Episode 156: Deer in the Headlights

Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode features two stories, sort of a double feature, and both stories involve a person seeing an unexplainable creature while they're out in the road. The first one comes from Phoebe in Salt Lake City, and the second one is from a guy named Pat in Kent, Ohio. Like I said, both of these people witnessed unidentifiable creatures while they were out driving. And I'd say that the things that these people saw seem to be completely different from each other. but what they do have in common is that both of these people described these creatures having a lot of similarities to deer. The first story comes from Phoebe who is a hairdresser and her story takes place when she was out one night driving all by herself in an industrial area of Salt Lake City trying to clear her mind. It was during this drive that she turned a corner and her headlights hit a group of what she initially thought were teenagers hanging out. But as she kept staring and got closer, she realized that they had certain features and moved in a certain way that made it clear these things, whatever they were, were definitely not teenagers. This is such a weird story. I'm going to let Phoebe explain it for herself. This episode is called Deer in the Headlights and you're listening to Otherworld. Hello? Is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science, you can't argue with. I'm worried about all the science. Up in the sky. It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm going to die. I'm like, if limbs were just like wrong. Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a minute. I'm Phoebe. I grew up in Salt Lake City. Now I live in the city in Salt Lake, kind of in this little neighborhood that's off to the side in the West. It's the cutest neighborhood of all time. I love it. And I'm a hairstylist. I've been doing that for 13 years or something. And I love it. Salt Lake City, I would say it's not a big city. I've been to, say, Chicago and that walking around, this feels like a big city. But Salt Lake City, I think is kind of, it's maybe a medium city, I would call it. It's definitely not small, like, I don't know, little spots in Wyoming and stuff like that. Like we definitely have a metropolitan vibe going on and we have bigger companies out here. And when you're walking around downtown, it's bustling at times. Where this experience happened to me, I would call it South Salt Lake. This area is kind of half suburban, half like almost industrial. And it's more up and coming. They're putting in these cute little shops and like 1 million low quality apartment buildings. So where I lived, it was like kind of this mini neighborhood right off of a busier road. I had neighbors. I lived in like a small home and I knew some of my neighbors. So it had a little bit of that suburban feel. But then if you walked like less than a block, you're on this busy road. That's kind of a major road in that area. And there's like some little shops and restaurants and stuff. But then there's like a U-Haul down the road and like kind of these more like industrial feeling buildings and things like that. So it's kind of an in-between. The most nature you're going to get is trees that they've planted to look cute as part of the city. I think there's one park down the street that's pretty small. There's like a couple little things for kids to play on and a small dog park area, but it's pretty industrial. There's these big like truck parking areas and just a lot of roads and sidewalks. The nature-iest part of it would be people's front yards, things like that. It's definitely when you want to get to nature, you would drive maybe 20 minutes any direction and you'll hit mountains. And that's really where the nature is. But down in the city, it's there's not any huge parks or anything. Our biggest park is more central Salt Lake and it's still pretty urban as far as parks go. So it was April of 2021. It's still kind of COVID time. I'm back at work at this point I couldn't work during the lockdown because I'm a hairstylist so touching people for a living really wasn't the best idea so we're starting to come out of COVID or lockdown I should say and it's still feeling weird it's still not feeling quite right to spend time with other people and I'm definitely still feeling I think the depression and the isolation of that time. It also, early 2021 was also just a tough time for me. I was going through a lot of things in my own personal life and was just really emotional all the time. I was getting ready to not live with my roommates anymore or I think we were all starting to get on each other's nerves having been locked all in the house together for so long that we just wanted to kind of get away from each other. And something I was doing a lot at this time that I've kind of always done is when I'm feeling too emotional or anxious, I can't sleep. I've always struggled with sleep. And so what I will do is get in my car and just drive aimlessly around and just put on music and usually sad music so I can cry. because sometimes to get these emotions out instead of just laying in bed and trying to pretend that everything's okay, I can just go in the comfort of my own car, put on my sad music and cry. This night I'm laying in bed and I'm just keep thinking about all of these things that I have going on with me and my family and all these personal things. I'm feeling really anxious about facing the day tomorrow. I just feel like I don't want to. I just have this anxiety in my heart and I can't sleep once again. And I keep laying there trying to. And finally I realized I'm not going to be able to sleep. So to get all of this energy out, I'm going to get in my car. I'm going to put on my sad music and I'm going to just drive around in the neighborhood. This was probably around midnight. I usually would wait until I knew that everybody else in the house was asleep, or at least hope everyone else in the house was asleep so I wouldn't wake them up, or I wouldn't bother them by leaving and shutting the door. My dog at the time was really mellow, so I would leave her behind and she would just sleep in my bed. But I wanted to make sure there weren't other people wandering around the house so she would poke her head up and try to get out of my bedroom. So it was probably around midnight. I get into my car and I put on my sad girl playlist driving around aimlessly. I know these neighborhoods really well. I've lived in this house for three years at that point. So I'm super familiar with these neighborhoods. Also my dog at the time I would take her on walks all the time, long walks, especially again, during that COVID lockdown, we were going on a lot of walks. So I got to know this neighborhood really well. So I'm just kind of swinging my car around, driving slowly, turning into whatever neighborhood feels good. No aim in sight, just trying to get my feelings out, trying to cry to some sad music. It's warming up. It's not quite warm in Salt Lake yet, but I have my windows down a little for a breeze, just trying to calm myself so that I can try to get some sleep that night. And when I am in insomnia mode, I'm wide awake. So I'm pretty alert on these drives. When I go on these drives and I listen to my sad music, I'm really just trying to clear my head enough so these racing thoughts aren't keeping me up anymore. I'm trying to break myself out of the thought loop cycle, but I'm very aware and I'm very awake. I definitely wouldn't get behind the wheel if I was really, really tired. I turn into this neighborhood. I'm envisioning myself there right now. I start to turn into this neighborhood and my headlights before they hit the road I'm about to turn to, I see this group of what I thought at first glance was a bunch of teenagers. And I was thinking to myself like, oh, it's a bunch of teens out late together, kind of messing around. I think there was probably about six of them. Thoughts as I'm turning in is just like, okay, as you're turning down this road, be careful, make sure that they're crossing the street, not running in front of your car, whatever. I turn and my headlights hit them and they all freeze and stare at me like deer in headlights, quite literally. And then it's at this point that I realized that they actually kind of look like deer. I felt my heart drop and like the blood came out of my face that cold fear feeling where your heart just stops and you almost can catch your breath and you feel cold for a second They were all really tall, long limbs. They definitely had human-like faces. It wasn't long and stretched out like a deer. It was like a human being, but they had skin, but the way they were standing looked like if a deer is standing on its hind legs. They were holding their arms kind of weird. The way they acted, they acted like deer. They froze when my headlights turned and they stared into my headlights for about a second. The way they moved was like if deer were moving on their hind legs. their eyes kind of glowed in the headlights for a second, like a deer. So it was like a human being had almost been stretched over a deer body and it was acting like a deer, but it looked like a human, except for really, really long limbs. It was when my headlights hit them and they paused and we had that second interaction where we were sort of looking at each other, where I realized, oh my God, these things are maybe seven feet tall and their limbs are so long. And this is not a human being. And there's about six of them. Some or at least one of them had their arms as if it's a deer standing on its hind legs. They were wearing clothing because I remember as I was about to turn onto this neighborhood road, I thought they were a pack of teenagers. A pack of teenagers. And they were wearing clothing. And it was just normal. That's why at first glance, I didn't really think anything about it. It looked like your normal, average 2021 teenager wearing what they might be wearing during the spring. I don't remember a ton of details about the clothes because then when I saw their freakish limbs, that all went out the window. I knew when I saw them and when they interacted in my headlights that it wasn't deer. But my brain, I think, was trying to tell me, this is some sort of weird deer. Because what the actual fuck is this? After our eyes connect, we both realize that we've seen each other. they scatter this entire group i think it was about six they all scatter and the way they go is they bound away i've seen deer my whole life growing up in utah there's deer everywhere i mean there's just deer everywhere they're unavoidable and so the way these creatures cryptids moved was like deer, but on their hind legs. So if you've seen deer run off, they do this hopping thing where they sort of hop on both sets of their legs and they'll hop, hop, hop, and go away into the meadow or whatever. So it's like they were doing that, but just on a pair of hind legs. There's some type of gazelle or something that I've seen video of where I think it's either trying to like get some leaves or fight something and it's hopping on its hind legs but the way the hind legs move and the I guess what would be the knee part bends is like kind of freaky looking I mean they're just weird shaped creatures and this is what this felt like is they're doing this high hop off of these hind legs bounding away but keeping their top part up not using all fours they hop away all of them and they all kind of scatter different directions, but the ones I was watching hop away on these back legs, bound away, jump up into the air, probably about six feet into the air. And then they jump and disappear down behind these hedges. The hedges are maybe four feet tall. And they're in front of this company building that's in this neighborhood that I'm driving down. They're like for decoration or something. They're not overgrown. They're actually perfectly manicured, little square hedges. And they jump up, land down behind the bushes, and I can't see them at all anymore. For them to completely disappear, they would have had to be lying flat on their stomach area and army crawling through these bushes, which based on the shape of them, I wouldn't think they could really do. And I sat there for a couple of seconds after this entire thing happened, trying to process what on earth has just happened to me, what I have just witnessed, which felt really like I probably shouldn't have seen this. And I didn't see them at all anymore. They were completely gone. And I just was thinking, oh God, what have I seen? What has happened to me? Because I just was trying to have a night to get my feelings out, go home and feel better. And now I've seen something I can never explain. I feel the blood come out of my face. I feel that cold fear feeling. And before I had turned, I thought they were a group of kids. I thought it was a group of teenagers. And I even kind of thought to myself in my sad brain, oh, that's nice that these kids have friends and they're having a nice night with their friends. I even, if they were deer, I think I would have been a little shocked for a moment because as there is deer that wander down, I mean, you don't see them every day. So it would have been maybe startling for a second, but then I think, oh cute a deer and I move on with my life but when I realized that it's neither of those things and it's some fucked up combination of both I have to try to catch my breath for a moment and I feel like I can't and I feel like my palms are getting sweaty and I'm just trying to process this because the whole interaction took less than 30 seconds certainly it was very fast as I'm turning onto the road before my headlights hit them but I turn my face and I see this group that's maybe four seconds. I turn and my headlights hit them. That's maybe one second. They look at me. That's probably two seconds. And then they scatter away. That was like a handful of seconds. This whole thing happened in 15 seconds, maybe a little more than that. So my whole world has changed within 15 seconds because I have never seen anything like this before. I've never seen anything paranormal ever in my life. I'm trying to gather myself because I'm telling myself, it's really time to go home now because I'm either fully losing my mind or I've really truly just seen a creature that does not exist in my world. And I did not sleep well at all after this. This drive did not work to clear my head to try to get to sleep. I get home. I'm really freaked out. I get into bed with my dog. and I hold her, and she was, she's passed now. She was this huge greyhound who was so comforting to me, and so I just held her, and I tried to get some sleep. I maybe slept for two hours that night, and then I had to work the next day. I was pretty freaked out still in the morning, but I also think I was trying to just convince myself that I saw something that I didn't, and it wasn't really this. I hadn't told anyone about this. And maybe two years later, I'm scrolling on Twitter and I see people posting about like spooky stories that had happened to them or unexplainable things. And it made me think, oh, I should I should tell my story on here and see if anybody else in SLC has seen something like this. and so I type in my Twitter and I say does anyone want to hear about the time I saw cryptids in SLC and my friend is like yes definitely so I type out my story pretty short and I remember my friend actually replying to me and saying either you're a great creative writer or this is the craziest story I've ever seen and I told her no this is very much real nobody else responded saying they had seen something like this. And then after that, because this was the first time that I had ever talked about it publicly, I had never told any of my friends. I started thinking about it again and really remembering the night. And so I started looking up Salt Lake City urban myths, Salt Lake City cryptids, Salt Lake City urban legends, things like that, trying to find anything similar to what I had seen. And I couldn't find anything. I found that there's supposed to be some sort of Loch Ness monster in Bear Lake. I found that people had reported other kinds of creatures, but nothing like what I had seen. The only thing that I saw, the only story I found that was similar or felt close to what I had seen was people talking about, and I almost don't even want to say the word because you're kind of not supposed to, talking about skinwalkers. I don't know that I believe in skinwalkers, but I don't know that I don't. I think I kind of am open to believing in anything, especially after this experience. I feel like the world is much more complicated and crazier than I thought. I also kind of am just open to believing in anything because I don know I do know that skinwalkers are a big thing in Utah A lot of people believe in them especially like the indigenous people here have talked about them. And there is a place out here called Skinwalker Ranch where people have talked about weird experiences. I don't know a ton about them. I know that people have said that they're shapeshifters. And from the couple of things I had read online, people had said that they're long and tall and skinny. I don't know if that's what I saw. I really hope that's not what I saw. I think that if it had been what people call skinwalkers, I hadn't seen any reports about multiple. Usually it's just one. And I had seen this as a pack, which is why I kept associating it with deer. Because when you're driving around, when you get up into where you reach the base of the mountain in Utah, you see deer everywhere. Like I said earlier, you see them in the city here and there, but you see them all over once you sort of get at the base of the mountain. And they always move in packs. There's always a few of them all together. And that's what this felt like. It felt like at first a little group of teenagers and then the way they moved, the way they behaved, it felt like it was a group of deer. The way that they were packed together, the way that they scattered when the car headlights hit them, it seemed like deer. And from what I had researched online with the skinwalker thing, people hadn't reported multiple altogether at once. these creatures I felt like were of this earth it didn't seem like they were an apparition or ghostly or anything like that it seemed like they were something that lives here on this earth just maybe they choose to hide behind the hedges all the time. It's like nothing bad happened even that night when I saw the dear teenage people cryptids. I just was freaked out, went home, didn't sleep very well, and then went about my life as if it was normal. Like nothing scary or dangerous or bad happened to me outside of seeing these weird things. When they locked eyes with me, it seemed like they were scared and startled by me and my car and they bounded away because they were scared. It didn't seem like they were out to get me. It didn't seem like they wanted anything to do with me. They wanted to get away from me as fast as possible. Again, kind of like a pack of deer. I just keep bringing it back to that because the way they interacted is exactly how a pack of deer would interact if you hit them with your headlights. I had always been open to belief systems, I guess, as far as like collective idea of collective consciousness or dreams being deeper than they seem. I believed that probably ghosts are real, but I had never physically interacted with something in front of my eyes. But I felt like I wasn't the type of person who would ever physically see something. Until now. All right. We'll be right back after this quick break. Okay, thank you to Phoebe for sharing this story. I am still struck by how unusual this is and how difficult it is for me to really put myself in her shoes because what she's describing is so uncanny and so strange. The concept of like a human-deer hybrid that moves like a deer but is wearing clothes, almost like human skin wrapped over a deer. It's very, very, very weird. I've never heard of anything like that before. I'm curious if anybody out there has heard of something similar. I thought it was such a weird story. So thank you once again to Phoebe for sharing it This next one comes from a guy named Pat The story was originally sent in by Pat's girlfriend Who had heard him tell it a bunch of times Knew about the story Sent it in and kind of made him come on the show Or at least talked him into it So shout out to her for that Pat is in a band I had never heard of this band But it turns out that two of the Otherworld producers Not only know of this band but they've actually played a show with them before somewhere in the Midwest. I thought that was a really strange coincidence. This band is a Midwestern experimental music duo, and both the Theo's have assured me that listeners who are familiar with them will be very excited to hear them on the show. So this story takes place when he was driving home from a neighboring town along with his bandmate, Doug. And as they turned onto a residential street just blocks from Doug's house, they noticed a sickly-looking creature that seemed to have the face of a man. The strangest part about this story is that it was in plain sight and happened in broad daylight. And after sharing the story with some friends, they came to learn that they might not have been the only people who have seen this thing before. My name's Patrick Madugno. I'm a visual artist and recording artist. I work at a pizza shop called Guy's Pizza. It's really low-key. If it's slow, we usually just watch movies all day. and I also collect weird objects and toys and weird collectibles. I collect specifically action figures, but then weird stuff leaks through when I'm hunting for it. I collect a lot of Halloween masks, anything horror-themed, anything monster-themed, anything that's slimy with an eyeball on it, I probably bought it. That's what I was into when I was younger, and then I'd say by the time I was in the fifth grade and it kind of was looked at as dorky to like still collect Legos and action figures, I definitely got self-conscious about it and stopped. And then I probably turned like 28 or 30 and it hit my mind like, oh, I should start filling some shelves with some knickknacks and then it got out of hand. And now I'm at like a borderline, I would say borderline hoarder. place in my life with it. Me and my friend Doug are in a band called Mothcock, and we do kind of weird industrial music where it's samplers and electronics, synthesizers, what have you, and also saxophone and trumpet and weird vocals ran through a lot of guitar pedals. And we have a small little audience, and we tour around sometimes and play lots of universities and art galleries and weird clubs and stuff like that. This would have been around COVID lockdown when anything social wasn't really happening. Everything was closed and we weren't able to play shows in a public space. So the resolution to that would be we would set up a Twitch stream at our friend's house that was about 15 or 20 minutes away. Anyway, we would have been up fairly late doing that. We did sleep there that night. And then the next morning we woke up, hung out for a little bit, and then decided to drive back home around noon or 1 p.m. So we were driving back to Kent from my friend's house. We would have been on a kind of more rural area, like a side street going into Kent, Not a main street by any means, but, and that's the quickest route to Doug's house. We pull off on a street called Steineff Street. That's kind of a, uh, like side alley street. Not a lot of people live on it. There's probably only like eight houses on the entire street because it's kind of just a connecting alley street to other more busy streets. So we're on that street. And on the passenger side, I look out and I kind of say like, oh, look, there's a deer. Look out. And we both look and we, on further inspection, it's not exactly, it's not a deer at all. It's more like a dog. The only parts that seemed like a deer were from the like leg joints down. Like imagine a deer's legs, the way they bend, how skinny they are. Like the exact anatomy of a deer leg. And then once you got up to the torso imagine just the exact anatomy of like a dog that hasn eaten in a really long time that you would see on like the side of a highway like it looked very sick i can see like almost like ailment in the way it's built and there's no fur on it it's very skin toned and when i inspect it further i realize it has a human head And what sounds, this sounds funny and goofy, but the head looks a lot like the actor James Woods. One scary aspect of it was when you see a dog, it has a snout and its face protrudes. This definitely had a flat human face and had a human nose and a human mouth and had wrinkles on its forehead like a human would have. very non-dog features on the face specifically. I only saw it for maybe three seconds, but its face, again, resonated as James Woods' face to me. It just looked like it. It resembled it. But as far as hair and, like, I'm not sure if it had eyebrows, it didn't have hair. It was definitely bald. The entire mass of the creature had no hair. it it was just it was just kind of dry flesh toned skin with uh ribs showing and lots of definition of bone and and it looked very starved and just like like the first thing that came to mind when i saw it before i realized what it was was it was either a deer or like a really sick dog and then its face almost looked like it was gagging or like ill like it it had an expression of like discomfort i guess i've never seen an animal with mange or i have any kind of like deformity that would match this or anything to compare it to it well it seemed like it was moving it just seemed like it was moving through somebody's front yard um kind of aloof to what was around it. You imagine seeing a cryptid or a monster and you assume it's going to be at dusk or like, you know, at like nighttime or when it's sort of dark. This was in broad daylight in public. And that's the other thing is there were cars behind us in front of us. So I'm assuming those cars saw it too. My immediate thought was just confusion. I was never afraid. Like if I were to see this on foot, I would definitely be like, what the hell? But I wouldn't feel threatened by it or anything like that. So I think my overall reaction was just confusion and just kind of like, what the hell did we just see? I didn't feel fear from it or anything like that. I think it helped that I was in a moving car. But yeah, I mean, it definitely made me wrestle with what exists in the world. So we drive past the thing, and this was about maybe like one block from Doug's house. So by the time we get to the stop sign in front of his house, I just kind of mention, hey, Doug, did you see a weird deer dog man thing with a human head just now? And he was like, yes. In detail, we kind of just exchanged what we saw. And he's like, yeah, I saw it too. but one thing that struck me that I didn't see was he mentioned that once he realized what he was looking at he was kind of hit with a glare that wasn't necessarily the sun and that he was kind of blinded when he tried to inspect it further and that led him to keep driving so like that didn't happen to me but it makes me wonder if that was some kind of defense mechanism that the creature had. Doug described it as kind of how light affects you when the sun hits a glare in your windshield or something like that. But he's convinced the sun was facing another way. And he said, yeah, he's like, he said when he stared at it, it just kind of, a glare hit him like the sun was hitting his eyes. I remember mentioning that it looked like James Woods. I'm not sure if we agreed on that aspect of it, but we definitely agreed that it had a human head, a dog body with deer-like legs. But I don't know, maybe Doug being blinded by it didn't allow him to see its face well enough. I don't know, but I just remember the face looking a lot like James Woods. It was close to Doug's house, but we never gave it entertained looking for it or anything like that. But we did talk about it a lot, whether we were at work or at downtown at the bars or something like that. And I'm not sure how legitimate the stories were, but we would get feedback. I remember managing a restaurant a few years later after the incident and mentioning the story. And one of my employees being spooked and being like, oh, wow, was it on Steineff Street? and I answered yes. And then he went on to say that when he was younger and had sleepovers at a friend's house that lived on that street, they would see the thing at night all the time. So maybe it's been there all the time. So it could just be something that is some kind of deep-seated Kent legend that a lot more people are aware of than I know. Since this experience has happened to me, It's kind of like left me a little more open on what could possibly exist in the world. Not that I haven't been interested in it before and been open to it before, but now it's kind of like in writing, I guess. I've always had an interest in monsters and kind of as a hobby, but now I'm kind of wrestling with the idea that it might be reality. and do I run with it or wrestle with it? I guess I'm just kind of running with it at this point. Okay, thank you to Pat for speaking to us. You know, when I first heard him describe this thing and its resemblance to a certain outspoken actor known for his roles in Casino, Once Upon a Time in America, Hercules, and many more. I had many thoughts running through my head at once. I think the first thought was that, strangely, this is not the first story we've had on this show where somebody sees a creature with a human face that resembles an actor. In fact, it's not even the second one. It's the third instance of this, which I think is very strange. I'm shocked that we even had one. This is an unusual pattern, although each time the creature has been very different. Secondly, when Pat was talking about this, I was feeling the sort of thing where I'm laughing at it because it's so absurd, but also getting creeped out at the same time. obviously this is something that is very outlandish and I think when you hear something that's strange your first instinct is to laugh at it you know like come on man James Woods that can't be real but on the contrary I think in the back of my head when I hear stuff like this I know that this is absurd. It's obvious that it's absurd. Pat knows how absurd it is. And I found that people usually don't stand by something this unbelievable and a story that's so difficult to tell and get people to take seriously if they aren't 100% certain of it and very impacted by it. And clearly this is something that left an impact on him and something he knows is very strange. And on top of that, perhaps the weirdest thing is that it seems they might not have been the only people to see such a specific creature in that area. That adds a whole other layer to this for me. And I'm curious if any of our listeners have heard of anything like this before as well. So that brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you once again to Pat and also Phoebe for sharing their stories. This episode was called Deer in the Headlights and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our producers are Theo Schaefer, Theo Krantz, Hayley Pearson, and Nikki Kate Delgado. Our theme song is by Coberman. The soundtrack of this episode is by North Americans and Juice Jackal. Our artwork is by Cul-de-sac Studios. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends about the show. If you want to hear bonus episodes of Otherworld, you can become a patron at patreon.com slash otherworld. Our social media is at otherworldpod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey, Leah Reese-Dennis, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Colin Gaynor, and Hilary Schuff. Follow and listen to Otherworld now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained, you can send us your stories at stories at otherworldpod.com. Thank you.