There is good reason that place has sat empty for decades.
The teller works in commercial real estate, a job that takes them everywhere from city industrial parks to farmland at the end of nowhere. In October 2012 their last stop of the day was an old farmstead near Cayuga, in Haldimand County, about thirty miles south of Hamilton, Ontario. It had stood empty since the 1990s, at the end of a dead-end country road, hidden from view at the top of a long driveway.
They arrived around 5:30 and started their walk-around. The house was boarded up tight. A tool shed had collapsed, but the garage was mostly still standing. Its side door was half broken in. A padlock and two hinges still held it, but the bottom had been forced inward, and the door and the siding around it were covered in scratches.
These weren't dog scratches. They were huge, deep, parallel gouges, spaced wide like fingernails, made with a lot of force. On the ground around the door were paw prints everywhere. They were not round like a dog's but slightly elongated, and at least five inches across. When the teller set a size-ten boot over one, the print showed on both sides of it.
That's when they noticed the woods had gone completely silent, and that the air stank of wet dog, urine and rot, like a swamp but much stronger. All at once they were certain they weren't alone, and they headed straight back to the car. Something big crashed through the bushes nearby, moving fast and hard.
They locked the doors and started the engine. When the headlights came on, two eyes shone back from the trees ahead, four or five feet off the ground or higher, far too high for a dog. In the dusk they could just make out what might have been a large shape among the shadows.
Watching it instead of the ground, they reversed straight into a marshy patch and got stuck. They spent several frantic seconds rocking the car free. When they looked up again, it was gone. They drove out faster than they'd come in, and they say they had never been so scared.
A coworker suggested a bear, but there are no wild bears that far south in Ontario. About a year and a half later the teller went back. The buildings had been torn down and many of the trees cut, but the land was still empty.
Later the teller handled a farmland sale near Six Nations of the Grand River for an elderly client, a man in his eighties or older. They asked whether he'd heard of anything strange around that area and mentioned the old farm. He answered with a question of his own: "You seen it, didn't you?" He wouldn't say more, except that there are many things unknown to this world, and that there was good reason that place had sat empty for decades.
The teller had nightmares for about a year and still hesitates to take on surveys of places like that.