weiknarf said:
This absolutely belongs in a game. Just enough detail to make it believable, but vague enough to let you fill in the details -- and very, very creepy.
I started reading this thread (which is excellent) and sifting through memories to see if I had any stories that qualified. I do, but just one:
In the summer of 1993 I did a 3 week Outward Bound course in North Carolina. One of the last things we did was a half-marathon trail run (probably about 14 miles, including elevation changes), and after 3 weeks of hiking, rock climbing and whitewater canoeing, I was in great shape for a run. I made it a personal goal to run the entire way -- no stopping, and no walking.
The area we were in was pretty hilly, and with people of different fitness levels everyone who did the run pretty much did it solo after the first couple of miles, as we were fairly spread out. About halfway through, I was cresting a large hill, tired but not loopy-tired, and off to my left I saw a flash of white among the foliage (low ground cover and tall grass in a low-density forest).
I was still running, and I probably only looked right at it for about 1 or 2 seconds. It was large, about the size of a gorilla, with stark white fur, and it seemed to be facing me. It looked roughly ape-like, too, with large black eyes that showed intelligence, a large head, and long, bulky arms. It was crouched about 50 feet away, and I was past it almost before I registered what I had seen -- the only thing I remember being certain of was that it was
not a deer.
I ran like hell, terrified, not even daring to glance behind me and convinced that it was going to be loping after me. After putting maybe a hundred yards (and some bends in the trail) between me and it, I did slow down and look back. I didn't see anything, and I didn't hear anything beyond my own footfalls (I still wasn't going to stop).
After getting out of that section of the trail, I didn't worry too much about it. I finished the run in about 2 hours, and walked it off by the pond at the "finish line." I asked the person who had finished shortly before me if he had seen anything odd in that section of the trail, and he said no. I described it to one of the instructors, and he said it sounded like I had seen the back end of a whitetail deer -- the ones with white hindquarters. I wasn't too worried about it at that point, and I pretty much left it at that.
That's not what I saw, though, and there's nothing I'm aware of that lives in the hills of North Carolina that looks like what I did see. I can think of all sorts of plausible reasons that I might have seen one thing -- something reasonable -- and thought I had seen another: endorphins, my tendency to scare easily, a vivid imagination, my emotional state, etc. As I would guess is always the case with things like this, though, none of them square quite right with me.
Not so odd compared to some of the stories others have told so far, but it still creeps me out when I think about it.
Edit: I should probably add that I was 16 in 1993, which makes me less likely to dismiss this than I might be if I had been younger at the time.