The menacingly named Village of Wolves in Flint is weird enough, but what about an actual wolf of the large-ass variety allegedly shot near Flint?
Linda Godfrey on Absolute Michigan writes:
One consistently described feature of the Dog Man, an upright-walking canine many witnesses claim stalks the woods and roadsides of Michigan, is its size…usually six to seven feet tall on its hind legs. It stands to reason, then, that massive, wolfen creatures should be glimpsed or even bagged by hunters now and then. That is exactly what happened to a deer hunter named Eastman around noon on November 18, 1935, on the third day of deer hunting season. Eastman was hunting near Flint around Rhody Creek Trail, and despite good weather and a great layer of tracking snow, there were absolutely no deer to be seen.
Eastman soon found out why. He suddenly heard what sounded like “horses running,” and turned to see a massive timber wolf at a dead run. Eastman ended up shooting a wolf rather than a deer that day. He gutted it and dragged it into town to have it weighed and measured; it was 182 pounds even after gutting, and measured seven feet, 11 inches tall when measured hanging vertically. The creature stood 39 inches at the shoulder! It was considered such a magnificent specimen that the carcass was sent to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh where it was mounted and displayed. The entire story of the great Flint Wolf was told in the Great Lakes Pilot, Vol. 3, No. 6, 2005.
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What the hell?
First, photographer awayfromkeyboard mentioned "a trip to find a fabled cult-driven neighborhood called Village of the Wolves" in Flint.
Next, an anonymous reader added:
"Village of Wolves was a a bizarre agricultural community of sorts on Groveland and West Boulevard Drive. Tucked between junk yards, Eastern European Cemeteries, and a mobile home park its residents did seem a bit zombie like. A very strange place indeed, the farms and graveyards were just a few of the draws. The dirt roads were used for dumping all manner of detritus, dead dogs and the occasional human included. Grave desecration, prostitute sex, makeshift shanty construction, and ditching stolen cars were also popular VOW activities.
"Today VOW is quite a bit different. The roads are paved, a barrier has been erected to prevent through traffic, the flooding problem has been fixed, the makeshift shelters are gone, and a number of the houses have been torn down. Part of the Flint River Bike Trail now courses through the portion of Riverside Park that abuts the neighborhood."
I’ve never heard of this place in Flint. There's nothing about it on the web. I demand more information.
UPDATE FROM MOOKIE:
"Wow! Talk about a weird place. I always knew it as VOTW and thought that my friends (known as the Jew Crue) had christened it that, so it was cool that someone else used that title. It was a weird place all right. For starters, it was a horseshoe street but both ends had a sign that said "Dead End." We had many adventures in that place, including propping dead dogs up in various disturbing poses and interacting with the people that lived there (if you could call them people or that living.)
"I always wondered about the lives of the people that lived there and was always amazed that there was so much trash along the road. Maybe the trashmen were afraid to go back there, but we never were. We were simply fascinated, and bored. It was definitely a place that defined Flint for me during the time I was growing up there.
"Actually at the time I knew it it was not a "neighborhood" in the classical sense like Mott Park or East Village. There were a collection of trailers, woods, and cemetery but no solidly built housing. You would of course drive in off of Dort but then park and roam. It was always this very mysterious place, in that no one knew why the things that were there were there (dead dogs included). The people that were there definitely had this "mutant" feel to them. I think that danger came from the mystery and never knowing if the residents would go Dawn of the Dead on you. As Smurfs Inc said, imagination definitely played a part, but there was a reality of a really messed up [place] that was just under the surface.
"If you are confused, all the better because I think that anyone who has ever experienced that area has walked out of there a little confused themselves."
