A listener writes “I live in Ohio. In June of 2016, my friend and I had just finished our junior year of high school and wanted to do a lot more fishing than we usually did. We found a nice size pond that neither of us had ever fished before in the south side of Sycamore State Park, just 15 minutes west of Dayton.
We got to the parking lot around 6:00 PM and saw that the reservable shelter on top of the hill had a wedding reception going on. We had to pass it to get down to the pond so we congratulated them and continued down to the pond. Once we got to the bottom, we started fishing for panfish(crappie/bluegill). We weren’t catching anything sizable so we decided to try catfishing on the bottom. We caught a few small bluegill and cut them up into chunks. Almost immediately we got a catfish. We kept getting bites so we decided to stay well after sunset. The park closed at 11:00PM so we started to pack up around 10:45 back up the hill. As we were walking up the wooded stairs toward the hill, we started talking about a particular movie, he’d never seen before.
We kept talking until we got closer to the hill. We startled to struggle carrying everything up the stairs as we had our phone flashlights in one hand and fishing gear in the other. As we turned the corner, we heard a pop can hit the ground by the shelter house. We both turned our heads and saw something hanging over the trashcan. Thinking it was a raccoon, I remember yelling “Hey ole boy, get out of here” real loud. Right after I said that, this thing straighten up really quickly. We could see from shelters light the lower half of this thing. The top of the trashcan was only about to this things groin region.
It stared at us only for a second before swinging its arm around and walking into the brush. Alarmed, we both fast walked into my car a sped off. I hunt that park pretty heavily in the fall/winter and have never experienced anything odd or out of the ordinary before. I will add thought that Sycamore State Park is about 1,500 acres of mostly hardwood forest/brushland. The park has 9 sections to it, all divided by roads cutting through. Out of the 9 sections of park, 7 are open for hunting, 2 are not. The area with the shelter and pond, are not open to hunting. I wonder now if the reason I’ve never had an experience in the other parts is because these creatures may have figured out the protected parts of the park.”