A listener writes “In 2016, my husband and I were driving through Micanopy, Florida. My dad was dating a woman who lived far out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by dense woods. As we turned off the road and pulled into the small clearing where her house sat, something suddenly ran across the front of our car.
To give some context, my husband had recently started hunting and was a former Marine. I was 21 at the time, an engineering student at the University of Florida, and I grew up in Boca Raton about as “manicured” a part of Florida as you can get. So my first reaction wasn’t fear it was excitement. I thought, Oh my God, wildlife.
It was a dark fall night, and the creature I saw had dark hair, not fur in the way I expected. My brain immediately started trying to categorize it, running through every animal I knew. But almost instantly, without me even consciously thinking it through, everything I knew got ruled out.
What I was looking at didn’t fit anything familiar.
It had very long, very thin legs, and as it ran across the road it didn’t move with the bounce or stride of a normal animal. There was no up and down motion at all, it almost seemed to glide forward, the way something unnatural might move in a horror movie.
By the time I fully processed that, it had already started to turn its head toward us while still moving across the road.
When I saw its face, I felt an immediate, intense wave of fear that I can’t easily describe. If I had to categorize it, I’d say it looked vaguely canine but wrong. Deeply wrong. Something about it felt predatory in a way that didn’t match anything I knew. I was shaken enough that I remember thinking, this doesn’t belong in any normal explanation.
Our dog in the backseat started freaking out.
I turned to my husband and said, “Chad, what the hell was that?” Without looking away from the road, he just said, “That was a coyote.”
But I could tell something about his reaction didn’t match that answer. And I think, in that moment, we both understood, without saying it that acknowledging it further would make it real in a way neither of us wanted to deal with.
We didn’t talk about it for years.
Later, when we were long distance because of work, we were at a friend’s wedding and had been drinking. At one point, I brought it up casually in the shower and said, “You know that wasn’t a coyote that night.”
He went quiet for a second and then admitted, “I know. I was so scared I didn’t want to think about it again.”
Years passed before we ever really tried to understand what we saw. We both knew about Bigfoot, but neither of us had heard of anything like a “dogman” at the time. It wasn’t until later, hearing other people describe similar encounters, that we both had the same reaction: that’s what we saw.”