They stalk through the woods at night. Half man, half beast. Their blood curdling screams the only warning of their presence. But, it isn’t man they hunger for. No these monsters seek another horror, an ancient foe they have been locked in mortal combat with since stories were told. When the sun sets, the Dewayo awakens.
The Dewayo is a fascinating cryptid, mostly sighted in Middletown Maryland with a spattering of encounters along the Blue Ridge Mountains. The more common sightings of the creature started back in the 1940s where people claimed to hear the creatures ungodly howling. Later in 1965 a man going by the name John Becker told the local newspapers that he fought the creature off when he encountered it in the woods. It looked like a large wolf but stood on its hind legs to attack.
This description was mirrored in another encounter a year later in 1966. A man claimed that the creature’s legs seemed to stick out from the sides of its hips when it moved away from him, giving the unsettling impression of a spider.
Now, wolf-man sightings are somewhat common throughout Maryland and Pennsylvania (where it is called the dogman.) However, what sets the Dewayo apart from the others is where the cryptid itself comes from. Much like its mortal enemy the Snallygaster, which is based on the Dutch legend of the Schneller Geist or “quick spirit”, the Dewayo has its roots in old German folklore. In the tale of the Hexenwolf.
My two cents on this cryptid are tinged with fascination. The Hexenwolf was brought over from German legends into the new world where the Dutch settlers believed it fought off the horrors of the Shneller Geist. They obviously spread these stories down the generation line and eventually the tale evolved into the Dewayo vs Snallygaster. It is amazing to actually track down the evolution of a legend.
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