Something was making sounds like children in the woods behind a Youngsville, North Carolina home — and when the family finally saw what it was, it wasn’t anything they could explain.
The account was shared to r/Paranormal by user TheJakester7610 and spans what appears to be a period of three to five years ago, unfolding over several months in winter. The original post is available on Reddit. The family lives adjacent to a wooded area, and the events came in three distinct waves before going quiet.
Voices Calling From the Woods
The first incident happened when the poster and a cousin were on the back porch. They began hearing what sounded like children in the woods, calling out for help and asking them to come inside. The two called back, but the voices just kept repeating the same requests. Something about it didn’t feel right. As TheJakester7610 put it, “it didn’t seem real… it sounded mimicked.”
No missing children were ever reported in the area during that time.
This type of encounter, where something in the woods appears to use a human-sounding voice to draw people toward it, shows up repeatedly in cryptid and folklore accounts. Commenter Leading_Layer_8220 noted as much in the thread: “basically every culture has something about entities that copy human voices to lure people into danger.” Whether that pattern reflects a real phenomenon or a shared human anxiety about the dark edge of the forest is a question worth sitting with.
The Screech
About two months after the voices, the poster’s mother stepped onto the back porch to smoke a cigarette at night and came back inside shaken. She had heard what she described as an inhuman screech coming from the woods. When she told the grandmother, the grandmother revealed she had heard the exact same sound a week earlier while taking her dog out around midnight.
Two people. Same sound. Neither had compared notes before that moment.
The family specifically noted there are no wild boars, pigs, or mountain lions in the area that could account for a scream like that. That rules out some of the most common explanations for woodland screams, though it doesn’t eliminate all of them. Eastern coyotes and certain owls can produce deeply unsettling sounds, and some witnesses who later hear recordings acknowledge the resemblance. Whether that applies here, only the family would know.
The Figure at the Woodline
The third incident came one to two months after the screams. The poster was heading to bed around 11 PM and went to close the blinds. What he saw at the edge of the yard stopped him.
A pale, whitish-grey humanoid figure was moving on all fours near the treeline. TheJakester7610 described it this way: “its legs were like a dog, but more bent inwards… it didn’t seem like it had a face, the head was smooth and pale.” The figure walked behind a tree and disappeared into the woods. No tail. No fur. No face.
The sighting lasted only a few seconds, but the details are specific and consistent with what researchers and enthusiasts often call a pale crawler — a category of humanoid reports characterized by a pale or grey complexion, quadrupedal movement, and an absence of obvious facial features. These reports surface repeatedly from wooded areas across the American Southeast.
A Neighbor’s Matching Account
What makes this case harder to dismiss is that a friend living nearby independently reported two matching experiences around the same time: voices calling for help from the woods, and a humanoid figure moving at the far edge of his yard, described in terms that matched what TheJakester7610 had seen.
Two separate households. Two sets of vocal incidents. Two visual sightings matching the same description. Neither account relies on the other to stand up.
Commenter ResplendentShade shared a third adjacent account in the thread — a childhood story from someone who grew up on a property in southern Georgia where, after a series of paranormal occurrences, they encountered what was described as a human-dog hybrid on all fours with a warped but human face that retreated into the woods on eye contact.
What Could It Be?
The honest answer is that no one knows. The pale crawler label is a community designation, not a scientific one. There is no verified biological candidate for what multiple witnesses across the Southeast have described. Skeptical explanations tend toward misidentification — a person crawling, a deer in an unusual posture, a large pale animal like an albino raccoon or coyote seen under poor lighting conditions. The smooth, featureless head is harder to account for under that framework, though lighting conditions and brief observation windows can distort perception significantly.
Mimicking voices are a separate puzzle. If the vocal incidents and the visual sighting are connected to the same source, the behavior pattern becomes stranger. If they are unrelated coincidences, then the family had a very unusual few months in the woods for multiple distinct reasons. Neither explanation is especially comfortable.
The family has not seen or heard the figure since, though other unexplained events have continued on the property.
Have you seen something unexplained near your property’s treeline? Send your report to Reports@ParaRational.com.
