What People Are Doing Wrong This Week: North Carolina Cryptid
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With Halloween just around the corner, let’s take a look at a creepy, and supposedly true, story that went viral this week. A 911 call recently surfaced from a North Carolina man who called police because he thought he saw a bloody man on the side of a deserted country road. While he was talking to the operator, something fell into the bed of his pickup truck, causing the caller to scream, “That’s not a person ! That’s not a person !”
Watch the video:
My initial reaction to this was the same as yours: it’s fake. Convincing, of course. But it’s fake, just like 100,000 other “paranormal videos” online. There’s no photo of the creature. We don’t know who it is. We don’t know the context. Filming and posting a video online is easy and risk-free, so there’s no reason to believe it’s real, so I moved on to the next video. But as it turns out, there’s enough evidence here to at least take a closer look.
The true part of the story
Unlike the vast majority of terrifying videos posted online, much of this story is true. It’s a real recording of a 911 call made at 11:00 PM on July 31, 2021, in Pender County, North Carolina. The verifiable details provided by the caller are also accurate. Snopes listened to the entire 11-minute 911 call and double-checked the data to ensure the distance reported by the caller is accurate. And indeed, it is.
The caller didn’t hang up either. He waited for the Pender County Sheriff’s Department to arrive and cooperated with the investigation. This means there’s a real person willing to corroborate the story—far more compelling evidence than most online paranormal claims. The police found nothing, but it also matched the 911 call: the man said he braked hard, and the non-human creature in the back of his truck flew out, landed on the road, and disappeared into the woods.
“Some idiot calls 911 with a false report,” you might say. True, but it’s a crime, and the anonymous caller was apparently credible enough not to be arrested for filing a false police report. The sheriff took the incident seriously enough to open a case, use state resources to investigate, and later give media interviews.
What amount of evidence is considered sufficient proof?
If the 911 caller had reported something else, like a wounded deer on the highway or something similar, we wouldn’t have doubted that it actually happened. A recording and a police report would have been redundant; we’d have believed the guy simply because he said it.
But I’m still 99.99% sure that this guy either mistook something mundane for a monster, or completely made up the story.
According to the 911 caller, the creature in the back of his pickup truck had sunken eyes and a missing nose, as if someone had “taken skin, placed it over a human skull, and stretched it.” It was not human. As Carl Sagan once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and a mysterious creature in South Carolina would certainly be something extraordinary. If true, it would upend everything we know about biology, zoology, evolution, and North Carolina. I’m open to the possibility, but a 911 call isn’t enough to accept it. We’d need extraordinary evidence: video, photographs, corroborating witness statements, and physical evidence alone won’t suffice. We’d have to catch at least one before rewriting zoology textbooks would be worthwhile.
There really may be a monster in North Carolina.
Don’t lose hope, all you “wanna believers.” It may still be true. Until the mid-19th century, gorillas were essentially Bigfoot in the eyes of Western science: some told stories of seeing them deep in the jungle, but there was no compelling reason to believe they existed. The same is true of giant squid: the occasional sailor would swear he’d encountered one, but physical evidence only emerged in the 1840s, and photographs of a giant squid only appeared in 2004 .
Yes, a previously unknown creature would have a harder time hiding in modern-day North Carolina than gorillas, which were rare in Cameroon in the 1840s, but it’s October, so I’m calling this a (barely technically possible) mystery rather than an outright lie.