NC sheriff: Scary 911 call with man screaming ‘That’s not human!’ really happened
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Pender County released a July 31, 2021 911 audio confirming a frantic report.
- Deputies scouted the scene, NC Highway Patrol logged scratch damage, no report filed.
- Coverage spurred debate: prank or deer collision versus cryptid tale and tourism motive.
The call came in just before midnight: a young man’s voice, somewhat rattled, telling a 911 operator he’d just seen a man streaked with blood on the side of a country road, staring back blankly in the dark.
As the dispatcher in Pender County tried to pin down the man’s location — somewhere on NC 210, just over the Black River — a loud thump came over the line.
“What the [expletive]!” the caller screamed. “That’s not human! That’s not human!”
“Sir, are you OK, sir?” the dispatcher asked over the driver’s yelling.
“There’s something in the bed of my truck!”
So begins the story of the Pender County creature, a new North Carolina horror story captured on real-time audio, in which one frightened-sounding caller described a pale-skinned monster landing in the bed of his pickup at 50 mph, then flying over the roof when he hit the brakes, vanishing into folklore.
The recording of the shaky-voiced monologue — “Just scared the absolute hell out of me!” — has already topped 3 million views on TikTok and more than 600,000 on YouTube, thanks to Carolina Case Files, a series dedicated to the unexplained.
But what sets this Tar Heel creature feature apart from a dozen other paranormal encounters is that it comes stamped with credibility: both Snopes.com and Pender County Sheriff Alan W. Cutler confirm that the midnight screeching can be heard on a real-live 911 call.
“I don’t know for sure what he saw or what he experienced that night, but it was obvious that he was distraught,” said the sheriff, interviewed for Carolina Case Files. “I’m afraid it’s just one of those things in this world that we may not ever know the answer to.”
‘That wasn’t a turkey’
But like many paranormal stories, this one includes some troubling factors — even if you accept the possibility of a cryptid dropping into a moving vehicle.
A few:
- The call came in on July 31, 2021, yet no one took notice till now.
- The Pender sheriff’s deputies released the entire 11-minute recording without bleeping out the 911 caller’s name or phone number. I’ve listened to probably 100 911 calls, and this is a first.
- The dispatcher seems strangely unprofessional, telling the driver “I’d be scared, too,” and fixating on the monster’s appearance. This exchange seems out of place in an emergency:“What was it?” asks the dispatcher.“I don’t know.”“Like a turkey?” she asks. “A deer? Turkeys are pretty big.”“That wasn’t a turkey because I was driving 50 miles an hour. A turkey doesn’t hit that hard, and it was not covered in feathers at all.”
- Deputies responded to the scene and flew a drone to scout the area, but they did not write an incident report. The NC Highway Patrol took over the investigation, but the paperwork shown in the YouTube video has troopers describing the scratch marks on the truck as being consistent with tree branches.
All of this prompted Matt Knicl, who describes himself as a paranormal researcher investigator, to contact The N&O and send this story screaming onto my desk.
Knicl suggests the whole hullabaloo might have been concocted to create a locally famous monster and thereby drum up tourism. Consider the Beast of Bladenboro, a North Carolina legend that boasts its own festival. Pender County does sit on the Interstate 40 route most people drive to the beach, and a truck-invading creature might make a tempting stop.
Regardless, it’s a fantastic story to score some pageviews — not that I’d be motivated by anything like that.
“Paranormal tourism is big,” Knicl said in an email. “Even if an area doesn’t fully embrace a cryptid or haunting like Point Pleasant embraces Mothman or Roswell embraces aliens, there’s money to be made. Making a monster is hard, but if you have local legends or just say there are local legends, some entrepreneurs or a town council could spin that into a festival or increase traffic to local businesses.”
I ran this by Rusty Martin Sr., the Wilmington actor who narrates the Carolina Case File videos, and he scoffed.
“A hoax that’s four years in the making?” he wrote back. “Seriously, Josh? Tourism for Pender County? The last thing that the LEOs (deputies) of Pender County want is people poking around the Black River on a busy, dark, two-lane country road late at night.”
He declined to connect me with the driver, whom he interviewed anonymously and mostly off-camera in the YouTube episode, and explained in a follow-up video that he had:
- Sold his truck shortly after the encounter, explaining the lack of pictures.
- Lost his phone on a fishing trip, explaining why the number given in the 911 call doesn’t work.
- Been extremely reluctant to speak to anyone, including Carolina Case Files, out of an intense desire to move on.
Whooo knows?
In the end, it seems a bit pointless to nitpick the factual elements in a story that involves nonhuman road beasts.
My take?
The 911 call definitely happened. The dispatcher may be a little unorthodox, but it’s clear the sheriff’s office got this hair-raising report, checked it out and found nothing. It likely circulated four years in law enforcement circles until a budding YouTuber heard it and grabbed hold.
Rational Me thinks the driver fell victim to a prank, whether for kicks, a fraternity initiation or a lost bet, and somebody dressed up like a bloody nightwalker while somebody else threw a dummy from a tree. Or maybe the driver hit a deer in the dark and it flipped over into his truck bed, scampering back over the hood when he hit the brakes.
But Halloween Me hopes the creature still exists, leaping into random pickups, joy-riding on the back roads of Pender. I like to think I’d slow down and let it into the cab, maybe let it pick a radio station and offer it a pack of Nabs.
That’s only human.
This story was originally published October 27, 2025 at 5:00 AM.