A North Carolina man says the creature he watched cross a dark road at 4 AM moved like a ninja, then slipped into a tungsten mine that has been shut since the 1950s.
The account arrived as a listener letter to Sasquatch Chronicles in June 2025, and it reads like a checklist of classic Bigfoot activity: loud wood knocks, nightly coyote chaos, footprints, a road crossing, and a neighbor who swears he once saw a very tall bear. It is a single, unverified account, but the details are specific enough to be worth laying out.
A Rental Across From a Closed Mine
In 2019, the writer was laid up with a back injury and out of work for a year and a half. He rented a house near Bullock, North Carolina that he had watched sit empty and listed for rent for about two years. It stood on a secluded road across from a tungsten mine that closed in the 1950s, and the road itself carried the mine’s name. He describes the mine as a dangerous place.
He moved in with his wife, his 15-year-old son, and his daughter, who was about seven. According to the letter, his family began having strange experiences, and he did not believe them until he had been there about three months.
Knocks, Coyotes, and Footprints
The coyotes went off all night, every night. The writer, with nothing to do while he healed, spent those nights standing by a wood fire outside. That is when he began hearing tree knocks, some of them, he says, so loud that no person could have made them.
He tested that idea. He put his son, who stood about six feet tall and weighed around 200 pounds, up in a tree with a baseball bat and told him to swing as hard as he could. The result was nowhere near as loud as what he had been hearing. He also walked near the mine and says he found footprints.
The 4 AM Crossing
One night around 4 AM, he was driving home about 20 miles per hour through a sharp curve when something crossed the road in front of him, heading into the mine. He says it moved in an odd, fluid way he compares to a ninja, and that the two of them made eye contact for a split second.
A Deputy, a Neighbor, and a ‘Bear’
Months later, he worked up the nerve to ask a sheriff’s deputy who had worked the night shift in that county for 20 years whether he had ever seen anything strange. According to the writer, the deputy said he had seen a creature at the very spot, though he could not say whether it was the same one, and that he had also seen lights in fields that shot into the sky when he drove toward them.
An elderly neighbor, about 80, told him he once saw a bear standing on its hind legs by the road, roughly eight feet tall. The writer’s take is that his neighbor saw something he preferred to call a bear, since the bears in that area are not that big.
The house later burned down. The writer says he is fairly sure he left with some kind of negative attachment. One sentence in the letter about the fire is too garbled to interpret, so it is left out here.
The Skeptical View
There is a lot of ordinary wildlife in the Carolina woods, and a bear standing up to look around can read as a very tall figure in the dark. Coyotes can sound like more animals than they are, and a driver rounding a curve at 4 AM gets only a flash of whatever crosses the road. The letter also offers no photos, casts, or audio, and the deputy’s account comes secondhand.
Still, the son-in-a-tree test is the kind of detail people do not usually make up, and a sheriff’s deputy who admits to seeing something at the same spot is a thread worth pulling. Maybe it was a bear. Maybe it was something that has learned where the old mine entrance is.
Seen something unexplained? Email Reports@ParaRational.com
