Unexplained Encounters
Unexplained Encounters

The Deer God

August 12, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Deer God

The thing that followed him down the fire road in the Cascades didn't walk like any animal he knew. When it finally screamed, the sound started as a low chest-range groan and rose into something like a woman's cry—then cut off instantly, with no fade. He ran three miles in the dark, cut his palm open on the gravel, and never night-hiked that road again.

The thing that paced him

The first narrator got sober in 2013 and started night-hiking a four-mile fire road east of him in the Cascades to fill the hours between 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. that he used to spend drinking. By July 2016 he knew the road well—the thick woods on either side, the gravel underfoot, the way sound carried. So when he heard footsteps behind him that stopped a half-beat after he stopped, he tested it. Walked, stopped. Walked, stopped. Then one time, after he stopped, there was one extra step. Just one. Then silence.

A mile in, near dusk, something came down the bank on his left and crossed the road in two seconds. It was on four legs, about the size of a German Shepherd, but everything from the hip back was too long. It didn't walk or run—it bounded, the back end coming up like a rabbit's, the head level with the shoulders and strangely shaped. His brain said dog, then immediately corrected: no canine. It cleared a four-foot bank of straight dirt in one bounding motion, like a kangaroo.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (03:01) **The Thing That Followed Me From Gray Dan** - A night hiker in the Cascades encounters a creature that matches his footsteps and produces an unnerving, guttural scream.
  • 2 (14:00) **The Corner of Mom's Room** - A woman describes seeing a dark, person-shaped patch of shadow in the corner of her dying mother’s room, which vanishes after her mother lowers her hand.
  • 3 (20:12) **Something Spoke in the Holiday Flat** - Four friends hear a clear woman’s voice speak three words in an empty kitchen in a Belgian seaside flat, and the property manager’s reaction suggests the building is known to be haunted.
  • 4 (23:56) **Voices Behind the Curtain** - A hospital patient overhears his curtained roommate apparently having a two-way conversation in the middle of the night, but a nurse later insists the man has had no visitors.
  • 5 (29:30) **Lady at the Bus Stop** - Over several summers, a boy repeatedly sees an old woman in a long coat waiting at a bus stop at 2 AM, even though no bus runs that late; his grandmother’s terse warning hints at the woman’s unnatural nature.
  • 6 (36:22) **The Road Trip** - A young man with an inherited ability to sense spirits takes a friend to an abandoned hospital site, where they are pursued by a malevolent, smiling dark figure that seems to feed on fear.
  • 7 (47:27) **The Albino Spirit** - A 14-year-old girl encounters an enormous, glowing white buck with blank eyes in the woods behind her aunt’s house, which silently communicates that she should go inside.

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Show Notes

There's a deer the lurks the woods that is not like the others. If you see it, your next action MUST be the right one, or you might never see the light of day again.

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