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Not sure why this situation popped back into my head all of a sudden but I thought it might at least be an interesting anecdote.
Quick context: For the first 5 years at my current company, I worked with a fairly small team and for the first 2 years (2018-2020) we were in an office. We cycled through a bunch of bad managers at one point, and when we had the opportunity to add 2 more staff to the team, the current bad manager opted to hire a couple of people from within Customer Service. To summarize a lot of things; they were never very good at the investigative work needed and only did the grunt defined-process stuff.
One of these two people is a guy in his late 40s. I'm not the kind of person to really try to have a conversation and learn about your shit, so I never knew much about him other than the surface level stuff. Long unkempt hair to or past his shoulders, tattoos all over his arms, general haggard looking metal/horror fan vibe. At some point early on I think he'd tried to engage when he found out I was from England, telling me the band he was in played over there once. I didn't try to get him to elaborate.
Well around 2020, actually I think just before the pandemic, I stumbled into the weird side of YouTube channels and found a couple paranormal/cryptid podcasts, specifically ones regarding "Dogman". Basically think of the whole "Bigfoot is out there" thing, but what essentially look like werewolves, though may not necessarily change to human at any time. Werewolves were the only monster that really ever scared me as a kid, and I started listening to these "eye-witness accounts" of people seeing wolf-like creatures in the woods around the USA and other countries too. They were entertaining, a lot of the guests they'd have on to tell their stories sounded pretty convincing, and perhaps my inner-child wondered for a moment if there was anything to it.
As I'd often listen to them while working and all of my co-workers lived in heavily forested remote areas of Maine, I shared what I'd found with the group. Most of them were like "lol weird" but that one dude latched on hard. He said he'd listened to some Coast-to-Coast radio channel that had paranormal stuff on it forever. We started talking and it was interesting enough to postulate about the possibility of it being true. It was in that time that I found out the band he played in is actually a very big metal band that've been around since the 2000s, that I semi-listened to. Like, touring with Iron Maiden, Cradle of Filth, etc. big metal band. He'd actually gotten fired from it at some point for reasons, but regardless, it was weird to find out this guy played bass on songs I'd listened to when I was 14.
Anyway, it took maybe 3-4 months before the novelty wore off for me and I stopped listening to the podcasts regularly. Probably also around that time, said work-dude who had been given a few more responsibilities like maintaining the team Google Calendar, fucked up and deleted the entire thing, which I had to fix, so he quickly realized I was annoyed and we stopped talking.
Well he kept running with that whole "dogmen are running around in our woods/cities" thing. He started buying t-shirts and other merch from the podcast channels, joining their Facebook groups and so on. He got a custom license plate for his truck of "DOGMAN" and shared a picture of where he'd put up a "Dogman crossing" sign on a tree along his driveway. I'm fairly sure he had started taking his then fiancée to Bigfoot museums and such, as he'd tried to get me to go on a double-date there once (nope).
I think probably within a month or two of me falling off believing it and him just digging in more, he let slip that him and his fiancée broke up. Never told us why but I always assumed it was because he went full conspiracy-theory on it thinking the government could have created them or that they come from the "inner-Earth", etc. He moved to some apartment situation which may or may not have been rehab for a while. I think in the years since then he's taken PTO to travel to conferences hosted by one of the podcast channels and actually met one of the hosts, so I don't think he ever backed off on his fervor. Actually now I think about it, the last time I saw him when I visited the office, he tried to chat about how he'd joined one of the "national organizations" for investigating cryptid activity. I think it was "North-American Dogman Project".
So I've always wondered whether me posting a link in work-chat of "lol there's werewolves in the woods" years ago contributed to some guy going completely nuts, or if he already was and I just spun it in a different direction...
(I do know in the last year or two, he'd gotten back together with his old band and was trying to work the job still while on tour with them, so he does have that going for him, which is nice.)
Quick context: For the first 5 years at my current company, I worked with a fairly small team and for the first 2 years (2018-2020) we were in an office. We cycled through a bunch of bad managers at one point, and when we had the opportunity to add 2 more staff to the team, the current bad manager opted to hire a couple of people from within Customer Service. To summarize a lot of things; they were never very good at the investigative work needed and only did the grunt defined-process stuff.
One of these two people is a guy in his late 40s. I'm not the kind of person to really try to have a conversation and learn about your shit, so I never knew much about him other than the surface level stuff. Long unkempt hair to or past his shoulders, tattoos all over his arms, general haggard looking metal/horror fan vibe. At some point early on I think he'd tried to engage when he found out I was from England, telling me the band he was in played over there once. I didn't try to get him to elaborate.
Well around 2020, actually I think just before the pandemic, I stumbled into the weird side of YouTube channels and found a couple paranormal/cryptid podcasts, specifically ones regarding "Dogman". Basically think of the whole "Bigfoot is out there" thing, but what essentially look like werewolves, though may not necessarily change to human at any time. Werewolves were the only monster that really ever scared me as a kid, and I started listening to these "eye-witness accounts" of people seeing wolf-like creatures in the woods around the USA and other countries too. They were entertaining, a lot of the guests they'd have on to tell their stories sounded pretty convincing, and perhaps my inner-child wondered for a moment if there was anything to it.
As I'd often listen to them while working and all of my co-workers lived in heavily forested remote areas of Maine, I shared what I'd found with the group. Most of them were like "lol weird" but that one dude latched on hard. He said he'd listened to some Coast-to-Coast radio channel that had paranormal stuff on it forever. We started talking and it was interesting enough to postulate about the possibility of it being true. It was in that time that I found out the band he played in is actually a very big metal band that've been around since the 2000s, that I semi-listened to. Like, touring with Iron Maiden, Cradle of Filth, etc. big metal band. He'd actually gotten fired from it at some point for reasons, but regardless, it was weird to find out this guy played bass on songs I'd listened to when I was 14.
Anyway, it took maybe 3-4 months before the novelty wore off for me and I stopped listening to the podcasts regularly. Probably also around that time, said work-dude who had been given a few more responsibilities like maintaining the team Google Calendar, fucked up and deleted the entire thing, which I had to fix, so he quickly realized I was annoyed and we stopped talking.
Well he kept running with that whole "dogmen are running around in our woods/cities" thing. He started buying t-shirts and other merch from the podcast channels, joining their Facebook groups and so on. He got a custom license plate for his truck of "DOGMAN" and shared a picture of where he'd put up a "Dogman crossing" sign on a tree along his driveway. I'm fairly sure he had started taking his then fiancée to Bigfoot museums and such, as he'd tried to get me to go on a double-date there once (nope).
I think probably within a month or two of me falling off believing it and him just digging in more, he let slip that him and his fiancée broke up. Never told us why but I always assumed it was because he went full conspiracy-theory on it thinking the government could have created them or that they come from the "inner-Earth", etc. He moved to some apartment situation which may or may not have been rehab for a while. I think in the years since then he's taken PTO to travel to conferences hosted by one of the podcast channels and actually met one of the hosts, so I don't think he ever backed off on his fervor. Actually now I think about it, the last time I saw him when I visited the office, he tried to chat about how he'd joined one of the "national organizations" for investigating cryptid activity. I think it was "North-American Dogman Project".
So I've always wondered whether me posting a link in work-chat of "lol there's werewolves in the woods" years ago contributed to some guy going completely nuts, or if he already was and I just spun it in a different direction...
(I do know in the last year or two, he'd gotten back together with his old band and was trying to work the job still while on tour with them, so he does have that going for him, which is nice.)
