Creature Encounter: The Pender County 911 Call | “That’s Not Human!” — Ep. 66

A Driver Spots Possible Blood

July 31st, 2021. It was just after 1130 at night, and a man was driving east along Highway 210 in Pender County, North Carolina. He'd just crossed the Black River when his headlights picked up someone standing alongside of the road. There wasn't much time to get a good look as he passed, but it appeared to be a man, and there was something running down from his head that looked red in the high beams. It looked like blood. By the time the driver realized what he'd seen, the man was already behind him. He could have kept going, but if somebody was standing injured alongside a highway in the middle of the night, he couldn't just ignore it. So he reached for his phone and dialed 911. He told the dispatcher what he'd seen while trying to give her his location. He was on Highway 210, just past the Black River, heading east toward Highway 53, and the man he'd passed was still somewhere behind him. As the dispatcher tried to narrow down where he'd seen the man and what kind of condition he was in, the driver kept going, putting more distance between them. And then in the middle of their conversation, something hit the truck.

Why The 911 Audio Matters

Okay, first thing. That call is real. It came into 911 in Pender County, North Carolina, late on July 31st, 2021. I'm going to call the man you just heard T. That's how he was identified when he later agreed to talk publicly about what had happened. And the reason this case caught my attention is pretty simple. T didn't call 911 to report a creature. He called because he thought he'd just passed an injured man standing beside the road, and the dispatcher was trying to figure out where that man was so somebody could go check on him. Then, while T was still talking to her, something hit his truck hard enough that you can hear it on the recording. And that changes the way I look at the story, because whatever happened after that, we don't have to rely entirely on somebody trying to remember it years later. At least part of it happened while somebody else was listening. Pender County sits in southeastern North Carolina, north of Wilmington, and Highway 210 cuts through long stretches of woods, farmland, and small communities. That's where T was driving on the night of July 31st, 2021. What makes this case unusual is that we don't just have someone describing a strange encounter after the fact. We hear it begin. T called 911 because he thought he had just passed an injured man standing beside the road. At that point, there was nothing paranormal about the situation. As far as he knew, somebody needed help. And then, while he was still on the phone with the dispatcher, something happened. So rather than begin with theories about what T may have encountered that night, I want to begin exactly where he did, with a man standing beside the road. This is the story of a 911 call that began with a driver trying to help a stranger and ended with him screaming three words into the phone. That's not human. And this is State of the Unknown.

Retracing The Drive On Highway 210

T was traveling north from Florida to visit family. Years later, when he finally sat down to talk about what had happened, he remembered that the air conditioning in his truck wasn't working especially well, so he'd been driving with the window down. It's a small detail, but I like details like that because they're usually how nights like this actually begin. Nothing special is happening. You're just trying to get where you're going. By around 1130 that night, T was on Highway 210. He crossed the Black River and kept heading east. Somewhere after that crossing, his headlights picked up a person standing near the side of the road. T didn't stop. There wasn't much time to really look at the man as he passed, but he saw enough to concern him. During the 911 call, he said there were red streaks coming down from the man's head. In the high beams, it looked like blood. He also noticed the way the man looked at him. T told the dispatcher that the plank stare reminded him of somebody that might have suffered a head injury. He connected that impression to his own army experience. So to T, this didn't look like somebody who was just standing around beside the road. Maybe he was hurt. Maybe he was confused. Maybe he needed help. By then T was already past him, and rather than turn around on a dark road, he called 911. That's where the call you heard begins. The dispatcher asks where he is. T tells her he's crossed the Black River and is heading east toward Highway 53. As he keeps driving, he gives her landmarks he's passing. She asks about the man, and T explains the red streaks and says they seem to start around his head.

The Impact And Instant Panic

They're still trying to pin down exactly where he was standing when something hits the truck. You already heard what happens, the impact, the dispatcher asking what it was, T reacting, and then that's not human. That's not human. If you keep listening beyond that point, the call gets chaotic pretty quickly. And for a few moments, T and the dispatcher are actually trying to have two different conversations. T says there's something in the bed of his truck, but the dispatcher seems to think he means there's something back in the road, near where he saw the injured man. T corrects her. No, not in the road. In the truck. Something is behind him. And remember, T hasn't stopped. He's still moving down Highway 210 at around 50 miles an hour, trying to talk to the dispatcher while also figuring out what just hit him. So he turns on the light over his truck bed. If you've never had a pickup with one, it's basically a light mounted high on the back of the cab that shines down into the bed. Normally you'd use it when you're parked and need to see what you've got back there. T turns his on while he's still moving and looks back. Whatever he can see behind him is pale. The dispatcher is still trying to make sense of what he's telling her, so she starts offering possibilities. At one point she asks if it could be a turkey, and honestly, that makes sense in the moment. She had a frightened driver on a rural road telling her something has somehow ended up in the back of a moving pickup. She can't see what he's seeing, so she's trying to work backward from what he's telling her and find something ordinary that fits. T says no. No feathers. Whatever he's looking at, he doesn't think it's a bird. And there's something about this part of the call that's easy to forget once you hear the much more detailed version of the story later. T isn't sitting there studying this thing. He's driving. It's dark. He's frightened. He's talking to a dispatcher on the phone. And every time he looks behind him to figure out what's in the bed, he's taking his attention away from the road in front of him. So when we get to exactly what T says he saw, I think we have to keep those circumstances in mind. Because the really detailed description people now associate with this case doesn't come from those few seconds on Highway 210. It comes years later. When T eventually agreed to talk about the encounter, he remembered a pale face very close to the rear window of the truck. He described deeply set eyes, barely any nose, no obvious ears, and skin that looked like it was pulled tightly over the shape of the face. Again, that's T remembering it years afterward. I don't want to take that description and quietly move it back into 2021, as though he was giving the dispatcher all of those details while it was happening. He wasn't. What we do here that night is somebody who wants whatever is behind him off the truck. So T starts trying to make that happen without getting out. He uses the truck. He speeds up and then he breaks. And according to what T says during the call, whatever was in the bed comes forward, goes over the cabin hood, and ends up off the truck. T keeps going. He doesn't turn around, he doesn't stop and get out with a flashlight. He doesn't try to get a picture. And I know that's the point where people sometimes say, why didn't he stop? Why didn't he film it? But put yourself in the truck for a second. A few minutes ago you were worried about an injured man beside the road. Now something has hit your truck hard enough for the 911 dispatcher to hear it. You believe that something ended up in the bed behind you. You turned on the light, looked back, and whatever you saw frightened you enough that you're yelling into the phone that it isn't human. Are you really pulling over? T wasn't. I know I wouldn't either. He kept driving, and that's exactly what I would do too. Years later, he gave a much fuller description of what he believed he saw once it came off the truck. He remembered it standing upright, very thin and very pale, and arms and legs that looked unusually long. Based on how it looked next to the truck, he estimated it at around seven feet tall, and he said it eventually moved away from the road and into the woods. Those details would matter a lot once the story became public, because people immediately started putting names to what T described. But none of those internet labels mattered to T while he was still driving down Highway 210. He was trying to get away from it. T stays on the phone with the dispatcher. And even though whatever was in the truck is apparently gone, he doesn't suddenly calm down. He keeps the truck bed light on. He keeps checking behind him. Most importantly, he keeps moving. At one point he mentions another truck up ahead, and you can understand why that would matter. Until then, he's been driving through a dark rural stretch of Highway 210 with whatever just happened behind him. Now at least there's someone else on the road. But T doesn't want to stop. Eventually he reaches a lit area where he's willing to pull in and wait for law enforcement. And the immediate encounter may be over, but T still doesn't know what happened. He knows what he thinks he saw. He knows something hit the truck. He knows that whatever he saw when he turned on the bedlight frightened him. But he doesn't have an explanation for any of it.

The Search Turns Up Nothing

Now there are other people involved. Responders go back out along the route and search. Deputies check the area. They use a drone. The North Carolina Highway Patrol becomes involved as well. And they don't find the man T originally called about. That's the part I think gets buried once this becomes a creature story. Remember why T picked up the phone in the first place? Before the impact, before the thing in the truck, before that's not human, there was apparently a man standing beside Highway 210 with what looked like blood coming down from his head. That's who T was trying to get help for. Responders don't find him. They don't find somebody injured nearby. They don't find a body, and they don't find a pale figure waiting somewhere in the woods either. So whatever happened that night, the police response doesn't hand us some obvious explanation that ties everything together. Then there's the truck. There was some scratching or damage noted on it, but this is another place where the story gets more dramatic as it travels. If you look up the case now, you'll sometimes see those marks described as claw marks, as though investigators found physical evidence that some kind of creature had scratched its way across T's truck. That isn't what the surviving documentation says. Highway patrol paperwork that later became public described the scratches as consistent with tree branches. That's an important distinction. There may have been marks on the truck, but there were scratches, and a creature left claw marks are two very different claims. And I don't think we gain anything by pretending they're the same. At some point during the response, T apparently reached for another word to describe what he thought he'd seen: skinwalker. And if you don't know that term, a skinwalker comes from Navajo tradition. It has a specific cultural meaning. It isn't just a generic name for any strange human-shaped thing somebody sees at night. But I also don't think T was trying to make a careful argument about folklore at this point. He'd just gone through something he couldn't explain. He was looking for a word. And then, for the most part, the story disappears. That's another part of this case that interests me. Because if the whole thing was staged specifically to make T famous, this would be a pretty strange way to go about it. Four years is a long time to wait for the payoff. And by this point, T already had one thing that would eventually make the story spread: the recording. He didn't have to convince anybody years later that he had sounded frightened that night. You can hear it. The 911 call already existed, but for the next several years, none of that turns into some public campaign. T didn't turn himself into a paranormal personality. He didn't start giving interviews about the creature on Highway 210. He didn't spend the next few years trying to convince anybody that he'd discovered something living in the woods of Pender County. The incident just sat there. T eventually sold the truck. And according to the people who later found him, he really didn't want to revisit what had happened. The story stayed mostly obscure until 2025. That's when Rusty Martin got involved. Martin is behind Carolina Case Files, a project that investigates unusual and unexplained stories from the Carolinas. He heard the 911 recording, started looking into it, and eventually found T. Apparently, getting T to talk wasn't easy. Martin later said T wanted to move on and was extremely reluctant to discuss the encounter. Eventually, though, he agreed. And that interview is where a lot of the details people now associate with this case centered the story. T remembered the man beside the road more clearly. He thought he may have been in his thirties. He remembered him near a ditch. And then he added something that isn't on the original 911 call, the clothing. T said the man appeared to be wearing an old military uniform, something that looked Civil War era to him. He also gave the fuller description of the pale figure behind the truck, the face, the proportions, the height, the long arms and legs. And suddenly, four years after the original call, there was enough of a story for other people to start trying to figure out what T had seen. Once Carolina case files released its investigation, the story started spreading online. The Pender County Sheriff's Office confirmed that the recording was genuine. Sheriff Alan Cutler later said he couldn't

How Labels Warp The Story

say what T actually saw or experienced that night, but he could say the man was clearly distraught. And this is where something starts happening to the story itself. People start naming the thing. Some call it a rake. Now, a rake is essentially an internet-created humanoid horror figure. It isn't some old North Carolina legend that people in Pender County have been talking about for generations. Other people call it a pale crawler. That's a broader paranormal label people use for reports of thin, pale, human-shaped figures, usually with unusually long arms and legs. Then there's the skinwalker label T himself had apparently used. And once the story about the old military clothing became public, some people started connecting the roadside man to local history. Morse Creek National Battlefield is nearby. A real battle was fought there in 1776 during the American Revolution. But T thought the clothing looked Civil War era. Those are two very different periods. So if somebody tells you this must have been the ghost of a soldier from the Battle of Moore's Creek, there's a pretty big historical jump being made there. And this is one of those places where I think the internet can actually make a strange story harder to understand instead of easier. Once enough names get attached to something, it starts to feel like we know what it was. Crawler, rake, skinwalker, ghost. They sound like answers, but none of them tells us what hit T's truck. So what do we actually have? For me, the strongest part of this case is still the 911 recording. Not because it proves a creature jumped into T's truck,

What We Can Actually Claim

it doesn't. But what it does tell us is that T didn't assemble this entire sequence four years later. He called because he thought he saw an injured man. Something happens during the call that we can hear. His reaction changes immediately. And while he's still talking to the dispatcher, he says something is in the truck bed. So we have good evidence that T was reacting to something in real time. We just don't know what. And once we move beyond the recording, things get a lot less solid. Nobody else reports seeing the figure. The search doesn't turn up an injured man. It doesn't turn up an animal or a body. By the time people investigate the case years later, the truck is gone, so nobody can examine it independently. And the physical damage that was documented had at least one ordinary explanation. Then we have T's later memories. I don't think it's fair to say he gave more details later, so those details must be false. People absolutely remember things they don't mention during a panicked phone call. But I also wouldn't give a description from four years later the same weight as something recorded while the event was actually happening? So I think the fairest thing is just to keep those two things separate. As for ordinary explanations, there are several. Could an animal have hit or gotten into the truck? Maybe. Could a branch, debris, or something else explain the impact? Possibly. Could darkness, speed, fear, and trying to look behind you while driving affect what you think you're seeing? Of course. And could the man beside the road have had absolutely nothing to do with whatever happened afterwards? Yes. That one keeps coming back to me because, of course, we want those two things to be connected. First, there's this injured man. Then something gets into the truck. It feels like one story. But maybe it isn't. Maybe two unrelated things happened within a few minutes of each other, and T connected them because that's what made sense in the moment. But even if that's what happened, it doesn't clean everything up. Who was the man? Why didn't responders find him? What caused the impact? What did T see when he turned on the bed light? And what caused the reaction we hear on the call? Then there's the crawler or rake idea. I understand why people go there. T's later description does sound a lot like the way people describe these pale humanoid encounters. Thin, pale, with long limbs. Could something like that exist? I'm open to the possibility that there are things in this world that we don't understand yet. But that's very different from saying this was one of them. And putting a name on it doesn't really solve anything. If I call it a crawler, I still have to explain what a crawler actually is. If I call it a rake, I'm using the name of an internet horror character. So I'd rather not pretend the label gives us an answer. Something happened to T. The recording gives us good reason to believe he was reacting to it as it happened. Beyond that, the evidence runs out. And maybe that's where we have to leave the evidence. Because T still had to leave Highway 210 with whatever happened to him that night. What sticks with me most isn't really the face T described

The Uneasy Power Of No Answer

or the estimate that the thing was seven feet tall. It's what happened afterwards. Or maybe what didn't happen. T didn't become the guy from the monster encounter. For years, he didn't seem interested in turning this into anything public. And when somebody finally tracked him down, he apparently wasn't all that eager to sit there and go through it again. I think that's worth thinking about because by the time the rest of us hear a story like this, somebody has usually cleaned it up for us. It has a name, a category, a thumbnail. Somebody has decided it was a crawler or a ghost or an alien or whatever else fits. T didn't have any of that on Highway 210. He had a dispatcher on the phone, and something happened behind him that he couldn't understand. Even that's not human, isn't an explanation. It's just his reaction in that moment. And then the moment ends. You keep driving. You get somewhere safe. The police show up. Eventually, life starts moving again. But the part you couldn't explain gets to come with you. That's probably one reason stories like this keep pulling me back. We live in a world that feels pretty well mapped. We carry cameras everywhere. We can identify animals with an app. We can look at satellite images of places we've never even been. It's easy to feel like the big categories are already settled. And I do think most strange experiences probably have ordinary explanations. But I also think we can admit that we don't know everything. Some mysteries probably survive because nobody collected the right information at the right time. Some are misunderstandings, and maybe every once in a while somebody runs into something we simply don't have a good category for yet. I don't know which one happened to T. Nobody does. And I think that's enough. Because whatever happened on Highway 210 that night, T drove away without an answer. Four years later, when the rest of us finally heard the call, we still couldn't give him one. This has been State of the Unknown. Whatever T saw on Highway 210, one thing from that night did survive the call itself. We can still hear the moment an ordinary report about an injured man became something neither T nor the dispatcher expected. And the person T originally called help for was never identified. Before I go, I want to thank Nikki Hens,

Listener Thanks And How To Help

who suggested this case in a comment on Spotify. I had heard about it before, but I never really dug into it. And her comment was what finally sent me down the rabbit hole. So thank you for giving me the push to take a closer look at this one. And keep those comments coming. I really do love hearing what you think about these stories. And if there's a case you think I should look into, let me know. As this episode proves, sometimes one of those comments can turn into an entire show. I also want to thank everyone supporting State of the Unknown on Patreon. Your support helps me continue researching, producing, and making the show, and I really can't tell you how much I appreciate it. And if you've been enjoying these stories, a rating, review, or follow is one of the easiest ways to help more people find it. Until next time, stay curious. Because sometimes the strangest part isn't what somebody says they saw. It's what they never got an answer for.