Since our house is surrounded by woods on three sides, it’s not uncommon to hear creatures rustling and romping about. I generally think this is pretty cool. But sometimes, like when I take Willa Jean out late at night to take care of her business, it spooks me a little bit. More than once she and I have come running back into the house, our hair standing on end, because “SOMETHING IS OUT THERE!” I never actually get to the point of determining what it is, but I know for a fact it’s something.

I often hear things from our bedroom as well, especially now that it’s summer and we sleep with the windows wide open. It rarely bothers me when I’m snugged up in bed with my husband and my watch dog. But I still hear the noises and wonder.

The other night, however, was an entirely different experience. All three of us were awakened from a dead sleep by a noise… a scream? It repeated every three or four seconds. Was it a coyote? A deranged bird? A tortured human soul wandering the woods? A dingo with a baby? Whatever it was, it was moving along the ridge line behind our house. Something really was out there.

Dave and I whispered to each other, “What the f$%@ is that?” The puppy growled and quietly barked.

“It’s ManBearPig,” I whispered. In my sleepy state, I was half-serious.

We listened for a several minutes, totally creeped out. We’d never heard anything like it. Finally, the creature turned away from our house and its cries became more and more distant until we could no longer hear them.

Unable to go back to sleep, we were determined to figure out what it was. In an inspired moment, I remembered reading somewhere that fisher cats have a totally creepy call that sounds like a woman screaming. I’d never heard it for myself, though. Dave grabbed his phone from the side of the bed and immediately began Googling.

We found this audio/video and determined that it was VERY similar to what we had heard.

But we weren’t quite convinced.

“A fox?” Dave suggested. He had detected a slight “bark” at the end of each blood-curdling scream. And then we both remembered that we’d seen a red fox a couple of weeks ago in the same general area. Duh.

So we Googled “red fox noise” (hey, it was 3:30 in the morning and it got the job done) and came up with this.

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner. Seems we had heard a red fox loudly staking his claim on the forest behind our house.

Now imagine that jolting you awake at 3:30 am. *Shivers*

Sadly, our foxy friend has not come back to visit us again, which can only mean one thing… ManBearPig really is out there.