; Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Shocking Upright Canine Encounter in Michigan's Eastern Upper Peninsula


I recently found the following account:

My encounter happened on deer season opening day in November of 2013 in the Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan on family hunting property near a town called Cedarville. The house where my husband and I were staying in had a big front yard but other than that cleared area and the gravel driveway everything else is pretty deep hardwood forest. I also want to state ahead of time that this happened at around 11 pm so everything that's beyond the porch lights was pretty hard to see.

My husband and I had gone outside to have a cigarette and we took our rifle out with us whenever we were hanging around outside because there's bear and stuff back there in that area. I was up on the porch still and my husband had gone down the steps into the yard and was facing towards me when we heard these really heavy, slow footsteps coming up the driveway through the woods. It sounded like a really big man but there was this weird heavy breathing too. Even though the footsteps sounded like a person, sounded heavier than anything I had ever heard walking in the woods including full sized adult bear. My husband looked at me and mouthed "wtf?" and I was trying to figure out what it was that I was hearing. But nothing I had ever heard out there in those woods matched the size and breathing and gait of whatever this was. So I was confused and shaking my head. (My husband isn't a hunter and grew up in the city, so he was completely confused too). I've hunted and tracked basically everything that's indigenous to Northern Michigan since I was small, so I was honestly terrified that this animal was a complete unknown to me by sound.

It walked out of the tree line at the edge of the yard behind my husband and it was a lot taller than him; at least 7 foot tall or more and I'd estimate the weight for its size at around 400 pounds. It was on two legs and had super dark black fur that was somehow even darker than the night time dark of the woods. It was walking back and forth at that distance from us the whole time this encounter happened, but it would not step into where the perimeter of the porch light was. I had a really hard time making out its torso for that reason but I saw a wolf-like head and snout with pointed ears that stuck straight up. Instead of front legs and paws it had really disproportionately long arms and hands. It was on two legs this whole time walking back and forth. I freaked out and grabbed the rifle and just started shooting at it and yelling at my husband to run and get up on the porch. So he did and then he took the gun from me and told me to find something to use as a weapon and to go inside and hide, so I did. I got a big knife and went and locked myself in our bedroom in the closet and could hear my husband shooting and reloading a bunch for about another 10 minutes.

He came in and told me through the closet door that the creature had finally run off but he wasn't sure if it was going to possibly come back so we were both pretty terrified. I ended up staying in that closet all night until sunrise with my husband guarding the door with the gun. He told me that he thought I had hit it when I was shooting at first but the next day we didn't find any blood or hair or anything which I thought was weird because I really thought I must have shot and wounded it a couple times. It moved incredibly fast though and was agile enough to run through the brush and stuff without really mowing it down or making a bunch of noise like big animals usually do running through dense underbrush and stuff. The whole encounter was incredibly weird and scary. My husband also said that he did see it sort of hunch over and drop down onto all fours a few times while it was running back and forth at the edge of the yard, but that when it ran away for good that night that it was running insanely fast and on two legs like a man. We didn't smell anything bad like a lot of people describe when they see these things and it didn't even leave any noticeable tracks anywhere even though the thing was so heavy when it was walking up the gravel driveway that I swore the ground near it must have been shaking.

We found out later from one of the neighbors that he had seen it too next door the winter before when it came up on the porch of his cabin and looked in the door window during a party he and his wife had been throwing. He said he heard really heavy footsteps on the porch and pulled back the curtain on the window and the creature was standing there on the other side of the glass looking down at him but that it's fur was white then. I think that's probably because there was snow on the ground at this point in the year. My neighbor hollered at everyone in the cabin and told them what he had just seen and then everyone decided to make a run for it through the woods to his mom's house next door since her place was a lot sturdier than the hunting cabin. I've known that neighbor my whole life practically since high school and he would never make something like that up. He was scared even while he was just talking about it. I also read somewhere online recently that another family about 45 miles north of our area had a bunch of livestock like cows and horses turn up dead and torn up by some kind of big predator. One of the guys in the family saw a giant upright wolf back near his hunting blind during deer season, which of course freaked me out since we had our experience on the season opener. The land butting up to that family's property is hundreds of miles of the Hiawatha National Forest so it would make sense to me that a big animal would hide in and near a protected area like that when it's hearing gunshots everywhere else. My lot and my neighbors lot also are right alongside state land.

My husband and I moved since this all happened but the experience was so upsetting to me that I constantly research online to see if anyone else has seen this thing up north and what their encounter was like and stuff. I've even heard that there's a small pack of about 4 or 5 of them that live in state forest downstate in Isabella County. A bunch of locals in the nearby area have seen and that somebody even saw one at night in downtown Saginaw, Michigan. What scares me about that is the fact that there's no tree cover there as that's a city. I wonder if people all over the state are seeing these animals because they're getting forced out of their usual hunting territories due to hunting, logging and mining that's really increased over the years here. Be careful out there everybody! TD

NOTE: Please read the following link - 'Dogman' Observed, Then Vanished, Along Highway in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Lon

Phantoms & Monsters: Unexplained Encounters

The Inhumanoids: Real Encounters with Beings that can't Exist!

Hunting the American Werewolf

The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf

Monsters Among Us: An Exploration of Otherworldly Bigfoots, Wolfmen, Portals, Phantoms, and Odd Phenomena

Lon's Suggested Reading List - Books & Films / DVDs