So goes the first line of the song that has chilled Michigan radio listeners for over two decades. In reality, “The Legend” began on a chilly March morning in 1987. WTCM radio morning personality Jack O'Malley was seeking an idea for an April Fool's prank to play on his listeners. He sat down to brainstorm with WTCM production director Steve Cook, who said he might have something.

"It really wasn't a song, or a poem, or even a story then," reflected Cook, "just the core of an idea." An avid folklore collector since his youth, Cook was especially fascinated by hauntings and unusual animals. Choosing characteristics of Bigfoot, the Boggy Creek monster from Arkansas, the Jersey Devil, and several other "cryptids," Cook created a mythical half-man, half-dog, and wrote several verses about appearances of the creature. He placed the events in Northern Michigan towns, and gave the dogman a mysterious chronological nature. Each sighting occurs in the seventh year of the decade.

"It's kind of funny, really," said Cook, describing why he implented the 'seventh year' rotation. "I was paying homage to an old movie called The Night Stalker. In that film, a reporter (Darren McGavin) was pursuing a killer who terrorized Seattle every ten years. That idea played very well in the dogman story. Everything in nature is cyclical: bird migrations, the seasons, locusts, etc. I picked the seventh year simply because it happened to be 1987."

As the poem took shape, Cook began sampling different ways of recording it for broadcast. The most promising featured a simple drum rhythm extracted from a cheap analog Casio keyboard. The meter of the poem fit perfectly into 4/4 time. Using some of the other voices on the keyboard, Cook developed a melody and chord structure that sounds vaguely Native American. Cook chose to use the name of one of his radio-show characters, Bob Farley, as the artist for the song.

"The first attempts were really cheesy," laughs Cook. "The music was so thin and lifeless. We ran it through several cycles on an Eventide harmonizer to give it some depth and presence." Eventually, the very first version of "The Legend" was born.

And then it almost died.