An unspecified resident of Michigan (USA) reports.
“When I was seven years old, I started living on my uncle's farm. Now he is no longer alive and I want to tell a story that once happened there.
Our ranch farm consisted of 5,000 acres and was adjacent to the state forest. For miles around us, there was nothing but forests and pastures for cattle.
It goes without saying that we all grew up in such rural conditions as hardened and tough people, and it took a lot of effort to scare us or make us worry.
We were all experienced hunters, fishermen and spent a lot of time in the woods, knowing well the habits of local animals. As the only girl on the ranch, I was everyone's favorite and grew up a real tomboy and took part in all such events.
My uncle just decided to make money and joined the army as a senior special forces officer in the US Navy. He was a sturdy build and taller than 180 cm with a long history of survival in difficult conditions and completely fearless in character.
It started when he came home on vacation and decided to go out deer hunting. And when he returned, he was completely out of his mind. He was trembling and tears were streaming down his face.
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I've never seen him cry. It took a very special reason to bring a man like my uncle to such a state.
Still not calming down, my uncle began to say that he saw SOMETHING in the forest. He could barely speak and my grandmother began to calm him down. Only after that, my uncle told me that he saw in the forest a creature that looked like a cross between a yeti and a wolf.
None of ours decided that it was a joke or a hallucination, they immediately believed my uncle and everyone, including grandfather, began to prepare for a big hunt for this beast. Uncle was still scared, but he also decided to go so that no one thought he was a coward.
Our men gathered all their guns and a large supply of cartridges, saddled their horses and drove to the place in the forest where my uncle had seen this animal. In those places there were legends about a creature called the Dogman and our family obviously heard them, but in those years I still did not know anything about him.
I was strictly ordered to stay at home and I sat and worried about them, especially when darkness fell. Finally I heard the neighing of the horses and realized that they had returned.
When they entered the house, they were silent and everyone looked somehow insecure, but they did not tell anything, they might be afraid to scare me. However, at dinner I was told that we now have a new law and that I am now forbidden to play alone on the street and even go to barns and barns. And if I want to go, then my grandfather or someone else must go with me.
Of course I was upset by all this, but I understood the seriousness of their words and obeyed. Also, from the next day, my father and grandfather began to teach me how to shoot a gun.
A day later, I overheard a conversation between adults and found out that on that day they found tracks of an animal and they were much larger in size than tracks of a wolf or a dog, although they resembled them in appearance. However, they could not identify which animal they belonged to. But as I mentioned, they knew all the animals in the local forests.
And then, not far from the tracks, they found traces of large sharp claws on a tree trunk, and they were 8 feet above the ground (2.5 meters). And these were definitely not bear claw marks.
When winter came, we began to regularly find our cows killed and maimed with terrible force. No local animal like a bear or a coyote could create such a thing.
This went on throughout the winter and in those few months we lost about forty cows. All the carcasses were mutilated and there were always these huge wolf tracks next to them in the snow.
All these events had a very strong psychological impact on my uncle. He had never drank alcohol before this incident, and after that he was only seen as in an embrace with a bottle of whiskey. He stopped coming to the farm on vacation and didn't even show up for my father's funeral two years later. Every year he became more and more self-contained and succumbed to self-destruction.
Soon he volunteered for a trip to the Middle East, participated in Operation Desert Storm, and then … committed suicide. I really believe that that day he saw something so terrible in the forest that it ultimately killed him."
