This Story’s Got Legs

Question from Hans:
This one has bothered me for some years, and I’m just looking for a reasonable answer for this, other than me being crazy:

One time I was on a mountain with my dog, when suddenly the dog started to bark and run around like crazy. Calling her name didn’t do anything, so I decided to walk down again. When I came down to the forest the dog still barked like heck, I heard her from near and far. She had never acted like this before and we have encountered everything from bears to rabbits.

when I had walked over a swamp I heard my dog closing in on my position so I turned around.

It is what I saw than that bothers me: I saw two large legs walking about 3-5 meters in front of me. They also looked like they had some sort of hooves or something. I ain’t joking, there was no upper body or anything else, i was stunned. When the dog came near it, it just ran very fast and without a sound. The legs or whatever would be about one to one and a half meters long and hairy.

A friend of mine has a brother who actually claims he saw the same thing when he was a kid, at a riverside pretty close to where I was. I know this sounds crazy, but is there any reasonable answer to this other than some paranormal bullshit? can it be some animal or something about swamps that makes it look like this? im pretty sure I saw what I saw since it was so close, but what could it be?

Answer by SmartLX:
It’s not the end of the world if you can’t explain what you saw, which is good because this is a toughie. I can make suggestions, but I certainly can’t explain it fully from here. Even an exhaustive search of the forest and the swamp might not yield any useful evidence, depending on what happened.

As for suggestions, I can think of two reasons why you might not see the body attached to those legs, regardless of what kind of body it was. Either there was fog in the swamp (brought on by the humid conditions) which obscured the body, or it was camouflaged – whether naturally, deliberately or unintentionally. (Perhaps both.) So either something might have evolved the ability to blend in with its surroundings above a certain level, or the perpetrator of a hoax has one hell of a khaki jacket.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but the other major variable in this story is you. You haven’t described what kind of state you were in that day, and if something was wrong you might not have known anyway. You don’t have to be crazy or drugged to see something which isn’t there, or misinterpret what you do see. As for your friend’s brother, perhaps whatever was affecting you did the same to him.

I’m not saying that you didn’t really see what you think you saw. I’m also not saying what I think it was, because frankly I haven’t a clue. I’m just saying that without more information, and in the absence of evidence, it’s really hard for anyone else to help you figure this out. The best we can do is guess. I wouldn’t be so harsh as to say “pics or it didn’t happen”, but absolutely anything you can find in that swamp to suggest unusual activity would be useful.

One thought on “This Story’s Got Legs”

  1. Swamp gas is known to have weird effects – mainly associated with flaring phenomena.
    The effect you describe is different.
    One more possibility I can think of (apart from the ones SmartLX mentions) is that there could be a dense concentration of swamp gas where you were. Swamp gas is heavier than air so would float near the ground and not exactly dissipate away. A high concentration layer of swamp gas could have the same effect a the effect you see when you put a block of glass in front of a pencil (the glass block must be shorter than the pencil in height). If you look at the pencil thru both the glass and the air simultaneously, the ‘leg’ of the pencil seems to be dissociated from the top. The same effect is visible when you put a spoon in a clear glass filled with water and look at it from the side.

    Its a remote possibility though – the refractive index of swamp gas is similar to the refractive index of air and the displacement would be slight. The idea just occured to me since you mentioned seeing only legs (which is classic for the pencil experiment).
    The displacement can increase as the angle increases. For e.g. a large enough angle you can make the bottom of the pencil disappear (i.e. not be visible when you look at it through the glass of block.

    Swamp gas also has an effect on the human nervous system by the way – can cause asphyxiation faster than carbon monoxide, apparently.

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