An eyewitness describes their encounter with a possible upright cryptid canine in the 1960s on Cresson Mountain in Cambria County, Pennsylvania.
I received the following account:
"In Cambria County, Pennsylvania, on Cresson Mountain, in 1965, I was exploring the woods with a friend who lived in the area. We crossed a stream at the bottom of a ravine and went uphill.
Maybe a mile up the slope, in trees, we came upon a dome made of interlaced tree branches. It was tall enough for me to enter without bending over. I did so. It stank horribly.
Inside we found fresh timothy grass laid out in a kind of pallet or bed on one end. There was no debris of humankind anywhere, but there were small bones and sticks. We couldn't stand the odor and backed out, then felt we were being watched from upslope.
Growing nervous as dusk fell, we left, fast. We told his father about it, who dismissed it as a hobo's hutch. We'd found many of those. It was not a person who made what we’d found. We’d glimpsed a shadow moving and maybe a glint of eyes, too. Reflective eyes can be down to something as simple as the lurker wearing glasses, we were told, but it had felt more animal than hobo to us.
One foggy Saturday morning I was again visiting my friend. We preferred roaming the woods to wandering in the town, where I lived. We were sprawled on the floor watching an old horror movie neither of us understood. It did feature a good many spooky images and a few jump scares, so it held our interest, especially with the fog that day. We heard a thump on the front door.
Glancing across the living room, we saw a dog’s face gazing at us through the middle of three narrow windows set high on the door. It would have had to be six or seven feet tall to peer through those windows. Its gaze shined, and we both screamed, thinking ‘werewolf’.
As we gaped, it dropped down below the door’s windows. Nervously, we peered out the picture window that took up most of one wall of the room. In the fog, we saw it again, moving past, just far enough away to be little more than a shadow. The thing is, it was upright. It sort of hop-walked on its hind legs, its forelegs held in front of it. This sight scared us even more.
When it had vanished, headed toward the tree line, we talked about whether the thing we’d just seen could be what had made the domed nest we’d found not long back. At the time, this seemed reasonable to us. We knew, though, not to tell his parents about the huge dog thing looking in through the front door windows. We didn’t want to be ridiculed again, but we did learn to be more careful when playing in the woods.
Only years later did I hear about the Ohio Grass Man, a Sasquatch analog for that area. Where we fell within its range. Later still, Western Pennsylvania began experiencing a cluster of what people called Dogman. Supposedly, it was pretty much what my friend and I had seen as kids, peering through his front door windows and moving past his house as it went toward the trees.
I’m glad we didn't encounter it directly either time, but kinda wish we'd seen it more clearly before it moved away. Still gives me chills thinking about being out on the mountain at dusk with something like that, or what would’ve happened had it gotten through the door." GR
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