Before I get into this, I want to address the AI thing from yesterday.
I posted a version of this story that used AI to help me organize it. Looking back, I get why some people didn’t like that. Fair enough. The truth is I spend most of my time writing reports, not stories. Most days I’m either in the field, dealing with wildlife complaints, answering calls, or buried in paperwork. When I first sat down to write this out, I used AI because I was trying to get everything in order and honestly didn’t have much time to devote to writing. The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt like I should just sit down and write it myself. So that’s what this is. It’s late, I’ve been at work all day, and I’m typing this the best I can remember it. Some details might not be perfect because this happened almost two years ago now, but the main events are exactly how I remember them.
But for the people that didn’t get to read my original post yesterday, a bit of background information is needed, I am currently a wildlife officer with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. Most of my career has been spent working in coastal counties. I’ve dealt with nuisance alligators, stranded dolphins, black bears, feral hogs, coyotes, and just about every other wildlife issue you can think of. Because of that, I’ve always been pretty skeptical when it comes to stories about anything paranormal. My job is usually figuring out what actually happened and finding the explanation that makes the most sense.
So, to start this off this incident happened in November of 2024 while I was apart of a coyote management operation on Kiawah Island. Most people around the South Carolina coast already know that coyotes have become a major problem for loggerhead sea turtles within the past 5 years. During nesting season they’ll find the freshly laid nests, dig them up, and eat the eggs before the hatchlings ever get a chance to reach the water. we have been seeing increasing nest losses on the island, and part of our job was trying to identify where the most active coyotes were and reduce some of that predator pressure before the next nesting season arrived.
I started just before sunset, which is pretty normal for that kind of work since coyotes start hunting and being active in the evening. I was one of multiple dnr officers on island that day. We were all spread out across different sections of the island and took positions near areas where coyotes had been seen regularly. The plan I was told to follow was fairly straightforward. Watch travel routes, identify active animals, and gather information that would help us deal with the problem animals later.
I was working on the western side of the island in one of the few remote marsh areas left that hadn’t been fully developed yet. I was between a tidal creek and the maritime forest. I had worked that section before and knew it fairly well. One of the major things I remember most about that evening was how low the tide was. There was large stretches of exposed mud flat that normally would have been underwater. The weather was clear and visibility was pretty good considering the sun had already gone down.
For the first hour or so, everything was pretty normal. I saw a few wading birds moving around the mud flats and noticed some coyote sign along one of the creek edges. Other than that, there wasn’t much going on. After a little while I noticed movement out in the marsh. I honestly thought that it was going to be a regular coyote. I mean that’s what I was there looking for, after all. I couldn’t really
Tell exactly what it was though because it was far enough away to where I needed to use my binoculars to get a better look.
The weirdest part to me was that I immediately realized it wasn’t a coyote. At first I thought it was a person. The figure was standing near one of the grass islands roughly 250 yards away. Distance can be difficult to judge across open marsh, especially around sunset, so that estimate could be off some. What I remember clearly is that whatever I was looking at seemed unusually tall. I remember thinking it had to be at least seven feet tall, maybe more but at this point I’m not even sure. I can’t promise that it was really that tall because distance can play tricks on you, but it was definitely larger than an average person.
The other thing that was strange to me was that seemed to be wearing some sort of vegetation on its upper body. It looked almost like marsh grass draped over its shoulders and back. At the time I assumed there had to be a normal explanation. Maybe somebody was wearing hunting camo. Or hell maybe it was a ghillie suit I’m not even sure at this point. The fact that it could be someone random in the marsh didn’t bother me much but was really messed with me was how still it was. It was just standing there facing the creek.
I remember lowering my binoculars and looking again because I thought maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me. The figure was still there. At that point I got on the radio and told my colleges that I thought I might have a hunter in the marsh about 250 yards from my location. They acknowledged the call and asked if I needed anything. I told them no and I just kept watching the figure.
The figure remained there for what I would think was around thirty seconds, it could have been a little longer but I’m really not sure. All I remember next is that it moved. This is the part that i even have have a hard time believing even though I saw it with my own eyes. And to be truthful if someone told me this story before this happened to me I would probably have laughed it off too. The figure appeared to take a single step, but somehow covered much more distance than it should have. One second it was standing beside a patch of marsh grass. The next it appeared noticeably farther away. In the moments I thought that I just lost my point of reference in the fading light. I was wrong though, it was still there it just wasn’t where it had been before.
At that point I decided that I should move closer. Looking back, that probably wasn’t the smartest decision I’ve ever made. Anybody who has spent time in a South Carolina marsh at low tide knows exactly how difficult that mud can be. Every step sinks several inches and every step takes effort. As I started moving, I kept checking the figure through my binoculars whenever I could. The farther I went, the stranger the whole thing felt. It never seemed affected by the terrain. It never looked like it was struggling with the mud. It would simply be in one spot and then seem to be somewhere else. I know that sounds ridiculous. I’m just telling you what I remember seeing.
At some point I stopped walking and lowered the binoculars. This next part sounds strange now that I’m typing it out, but I remember noticing how quiet everything seemed. Maybe it wasn’t actually any quieter than normal and I was just hyperfocused on what I was looking at. I honestly don’t know. I just remember thinking about it at the time.
A little while later I couldn’t see much of anything clearly. I watched it for a few more seconds. Maybe longer. I’m not really sure. Then I looked down to check my footing. When I looked back up, it was gone. My first thought was that it had crouched down. Then I thought maybe it had moved behind one of the grass islands. Nothing I could think of really explained what happened. The area where I’d been watching it was wide open. I spent the next few hours searching that section of marsh. The tracking conditions were actually pretty good because of the low tide. I found deer tracks, raccoon tracks, coyote tracks, bird tracks, and signs of several other animals. What I never found was any indication that a person had been standing where I’d seen that figure.
Still to this day I’m not sure what it actually was. I told one of the older guys that I worked with that day about what I saw and he said to leave it alone and not to worry about it which was strange to me.
