He grew up in the Florida Panhandle, and this happened when he was about twenty, around 2004, on a long, dark road that crosses the Escambia River. Back then there were no street lights there. The river bottom is thick with woods and a wildlife management area, a green corridor that runs south to Pensacola Bay and north toward the Georgia line.
It was about 2:30 in the morning. Heading west toward the bridge, he saw a shape at the side of the road ahead. Worried it would dart out in front of him, he stopped about a hundred feet short.
It began to cross on all fours, angling across the road, and the closer it came into his headlights the more shocked he was by its size. There are black bears in those woods and he knew what they looked like. This was much bigger, and the wrong colour for anything that lived there: a dingy, dark grey.
When it reached the passenger side of the road, it stood up on its hind legs. He describes a fear so deep it felt primal, and a certainty that if it came for him he wouldn't stand a chance. It just stood and looked at him. He puts it at seven feet tall at least, and well over five hundred pounds, with eyes that glowed orange-yellow in the lights.
Then it stepped into the tree line and was gone, and he floored it out of there.
He kept it to himself for years. When he finally started looking for an explanation, he says, the only thing that matched what he saw was the creature people call Dogman.