Michigan Monsters: The Dogman, Pressie and The Nain Rouge [Video]

Halloween is the season for scary shenanigans, and Michigan has no shortage of weird legends like the Saugatuck Melon Heads and the Dogman of Manistee, which even has a song written about it. A creepy song, to be sure, but a song nonetheless.  The myths and legends of the back woods and even the big cities of Michigan may be too numerous to mention, but several have stuck around in the minds of Michiganders to get repeated time and time again.

The Detroit Free Press recently recounted many of these legends, and here's a quick recap of the more famous monsters and myths.

The Dogman of Manistee -- A beast with a dog's head, but the upright gait of a man has been around since Native Americans first occupied the Mitten State. It was when the Dogman invaded a lumber camp near the Manistee River that the myth took hold, inspiring this creepy song about him by DJ Jack O'Malley of WTCM Radio in Traverse City.

The Melon Heads of Saugatuck -- The smallish, big headed, mean creatures were said to roam the grounds of the Felt Mansion in the woods near Saugatuck. According to the web site Roadtrippers:

The tale tells of a group of a family that gave birth to a brood of deformed children, kids with massively oversized heads. As this particular story goes, the children were shipped off to the old Junction Insane Asylum, where a terrifying madman performed twisted experiments on them, injecting their brains with strange fluids and torturing them for his sick amusement. Eventually, with word spreading that the doors of the asylum would soon be shuttered, the kids hatched a plan to end their abuse once and for all. On a rainy night, they attacked the mad scientist, escaping the hospital with his body, and fleeing into the woods. By this point, they had lost their sense of humanity, and they feasted on the doctors flesh, scattering his bones around a deserted mansion tucked away in the forest.

Teenagers in the area still recant the tale to this day to freak out their friends while driving the rural dirt roads in the area, even though no insane asylum ever existed in the area.

Pressie, the Lake Superior serpent -- Like his distant cousin, Nessie, who has long roamed the waters of Loch Ness in northern Scotland, Pressie is said to have been sighted near the mouth of the Presque Isle River near the remote Porcupine Mountains of the Western Upper Peninsula. However, tales of Pressie's excursions in the Big Lake They Call Gitchi Gumee have reached as far east as Whitefish Bay near Sault Ste. Marie, where sailors working the freight ships of the Great Lakes claimed to have seen him as early as 1894. Here's the tale (a tall one at that) of Pressie as told by Randy Braun, who claims to have encountered Pressie in 1977. Coming up with the best photographic proof of the serpent's existence.

The Nain Rouge, or the Red Dwarf of Detroit -- Detroit has had a sad history of economic hard times, violence and street crime, and all of these can be tied to what is known as Detroit's first mugger, a small man with bad teeth and a violent streak who rolled the founder of Detroit, Antoine Cadillac way back in 1701. Sightings of the little guy have been reported at a series of unfortunate events in the Motor City including military defeats  during the War of 1812 and even the Detroit riots of 1967. The dwarf now is the subject of a street parade every spring in the city's Cass Park.