lovec1990 wrote:terastas they might notice them but as you said it they will do their job, but only police may look at them when they look around the car and only way they might put some effort at investigate them is if familiy is claming a werewolf saved them.
Police will be preoccupied first and foremost with determining the cause of the accident. If the driver says s/he swerved to avoid hitting something, they
might look for tracks, but more to verify his/her story, and even then only if the crash looked suspicious.
Meeper wrote:Assuming the family get a good enough look at the werewolf, and even recognize what they're looking at (seriously, are you sure you'd know a werewolf if you saw one? Because like, nobody knows what a werewolf looks like, all we have is imagination and art), what are the police supposed to do? Pull off precious policing resources to go after some cryptoid that hasn't been linked to any crime? (Quite the opposite in this case)
Even if the family did get that good of a look at the werewolf, the responding officers would probably assume they didn't and that, when they say they say a werewolf, they meant to say they saw something or someone that looked like a werewolf. Big hairy guy, guy in a heavy coat, guy wearing
one of these, guy accompanied by a large dog, etc., etc.
The police probably wouldn't even make that detail public at all, in fact, unless it was compounded with other sightings in the same area. And even then, I doubt they would take the "werewolf" seriously. They may put up an increased presence in the area if only to reassure the populace, but they would do so expecting to find something that could possibly resemble a werewolf, not an actual werewolf.
Which, given the capacity of human imagination combined with their skepticism, I wouldn't expect to take very long for them.
Uniform Two Six wrote:Exactly that: Even if something weird happens and half the town hears about it by word of mouth, most are going to dismiss it no matter how bizarre it is (or even would be inclined to dismiss it more the more bizarre it is). On the other hand, some TV crew shows up, sensationalizes everything (for ratings), and winds up convincing everybody that maybe there's something dangerous out in the woods... Suddenly you find yourself out loping through the woods at night, minding your own business and stumble across a mob of frenzied townsfolk with torches and pitchforks (or flashlights and shotguns -- y'know, whatever).
Meh. . . Not so much, actually. I think the locals are much more likely to start rationalizing that they and their ancestors before them having been living there since friggin' forever, so if there really were something out there they had to worry about, they'd have been given cause to worry long before now.
Much as I hate to give credit to a craptacular movie, I think a much more realistic depiction of what would happen can be found in
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. Sensationalists, as well as some possible crypto-tourists, would visit the area, and with them would come a spike in local revenue, enough to give at least a few locals the idea that encouraging the rumors and getting the word out that this is Werewolf Town would actually be much to their benefit.
Which, were I the werewolf. . . You know what? I'd be all for that.
After Salem, MA started honoring its history of the infamous witch trials, the city not only became a real tourist's hotspot, it actually (with no small amount of irony) began attracting as prospective residents real live Wicca practitioners, who, in turn, did a lot to raise awareness, and tolerance, of the practice as a whole.
So if a town started billing itself as the City of Werewolves just as Salem billed itself as the City of Witches, I would expect two things to happen:
#1: Other real life werewolves would take an interest, and at least discretely try to check the place out.
#2: The word "werewolf" would lose a lot of its negative associations, at least as far as the locals are concerned.
So much so that, if I ended up much more publicly outed as a werewolf, the reaction would be. . . Well. . . Yeah, they would still definitely be surprised, but it would be less "HOLY [expletive]!!!" and more "Oh, well I'll be darned."
Assuming this wasn't long after the place became Werewolf Mecca and my reveal was instead met with "Hey, small world -- me too."