The creature reportedly photographed by John. *(Believe: Paranormal & UFO Podcast)*

A man introduced as John appeared on a recent episode of the Believe: Paranormal & UFO Podcast to recount his tale of being stalked by an upright canid while fishing outside of Sydney in the Australian wilderness.

John said the encounter took place last Boxing Day (December 26th) at around 7:30 a.m.

He had been fishing for about 10 minutes when he heard a branch snap off to his left. At first he thought nothing of it, but eventually noticed a pattern in what he was hearing.

“I noticed that every time I took a stroke with the paddle of my kayak, whatever this thing was, it was taking a stride to each paddle I was taking," John said. "I stopped for a bit and the sound stopped in the bush too, and I thought it was a bit odd. So I took off paddling again, and sure enough as soon as I started to paddle every stroke, this thing would take a step...So whatever it was, this thing was following me, it wasn’t a coincidence or anything. It was more of a stalk."

The creature sounded “a lot bigger” than any animal native to the area, he added.

"I’ve worked with race horses for 10 years and I know what a big mammal sounds like, going through the bush or the sand or anything like that," explained John.

After 15 or 20 minutes of being followed, John saw something unusual in the bush.

"I seen something just sort of black in the part of the bush I’d stopped to have a fish at, and I thought, ‘That’s a bit odd,'" he said. "I didn’t know what it was, so I pulled me phone out and zoomed in a bit and took a few photos, and took off fishing again and thought nothing of it because after that I never heard it follow me or even heard a noise of it taking off."

When he stopped downstream to have a look at the photos, though, he was startled by what he found.

"I thought I’d have a look at the photos and when I zoomed in, the creature, I actually got it in the photo," he said. "What I think it is—I’ve spoken to a few people—I reckon it’s a dogman."

The three photos presented by John, pictured here together. *(Believe: Paranormal & UFO Podcast)*

John, who had previously thought that dogman “was a bit of a joke,” was disturbed by the encounter.

“This thing, it was persistent, and it followed me; it would have been a kilometer down the river. It wasn’t like it followed me a little bit, it followed me a fair way," he said.

I’m actually pretty glad that I couldn’t see it properly with my eyes, I just sort of seen the black out of the left, because I reckon if I seen that...I reckon I would have had a full blown panic attack. And you freak out in a situation like that and bad stuff usually happens.

"The scariest part was, I estimated it to be about six feet or seven feet tall because of the way it was standing in the bush," he added. "After that, I couldn’t go back to the area to check it out by myself, I was petrified. For probably a month after it, I was waking up in the middle of the night, seeing the creature in my dreams."
John said he returned later with a few friends and confirmed there was no object in that spot which could have acted as a simulacrum of the creature or created a pareidolic effect.

And on a later fishing trip, he claimed to have had an even stranger encounter with the creature.

Once again, he heard noises off to his side.

“Off to my right, I heard a bit of a bang, and then I could hear running," he said. “As it was running, it was smashing trees out of the way. I don’t know if they were breaking or it was hitting them, you couldn’t see what the bush was like because it was so thick."

It was then that the creature began to roar.

“I’d never heard anything like it in my life,” he said. “It would roar, and then it would take a breath in, but then the breath it was taking was actually louder than the roar it was doing.”

As John struggled to exit the water and flee, he said he heard an intrusive voice in his mind.

"I could hear in my head something saying, ‘Go now or you’ll die,'" he said. "It wasn’t my own voice, my own consciousness, it was something else. That 10 minutes was probably the longest in my whole life, I thought I was going to be killed. I had no weapons, didn’t even have my fishing knife, no phone service.”

Having escaped, John explained that he is sharing his story now to protect others.

"I’d heard about [dogman] and thought it was a joke, but actually I’ve had encounters with it now and it’s terrifying," he said. "I wouldn’t be putting myself out showing these photos if it was a fake, or I didn’t know that there was actually something there. That’s the main reason I came forward, I’m worried that someone’s going to go missing or get hurt, and I’ll have it in the back of my mind that I should have told someone about that.”

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