I had this feeling it could go even faster.
The teller was nineteen, out on a late date with a girl a year younger, at a nature center about twenty minutes from home in southeastern Wisconsin. Theirs was the only car in the lot. Around ten they climbed through the woods to the top of the main hill, where an old backless wooden bench looks out over the distant lights of Waukesha. He knew the spot. They spread a blanket twenty-five or thirty yards down the far slope, where anyone up at the bench would be out of sight but easy to hear.
About forty-five minutes later he heard someone up top, rustling around in the leaves and dirt. Then came a huffing, puffing, low-growling noise. He crouched and whispered to the girl to stay flat and still. Neither of them wanted to be noticed by whoever was up there.
Then a figure appeared, exactly where the bench stood. The noises went on. His first thought was some strange man standing on the bench. But in the bright moonlight he could see it from about the waist up: a thick, solid, dark shape with a head far bigger than any man's. The head kept snapping from side to side, huffing and puffing, as if it was in a frenzy, or studying the hillside. It never paced. It stayed in one place, just jerking its head around.
He was still telling himself it must be standing on the bench, which would explain the height. Then it snapped its head to the right one last time and took off, and it didn't jump down from anything. It ran upright, at an angle down the side of the hill, for thirty or forty yards, at a speed no person could reach, and vanished into the woods.
What still unsettles him most is how it ran. It stayed bolt upright, arms held close at its sides and bent at the elbow in an L, with almost none of the arm swing a human sprinter has, and with the sense that it could have gone faster still. The huffing stopped the moment it started to run.
He grabbed the blanket, pulled the girl to her feet and said they had to leave, now. About a hundred yards from the car, a screech, part yelp, rang out behind them, perhaps a hundred or two hundred yards back in the woods, and it lasted ten or fifteen seconds. He has never heard anything like it. She clung to him as they froze, then they jogged the rest of the way as quietly as they could.
He estimates it was over eight feet tall and more than three hundred pounds, one solid colour, wearing nothing. He notes that the spot is about half an hour from the area of the famous Bray Road Beast sightings. Years later, a friend's girlfriend who knew nothing of his story told him that she and her brother had once seen something along a bike trail not far away. He has never gone back into those woods.