Surveyor Elwood Foss Vanishes During Michigan Dogman Hunt

A recent video posted by the YouTube channel Trail Stories has been making the rounds in the cryptid community, and it's one of those stories that sticks with you long after the video ends. It tells the tale of Elwood Foss, a 61-year-old former surveyor who lived alone on the edge of the Manistee National Forest in Michigan for nearly two decades, and who walked into the woods one night in October 2021 and never came back out. The story unfolds like a slow-burning campfire tale. Foss was a regular at the Cedar Tap, a small bar on the north end of Baldwin, Michigan, where the same 40 people have been drinking together for 30 years. He was a quiet man about most things, but when it came to the dogman he believed was living in the deep forest north of town, he couldn't be stopped. He had files. He had maps with pins. He had a notebook so swollen with damp it looked like a Bible when he set it on the bar. What makes this story hit different is how Foss approached the creature. He wasn't out there hunting it or trying to prove it existed with a rifle. He was leaving it food, including deer, fish, and pork from the grocery store, placed in the same spots year after year so the thing would learn his pattern. His logic was simple: a creature that could learn a pattern could learn a man, and a man it had learned was a man it might let close enough to talk to. And here's the part that gave me chills. In his last year, Foss started finding things left for him. Stacked stones. Twists of grass tied in knots. A ring of small bones laid out around one of his feeding spots as neat as a clock face. He told the bartender he believed the conversation had already started. The bet that sent him into the woods came from Jud Landry, a propane driver who laughed hardest at Foss's stories. Jud pushed him, saying if he knew so much, why had he never brought back real proof? Foss didn't get angry. He just closed his notebook and said he already knew how to talk to it. He wrote a date on a napkin, slid it under a pile of bills, and said he'd be back in three days with a recording. Five days later, a search party found his camera zipped inside its case, still holding a partial charge. It had 41 still images and no video. Foss was gone. The Lake County Sheriff's office closed the case 11 days later. Cause of death: misadventure, presumed exposure. There's also a detail in the video about a trapper who came into the Cedar Tap a few times a year and never laughed at Foss's stories. The trapper told of losing 11 coyote traps in a single night, finding them pulled from the ground, chain, stake, and all, and hung in the branches of a single pine 20 feet up, arranged in a spiral around the trunk. One track in the snow beneath it, longer than a snowshoe. He pulled his line the next morning and never ran traps in that country again. Michigan has a long history with upright canid reports, from the old Ojibway accounts of a wolf-headed creature that walked on two legs to the modern-day sightings that pop up in Wexford and Manistee counties every few years. The Manistee National Forest, with its dense old-growth pines and remote ridges, is exactly the kind of country these stories tend to come out of. The video does a great job letting the witnesses tell the story in their own words, and the pacing is perfect for a late-night watch. If you're into cryptid lore, disappearances, or just a good unsettling story, this one's worth your time. Head over to Trail Stories on YouTube and check it out for yourself.