Submit a story

Cryptids

'Something Grey Running at the Road': A 4 a.m. Drive Home From the Lake in Indiana

An 18-year-old on fall break says she felt a sudden urge to look out the driver's side window on a gravel backroad in Indiana, then saw something grey 'probably the size of a bear' run across in a dead straight line. Her dad saw it too. Another Indiana driver says she saw the same thing.

INDIANA By Dead of Night Dispatch

Location A gravel backroad 40 to 50 minutes from a large Indiana city

Illustration: a gravel backroad through dark Midwestern woods before dawn, a pool of light on the gravel and haze in the air, a blurred large grey shape moving into the trees

INDIANA (October 2026): Her dad has a fishing page on social media, a fairly popular one, and he’d been after her for a while to come along. She was home on fall break from college with nothing much to do. So she said yes.

Where it started

The original social media post

  1. u/cha0t11cz

    I see something grey running at the road and immediately start yelling "DAD THERES A DEER" He slams on his breaks, and we expect a deer to come running past. The thing I saw was probably the size of a bear, but it was grey.

    The poster's own account, quoted as written.

    70 points · 30 comments as of Oct 17, 2026

    View original on Reddit

    From the conversation

    See the full thread on Reddit →

Posts shown as originally published; we don’t verify individual comments. Retrieved . “Load the post here” fetches the original from Reddit, which may set cookies.

That’s how an 18-year-old from one of Indiana’s biggest cities ended up on a gravel backroad “in the middle of nowhere” at 4 o’clock in the morning, and how she came to post this on Reddit’s r/Paranormal on Friday, Oct. 16: “I have no idea what I encountered in the woods.”

What’s claimed

Accounts, testimony and theories, as told by the people who tell them.

  • The trip. The fishing spot was a lake 40 to 50 minutes from home, reached by “a weird gravel backroad.” They got there around 2 a.m., which she says is normal for her father. They didn’t catch anything but “had a really good time together.”
  • The urge. They headed home between 3:30 and 4 a.m. because neither had brought a hoodie. On the drive, she wrote, “I have this urge to look out the drivers side window.” That was strange in itself: she gets bad motion sickness and usually can’t look out side windows.
  • The sighting. “I see something grey running at the road and immediately start yelling ‘DAD THERES A DEER.’” Her father slammed on the brakes. No deer came. “The thing I saw was probably the size of a bear, but it was grey.”
  • The way it moved. Her dad noticed it was moving “in a directly straight line. Kind of like it was chasing something.” And fast: “from the moment it crossed the tree line it was gone.”
  • Afterward. They sat for a few minutes watching for anything else. Nothing came. Her dad has no dash camera. “I wish there was a way for me to look back and pause on that thing.”

What we know

On the record: documents, statements, dates and places. Sources below.

  • Two witnesses. Both she and her father saw it, though not the same way. “My dad described it as a wolf too, I see more of a bear tho!” she wrote in a reply.
  • What she checked. She looked up bears and found there hadn’t been a bear sighting in the area “since the late 90s,” and that the only grey bears she could find were in Alaska.
  • What’s missing. She doesn’t name the lake, the road or the city, and doesn’t give a date beyond her fall break. There’s no photo or video.
  • The skinwalker suggestion. Friends who are “very into the paranormal,” she wrote, told her it could be a skinwalker. “Skinwalkers are in the SW,” one commenter replied, pointing to the legend’s roots in the Navajo Southwest.

What readers said

The most-upvoted reply was a match. “omg, I saw something exactly like this when I was driving around 2 am near Plymouth, IN,” wrote u/Fyourchickenstrips7. “I barely saw it before it disappeared in the tall grass. I told my husband keep going because we knew there weren’t any wolves in the area, and it looked like a MASSIVE grey wolf.” The poster said that was about two hours from where hers happened.

The likeliest explanation got its own detailed reply. “What you most likely saw was a large gray-colored domestic dog,” wrote u/NoCountry2020. “Dogs love to run alongside cars whether directly beside one or at a safe distance. It’s a chase prey instinct. When your car stopped it probably took that as a cue to bolt into the woods for cover and watch.” The same reader added, on the paranormal side, that there are reports of grey Bigfoot in Ohio and West Virginia.

And u/nev2000 found the bright side: “Sounds like the first bear sighting since the 90s.”

The questions

A big grey animal crossing a rural road at 4 a.m., glimpsed for a second or two by headlights, is a short list: a large dog, a coyote, a deer at an odd angle, maybe a bear, which do occasionally wander into Indiana from neighboring states. The poster doesn’t rule any of them out. She just knows it wasn’t a deer, and that it was moving like it had somewhere to be.

Sources

  1. I have no idea what I encountered in the woods · r/Paranormal (Reddit) First-hand account by u/cha0t11cz, posted Oct. 16, 2026. Read in full, read-only. The exact date and place aren't given.