[Crying]
Now, I'll tell this to you straight.
I'm not a man prone to flights of fancy.
I work for what I have.
I keep to my land and my family, and I'm not in the business of making up big stories
to keep kids entertained.
Folks around here?
Yeah, they will tell some tall tales, sure.
But there's a difference between a story and the real thing that is straight up the stuff
of nightmares.
What am I about to tell you?
Happened right here on my own property on a very clear night with no moon, and it's
left me with more questions than I will ever be able to answer.
I live on ten acres of mixed pasture and pine on the Tennessee side of the Cumberland
Plateau.
It's not a fancy place.
There's a double wide set back from the county road, a long gravel drive that floods
out every march, and a good barn that was built before either World War ever happened,
and it still stands strong, if a bit ragged.
But my pride and joy, now side of my wife and my kids, are my three hounds.
Two are black and tans, and there's one blue tick, and all were bred for tracking and
treing coons.
They aren't city-lap dogs that live in houses.
But I love them and protect them like they were my kids.
But make no mistake, they're far too wild to be indoor dogs.
City people, you won't understand.
But country folk, you know what I mean.
If you know, you know.
Those dogs sleep outside in a run that I built myself.
Six-foot-high chain link, dug down into the ground so nothing can burrow under.
And there's a tin roof across half of it for shelter.
I keep their straw fresh.
I keep their balls full of clean water, and in the winter I wrap tarps up around it,
and they have heated mats and warming lamps.
And I've never had a night when they weren't raising holy hell at something crossing the
edge of my yard.
A possum waddling through.
Ugh, they're louder than Gabriel blowing his horn.
A bear coming too close and sniffing around?
They are out there trying to tear down that fence to get at that bear.
So that's why this one night in question sticks out so much.
Because they didn't bark.
Not once.
It was mid-October, a Saturday night, and I remember because we just had the first fire of the
season in the wood stove.
The kids were in bed, and my wife had gone to sleep early.
And I was up nursing several cups of coffee, rereading a favorite Louis Le Mans novel,
and that's my guilty pleasure when the houses are quiet.
Somewhere around eleven, I stepped out onto the porch for a cigarette.
The air was cool and sharp, but heavy with the smell of wood smoke.
The yard light out there hummed up on the pole, casting a yellow glow across the gravel
drive and the dog run.
At first I didn't notice it.
There was the sound of me walking out, the sound of the screen door closing behind me,
in my boots on the porch wood, and the crinkle of me fishing out of cigarette from the
pack, in the grinding of the lighter wheel as I lit it.
I took a deep drag and exhaled.
That's when I heard it.
More to the point that I didn't hear it.
There was nothing to hear out there.
It was like I stepped into a vacuum.
Usually when that back door opens, my dogs would come to the fence, they're thinking it's
treat time or time to run, or they just come out to say hello.
I'd go and see them at the fence, and they'll whine for attention, and almost always I will
walk out there, check on them, and give them some attention as I smoke a cigarette or
two.
It's just a nightly thing we do, right?
But not that night.
The dogs were not at the fence.
They weren't pacing back and forth, whining and yipping, anxious for me to step down off the
porch to come see them.
I blinked a couple times to my eyes, adjusted to the light out there.
All there was was that yellow pole light, and by the time it made it to the dog run, that
life was less than half-strength.
But it was enough I could still see.
I had never needed more light out there before.
I knew if there was a problem big enough that I shouldn't walk out there unarmed, my
hands would tell me before I ever stepped off the porch.
So I was confused.
I looked at the front of the run.
They were not there.
In a second though I started to pick them out in the darkness.
All three were plastered to the very back corner of the run, pressed tight up against the
chain link as if they were trying to climb out.
Their ears were flat, their tails tucked under them.
I thought maybe a bear had wandered in way too close, but bears do not make my hands go
silent.
If anything, the scent of a bear makes them fighting mad.
I called out to them.
"What's the matter with you all?"
They didn't move.
They didn't make a sound.
Boom-hower, my youngest, let out a low, whimpering sound that I'd never heard from him before.
And yes, before you ask, I am a king of the hill fan.
And my other two dogs are named Hank and Dale.
Anyway, that's when I heard the noise.
I heard a soft, clean, clean, of metal, followed by the rattling of the dog-run gate handle.
At first my brain said, "Rakun."
We've had them fiddle with the latch before, though they can't usually work it out and
get it open.
No idea why they bother with it.
There's nothing for them in there but death if they happen to get inside.
I think they do it just to tease the dogs.
But what I was hearing was different.
This had a sound that didn't make me think like little paws.
I froze, listening hard.
The handle jiciled again.
Clink, clink.
Then a pull, slow but strong, making the chain links grown and shudder.
I squinted into the arid lights glow, looked to the far side of the pin, and that's when
I saw it.
There was a shape there in the darkness, barely visible, but it was crouched low on the
outside of the dog-run.
At first I thought there was some man out there, maybe some dumb fool from town trying to
steal my hounds.
But then it shifted, and I caught the outline of the shoulders.
A broad sloping covered in something that moved like fur under the light.
The head was way too big, the arms far too long.
Then one of those arms stretched up, and I watched, transfixed, as a massive hand wrapped
around the latch, testing it again.
It was trying to figure out how to work that latch.
Why it was doing that when it could have just peeled back the chain-linked fence like
the top of a can of spam?
I don't know.
Maybe it didn't know it could.
I have since thought that maybe it might have seen me come and go that way long before
that night, and it knew somehow that was an entrance and an exit.
But that hand, it was lit up in the weak yellow light when it reached for the latch.
I will never forget what I saw.
Big fat fingers like thick-brought worst.
I saw dullness in the light when it reached.
I guess they were the fingernails.
They looked short, blunt, and dull at the end of the big fat sausage fingers.
And for the record, I can't eat sausage links to this day.
Never mind a brot.
It pooled on the latch again, rattling it with more force.
I felt its frustration build.
And the dogs began to whimper louder, pressing themselves tightly up against the back of the
pin.
Their sound was now a low, pitiful wine.
They were telling me they were scared out of their wits.
If I'd thought that it was just some guy from town, I'd have been out there with my son's
baseball bat that he'd left on the porch earlier, or I'd go in and grab the shotgun from
inside, and I'd make him get off my land.
You see, but I wasn't sure.
And usually I'm a man who's sure about everything, but not that night.
I saw the figure lean in closer, and the light caught its face as it leaned forward just
enough for me to see the eyes.
And that's all I remember seeing are the eyes.
They were forward facing, and deep set.
As they leaned forward out of shadow into light, they reflected the light in a way that
humans don't, unless you manage to get them with a camera flash just right.
And human eyes with a camera flash, as you all know, will give you red eye.
They shine red.
But what I saw was a yellow-green color that I'd never seen before, and I know my animal
eye-shines at night.
I know a raccoon's as yellow.
White-tailed deer, greenish-white.
White eye-shine belongs to porcupines, owls and cats.
Possums are a strange orange.
Squirrels are a little bit of red and a little bit of orange.
You see, I know them all well.
I like to hunt at night.
But a yellow-green eye-shine?
I had never seen that before.
It studied the latch just a moment longer.
Then it let out a low, chest deep-sound.
If I hadn't been outside, I probably wouldn't have heard it.
This wasn't a growl exactly.
It was more like a frustrated grunt.
Then as if realizing it wasn't going to get the door open, it slowly stood to its full
height.
And Lord helped me.
It was tall.
Then I was sure this could not be a man.
And it was a shock of a moment when I realized that.
But I knew.
The top of that dog-run fence came to just below its collarbone.
As I said, that was six feet tall.
It had to be at least seven and a half feet, maybe more.
Its shoulders stretched wider than the door gate itself.
It turned its head.
And even from the porch, I felt its eyes hit mine.
I hadn't moved a muscle.
I hadn't made a sound.
Maybe it smelled the tobacco.
But once I had seen it, I had frozen, and now it's looking right at me in the darkness.
We locked eyes there in the half-dark, for what was probably a couple heartbeats.
Then without a sound, it stepped back into the shadows just beyond the yellow yard light.
One step, two steps.
Then it vanished into the darkness.
My dog stayed frozen in the corner, trembling.
I don't remember going back inside to get it.
But when the sun came up, I was still sitting on the porch with my rifle on my lap.
I have a memory of going out there, checking my dogs very well, walking around with my rifle.
I remember checking the fence in the run carefully.
You don't mess with my dogs.
I don't care who or what you are.
The dogs were their normal selves, hanging at the front of the run, hoping for my attention,
but then an hour.
But I still didn't trust that.
I know dogs don't lie, but I didn't trust that thing was really gone.
When the sun came up and I checked the run that morning, the dirt down by the gate was pressed
deeply with prints.
Not paw prints.
And I had been careful when I was out there checking it during the night.
I made sure not to step in that area.
I already knew what I was dealing with.
When I had a feeling I would be finding prints come morning.
And there they were.
Foot prints, several of them, wide, human-shaped feet, pressed deep into the damp ground.
I scuffed the prints over with my boot, then put some filled dirt and gravel over there.
I didn't want my kids or wife to see.
Over the next few days I put out several more lights by their run and all over the yard.
I enclosed more of their run permanently.
I made sure they would have a place to retreat to that they couldn't be seen if they didn't
want to.
Somewhere they would feel safer.
But my dogs, well, they've never been quite the same.
They are more quiet at night.
Oh, they will still bark if something comes into the yard, and they still bark like the
Dickens when we're hunting.
But it just isn't the same.
It's hard to nail down, but their behavior is different.
They always stuck close together before.
But now they are velcroed to each other.
I don't know what it wanted with them.
Maybe it was curious.
Maybe it thought it could open the run and take one of my dogs.
Maybe it was testing me.
Maybe all it wanted was to know that it could figure out a human's latch.
But I haven't seen that thing since.
That doesn't mean that it's not out there right at the edges of my yard, right where the
lights can't reach it.
All I know is from that night on, I never trusted the dark edges of my yard again.
I put out more motion lights, and I promise you, if I see one go off, I'm out there,
lickety split.
Because this is my land, this is my yard, it's my castle.
I will defend it.
[At the end of the video, we're done]