Michigan, because we didn't really have one.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Obviously we had Bigfoot and, and the Native Americans had a number of legends and so forth, but, There was nothing really that was ever concrete based in northern Michigan. So I was just looking, trying to find something that could potentially represent an odd creature that people could spot in the woods. So there wasn't really any basis or model for it other than imagination, I guess.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
No, it just slipped into the music rotation in the 7 to 8 a.m. hour and then again in the 8 to 9 a.m. hour. And we just dropped it in. The warning man just dropped it in. And honestly, as I recall that day, I had forgotten that he was even going to do it until I was on my way to work and the song had already played once. Um, so yeah, uh, it was just, there was no, there was no introduction.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
This is a new song from so-and-so, or this is a song about Northern Michigan. It just fell into the music rotation. The first hour that, that it played in was the 7 to 8 AM hour and nothing happened. No one called, uh, there was no reaction whatsoever. And then it played, uh, in the 8 to 9 AM hour. And again, nothing happened while the morning show was going on.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
But just a few minutes after Jack got off the air, the receptionist took a call from a man. And I still remember his name. His name was Robert Fortney. He's since passed on. But he was 68 when he called in in 1987. But he told us that when he was a teenager, he had been fishing along the banks of the Muskegon River near a little town called Paris, Michigan.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
when he had been approached by a pack of what he thought were either feral dogs or coyotes or even perhaps wolves. And he had never seen anything like that. And he was quite an outdoorsman, a fisherman and hunter. He'd never seen anything of that nature. So he just thought it might have just been a pack of dogs. And so he didn't pay much attention to them until they started to circle him.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And they had a show called Monster Quest. And they had heard about this film. And they wanted to do a study on it. And when I talked to the History Quest people, I told them right off the bat, I said, look, this is not real. This dude created this out of thin air. And they were like, that's okay.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
We still want to do a show on it. And I said, okay. And so they kind of created this whole scenario where Another crypto researcher supposedly pinned me down and made me admit that the thing was a hoax and all that. And I just went along with it because I just wanted to be done with the whole thing.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
But even after the History Channel episode aired that revealed that the whole thing was a hoax, there were people who denied that it was a hoax. There were entire forums devoted to this where people were picking this film apart frame by frame and saying, no, there's no way this is hoax. They're telling you it's a hoax because they don't want you to believe it's real.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
And so it became almost like a JFK conspiracy after a while.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Yeah, yeah. Well, as a matter of fact, the creator then later on came out with a second piece. of another found film. And it was even more creative. It didn't get quite the traction of the first one, but we had a lot of fun with it and took a lot of flack online for it. A lot of people wanted me to be prosecuted for fraud and all kinds of crazy things.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
But being a radio guy and this thing started as a hoax and all that, I just thought, let's just have some fun with it. And we did.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Oh, yeah. There is a filmmaker, a local filmmaker here in town, has made three movies about the Dog Man. In doing the background on the DVD of the first movie, we interviewed a number of people. And one of the people who sat for an interview was the set photographer from the film, who I had known for a good 30 years at the time.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Uh, he and his wife, they had a, uh, a little, uh, paddle boat, pedal boat, and they were out on a small Lake that they live adjacent to. And they peddled the boat out and they were just sitting there enjoying glass of wine on the Lake, watching the sunset. And they both, uh, attest that a creature, a dog came down to the shoreline and, um,
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
looked like it was like drinking from the lake to start with and they thought it was just one of the neighborhood dogs, but the photographer the man said it was very very large this dog and so they just kind of watched it and didn't really say anything to each other and And it got into the water and swam across the lake and swam right in front of them within 15 feet of them.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
He said it was definitely a dog, but it was as big as a large man. And when it got to the other side of the lake, it walked out, shook like a dog, stood up on its hind legs and walked into the woods. And he said he had never seen anything like it in his life. It terrified him. They looked at each other and said, What the hell did we just witness?
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
And when the Dog Man films came out, he was hired as the set photographer. And as the stories were told around the set, he called his wife and said, we've got to tell this story. No one's going to believe us, but we've got to tell them. And he's very serious. I still associate with Don to this day.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
And that story to me was probably one of the most compelling because of the longtime personal relationship that I had with this guy.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Yeah, he's not the kind of guy that seeks attention or fame or anything like that. He just wanted to unload that off his shoulders that he had witnessed this.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
I think, as you pointed out earlier, I think that when the song hit the airwaves, it turned on a light bulb that illuminated something that was kind of in the shadows for a long, long time.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Whether that is an actual real thing or whether people are just seeing odd animal behavior in the woods, but I can't take credit for inventing it because the artwork and the stories predate my song by thousands of years. So I just maintain a healthy skepticism, but I believe that people are experiencing things that they can't explain.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
And if this gives them some comfort, then I feel good about that.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
Oh, I could tell some great stories of the things we've done.
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Episode 113: The Michigan Dogman Pt. 1
No, not paranormal ones. Just ones that either drove people crazy or made them really mad at us.