In December of 1965, newspaper reporter George May was keeping the people of Frederick County, Maryland, on the edge of their collective seats.

For days, he had been their only source of news about something that had left almost everyone in a constant state of fear.

A local man named John Becker had told his friends that something large and unnatural had attacked him outside his home a few days earlier.

He described it as a dog, the size of a bear, with black fur and a vicious growl, and it stood on two legs.

Becker claimed that this enormous beast actually attacked him, but he somehow managed to fight it off.

There had been stories of something that fit Becker's description as far back as the 1890s, with sightings as recent as 1944 in nearby Carroll County.

So a group of over 100 college students did the only logical thing they could think of. They organized a hunt.

John Becker himself even applied for a hunting license, paying the $1 fee in cash.

If anything ever came of the hunt though, it was never reported, probably because it was all a hoax.

You see, the police never received a report from John Becker about an animal attack, and the hunting license had a return address with someone else's name on it.

The newspaper reporter himself, George May.

It seems John Becker was no more real than the monster he was supposed to have fought, but what is real is the tension and fear that rippled through the community there in 1965.

We fear invasion from the outside. We fear for our safety in the face of the unknown. We fear, or maybe we know, that the world holds more danger than we'd like to admit.

And it's out there, waiting for us.

Some run and hide, and pray it goes away. Others dispel the darkness of superstition with the light of reason.

But history holds a story of those who chose a different path. There are some, it seems, who took the fight to the darkness.

To grab your metaphorical gun, embrace yourself. The hunt is about to begin.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

Every widespread panic begins as something small. A whisper here. A rumor there. It's a seed full of potential, just waiting for something to nourish it into maturity.

An art story found its nourishment in the southeastern countryside of 18th century France.

It began on June 30th of 1764. A 14-year-old girl named Jean-Boulay from the village of Ubec was outwatching over her family's cattle, up on the gentle slopes of the hills south of the city of Vivare.

There are no detailed records of exactly what happened to her, outside of the notes written down by a local priest upon her burial.

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