With apologies to the folks who made Michael Landon's first movie

9:01 p.m. Photo by Eric Jackson

An unsual night for those who undergo "The Transformation"

Ordinarily on such nights, I am restrained indoors with my most valuable possession, a strong silver chain with shackles and padlocks of like material. It's better to keep it inside, so that the neighbors are neither frightened nor annoyed by all the howling.

How did it ever get that way? Don't believe the Hollywood versions. I was NOT bitten. But I wasn't born this way, either.

It started when I was a teenager, in a new high school in a new country, and totally unable to adjust. The school referred me to Dr. Rakosy.

After taking a preliminary history and asking a few mild but pointed question, Dr. Rakosy's demeanor changed.

"I know WHO you are, and WHAT you are," he said with a slight but unmistakable Central European accent that I couldn't specifically identify. "You are a peasant."

"Don't get me wrong. I'm not a snob. A peasant is an honorable thing to be. However, your classmates will never understand and they will make your life miserable."

"There is no cure, and why should there be?" he added. "I do have a formula that will allow you to blend in and better protect yourself."

He handed me a test tube full of a reddish liquid and ordered me to hold my nose and drink it down in one gulp.

Nothing happened at first, but I noticed my hearing getting better, my vision worse and my natural cycles became ever more nocturnal. Nobody at school bullied me anymore. For some reason I couldn't understand, the guys who used to do that became afraid of me.

9:38 p.m. Photo by Eric Jackson

Dr. Rakosy was very civic-minded --- about someplace else. He was a fervent patriot of a once but no longer dominant ethnic group in a remote mountainous region of another continent. His great mistake was that he failed to take into account my new ability to hear his conspiratorial conversations conducted behind closed doors. "Werewolf forumula," and "excellent progress," and "reintroduction program" were the snippets I heard.

Having pieced together the puzzle, I was overtaken by stark animal fear. Before I could make my escape from the clinic, the doctor appeared with something that looked like a .410 gauge shotgun, leveled it at me and pulled the trigger. I just got a glimpse of the silver syringe dart in my backside as the world went black.

Fortunately for me, he had another careless moment. The newspapers had a field day but to the homicide squad, the Rakosy case is just a fading memory, one of the strangest of all their cold cases. At the time there was speculation about hippie cultists, and after laying low for awhile I in fact found that I could fit in pretty well as a freak.

Photo by Eric Jackson

But I digress.

On this particular night I prevailed on my aging mother to chain me to the porch with my camera within reach.

It's hard to take pictures when your fingernails turn to claws and you hands to paws without reversible thumbs. It's also hard to brace the camera when your face elongates to a muzzle. But along about quarter to nine I found my ears become less pointy, my face growing flatter, my hair receding. The full moon was going away!

10:48 p.m. Photo by Eric Jackson

Now my usual once-a-month playmates, the dog pack, started acting strangely. They were running around excitedly, but seemed too frightened to howl. And what was there to howl at now? They took one sniff of me and backed away.

Things began to get back to normal, if you can say that about the way I get on nights with a full moon.

But there was this strange olfactory hallucination --- or was it? Did I smell green cheese somewhere?

10:59 p.m. Photo by Eric Jackson

Editor's note: For those of you who insist that a newspaper should stay away from legends and stick to scientifically observable facts, consider the following from NASA: