The Dogman Files
Launch promo ends in00:00:00
Get the Dogman Files — $73.98 $29.99
First Edition · MMXXVI · Illustrated

The Dogman Files

Four volumes of first-hand testimony about the upright, dog-headed animal people keep seeing on American back roads — collected from the witnesses themselves, set down the way they told it, and left for you to judge.

Most of what exists on this subject is a ten-minute video with a stock forest photo and a voice reading a forum post. These are books. Four of them, 413 pages, gathered over years from deer hunters, log-truck drivers, dairy hands, county road crews, night-shift nurses driving home at four in the morning, and children who saw it first and were not believed.

Names are withheld where the families asked. Counties and dates are given as reported. Nothing here is offered as proof — where a second witness contradicts the first, it says so; where there is an ordinary explanation, it is printed in full. That is the whole method, and it is the reason people who never talked before were willing to talk.

Real Voices

“I bought The Beast That Fled expecting more of the same and got the opposite. Nobody had ever asked what the thing is afraid of. The section on the line it would not cross rearranged how I think about every other account I have read.”

Raymond K. Raymond K.57, Michigan

“My grandfather told one story like the ones in Neither Friend Nor Beast and then never again for thirty years. Reading forty-two families describe the same shape of night was the first time I felt like he had not been making it up.”

Marla L. Marla L.51, Pennsylvania

“What sold me was the honest doubt chapters at the back of DOGMAN Country — the bear standing up, the hoax trade, what the dark does to memory. A book willing to argue against itself is a book I will believe on the rest.”

Travis B. Travis B.54, Arkansas
★ 4.9 / 5 stars · over 8,000 readers of the record
Get the Dogman Files — $73.98 $29.99
Instant download · Yours forever · PDF, reads on any device
4Illustrated volumes
413Pages
123Accounts & case files
1887–2020The record spans
I

Somebody in your county has seen it

They have not told you. They told one person, once, usually within a day of it happening, and then they watched that person’s face and decided never to bring it up again. That is the single most consistent detail in this entire body of testimony, and it is more consistent than the height, the eyes, or the sound.

A few thousand people in the United States believe they have seen a large, upright, dog-headed animal. They are not the people you would expect. They are hunters who know every animal in their woods by its gait. They are farmers who have found what a coyote does to a calf and know this was not that. They are men who drove log trucks down the same road for twenty years and stopped taking one particular stretch of it after dark.

“A bear on two legs walks like a drunk. This came down that cut like it was late for something.”
— D.L., utility lineman, Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, March 2011

These four books are the collected record: what they describe, where it clusters, what the animals do before it arrives, what the families did afterward, and — in the volume nobody else has written — the small category of encounters where the witness did not break first, and the creature did.

What comes out of putting that many accounts in one place is arithmetic, not atmosphere. Across the forty-two families in Neither Friend Nor Beast, the animal made a deliberate pause within striking distance in 42 of 42 accounts. Human injury of any kind: 0 of 42. The ambient animal noise stopped completely in 31 of them. Where a dog was present, it refused to bark and put a person or a building between itself and whatever was out there in 27 of 34.

The witnesses who ran are overrepresented among the ones who got hurt.
— the single clearest pattern across several hundred collected accounts

That is why a book of sighting reports ends up with a practical section at all, and why every volume puts it within reach: Section IX of the Codex, the nine-step first-ten-minutes checklist in DOGMAN Country written to be copied, folded and kept in a glove box. Its first rule is the opposite of a hunt. Every bad outcome in these files began with somebody going in to find, film or shoot the animal.

They are written for the reader who is tired of being sold a conclusion. There is no theory here. There is a method, stated plainly at the front of every volume, and then the accounts, and then a chapter at the back arguing honestly against everything that came before it.

II

The Difference

There is no shortage of dogman content. There is a serious shortage of dogman records. This is what separates the two.

Compilation videos & forum threadsThe Dogman Files
Where accounts come fromReposted, re-reposted, origin unknownInterviews, correspondence, family papers, a chore log, a cassette from a county historical society
Witness details“Somewhere in Michigan, a few years ago”Trade or role, county and state, month and year, as reported
When two tellings disagreeThe better one gets usedBoth are printed and the disagreement is named
Ordinary explanationsCut, they ruin the videoA full section: the bear standing up, the hoax trade, what the dark does to memory
What it asks of youBelieve itRead it and decide. Testimony is not proof, and it is never presented as proof
What you are left withTen minutes and a recommendation feed413 pages, 114 accounts and 9 case files, indexed by place, year, behavior and sound
III

What’s Inside

Four volumes, each doing a different job. Real contents, taken from the finished books.

The Dogman Codex
Volume One

The Dogman Codex

A field record of America’s upright canine — the sightings, the witnesses, and the pattern behind them.

50 pages · 10 sections · 9 case files · 22 plates

The way in, and the book to read first. Written openly by an amateur who says on page one that he has no badge and no press card. Nine case files are given in full — a night medical courier at a culvert, a trapper who kept a forty-year arrangement, a deer camp that gave up its lease over a whip-poor-will that never stopped for breath — taken by phone and email between 2015 and 2020, two of them corroborated by a second witness.

Section X is the reason to keep it: the checkable record, with names, dates and places you can research yourself. The 1887 Wexford County lumberjack report. Robert Fortney’s 1937 account near Paris, Michigan. Linda Godfrey’s Bray Road investigation for the Walworth County Week. The 1987 WTCM-FM April Fools’ song that arrived after the reports rather than before them. And the 2007 Gable Film, included precisely because it was a hoax and was admitted as one — a book that shows only the convincing cases is lying by omission.

Contents
  • Read This First — the method
  • I. The Oldest Fear
  • II. What the Witnesses Describe
  • III. The Case Files — nine accounts
  • IV. The Composite
  • V. Where the Sightings Cluster
  • VI. The Regional Record
  • VII. What the Locals Do
  • VIII. Why the Reports Go Quiet
  • IX. What the Survivors Did
  • X. The Cases You Can Look Up
  • What I Think
Get The Dogman Codex — $9.99 Instant download · or take all four for $29.99
DOGMAN Country
Volume Two

DOGMAN Country

True sightings from Michigan, Appalachia, and the Ozarks.

149 pages · 60 chapters · 36 accounts · 12 per region

The big regional survey. Three landscapes where the reports cluster hardest — northern Michigan and above the bridge, the ridge-and-hollow country from north-central Pennsylvania down through the Carolinas, and the Ozark uplift across southern Missouri, northern Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. Twelve accounts per region, running roughly north to south within each, so you can find your own county without hunting for it.

Every account closes with a block called What Holds Up, and it cuts both ways — some are accounts the compiler would take to a jury, and some are printed with a plain statement that he does not think much of them. The patterns are given as numbers, not adjectives: height clusters tight around seven feet in a range of six to eight, and he notes that an exaggerating witness exaggerates upward. Eyeshine appears in roughly four of every five night accounts, overwhelmingly amber, gold or hard yellow-green; red turns up in about one report in fifteen and is treated skeptically for exactly that reason.

The seven parts
  • One — The Thing Itself
  • Two — Michigan
  • Three — Appalachia
  • Four — The Ozarks
  • Five — The Patterns
  • Six — In the Field
  • Seven — Honest Doubt
  • Appendix A: The Witness Report Form
  • Appendix B: The First Ten Minutes
  • Appendix C: The Look-Alike Table
  • Glossary
  • A Closing Note
Get DOGMAN Country — $27 Instant download · or take all four for $29.99
Neither Friend Nor Beast
Volume Three

Neither Friend Nor Beast

True DOGMAN encounters from the families it chose to spare.

162 pages · 42 accounts · 22 states · 1965–2018

The longest book in the set, the strangest, and the one most people go back to. Forty-two families across twenty-two states who were, for some period of time, completely at the mercy of something they could not identify — and were left alone. Assembled from interviews, correspondence, family papers, a chore log, a foreman’s letter, one clip of nursery audio, and a great deal of sitting at kitchen tables being told things slowly. Each account closes with The Detail That Stayed — the one thing the witness could not put down afterward, which is almost never the thing an outsider would guess.

Part Seven sets all forty-two side by side and tallies what repeats. Sustained bipedal locomotion, 38 of 42. Total cessation of ambient animal noise, 31 of 42. A dog present that refuses to bark and hides behind a person or a structure, 27 of 34 accounts with dogs. A deliberate pause within striking distance, 42 of 42. Human injury of any kind, 0 of 42. That last pair of numbers is the book, and the title comes from a woman in Vinton County who said of it: whatever it is, it knows where the wall is.

The seven parts
  • One — On the Road
  • Two — The Fence Line
  • Three — The House After Dark
  • Four — The Timber
  • Five — The Children Who Saw It First
  • Six — The Ones It Came Back To
  • Seven — What the Accounts Share
  • Appendix B: The Behavior Index
  • Appendix C: What It Is Mistaken For
  • Appendix E: The Sound Index
  • Appendix F: If It Happens to You
  • Glossary & A Closing Note
Get Neither Friend Nor Beast — $27 Instant download · or take all four for $29.99
The Beast That Fled
Volume Four

The Beast That Fled

True accounts of witnesses who watched what the Dogman runs from.

52 pages · 36 reports · six categories of departure

Almost every dogman account ends when the witness stops being able to see. This book is made of the accounts that do not end that way — the small category, separated out of four years of correspondence, where the witness did not break first and the animal did. Something entered the situation, and the creature that had every physical advantage turned and left at speed. The six parts are the categories of departure event. They were not decided in advance; they emerged from the pile.

The findings are narrow and strange. In 31 of the 36 accounts the animal’s attention changed before the witness perceived anything at all. Nineteen witnesses independently reached for the word “flat” to describe how it left. Not one described it leaving on two legs. In the nine accounts involving a carcass or livestock, it abandoned the food. And of twelve departures in country with an obvious high escape, only one witness saw it climb.

The six parts
  • One — Lights in the Trees
  • Two — The Sound Underneath
  • Three — Something Bigger
  • Four — The Ground Opens
  • Five — Men With Equipment
  • Six — The Line It Would Not Cross
Get The Beast That Fled — $9.99 Instant download · or take all four for $29.99
IV

About This Record

The Dogman Files is a small imprint that does one thing: it collects and prints witness testimony about an upright, dog-headed animal reported across North America, and it does it without arguing for a conclusion.

Every account in these volumes came in the same way. Somebody wrote, or somebody was introduced by a friend of a friend who said you should talk to my uncle. Then the same questions, every time: date, location, weather, distance, how long it lasted, what the animal did, and what you did. Where something could be checked — an old newspaper write-up, a second person who was there that night — it was checked, and the book says so. Where it could not be, the book says that too.

Names have been withheld and identifying details of properties changed at the request of nearly every family involved. Measurements are given as the witnesses took them, in the units they used. No measurement in these books was made by the author.

“Everyone asks what it is. Nobody asks what frightens it.”
— from a letter received by this office, undated

The properties described here are private. The families who live on them did not invite visitors. Going out to look for any of this would be both a trespass and a discourtesy, and the books say so on the copyright page.

V

Questions

Are these accounts real?

They are real testimony. Real people said these things, on the phone, in letters, and at kitchen tables, and they are set down here the way they were given. That is a different claim from “a large upright canine exists in North America,” and these books are careful never to make the second one.

Every volume states its method in the front matter, prints the disagreements between tellings, and gives an ordinary explanation where one exists. DOGMAN Country devotes an entire part — Honest Doubt — to the bear standing up, the hoax trade, what the dark does to memory, and what would have to be true for any of it to hold. You are being handed the record, not a verdict.

There are free videos and forum threads everywhere. Why pay for this?

Because a free ten-minute video is a reposted paragraph read aloud over a stock forest photo, and you cannot go back to it, cross-reference it, or find out who said it or when.

These are 413 pages you own. Accounts carry the witness’s trade, county, state, month and year. They are indexed by place, by behavior, by sound, and by what the creature would not do. When four hunters in three states describe the same seven seconds, you can actually put those four accounts side by side — which is the only thing in this subject that has ever been worth anything.

Why is the whole collection only $29.99 when two volumes are $27 each?

Because these are digital files and it costs nothing to send you four instead of one, and because the books are better read together. The Beast That Fled means very little until you have read a hundred accounts that end the ordinary way, and the pattern chapters in DOGMAN Country are built out of the same regions Neither Friend Nor Beast works through family by family.

The launch price is what it is for the launch. Buying all four separately is $73.98, which is what the buttons on this page charge if you buy them one at a time.

What format is it, and how do I get it?

Illustrated PDF, one file per volume, emailed to you by Gumroad within about sixty seconds of checkout. It opens on a phone, a tablet, a laptop, or an e-reader that takes PDFs, and it prints cleanly if you would rather have it on paper — the first-ten-minutes checklist is designed to be printed and folded into a glove box. There is no app, no account to keep, and no subscription. Download the files and they are yours.

Can I buy just one book?

Yes. Every volume is sold on its own, and each one has its own buy button in the selection above and again in What’s Inside. If you are new to the subject, start with The Dogman Codex at $9.99 — it is the shortest and it explains the method the other three run on.

The only reason to take the collection is arithmetic: the four separately come to $73.98.

Is this frightening? Can my kids read it?

It is testimony, not horror writing — there is no gore and nothing is dramatised for effect. That said, a whole part of Neither Friend Nor Beast is about children who saw it first and were not believed, and plenty of readers have found the quiet accounts the hardest to put down at night. Use your judgement; most readers put it around thirteen and up.

I have seen something. Can I send my account in?

Yes, and that is how most of these books were built. DOGMAN Country includes the Witness Report Form used to take accounts, and Neither Friend Nor Beast has an appendix on how to take one from someone else without leading them. Names are withheld by default and locations are given no closer than the county unless you say otherwise.

Four volumes. 413 pages. 114 accounts.

The record, as the witnesses gave it — and the one book that asks what the thing runs from.

Get the Dogman Files — $73.98 $29.99
Instant download · Yours forever · PDF, reads on any device