Hodag
A horned, spined beast of Wisconsin and Minnesota loggers' tales, and a hoax the logging camps played on newcomers.
Meaning
William T. Cox's Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (1910) says woodsmen described it in many ways, some claiming it was covered with horns and spines. His own version was the size of a rhinoceros and hairless, with a spade-shaped bony growth on its nose that let it see only straight up; it lived on porcupines, digging round a spruce where one sat in the branches, cutting the roots until the tree tottered.
Origin and history
A postcard published by the North Wisconsin Post Card Company of Rhinelander tells how the joke was played. On a new crew's first night in camp, a man went out into a nearby swamp and made the most terrifying noises, and the newcomers were told it was the hodag. "Many a tale was spun by the loggers about this mythical animal", the card says, "and a great number were taken in by the hoax."
Rhinelander’s hodag
The Wisconsin Historical Society finds the earliest known mention of the hodag in print in an 1870 history of Kent County, Michigan, but Rhinelander made it famous. In 1893 the timber cruiser and land surveyor E. S. “Gene” Shepard claimed to have captured a live one. For the 1896 Oneida County Fair he and a woodcarver, Luke Kearney, made their own: a wooden body covered with ox hide, bulging eyes, twelve cattle horns along its spine and wires to move its head. Shepard eventually admitted the hoax, and Rhinelander adopted the hodag as its mascot.
Read next
- Next in Cryptids and folklore creaturesJackalopeA jackrabbit with deer antlers, a tall tale of the American West first mounted by two taxidermist brothers in Douglas, Wyoming.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsTǔ 土The character for ‘earth’ and ‘soil’, and radical 32 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for the ground and what is built on it are filed.
See also
Kraken, Sea serpent, Loch Ness Monster, Champ (Lake Champlain monster), Bigfoot (Sasquatch), Yeti (Abominable Snowman).
Sources
- Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (William T. Cox, 1910), William T. Cox, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, with a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts (Washington, 1910), Internet Archive, The Hodag; The Hodag (continued)
- The Hodag from Rhinelander, Wisconsin (postcard, North Wisconsin Post Card Co.), Postcard, The Hodag from Rhinelander, Wisconsin, North Wisconsin Post Card Co., Rhinelander, Internet Archive, reverse
- The Hodag (Wisconsin Historical Society), Wisconsin Historical Society
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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