I had to look slightly up to see where I thought its head was.
He lives with his family in an ordinary two-storey house in a typical Durham, North Carolina, subdivision, with roads crossing in every direction. One night in May 2019 the rest of the family had gone to Greensboro to visit a relative with a new baby. He stayed home to look after the dog, who had recently been to the vet for unusually anxious behaviour.
She spends the day in a kennel in the backyard. A door at the back of the attached garage opens onto a narrow, four- or five-foot strip between the kennel and the house wall, with a bed of rocks against the house. A single dim light on the back of the garage lights the spot.
Around half past midnight he took her out on her long leash. He was in his socks and didn't want to step into the wet grass. She walked into the strip beside the kennel to do her business, facing him in the dim light.
Suddenly her back end lifted one or two feet into the air, as if something had grabbed her and pulled. He screamed. His first thought was a wild dog trying to drag her off. She tore free and ran back to him, and he heard something moving over the rocks. A figure came forward and stopped right at the edge of the light.
It was tall. He is six foot two and had to look slightly up to where he thought its head was. It was pale, not white or grey but ordinary pale skin, like someone who hasn't been outside in a couple of weeks. It was lanky and oddly proportioned, though not emaciated. It looked at him for a second or two. Then it went backward, faster than he could ever hope to move, and was gone. He ran inside.
About half an hour later the police turned up, probably called by a neighbour who had heard him scream. He told them only that he had seen a man in the backyard. He couldn't bring himself to say the rest.
He has gone back and forth between some unknown creature and, as he puts it, a naked, unusually tall drug user. He doesn't consider himself a believer in anything. He hasn't taken the dog out alone since.