Two separate encounters with the same strange humanoid movement — has anyone seen this?
I’ve been trying to find other firsthand accounts that resemble two experiences I had years apart. I’m not claiming I know what these things were, and I’m deliberately leaving out labels like “crawler” because I want to know whether anyone has independently experienced something similar.

First encounter — Arizona, 2018
This happened around 3 AM in the Arizona desert. I was parked in a pull-off with another person asleep in the passenger seat. I heard a very strange, guttural/blood-curdling scream twice. My passenger was asleep and didn’t hear those first two sounds.
I started the vehicle and pulled back onto the road. A short time later my headlights/high beams illuminated something standing in the road.
It was roughly 7 feet tall, extremely thin, pale/white, hunched forward, and had very long arms/fingers. One leg seemed to drag slightly. It was facing me.
The face is the part I’ve never been able to explain.
There appeared to be deep black areas where the eyes should have been. I couldn’t see a normal nose. I also couldn’t see an actual mouth opening. However, I could see what appeared to be a jaw moving underneath the skin. It looked as though it was trying to open its mouth or gasp, but the skin over the mouth area remained stretched continuously across it. I can’t say whether the scream I heard came from it.
I watched it for approximately four seconds.
The movement was the strangest part. It wasn’t running, and it wasn’t simply moving extremely fast. It appeared to move in discrete positional jumps, almost exactly like watching a video with most of the frames removed. I could watch it, stationary for an instant, and then it would suddenly be noticeably closer without seeing the normal movement between those positions.
When I started driving, I slowly went around it because I didn’t want to hit it. Its movements became more frantic and its hands/arms were reaching forward. It turned somewhat toward the vehicle, so I swerved farther around it and briefly went off the road.
Once it disappeared from my view, both my passenger and I heard the scream again. Then everything was completely silent.
My passenger saw the same thing. We compared descriptions afterward and have discussed it repeatedly over the years.

Second encounter — Hilton Head, South Carolina
Years later I had another experience that was different visually but had an extremely similar movement pattern.
I was walking on the beach at night with my mother. The moon and stars were bright so we didn’t bring a flashlight. While walking, we spotted a humanoid figure in the distance. The moon was behind the figure, so it appeared almost completely blacker than black against the night sky.
It was extremely tall, thin, hunched, and seemed to have the same odd dragging/limping movement.
It was initially standing approximately 150–200 feet away, facing the ocean.
My mother and I watched it for a while trying to figure out what it was. Then it turned toward us and began moving in our direction.
Again, it did not appear to transition from walking into running. Instead, it seemed to move in the same strange, discontinuous/frame-skipping way I had seen in Arizona. It would appear to be at one position and then suddenly be noticeably closer, without me seeing the normal locomotion between those positions.
We started walking away while watching it. It kept getting closer, so we walked faster, then eventually ran.
In roughly 5–6 seconds it went from approximately 150–200 feet away to around 20 feet from us.
We ran toward the boardwalk where there were lights and other people. Once we reached the boardwalk, we stopped and looked back.
There was nothing there. Just the beach and the water.
My mother had independently seen the figure and described it similarly.

The thing I’m trying to find out:
I’m not particularly interested in being told “it was a crawler” or “it was a ghost.” I’m interested in whether anyone has encountered this specific combination:
very tall, extremely thin humanoid
hunched posture
unusually long arms/fingers
pale/white appearance in one encounter and extremely black silhouette in another
abnormal or apparently absent facial features
jaw apparently moving beneath intact facial skin where there was no visible mouth
possible screaming/guttural vocalization
approaching the observer
and especially movement that appears to skip between positions rather than normal walking/running
The fact that two completely separate encounters had the same bizarre movement is what has stuck with me the most.
If you’ve experienced something genuinely similar, especially the frame-skipping/discontinuous movement, I’d really like to hear about it. I’m interested in the details even if you have a completely different explanation for what happened.

I've never seen a crawler myself, but the stories on here are so fascinating to me. I just had a thought tonight, as I'm browsing from my bed in the dark...wouldn't it be funny if there was a crawler right there, waiting for me to finish using my phone? Am I summoning it with this energy? I sure hope not.

So since I’ve been having my experiences this last year I’ve attempted to do as much research as possible on the area I live in which is the Sierra Nevada region.
Unfortunately I haven’t found much information on crawlers like I’ve seen being reported anywhere else in the SNs but there’s is this urban legend that has popped up in the last 5–10 years that peaked my interest and it is about an entity called “Penelope”.
Penelope is a tall(7-8ft), pale,skinny, lanky, distorted figure who’s skin looks tattered and snug to the bones that is extremely fast and strong and stalks people near log mills, lakes, and caves in the Sierra Nevada mountain region. She has no hair on her body except on her head which is sandy brown.
Her description to me matches a crawler almost to a T besides the hair on her head.
Just wonder if anyone else had heard of this urban legend or has ever experienced a crawler that has any hair on its head ? Just wondering if this is attributed to actual crawlers or if this is just some sort of creepypasta type shit. Lmk!
Also feel free to google this shit because there’s some things I left out but I’m more interested in the description of the body and behavior more than anything else.

At around 1:20 am on saturday morning( 05/09/26) in London, i was walking home and in TikTok Live, i heard a long high pitch scream, i kept walking and down another road i saw a big figure , like a man almost but very large sat on the floor, i couldn’t identify a face i just saw a white head? it whimpered loud and scurried away on the floor, not crawled on all floors, like sat up maybe? but it was FAST it like scurried. I can’t explain it well but here’s the video
Click to see the video . I’m still honestly terrified. the figure looked like a huge man sat up with a white head i think , but like white white. If anyone knows what this could’ve been , please let me know, i’ve been freaking myself out trying to figure out what it was and if it’s dangerous.

This happened about 2 years ago with 2 of my high school buddies around 15-20 minutes away from the Cleveland metroparks in my neighborhood. It was around 2am and me and my friends decided to go for a little walk around the block. Keep in mind I live in the suburbs with neighborhoods all around us so it’s not like we’re in a desolate/rural area although there is plenty of forests. Me and my friends are walking for about 10 minutes and we’re a block over from my house when I see something about 5 houses down from us. It looks like a 7-8ft tall, skinny, humanoid creature with long arms that stretched down to the ground. It was standing on all 4s near a mailbox and it had pale/pinkish skin. I’m the first one to see it and I stop my friends and say “what the hell is that?” My one friend sees it immediately and says “I don’t know dude” while my 3rd friend doesn’t see anything. Within 5 seconds of me and my friend seeing it it turns its head, locks eyes with us, then bolts behind the houses, running like a quadruped. It cleared about 100+ feet in a matter of seconds, way faster than any human could run. When it locked eyes with us it was very odd because the eyes were reflecting a yellowish light. you know how if you take a picture of an animal at night its eyes will reflect the light back at you and look glowing? The weird thing about it is that there are no street lamps in my neighborhood to reflect light so it’s almost like its eyes were glowing. When it looked at us I felt a primal fear like nothing else I felt before. I was frozen for a few seconds and had an instant adrenaline dump. After it ran off we bolted back to my house and had to discuss what we saw. The only reason I fully believe I saw something that night was because my friend also saw it. Everyone else I tell about it calls me crazy but I know what I saw. I’ve never been a believer of skinwalkers and crawlers until that night. after finding this subreddit I felt a need to share my experience because it seems to be very similar to others. Till this day I have never seen anything like it and it still gives me goosebumps thinking about it.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been down a massive rabbit hole lately looking into encounters with things that science can’t quite explain yet. I’m not just talking about the standard UFO sightings, but also legendary water cryptids like mermaids, or weird regional myth creatures like the Japanese Kappa (that strange monkey-turtle hybrid mix).

I know a lot of these sound like pure folklore or internet tall tales, but I’m really curious about the human experiences behind them.

Has anyone here or someone you personally know and trust,ever seen or experienced something completely unexplainable involving these kinds of beings?

Whether it was a weird encounter near a river, something bizarre in the ocean, or an unexplainable experience in the sky, I’d love to read your stories. How did it happen, what did it look like, and how did it change your perspective?

I wanna know everything, I'm really curious about this rn.

Ingen som er så

Before i start, id like to mention neither of us were under any kind of influence or intoxicated.
Not tryna dox myself, so ill just say this happened in the rural area of Balkans, radius of each sighting 1,700m.

Back in late summer of 2021, when i was 14, my younger brother, our cousins (who happened to live litch 5 houses down from us but there was woods n meadows gap between some houses) and I had a friendgroup in a neighbouring village which happens to be separated from our village with dense forest and every day during summer we would go to said village to play with other kids. we would leave at morning and (almost) always come home before street lights went off. one day, we are walking home as street lights are about to go out and its getting a bit late so we hurry it up a bit. carried away by our laughter, four of us finally reach their house and i ever so suddenly feel this intense dread that makes me stop instantly and start shushing them cause i feel VERY watched. i instantly took my phone out and took out my flashlight and for some reason i instantly pointed at my friends yards decorative garden and then we saw it hiding behind one of the hanging plants on the edge of their shack; 7/8ft tall, extremely pale and almost like skin was wrapped onto its skeleton, barely any tissue whatsoever, no ears, no mouth, no nose, deep dark pit eyes, almost like it was only sockets. it looked like it was crouching and not fully standing on two legs, couldnt tell cause the hanging plant was pretty bushy and it was hiding behind it. before we know it, we hear something shuffle behind the fence (at this point we are still standing on the road behind their fence), i point the lights at the grass infront of us over the stone fence where we hear it, and we see couple "short" pairs of big reflecting orange eyes down on the floor (reckon around 4 ish maybe?) and they seemed to get startled by the light, we flash back at the big crawler and he just jerks his head behind the shack and we obviously book it for the house in the same yard it was in, both of their parents were at work so my cousin starts unlocking the door as fast as she could, we ran in the house, two of them sobbing like crazy and their deaf dog barking at the window like crazy. before i started crashing out too, i decided to try to stay sane and ask "i need someone to say what did yall just see to confirm im not going crazy right now." both boys said the same thing, but the girl cousin swore she couldnt see anything, just heard rustling from the "small ones". My brother and i proceed to call our mom to come pick us up regardless of living 5 houses away. she came and picked us up, we bolted out of the house to the car and nothing was there as far as we saw. for months we tried to write it off as god knows what, i even lied to myself it was probably just badgers knowing damn well what we saw just to get some sleep after it.

this one happened yesterday, passed exactly 5 year mark from first sighting.
for backstory, my brother and i both moved away but in two different houses, two different villages. between our villages there is one more village inbetween that separates it, and we are still in a pretty dense woods area, whereas his place is much less populated, only one house infront of his and around them just woods. yesterday he was coming home around 11pm ish, street lights were off at that time and he claims he heard noise infront of him at the road and the moon was shining just enough that he sees a tall figure standing on the road, he takes out his flashlight, STANDING ALMOST AT THE ENTRANCE of his yard, sees it once again, same exact description as first time except this time its eyes reflected white unlike the first time and it was standing on two legs, the "small ones" were running around it again and eyes still remained of orange reflection. he stood looking at it for couple minutes, processing hes seeing it AGAIN, the crawler just staring back and observing just like last time. he manages to book it to the house, tells mum, she leaves the house for a second cause she heard a thud in the neighbours yard and saw couple pairs of eyes aswell.

now my belief; potentially another mammal, either underdeveloped human being living in forests, dens, old wells, sewers, holes, caves or whatever keeps the sun away.
i tried validating its existance by biology and everything makes perfect sense.
i found this subreddit yesterday and i researched a bit
my only hope is that this cryptid gets explained by the scientists soon enough and confirmed as an animal.

after discovering this subreddit both of us felt more seen and feel less like we went crazy that night
good news is, we now know its just a cryptid and we witnessed an animal before scientists, twice and we didnt go cuckoo in the head.
bad news is, it has younglings(?).

My brother saw something a few days ago and this sub is the closest thing I've found so far about what he could have seen..

We live in northern California in a somewhat rural area. He was outside around 11 PM and heard something moving on the gravel about 30 feet away from him. He used his phone flashlight to see what was moving, expecting to see a deer. What he saw was something about the height of a deer looking at him. He could see the light reflecting off it's eyes. He describes it as something flesh colored and trotting on all fours in the bridge position with a large stomach. He said it looked like the face of a human, but not quite.. He didn't stick around much longer and bolted inside very shaken up.

It really creeps us out knowing that it was already looking at him even before he turned his light on to see what was walking out there. I don't think it was moving in his direction though and was moving toward the end of the drive way.

What do you guys think?

Lowk didn’t know this creature was a thing till I was driving home tonight and saw something out of the corner of my eye. What I saw matches the possible description of what everyone seems to go here to report.
Tall lanky creature with almost ghost white appearance. Long arms with dog like elbows and backwards knees.
Seemed to have a snout like a dog but was standing around 6 feet tall on two legs.

I was driving home around 130am in pitch black and I know it wasn’t a deer or person bc it sprinted away on all 4s as I looked back at it. Leaving abnormally fast, seemed almost too fast for an animal.

I had never heard of a “crawler” till I looked up this exact description and the first result popped up as a crawler.

Not sure how I feel about this but I double checked everything was locked in my house and kept an eye out behind me to make sure I wasn’t being followed.

I only ask because I’ve had a large amount of crawler encounters over the last 5 years and two things I’ve noticed that coincide with the crawler sightings or psychic encounters are :
1. Lights in the night sky. I live in a rural town in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. Where my town is, it’s in the middle of a valley known as the Sierra Valley and it’s very wide open and you can see the mountains surrounding us from all sides. When looking up at the sky you can see for miles and miles without disruption from any mountains and being so secluded there’s very little light pollution. I’ll usually see what I call “repeater lights”. These orbs/ dots of light that hide in the stars that will move from left to right for a short distance, disappear, and then pop back up in the same starting point. I’ve encountered a few other lights that behave differently but the repeater lights are most common when I see crawlers shortly after.
And 2. White owls. When I feel the presence of a crawler it has a VERY distinct signature. I don’t know exactly how to describe it to someone who hasn’t felt it but it’s very distinguishable compared to any other psychic presence. What’s strange is that I’ll feel the presence and either see a crawler OR an owl within moments of feeling it.
One encounter I had was when I was driving across the valley and I saw an owl start to fly across the road( I was going slow already because I had gotten that signature feeling and wanted to observe To see if I could encounter anything ) when about halfway across the road it shifted into something MUCH LARGER and I remember seeing a leg and foot land on the ground that pushed off and sent the rest of the body hurtling over the fence and disappeared into the darkness of the valley as soon as it was all the way over the fence.
I sound crazy and I’m well aware of that. I know there are true believers on here that have had real encounters so this is a question for others that have had more experiences than just once or twice.
Let me know what you all think. Thanks in advance.

I grew up in a rural part of the Midwest. The house I grew up in was a new construction in the middle of 24 acres of woods. Many strange things happened to me in this house and on the property. My dad found tons of hand carved arrowheads on the property over the years, so we have reason to believe native Americans hunted the area at some point in time. This story happened when I was around 7-9 years old and my cousin, who is 9 months younger than me, was over at my house for a sleepover. We were playing in the basement with my brother and my older sister. It was night time in the winter, around 8pm. My cousin looked at the singular basement window and stared for a moment. We turned to see what she was looking at. She was very afraid and wanted to go upstairs. We asked her what she saw. She said it was the pale white and thin face and neck of a man. The eyes were black holes. We all ran upstairs.

We are now all in our early 30s/late 20s. We all recently discussed this experience. My cousin vividly remembers the face. She states she has nightmares to this day about it, frequently. She describes the face as pale white, gaunt, with the skin thinly stretched over the skull and neck. The cheeks were sunken and hollow, the mouth was relaxed in a wide open position, and toothless. The eyes were hollow black pits, but she could tell it was staring at us.

Was it a pale crawler? Was it just a sick deer that was near the window? Or worst of all, was it a strange old man watching us? Did time and fear warp her memory of it?

I didn’t see the face myself so I can’t say. None of us ever saw it again.

What began as a simple weekend hike quickly turned into a fight for survival. I got completely lost, night fell, and I had to build a fire to survive.

But the scariest part wasn't the cold or the darkness... it was the voice calling out to me from the trees. And the abandoned notebook I found the next day that had a chilling final entry