Story:

I waited to tell anyone about this before now just because of how weird and honestly scary and unexplainable it is.

This is an encounter I had while hunting.

I was out in the woods before the sun came up. Got to my spot. Sat down on the ground and started waiting for the sun to come up. Before shooting light I started hearing something walking behind me. No big deal. Lots of squirrels and rabbits around. Constant noises in the woods. Critters rustling around as they wake up. Then as I listened it got closer and closer. It sounded big.

I didn’t want to move and spook it if it was a deer. Hoped it would walk past me and turn into a shot. As I listened to the crisp crunches in the snow, it started sounding more and more like two feet and not four. Now any hunter will tell you that your mind plays tricks on you out there all alone in the dark. I held completely still as the steps came closer and closer right towards my back. It would stop and the woods would be completely silent. I would think it was nothing. Think maybe I imagined it completely. Then another crunch. It sounded like it was RIGHT behind me. I started thinking what if it was a hunter that hadn’t noticed me. It was dark so that was possible I supposed.

I determined I would turn to look but I didn’t want to spook anything. Even a hunter. I decided swinging the shotgun around would be too much motion so I drew out the 500 Smith and Wesson Magnum really slowly and then quick like lightning I stood up spinning around and pointing the handgun out in front of me.

Nothing. No animal or anything. That on its own is kinda weird but it got worse. I walked in the direction of the footsteps and saw boot prints. Perfectly clear and fresh. It had snowed overnight so it was fresh and untouched. Just occasional squirrel tracks but even those were very few and far between. The boot prints just led right up to about ten feet behind where I had been sitting and just ended. As if someone walked right up behind me and then flew up into the air or vanished completely.

I followed the prints to see where they came from. Took me on an hour long walk through the woods curving this way and that, like the person didn’t really know which way they wanted to go. No clear direction. Large circles of just aimless walking. The footprints led under branches that I had to push away from my face and body. Thick brush and thorns. The weird thing was… I was knocking snow off these branches. Whoever passed through somehow didn’t disturb the brush or knock the snow off the foliage. As if he just passed right through them like a spirit. The sun started coming up so the orange light off the snow made it easier to track without my flashlight.

The prints wound around in the trees and never showed indication that the person was running or speeding up. Never deep toes or sliding prints. Nothing except perfect boot prints. It was the same steady prints the whole way. Up steep hills that I had to slip and slide down. They lead to the edge of a drop off as if the person stopped to look at the view even though it was pitch black.

Then the prints doubled back and kept leading deeper into some swampland. I was fighting through thick grass taller than me. More thorns. Somehow the prints just kept going as if nothing was hindering this person from walking along. As if it was just an open field and not thick, almost impenetrable wilderness.

The prints led to a deer carcass. Fresh. Blood on the snow. The head completely gone. The legs had the skin cut at the tops near the body and then the skin was pulled down to the hoofs like pants around the ankles. No bones missing. No meat harvested. I spent a little time looking around for the head but never found it. The site had a lot of disturbance in the snow. Like the deer had thrashed around violently or been engaged in a violent fight with something. I didn’t see coyote tracks or anything other than my buddy I’d been tracking all morning. The tracks didn’t lead any further than the deer site.

No other footprints lead away in any direction except the ones I followed to that spot. It was as if something burst out of the deer or dropped from the sky onto the deer, killed the deer, and then started walking around casually and calmly through the woods till it saw me. It crept up to within ten feet and would have come closer if I hadn’t stood up and turned around.

This happened a year ago. I hiked out to the deer site a few months later and the carcass was still there. Uneaten by scavengers.

To this day I can’t explain what I saw in those woods.

Follow-up post shared February 22nd, 2026:

What exactly am I looking at here? This is way out in the middle of a swampland completely surrounded by thick almost impenetrable forest, wicked thorns, and mud deep enough to swallow a person. I can’t show it on this post because I don’t want people to see it without their consent but this thing is coming up out of a deer’s ribcage.