North Carolina Man Reports Encounter with Hyena-Like Creature

41-year-old Chris Payne of Haywood County, North Carolina, spoke with Georgia-based investigator Aubrey Bowen recently about an encounter he’d had with a strange animal outside of Spring Creek in either 2003 or 2004.

Spring Creek is an unincorporated community of less than a thousand people that sits at the base of the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina’s Madison County.

In a phone interview, Payne told Bowen that he had been returning home from his girlfriend’s house on Thanksgiving between midnight and 1 a.m. when, approximately 20 minutes away from Spring Creek, he saw what appeared to be a “large, black hyena” on a road near Highway 209.

I was driving home, just looking forward to getting home, honestly, because it’s a long drive. I was maybe 10 minutes from [my girlfriend’s] house; [the roads over there are] very mountainous and very curvy. I came around a curve into a short straightaway and, in my headlights up ahead, I could see red eyes reflecting back at me from the side of the road. So, I slowed down because, judging from the height of the eyes, it looked like it was a pretty good size.
My first thought was a black bear, and I really didn’t want to hit it, so I started slowing down. As I got closer, the shape kind of resolved itself and it was definitely not a black bear. It looked to me just like a large, black hyena.
The posture, the amount of slope going down the back. Hyenas have high front quarters sloping down to shorter hind quarters. It was that shape, and the head was not [held where a dog or a bear would hold theirs], you know, obviously upright and everything. Its head was drooped over and looking up, just like a hyena.
You know how they hunch forward with their neck down? That’s the posture it had.
My immediate impression was hyena. The closer I got, the more convinced I was that if it wasn’t a hyena, it was something very, very similar. It just kind of stared at me as I drove past it, which was fine, because I was scared to death.
Honestly, I kind of regret not stopping my truck and staring at it.

When asked for any further details about the creature, Payne responded, “It was dark. The best I could tell as far as color is if it wasn’t solid black, it was close. It appeared to have short, coarse hair.”

Bowen explored prosaic explanations with Payne to determine if perhaps he’d misidentified an animal native to the area, beginning with bears, possibly one with mange.

The 41-year-old didn’t think he’d seen a bear, mangy or otherwise.

“This animal wasn’t mangy. I live in the country and know what mange looks like,” Payne said. “This animal appeared to have all its fur. And I know what a bear looks like. Bears don’t have the same silhouette that this animal had. They are broader than the thing I saw. It was lean.”

Nor did he think he’d seen a wild boar, since they lack the special layer behind their retina that reflects light back into it to improve vision in low light conditions and causes eyeshine.

Payne was certain that he’d seen something unusual, and explained that his girlfriend’s parents “were the straight and narrow type, so no drinking…I wasn’t really sleepy; we ate dinner and laid down for a nap, so I was fairly fresh when I left.”

The area is “pretty much all backwoods, with the exception of the county seat,” he said. “Mountainous, heavily wooded, [and the] houses are pretty spread out. Great place for something to live and go unseen.”

Payne noted the similarity between what he’d seen and the “Maine Mutant,” a creature said to resemble a black hyena that some residents of Turner, Maine thought responsible for killing pets and livestock in the early aughts. Similar, he said, are stories of the Shunka Warak’in; a nocturnal monster in Ioway folklore whose name means “carries off dogs.”

It is unknown if there have been any reports of missing dogs or other domesticated animals in the area of Payne’s sighting.

Other than Bowen, Payne said he had only confided about the incident to his mother, his girlfriend at the time, and two friends, since, he explained, “They are the only people I felt like wouldn’t make fun of me and might find it interesting.”

And as for anyone else who might have witnessed the same thing in North Carolina, he said, “I’ve never heard anyone else mention anything like that around here.”

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