Hey, I'm literally staring at something and we need to leave.
The teller and their husband had taken to driving out to different parts of Appalachia on weekends to hike and clear their heads. They had had strange experiences in the woods before, enough that they had made up code words: one meaning "I think I saw something, but we don't need to leave," and another meaning "I'm looking right at something and we need to go, now."
On a rainy Sunday in June 2026 they drove to Monteagle, Tennessee, to walk the Fiery Gizzard Trail and the Grundy Forest day loop on the Cumberland Plateau. They had hiked it before. They arrived around five in the afternoon and had the trail to themselves.
About a mile in they started finding clusters of red-capped fly agaric mushrooms and, delighted, followed the patches a little way off the trail toward a meadow. They stress that they didn't eat any; the mushrooms are poisonous, and both of them were completely sober. Just before the meadow they passed a tree stump with broken clay pottery sitting on top of it.
The teller was walking ahead when something very dark brown shot across to the right of the path. It was so fast they told themselves it was probably a deer or a coyote, but they used the first code word anyway. Their husband came up beside them. The woods went silent. Then there was a sound like a whistle, and the husband's eyes went wide as he said the second code word.
The teller looked where he was looking. Standing in the spot where they had seen the movement was a very tall, muscular, dark, two-legged figure, staring at them. They say it didn't look like Bigfoot.
They turned and walked quickly back toward the trail. Then the strangest part began. A deep, pulsing hum filled their ears, so piercing it hurt. They both felt dizzy and lost, as if they weren't on the trail even though they knew they were. Their muscles went weak and they felt sick. The teller kept silently repeating a prayer to stay steady. The whole way back they could hear something moving through the trees alongside them, and once, in full daylight, they saw its eyes. They say the eyes were glowing.
Even once they reached the road, the pressure in their heads and ears stayed with them. As they drove away they passed what they took for a deer standing at the edge of the woods. It was holding perfectly still in an awkward pose, and something about its limbs and jaw looked wrong to them.
The dizziness and pressure faded after about a day. Reading about it afterward, the teller found that what they experienced matched dogman accounts most closely, though they can't say for sure what it was. They're still hoping someone can tell them about that hum.