'Bryn Athyn Beast' remains elusive, but this dogman phenom sure captures the imagination
There's three things you look for when searching for a cryptid.
“There’s eye shine, a smell and unusual sounds,” said Eric Mintel, a paranormal investigator from Bucks County, checking his video cam, just in case the Beast presents itself this night.
Eye shine is what you get when a flashlight hits the eyes of the thing. Smell is common and can be “like horse manure or a wet dog.” Sounds are easy to detect.
“Branches breaking, crunching gravel, leaves, things like that,” Mintel said.
He stopped and listened. Nothing. No Beast, just crickets.
Last week, behind a local Baptist church in Bryn Athyn, Montgomery County, Mintel and his team of investigators searched for a dog-like creature known among locals in the borough as the “Bryn Athyn Beast,” or sometimes, “The Montgomery County Monster.”
Spotted a handful of times in Montco since 1990 in the area of Quarry Road, a lonely country lane near the Cairnwood estate, Mintel said eyewitnesses who’ve encountered the creature tell similar, disturbing stories.
“It prowls on all fours and then rises up on two legs, maybe seven, eight feet tall,” he said.
Then it weirdly glides away as if floating, then vanishes into the woods.
Mintel, a jazz musician by night and, later at night, a hunter of ghosts, poltergeists and other things that go bump in the dark, was in Bryn Athyn producing an episode of his popular local YouTube show, “Eric Mintel Investigates.”
He’s with Dominic Sattele, a pal since they attended Pennridge High School. Sattele, an HVAC mechanical estimator, is the show’s “spirit medium.” He’s sensitive to the paranormal, and discusses it as a matter of fact.
“I’ve had this gift since I was a child,” he said.
Along with Mintel and Sattele is Tom Carey, 81, a retired financial analyst for Cigna in Philadelphia. For years he has been intrigued by paranormal phenomena like Bigfoot and UFOs. He has spent years studying, investigating and writing about it.
“I’ve written 12 books on Roswell,” he said.
They were joined by cameraman Justin Rose, a Bryn Athyn native, who said the reports of the thing prowling the woods of his hometown are popular local lore.
“Everyone in town knows about the Beast,” he said.
As the men gathered in the parking lot near the place of a 1990 sighting by two teenage boys, they were joined by one of those boys, now a middle-aged man, Rich Show.
Show grew up in Bryn Athyn. As he tells it, he was 15 when he and a friend cut through woodlands to a clearing behind the Baptist church, on their way to watch the 1990 NFC Championship game. The clearing was a softball field back then, and they took a seat on a bench behind home plate. What he and his friend (now deceased) saw was so bizarre he never forgot the date, Jan. 20, 1990.
Some sort of creature, large like a lion, was gliding over the baseball diamond.
He asked his buddy, “What is that?”
The field had Diamond-Tex, the gravel found on ballfields.
“You would hear crunch, crunch, crunch if something was walking on it,” he said.
But there was no sound.
“A little fearless at the time, probably a little too much testosterone,” Show said, “I slapped my buddy on the knee and I’m like, let’s get it, and we start chasing this thing.”
Whatever the thing was, it took off.
“And I could hear it run,” he said. “I could hear it run into that woods line down there, and the crunching of the leaves and the branches and everything. The way I describe it, it was like a shadow lion. Imagine a male lion, just a dark shadow.”
As they pursued it, it suddenly turned around and pursued them.
Dogman of Michiganhttps://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/life/2019/10/17/battle-creek-folklore-do-you-believe-dogman-fort-custer/391973
They ran from the field, up a hill to the church parking lot, which was bathed in security lighting. He kept quiet about it for years. Then he saw a documentary on a similar creature in another part of the country. The eyewitness accounts were nearly identical.
He researched and found Tom Carey, the first to hear his story. Carey wasn’t surprised. He’d looked into Beast sightings before.
“People have variously described it as a werewolf, (or) a biped that’s nine or ten feet tall,” he said.
Some confuse it with Bigfoot.
“It’s not Bigfoot,” Carey said. “It’s a quadraped. Bigfoot’s a bipedal hominid … but much, much larger … So our working hypothesis is that the Beast of Bryn Athyn is a dogman.”
The dogman apparition, or whatever it is, is a worldwide phenomenon, and there are written accounts dating to the 1700s.
Last year, an Australian man described how he was stalked by an immense dog-like creature in the Outback. He took several photos, but it’s hard to see if it’s brush or Beast.
Regular reports roll in across America, with Michigan and Louisiana among the hotspots. In Augusta, Michigan, sightings are so regular a book was written by author Linda Godfrey, “The Michigan Dogman.” Mintel and his team traveled to Elkhorn, Wisconsin, 40 miles south of Milwaukee, to research a dogman creature known as the “Beast of Bray Road.” So many in Elkhorn have seen or know someone who said they’ve seen it, that a town meeting was called and more than 100 people showed up to discuss the phenomena.
Mintel was there.
But if these things are so widespread, why hasn’t one been captured or even photographed?
“They don’t get paid enough to be on camera,” Sattele joked.
With its sudden appearances and disappearances, Tom Carey speculates the beast can transform from physical to metaphysical at will.
“There’s some sort of portal in Bryn Athyn, Montgomery County, that this thing, this creature, comes and goes,” he said.
Mintel, who loves a good ghost story, said he maintains healthy skepticism about such things.
“But they’re seeing something,” he said.
Daylight faded, shadows grew. With camera lights charged and microphones checked, the men walked down a steep embankment from the parking lot to the lush field where Rich Show said he encountered the thing 32 years ago.
They stood silently, checking compasses and other electronic instruments that indicate unusual magnetic activity, the calling card of the paranormal.
They listened. White moonlight beamed through tall pines. They looked around, searching for shadows. They sniffed, seeking a telltale sign of the Beast. But there were only crickets and distant nightbirds. Carey pulled out his compass, turned on a flashlight and looked. The needle was steady.
Mintel broke the silence.
“We’re getting some activity on this one,” he said.
He flashed a beam on a compass. Its needle twitched and shuddered.
Sattele called out. His electromagnetic field tester jumped from zero to 1.4, indicating some sort of activity. It could be iPhone interference, they didn’t know. But the sudden jump from nothing to 1.4 is huge, he said.
“A lot of times this will go off because we have ghosts in the area,” he said.
Oh great.
After a half hour of waiting and finding nothing, the men drove to Quarry Road, where several encounters with the Beast have been reported.
The road winds and descends through darkened fields, leading to an abandoned quarry from which Cairnwood and the Bryn Athyn Cathedral were built. The men parked, assembled and waited. High above on a hill loomed the gothic tower of the cathedral, illuminated and lovely.
Tom Carey discussed his investigation of a 2006 incident in which several high school girls encountered the dog-like thing in the nearby field.
“See those lights there? They spotted a dog-like creature on all fours galloping toward them,” he said.
The creature got to within 50 feet of the girls and it rose up on its hind legs, seven or eight feet tall.
“It became a biped and glided off into that distance, into the woods,” he said.
The men waited quietly, checking their instruments. Someone said, “Whoa!”
Sattele’s EMF device jumped from zero to 3.3. Something was out there, and it wasn’t an iPhone. But nothing presented itself to them. No unusual sounds, no smell.
But at one point, they picked up eye shine.
“It was just a couple of deer,” Mintel said.
JD Mullane can be reached at 215-949-5745 or at jmullane@couriertimes.com.
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: 'Beast of Bryn Athyn' lives large in Montgomery County monster lore
