Eerie Howls Recorded in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, Accompanied by History of Strange Experiences

The Singular Fortean Society received three videos earlier this month from Colton Greenhaw, a resident of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, which feature eerie howls captured by Greenhaw and his friends and neighbors.

In an April 4th interview with investigator Tobias Wayland, Greenhaw said that the videos had been recorded outside of his apartment the week prior.

"Kind of towards Highway 8, there’s a little patch of woods by the edge of town and the apartment complex where we’re at, and around nine or ten o’clock at night, every night, there’s been some weird stuff going on out there," said Greenhaw.

Greenhaw said that he and his neighbors have all heard the sounds, and that he recorded two videos on his phone, while his neighbor has recorded one on his GoPro camera.

"I got two videos on my phone," he said. "That was two nights ago. It’s big, you can hear on the GoPro that it’s big. We could hear it crashing as it walked through the woods. They’re not small twigs breaking, they’re pretty big sticks breaking. We haven’t seen anything yet, but we put a deer cam out last night and we’re putting another out on the other side of the forest tonight.”

“We’ve been asking a lot of people, ‘Have you heard anything weird?' We’ll play the sound on our phone and they’re like ‘That’s exactly what we heard,'" added Greenhaw. "It’s really loud at night, too, you could have your windows closed and you can hear it."

The apartment complex where Greenhaw lives is situated across the Pelican River from the Holmboe Conifer Forest State Natural Area.

Greenhaw told Wayland that he’d seen evidence of something throwing rocks and disturbing waterfowl in the area, and that he and his friends had even found an unusual footprint.

"The crazy thing is, we [found the footprint] on our side of the shoreline, where the apartment is. The apartment is at the edge of the woods on the river, and then on the other side is national forest. But we got the footprint on our side. On our side is a little pond, and there’s a bunch of ducks and geese, and then we’ve got a couple big rocks that are laying in the pathway and on the edge of the water, so I don’t know if something is throwing them or whatever. They weren’t there before. It could be a person throwing them on the path or kids playing, but the rocks are coming from the river and they’re ending up on the walkway that people walk their dogs on and stuff," he explained. "Then at night, at about twelve o’clock at night, between twelve and three o’clock at night, something like that, you can hear the geese picking up and flying off, and I know they don’t fly off at that time of night."

Greenhaw added that the geese made considerable noise while flying off, honking as though something had frightened them.

According to Greenhaw, a cast was made of the footprint.

"Everybody was watching us pull the cast out of the ground, and we’re like ‘What the hell is this,'" he said. "You can’t see the toes very clearly, but you can see where they’re at and it looks like there’s four toes—when you put your hand in the print, you can feel the digits. There’s only four of them."

"I don’t [have a photo of the footprint cast] but I can get it, I think it’s still sitting in my garage yet," he added. "That was three or four days ago now that they got that cast. It shocked the hell out of all of us. I mean, it’s pretty obvious. At first, I thought it was a bear, we all did until the cast came out, but it’s not a bear. It’s pretty big. 14 inches long by 8 inches wide. You can tell where the toes are, but it only seems like there’s four toes."

The Singular Fortean Society has requested photographs of the cast, but so far they have not been made available.

This image "was screenshotted from the video we caught, and you can see the eyes flash. We screenshotted right at that second, and they’re amber-colored eyes. It’s pretty creepy," said Greenhaw.

Waterfowl might not be the only wildlife disturbed by whatever is making the eerie howls, according to Greenhaw.

"I mean we have coyotes across the river and then they stopped and two days later this thing started to happen," he said. "Every night you’d hear the coyotes take something down on the other side of the river, and it’s loud, everybody hears them at night, but lately we haven’t been hearing them at all."

But these most recent incidents aren’t the only unusual encounters that Greenhaw and his friends have had around Rhinelander, he said.

"It’s not our first encounter that we’ve had," he said. "My friends and I, we go have bonfires in the woods and stuff, way out in the middle of nowhere. You’re driving three or four or five miles in the middle of nowhere and we saw something that was, well, none of us want to say what it is because we don’t want to sound like idiots, but it looked pretty damn tall. I mean, it was huge and it was at night—about twelve-thirty at night. I slammed on the brakes of my Toyota—this was out in the Parrish Trails—he grabbed his shotgun and I grabbed my shotgun, and we’re just sitting there while the thing watches us. And then it just slowly turns its head and it’s gone. You can’t hear anything crack or nothing, and it’s just unbelievable how quiet whatever it is can be."

"It was sitting right on the edge of the trail, and it looked like [where the creature was] the pine trees were sitting on a hill, but we walked in and they’re actually in a hole and you could see that the eyes were right next to the trees," he continued. "You could see it, it was something big. We thought it was something sitting in the trees, but it definitely wasn’t something sitting in the trees because when it moved, it moved fast. We stared at it for probably a minute to a minute and twenty seconds. We’re all making eye contact with this thing and it’s just scary as hell when it’s just staring back at you. We locked the doors, grabbed our shotguns, and were like ‘What the hell do we do? What is that?’ It was weird."

"We have bonfires out there all the time, and when it starts to mellow out, you can hear some weird stuff out in those woods. People freak out and end up leaving because they’re afraid to camp out there," he added.

The most recent phenomenon appears to be receding with the influx of colder weather, said Greenhaw.

"My neighbor and I were talking last night while we let our dogs out, and it was snowing, and we were like ‘I don’t think we’re going to hear anything,’" he explained. "It’s starting to snow and we had that cold front blow in the other night and both nights it’s been dead quiet. But it was making all these noises when it was really warm out and nice out at night, with clear skies, but the second the clouds started to move in it just stopped."

Regardless of the reprieve brought by the weather, Greenhaw insisted that people were on edge from the strange experiences.

"Nobody’s walking at night anymore after hearing that stuff in Rhinelander," he said. "They’re freaked out."

And as for himself, Greenhaw isn’t sure what to make of what he’s seen and heard.

"I don’t know what to think of all this, to be honest with you. I don’t know what to believe. Could be some redneck like myself out there doing something stupid to freak people out, but we’re out on the edge of town and nobody in town is really doing anything out there. It all started happening when the coyotes went away, and then during this pandemic there’s no action on the street—there's no cars running around or nothing at night—everybody's hunkered down, and that’s when you hear it. It’s probably close to the city, which is weird," he said. "All the neighbors now, we’ve all got pistols. We’re being careful. We’ve all got guns now, and we’re watching out, walking around with our guns at night. We’re all scared."

Eerie howls similar to those captured by Greenhaw and his neighbors have been recorded relatively recently in Ohio and northern Ontario, Canada.

Skeptical explanations include everything from wolves to elk to moose, while others attribute the sounds to something more paranormal, like Bigfoot or even Dogman. Wolves and elk have seen a resurgence in northern Wisconsin within the last decade, and the occasional moose does wander down from Canada—but that doesn’t explain Greenhaw’s sighting in the forest or the continued activity reported by him and his friends.

For now, the incidents remain unexplained.

To report your own encounter with the impossible, reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

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