It's like it's always watching, and it won't show up when the cameras are out.
A Reddit user has been collecting encounter stories from people in their community. This one comes from a family friend who lives on the outskirts of town, five miles from the nearest gas station, with forest around him and a single neighbour across the road.
In 2013 he picked a bucket of squash from his garden, set it on the porch and forgot about it overnight. In the morning the whole bucket was gone. A raccoon would have rummaged and spilled squash everywhere. Nothing had spilled. It was as if something had picked the bucket up and carried it off carefully.
A few days later he came home from work to find a dead mouse on his doorstep, carefully wrapped in a leaf with some grass, almost like a sandwich. He wondered whether someone was playing a prank on him, or even trying to put some kind of curse on him.
Nothing more happened for about a year. Then one evening, watching television, he caught movement through the window by the garden. A figure was hunched over the squash plants. He went out to confront it, and was struck by how silently it was moving, as if trying not to be heard. When the porch boards creaked under his foot, it looked up, and its eyes shone in the porch light. Then it stood up on two legs.
It was large and bulky, at least seven feet tall, black, hairy and shaped like a man. The moment it saw him, it fled into the woods at astonishing speed, still barely making a sound. He had no doubt what it was. He lay awake that night thinking about the missing bucket and the wrapped mouse.
The next morning he tried an experiment. He rolled some turkey up in a leaf with some grass, the way the mouse had been wrapped, and left it on the picnic table when he went to work. That evening it was gone, leaf, grass and all, and the lawn around the table looked undisturbed. On his doorstep was another mouse, headless this time, with a small pile of berries beside it.
The exchange has gone on ever since. A few months before the post, he received a whole deer antler. He has set up trail cameras many times and never caught anything. He says it feels as though it is always watching, and simply stays away whenever the cameras are up.