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It was well after midnight, somewhere between one and two in the morning, when I found myself winding back toward Wetzel County on Route 7. If you’ve ever traveled that stretch of West Virginia, you know it’s the definition of the middle of nowhere. Nothing but miles of blacktop, steep hills, and deep, silent timber. I was coming up on the little town of Hundred, coming around one of the sharp turns, when I saw something walking right on the white line to my right.
In the dim glow of my headlights, it looked like a massive, dark blob. I had hit a deer only months before this, a collision that cost me fifteen hundred dollars in repairs, so I wasn’t taking any chances. I slowed to a crawl straddling the yellow line to give the thing space. As I pulled alongside it, I looked out my passenger window and my heart skipped a beat. The thing’s head and shoulders were level with my window. Even hunched over, it was towering. I saw a long snout and sharp, pointed ears. In my exhausted state, my brain tried to rationalize the impossible. I remember thinking, Wow, that’s a really big dog.
I just kept driving, too tired to process the reality of a canine that stood five feet tall at the shoulder. It wasn’t until I was miles down the road that the logic caught up to the fear. Dogs don’t get that big. Not even the largest breeds would have had their eyes level with a car window while walking. To keep myself from spiraling, I forced myself to believe it had been a bear—just a very strange, very skinny bear. But the image of those pointed, alert ears wouldn’t leave me.
I carried that lie for a decade, always feeling a prickle of unease whenever I drove that route after dark. Then, in the fall of 2021, I was back on that same stretch near Manningtin. It was the second week of November, and the night was thick with a heavy, rolling fog that seemed to swallow the beam of my headlights.
Somewhere between ten and eleven at night, a large, dark shape vaulted over the guardrail ahead of me. It moved with a fluid, terrifying speed, disappearing into the mist and then reappearing as it crossed the yellow line. Usually, when a deer crosses the road, you see the staggered motion of the legs and the rise and fall of the body. This thing crossed in one singular, upright motion. It was bipedal. I slowed way down, my hands gripping the wheel until my knuckles turned white, terrified there might be more of them following in the shadows.
As I got within twenty yards, I could almost make it out. It stood between six and seven feet tall, and very dark and almost looked like a person in a dark hoodie. As it reached the far white line, the human illusion shattered. It dropped down onto all fours in a seamless, predatory crouch. It turned its head to look back at me, and there they were again: the long snout and the tall, pointed ears. Before I could even gasp, it launched itself up a six-foot embankment and went barreling through the dense woods on all fours.
Not long ago, I attended a seminar in Fairmont where an investigator named Les O’Dell spoke about the “Dogman” of Northern West Virginia. He described bipedal, canine-like creatures—not quite wolf, not quite man—that have been sighted throughout these hills for generations. These aren’t just animals; they are something older, something that seems to understand the roads and the people who travel them. As he spoke, the hair on my neck stood up. I realized that the “skinny bear” I’d seen a decade ago was the same nightmare I’d encountered in the fog. I didn’t see a person in a hoodie. I saw exactly what the legends warned about: a hunter that has claimed Route 7 as its own.
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