Your True Tales
October 2004 – Page 7

Pine Barrens Creature
by Dawn W.

When you grow up in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, you can't help but hear of the "Jersey Devil." But of all the things I never thought I would see out in those woods – and I saw some very very strange things through the years – was a white creature about three feet high that could move as fast as the horse I was riding.

I was about 17 years old at the time (1988) and did not do drugs (my mother's first question when I told her this story). It was late fall and a bit cold, around 4:30 p.m. and I was about an hour out on a trail ride. As I tried to turn my horse around to go home, he stopped and would not move. He was staring off of the trail and he began to tremble; sweat instantly came up on his neck. Now this was not an animal that got spooked easily; we had run into deer and irate hunters before, even a few wild dogs in the past, but nothing had ever freaked him out before. I tried to reassure him, but he was trying to rear up, and it was all I could do to keep him from hurting both of us.

This dirty white creature stepped out onto the trail and bared its teeth at us. It had a face like an owl, sort of, but it was sparsely hairy and dirty. It had long claws and matted fur about an inch long. It sort of squatted there and growled, showing a row of uneven sharp yellowish teeth. I only saw it for about five or six seconds, but by then I too had panicked and knew why my horse had become so frightened.

We crashed through the woods and came out on another trail and it was right behind us growling loudly. We bolted forward again, running most of the way back to the barn. I described this thing to several other people, and a few years later I met a man from the National Guard and he described it to me exactly with one difference: he saw two of them. He had been in the same area, more or less, and had seen them from his jeep. They did not move against him, just went into the woods.

I never rode on that side of the Garden State Parkway again and never rode into the those woods alone.

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