Ohio Man Reports Encounter with “Tall, Woody Being”

The Singular Fortean Society was contacted this month by a man who wished to report an encounter with a tall being that was seemingly made from wood.

The man, who asked to remain anonymous, said he was inspired to contact the Society after attending lead investigator Tobias Wayland’s presentation at the Frogman Festival in Ohio on March 4th.

Following his initial contact, he related his experience through a series of email correspondence.

The encounter reportedly took place in Sharonville, Ohio, “about two miles from Sharon Woods in the winding trees that are scattered between the houses dotting the area.”

“Not a deeply wooded area itself, but close enough to deeply wooded areas,” he said of the sighting location.

The man said that “it was spring, just about this time of year,” in 2014, when the encounter took place.

He was in his early 30s.

“The leaves had yet to bud on the honeysuckle line across our property, and the air was still cool enough to see your breath,” he said.

He was outside smoking one night, around 2 a.m., when he noticed his 130-pound dog react to something in the woods.

“She had only reacted that way once, and that was back when a black bear had made its way to our neighborhood and was mucking around in the woods. She is not a brave dog despite her size, but a pure coward,” he said. “Her hair stood on end along her back with hackles raised, whale-eyed and with stiff body posture. Not even raccoons or opossums in our yard would conjure this reaction, nor the woodchuck that chases her.”

Noticing her reaction, he looked to see what had got her attention.

Amongst the gnarled branches was ‘something’ staring back at me. Pale white eyes, wide and milky with a near pearlescence, the face was rough and woody with a ratchety and roughhewn grain. It went against the grain of the trees it stood amongst. Tall, gangly yet amorphous, as if my eyes couldn’t focus on the rest of the being even if I wanted. The face was more of a honey-colored wood yet almost faded as wood does in time. The deep grain and grooves were darker, almost as if wood that is stained then wiped free on the surface.

There was no sense of evil about it, no unease beyond my dog dashing to hide behind me. If anything, it seemed just as surprised that I had seen it as I was for seeing it as it pulled back and shook the tree.

I, of course, being a person of self-preservation, hightailed it out of there and into my house as my dog was on my heels wanting to also get inside.

In further correspondence, the man went on to explain that the “roughly humanoid” creature was around 15 feet away from him when he spotted it and seemed likely to be between eight and ten feet tall.

“[It was] definitely taller than me, but a lot is,” he said. “It had limbs, organized in a humanoid way from what I could tell at the glance.”

The sighting itself was over fairly quickly.

“My dog was certainly alert for probably a full minute and spooked before I glanced over myself, and that was a pretty quick jump scare reaction of seeing it, then bolting to the door with my dog right behind me,” he said.

At first, the man thought that perhaps he was over-tired and seeing things, but his dog’s reaction to the creature convinced him that he might have actually encountered something unusual, and the experience has since become ingrained in his memory.

“I normally would assume it was just me being tired or what not, but my dog also reacted to it before I saw it, which is why I saw whatever this thing was,” he said. “It stuck with me all these years, but I never found a sense of danger in my yard or even around it. I do feel bad for my cowardice, but fight or flight rings hard with something unknown and far larger than myself.”

Although the man hasn’t had any more sightings of the creature himself, he does sometimes feel as though something could be lurking around his neighborhood.

“I haven’t seen it again. I don’t know what I would do if I were to see it again. I live in the suburbs of northern Cincinnati, Ohio, and have no idea if it was something that my dog and I were just making up or if it was passing through, or even just a resident of the woods who wandered over,” he said. “What’s odd is when I am walking my dog at night around the neighborhood, she gives pause to leer at the woods down the street now and then, almost hesitant to move on. That, however, could easily be the coyotes that live locally, or the foxes who make their dens in our ravine, or even just that fat opossum who waddles around.”

While the man’s sighting is unusual, it does bear some resemblance to the Green Man—a legendary figure primarily associated with rebirth and the fecundity of springtime.

Often depicted as a being with a face formed from vegetation, the Green Man motif can be found in the history of many cultures around the world and is often related to various plant deities.