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The original was posted on /r/paranormalencounters by /u/Acrobatic_Team_1851 on 2025-06-16 22:10:45+00:00.

My boyfriend and I went out around 10:30 to go catch possums and raccoons at my schools arboretum one night. I’ve run these trails for months 2-4 times a week at early hours of the morning when it was still dark. I know them inside out and I’m comfortable with them. We walked my normal route, which just consists of taking the first path left and then walking forward with zero turns. This takes you around the perimeter of the arboretum where you can literally see the football field and residential houses. We’d been walking about 45 minutes when I hear a noise to the left of me like a small animal and I look around in the bushes (the grass here isn’t too long). He points toward the trail and asks if I see a deer. I’ve got pretty good night vision and senses, I’ve been walking the woods by myself since I was like 10/11. I didn’t see it but he just kept pointing and saying that it was moving and even said it leaped across the trail at one point. By this point the woods were completely silent save for some very faint bug noises but I saw and heard nothing.

I jokingly asked him if he was hallucinating and he made an offhand comment about how it was unusual for a deer to be by itself. We didn’t think anything of it until after we got out if the trail. We walk another mile or so and the terrain looks totally unfamiliar and smells super strong like weed and burning. I look at him and tell him that this wasn’t the trail I usually took and I had no idea where we were. About there the path forked into a very dark path forward and a small trail to the right which was the direction of the entrance. Despite his insistence we go forward I took us right. After not even 15 feet of walking that direction, I hear a faint crunch of a branch to my right and ask something like “did you hear that.” He takes his phone out and turns the light on and I start looking in the field thinking it’s an armadillo or something. The grass here is incredible dense, easily 4 feet tall and up to my lower chest, but there’s no trees (we verified on maps). He’s holding the phone above my head for about 45 seconds to a minute and then he just says my name and to look. I finally look above where I was searching the grass and I see a pair of blue slanted eyes about 9 feet tall almost like those of a mountain lion so bright they looked like they were glowing even without the right. I watched them scan from his eyes to mine and then it started moving diagonally completely silently. I grab his wrist and tell him “we have to go” and start pulling him back from the trail. I told him not to run because in my mind I was trying to rationalize this being a bear. He walked backward and kept his eyes on it while I led us out forward. I took glances back occasionally and I could see it stalking us at about a 10 foot distance. It kept moving crookedly and almost completely silent. The bushes didn’t seem to move as it walked the only thing you’d hear is the occasional crack of a small twig. After about a half mile of this it lets out a shriek (for lack of a better word) like nothing I’ve heard before. I’ve heard mountain lions and coyotes but this was completely different. At that point we ran out of there, screaming prayers. We could hear the crickets and other bugs crescendo and get louder as we made our way back.

I called my stepdad and explained what happened to him and he stayed on the line while we made our way out. Neither he nor I are very superstitious, we would even make jokes about my mom burning sage in our house to get rid of bad energy, but I could tell by his voice he believed us and was trying to get us out without panicking us more. The whole time we were running my boyfriend kept telling me things like “this isn’t the right path, we need to turn” even though it was just a straight shot back. Once we made it out he couldn’t stop looking toward the woods and kept telling me his body was telling him to go back and things like that. It was super unsettling. I didn’t start to panic until we got back to his house. I couldn’t stand going home alone and walking by that forest at night to get back to my dorm so I stayed at his place until sunrise. Every time I tried to close my eyes to sleep I saw images of the eyes and these fucked up deer. I didn’t sleep for about 48 hours and when I finally did it was a restless 2 or 3 hours nap. I’ve had extreme paranoia since being back and can’t stand to go anywhere without him on the phone.

We’ve tried to rationalize it but nothing makes sense. It didn’t move or sound like a bear (I’ve seen plenty), and there were no trees for it to have been a panther, not to mention the fact there’s never been a sighting in this part of Florida for several miles. Nothing else but possibly a panther could’ve had those eyes or that scream nor stalked us through the woods the way it did. The only other thing I could imagine was a drone of some type but the woods were dead silent and we never heard any mechanical sounds