He took the concept and ran with it, embellishing and burnishing the tale, perhaps even using a water creature from Native American mythology to create the hodag's look. About 'The Outhouse Papers' ...

The hodag is the coming to fruition of the power of these folk narratives to kind of mesh with pop culture, and then spun all these various sorts of potential narrative and embodied aftermaths.

The Hodag is a legend in the Rhinelander area which dates back to the late 1800's. It is generally credited to the imagination of Eugene Shepard, a logger in the area during that era.