I'm sure she still talks about the crazy kid who worked for her.
In 2015 the teller worked on a small cattle ranch near Marlin, Texas: two sixty-acre pastures in an L shape, rolling grassland broken up by thick oak woods, with a creek along the bottom. On days off they liked to paddle a kayak half an hour upstream, where the eight-foot-deep creek gave way to gravel bars full of arrowheads and fossils.
About fifteen minutes into one trip they came upon two deer on the bank. Deer don't seem to know what to make of a kayak, so the teller paddled slowly toward them, and the pair just watched. At about twenty yards both deer suddenly looked back down the creek, snorted the way deer do when they smell danger, and bolted.
The teller turned to see what had spooked them. Seventy-five yards downstream, a hairy, human-shaped figure was leaning out over the creek bank, holding a big oak branch with one arm to keep from falling in.
Everything else went blurry. It was mid-afternoon and the figure was backlit, so they could see only the upper body and no detail in the face. The hair hung two or three inches long from its arm and looked black, except where the sun shone through and turned it brown. They looked at each other for six to ten seconds. Then it pulled itself back behind the tree, and the brush was too thick to see it go.
Once they had collected themselves, the teller paddled back to find the tree and get a sense of its size. The brush that had hidden its lower half was about three feet tall, which put the figure at a little over six feet. There was no trace on the hard grey clay under the leaves, ground where you can't track a wounded deer without a blood trail. There was no hair on the bark or briars either.
Back at the house they told their boss, a woman from Connecticut who had bought the ranch to enjoy in retirement. She was skeptical, but she mentioned something odd: for several days the cows had stopped sleeping in the pasture by the creek and had been bedding down by the barn, as far from the water as the property allowed.
For weeks the teller got chills and felt watched whenever they worked the lower pasture. Their boss joked about drug testing them. Eventually the cows went back to their old spot, and the feeling faded.
A month later the teller climbed into a tree stand above a corn feeder at the edge of the creek woods to hunt hogs. Normally the feeder went off at seven and the hogs came in by eight. Nothing came. Around nine, as it got too dark to see through the scope, something pushed through the brush behind the stand like a group of hogs, then stopped dead twenty yards away. Hogs grunt as they come in, and this made no sound at all. When the teller climbed down a few minutes later, whatever it was had gone without a sound, but a faint musky, rotten-egg smell drifted past on the breeze for a few seconds.
Nothing else happened. The teller worked the ranch another year until their boss sold up and went home to Connecticut. They figure she still tells people about the crazy kid who worked for her.