She Saw Two DOGS Fighting, Until One Stood Up Like a DOGMAN

The Secret at the Edge of the Woods

She thought she was watching two dogs fighting in her backyard. Just a normal Tuesday afternoon—until one of them stood up on two legs, turned its head toward her kitchen window, and looked directly into her eyes with something that wasn’t animal. What she saw next made her question everything she thought she knew about what lies in the woods behind suburban America.

My name is Margaret Chen. I’m 72 years old now. For nearly five decades, I’ve lived with the knowledge that something impossible exists. Something that watches us from the edges of our safe, normal lives. Something I saw standing in my backyard, looking at me like it knew exactly who I was.

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This is the story of how an ordinary housewife in suburban Michigan became a witness to something the world isn’t ready to accept.

October 1977

Gerald Ford had just left office. Star Wars was in theaters. I was 25, newly married to my husband David, and we’d just bought our first house in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. A small three-bedroom ranch on half an acre, backing up to a decent stretch of woods. Nothing fancy, but it was ours.

We were living the American dream, or at least our version of it. Normal people, normal jobs, normal life. The neighborhood was quiet—families with kids, retirees, the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, where you could leave your doors unlocked, where the biggest excitement was the high school football game on Friday nights.

Our property backed up to about fifteen acres of undeveloped woodland. Not a big forest, just a strip of trees that separated our neighborhood from the industrial area beyond. During the day, you could hear trucks from the factories. At night, it was quiet except for the usual sounds—owls, crickets, the occasional rustle of raccoons or possums going through someone’s trash.

I loved that house. Loved the privacy of having woods behind us. I’d sit on the back porch in the evenings with my coffee, watching birds, enjoying the green space that felt like a little escape from suburban life.

David traveled for work sometimes, a few days at a time. I was used to being alone in the house. Never bothered me.

The Day Everything Changed

October 18th, 1977. David had left that morning for a three-day trip to the plant in Louisville. I’d taken the day off work, fighting a cold. It was unseasonably warm—mid-60s, sunny, beautiful fall weather. I spent the morning doing laundry, light housework, nothing exciting.

Around 2:00 p.m., I was in the kitchen making myself lunch—a tuna sandwich, I remember that detail clearly. The kitchen window looked out over our backyard and the treeline beyond. About fifty feet of grass between the house and where the woods started. I had a clear view of the whole area.

I was spreading mayonnaise on bread when I heard it: deep, aggressive barking, snarling. The kind of noise that makes your stomach drop because you know something’s fighting. I looked out the window and saw them—two large animals at the edge of the woods, maybe thirty feet from my back porch. At first glance, they looked like dogs. Big dogs. Maybe German shepherds or something similar, dark-colored, moving fast, circling each other aggressively.

Dogs fight sometimes. It’s not pleasant, but it happens. I figured two neighborhood dogs had gotten loose and were going at it over territory or food or whatever dogs fight about. I watched for a few seconds, trying to decide if I should go out there and try to break it up or just let them work it out.

They were really going at it, lunging, snapping, that horrible growling sound dogs make when they’re serious about hurting each other.

And then everything changed.

One of them, the larger one, suddenly pulled back from the fight. Instead of staying on all fours, it rose up. It stood up on two legs like a person. I froze with the butter knife still in my hand. The thing was tall—maybe six and a half, seven feet. Its body shifted from horizontal to vertical in one smooth motion. Not awkward or unbalanced, but natural. Like this was something it did regularly.

The other animal, the one that still looked like a dog, immediately dropped to the ground, submissive. It didn’t run away—it just lay there, head down, completely still.

The standing one looked down at it for a moment. Then it turned its head slowly, deliberately, and looked directly at my kitchen window. At me.

I dropped the knife. It clattered into the sink. The thing’s head was wrong—not a dog’s head, not a wolf’s, something in between. The snout was too long, the jaw too heavy. But the eyes—God, the eyes—were looking at me with an awareness no animal should have.

We stared at each other for maybe three seconds. It felt like an hour.

Then it dropped back down to all fours and vanished into the woods. The other animal scrambled up and followed. Both gone in seconds, like they’d never been there.

The Secret

I stood at that window for a long time, hand shaking, trying to convince myself I’d seen something else. A trick of the light. A bear, maybe, though we didn’t have bears in suburban Detroit. A person in a costume, though that made even less sense. But I knew what I’d seen. Something that shouldn’t exist had been standing in my backyard, and it had looked right at me.

I didn’t tell David right away. When he called that evening from his hotel, I almost said something. Almost. But how do you explain something like that over the phone? How do you tell your husband you saw a creature that walks like a man and looks like a wolf standing in your backyard? He’d think I was losing my mind, or that the cold medicine was making me hallucinate. So I said nothing.

That night, I barely slept. Every sound made me jump. The house settling, the furnace kicking on, tree branches scraping the roof. All of it sounded threatening now. I kept seeing that moment when it stood up. The way it looked at me. That wasn’t animal behavior. That was something else—something intelligent, something that knew I was watching and wanted me to know it was aware of me.

Searching for Answers

Wednesday morning, I called in sick to work again. I spent the day researching. This was 1977, so there was no internet. I went to the library. I asked the librarian if they had any books about unusual animals in Michigan. She looked at me oddly but showed me to a section on local wildlife.

I spent hours reading about bears, coyotes, wolves, foxes. Nothing matched what I’d seen. Then I found something in a collection of local folklore and Native American legends—stories about beings that walked like men but had the heads of wolves or dogs. Shapeshifters, guardians, tricksters. The library book called them by different names depending on the tribe, but they all described similar things—creatures that lived in the forests, that could walk upright or on all fours, that were intelligent and powerful and dangerous.

I checked out the book and read it cover to cover that evening. Some stories were just myths, but others were told like witness accounts, people describing encounters with specific details: the way the creatures moved, the sounds they made, the intelligence in their eyes.

Telling David

David came home Thursday evening. I made dinner, trying to maintain normalcy. Afterward, as we were cleaning up, I finally told him. All of it. The fighting animals, the way one stood up, the way it looked at me.

He listened without interrupting. When I finished, he was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “Margaret, you were on cold medicine. Sometimes medications can cause visual disturbances.”

“It wasn’t the medicine. I know what I saw.”

“Okay. What do you think you saw?”

“I don’t know, but it wasn’t a dog. It wasn’t anything normal.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Look, I’m not saying you’re lying. But there’s got to be a logical explanation. Maybe it was a bear standing up. They do that sometimes. Or someone’s exotic pet that got loose.”

I wanted to believe that. God, I wanted to believe there was a normal explanation, but I couldn’t shake the image of those eyes looking at me.

Obsession

Over the next few weeks, I became obsessed. I started watching the backyard constantly. I bought binoculars, scanned the treeline for hours, set up a folding chair on the back porch and would sit out there, even when it got cold, watching, waiting.

David was patient at first, then concerned, then frustrated. “Margaret, you’ve got to stop this. You’re barely sleeping. You’re calling in sick to work. You’re spending all your time staring at those woods. This isn’t healthy.”

“Something’s out there, David. I saw it.”

“Even if you did see something unusual, what are you going to do about it? You can’t just watch the woods forever.”

But I couldn’t let it go. I started walking the treeline during the day, looking for evidence—tracks, scat, anything that would prove I wasn’t crazy. I found things: tracks bigger than any dog’s, with claw marks that looked wrong; pushed-down grass in patterns that suggested something large had been moving through; scratch marks on trees high up, higher than a dog could reach. I took Polaroids, blurry and inconclusive, but I kept them anyway.

More Encounters

In November, I was in bed around 2:00 a.m. David was asleep beside me. I heard something outside, not close to the house, but out by the woods. A sound I’d never heard before—a low howl, like a wolf, but deeper, more resonant. It went on for maybe ten seconds, then stopped. Then it started again, but this time it changed pitch midway through. It went from a howl to something that almost sounded like speech, like syllables, like language.

I sat up in bed, heart pounding. David stirred but didn’t wake up. The sound came again, and this time I was sure: it wasn’t just an animal howling. There was structure to it, pattern. It was communicating.

I got out of bed and went to the window. Our bedroom was on the second floor with a view of the backyard. I pulled back the curtain and looked out. The moon was bright that night, almost full. I could see the yard clearly and the treeline beyond. And I saw them—three of them, standing at the edge of the woods, upright, looking toward the house. They were tall—the middle one the biggest, maybe seven feet. The other two were slightly smaller.

They stood perfectly still, like statues, just watching. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. I just stood there at the window, staring back at them. Then the middle one raised its head and made that sound again, that howl-speech, and the other two responded, their voices slightly different in pitch and tone. They were talking to each other.

After maybe a minute, they dropped to all fours and disappeared into the woods, gone in seconds. I stood at that window until sunrise, shaking, unable to process what I’d just witnessed.

Confronting the Impossible

When David woke up, I told him. He looked at me with an expression I’d never seen before—real worry. “Margaret, I think you should talk to someone. A doctor, maybe a therapist.”

“I’m not crazy, David.”

“I didn’t say you were crazy, but you’re clearly stressed. You’re not sleeping. You’re seeing things that you can’t explain. That’s not healthy. We need to figure out what’s going on.”

“What’s going on is that there are creatures living in those woods that shouldn’t exist, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

David was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “Okay, let’s say you’re right. Who would you even tell? Who would believe you?”

That stopped me. He was right. Who could I tell? The police? They’d laugh. Animal control? Same thing. Scientists? I had no proof, just my word, some blurry Polaroids, and tracks that could be explained away. I was trapped with knowledge I couldn’t share and couldn’t prove.

The Years of Silence

December came. The weather turned cold. Snow started falling. I kept watching, but I didn’t see them again. Just empty woods and winter silence. I started to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing. Maybe David was right. Maybe I had been stressed and my mind had created something that wasn’t there.

In January 1978, we had a bad ice storm. Power was out for three days. On the second night, I heard something on the back porch—heavy footsteps, not the light patter of a raccoon, something big, walking deliberately. I grabbed a flashlight and went to the kitchen window. The moon was behind clouds, so it was dark. I turned on the flashlight and shined it toward the porch.

It was standing there, on the porch, on two legs, maybe six feet from the window. The flashlight beam hit its face and it turned to look directly into the light, directly at me. I screamed, dropped the flashlight. It clattered on the floor and went out. I heard it move fast. Heavy footsteps across the porch, then the sound of it jumping down to the ground and running toward the woods.

When David got home an hour later, I was sitting on the living room floor, shaking, all the doors locked, every light in the house on, even though we were supposed to be conserving candles. He held me while I cried and told him what happened.

This time he didn’t suggest therapy or medication. He just held me and said, “Okay, okay, we’ll figure this out.”

The next morning, after the sun was up, we went outside together to look at the porch. There were marks in the ice—footprints, big ones, not human, not dog, something in between. David stared at them for a long time. Then he said, “We’re not telling anyone about this. You understand? No police, no newspapers, no one. If people find out there’s something like this around here, they’ll come with guns. They’ll tear up these woods. They’ll turn our lives into a circus. So we just live with it, knowing it’s out there. We live with it carefully. We keep the doors locked. We don’t go into the woods. We watch, but we don’t tell anyone.”

That was the agreement we made. The secret we started keeping.

A Strange Peace

In April, I was in the backyard planting flowers in the garden beds along the porch. It was a Saturday afternoon, bright and sunny. David was inside watching a baseball game on TV. I had my back to the woods, focused on my work. Then I felt it—that sensation of being watched. That primitive instinct that tells you you’re not alone. I turned around slowly, and there it was, sitting at the edge of the treeline on its haunches, like a dog, but massive, watching me.

We looked at each other for maybe thirty seconds. I didn’t move, didn’t scream, just watched it watch me. Then it stood up, rose to its full height, maybe seven feet tall, and did something I’ll never forget. It raised one hand—not a paw, a hand with fingers—and placed it over its chest. Then it lowered its head slightly. It was a gesture, almost like a bow, like it was acknowledging me. Then it turned and walked away into the woods, upright like a person.

I told David what happened. “Did it seem aggressive?” he asked.

“No, it seemed almost respectful, like it was showing me it meant no harm.”

“That’s crazy, Margaret.”

“I know, but that’s what it felt like.”

Gifts and Goodbyes

Over the following months, I saw it a few more times—always at a distance, always watching, never approaching, never threatening, just observing. I started to think of it not as a threat, but as a neighbor, something that lived in those woods and was aware of us, just as we were aware of it.

One time in June, I left food out—a plate with leftover roast chicken and some bread. I put it at the edge of the yard before I went to bed. The next morning, the plate was licked clean and placed neatly on a stump. Not scattered or knocked over—placed carefully.

David thought I was crazy for feeding it. “You’re going to make it come closer. Make it dependent on us. It’s not a pet.”

“I’m not trying to tame it. I just wanted to see if it would accept an offering.”

“Why?”

“Because maybe if it knows we’re not a threat, it’ll leave us alone.”

And it did. Sort of. It never came onto the porch again, never approached the house. But I’d see it sometimes, moving through the woods, a shadow among shadows.

September 1978, almost a full year since the first encounter, I’d gotten used to living with the knowledge that something impossible existed in those woods. I’d stopped being afraid and started being curious.

One night in October, exactly one year after the first sighting, I saw all three of them again, standing at the treeline, the big one in the middle, two smaller ones on either side. I was on the back porch, sitting in my chair drinking tea. They didn’t hide. They just stood there upright, watching me. I raised my hand and waved—a simple gesture. Hello, I see you. The big one raised its hand and waved back, an exact mirror of my gesture. Then they turned and walked into the woods. And I knew, somehow, that they wouldn’t be coming back, that this was goodbye.

Legacy

I never saw them again. Not in our backyard, not in those woods. They moved on, or went deeper into hiding. Or maybe they’d just been passing through. But I knew they’d been real. I had the branches—a pile of sticks left on the porch one night, arranged in a deliberate pattern, with a piece of dark fur caught in the weave. I had the memories. I had the knowledge that something impossible had existed in my life for one year, and I’d been changed by it.

David and I lived in that house for another twelve years. We never spoke about the creatures to anyone outside of each other. In 1990, we sold the house and moved to a condo closer to the city.

But I think about those creatures almost every day. I’ve spent forty-seven years thinking about what they were, where they came from, whether they’re still out there. With the internet, I found other stories—people who’d seen things in the woods, things that walked upright, things with dog-like faces and intelligent eyes. Most people called them dogmen. Some called them werewolves or skinwalkers or wendigos. Different names for the same phenomenon.

There are too many similar accounts from too many different places for them all to be lies or hallucinations. I think they’re real. I know they’re real. I’ve seen them. I’ve interacted with them. And I believe they’ve been here as long as we have, maybe longer, living alongside humanity while choosing to remain hidden.

Maybe they’re smarter than us in that way. They know what happens to things that humans don’t understand. We hunt them, study them, cage them, destroy them. By staying hidden, they’ve survived.

The Truth

David died three years ago. Heart attack. Quick and painless, the doctor said. I miss him every day. He was the only person who shared this secret with me, the only person who believed me without question after he saw those tracks in the ice.

I’ve told my daughter some of it. She listened politely, didn’t say I was crazy, but I could see in her eyes that she thought it was a story I’d convinced myself of. Maybe she’s right. Maybe after forty-seven years, my brain has created something bigger and stranger than what actually happened. Maybe I did see a bear standing up and the stress of being alone caused me to interpret it as something more.

But I don’t think so. I remember too clearly the way it moved, the way it looked at me, the intelligence in those eyes, the deliberate gestures, the crafted branches. That wasn’t a bear. That wasn’t a person in a costume. That was something else. Something the world doesn’t have a category for.

I’m seventy-two now. I don’t have many years left. And I wanted to tell this story before I’m gone. Not for attention or fame. Not to convince anyone of anything. Just to document what happened. To say that in October 1977, in suburban Michigan, something impossible existed for one year in my backyard, and it changed me. Made me understand that the world is bigger and stranger than we’re taught to believe.

I hope they’re still out there, still hidden, still surviving in the deep woods and remote places where humans rarely go. I hope they continue to avoid us, to stay secret, to protect themselves from our tendency to destroy what we don’t understand. And I hope that somewhere in a forest I’ll never visit, there’s an old creature with graying fur who remembers the woman in the house at the edge of the woods, who remembers the exchanges of gifts and the peaceful coexistence. Who knows that at least one human saw them and chose to protect their secret rather than expose them.

That’s my legacy. That’s what I did with the knowledge I was given. I kept the secret. I protected them by staying silent for forty-seven years. And now, finally, I’m speaking—not to prove anything, not to convince skeptics, just to tell the truth about what happened to me.

On October 18th, 1977, I saw something that shouldn’t exist. And it was the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in my ordinary life.

If you made it this far, you’ve just spent forty minutes hearing about something that sounds impossible but happened anyway. If this story made you think, made you wonder, or made you look at your own backyard a little differently, remember: just because something seems impossible doesn’t mean it isn’t real.