Appalachian Mountains, North Carolina, 1990

In August of 1990, 17-year old Andy Anderson decided he needed an adventure. It began by sneaking away from home.

“This was a trip that I decided to take on my own without anyone's permission. I was depressed and I really wanted to get away on a bus ride from Minnesota to Florida. I'm about halfway down there we reached North Carolina and I had a change of heart so I stopped there and decided to go back to Minnesota. But the next bus was not scheduled to depart for another two days. Being at my age I couldn't get a hotel or motel or anything like that. I decided to go camp out and I was prepared for camping so I made my way out into the Great Smoky Mountains area. I had a bullwhip, I had a machete, and I was pretty much prepared for any type of wildlife that was out there except for what I encountered next I was not prepared for.

It was around 1:00 – 1:30 in the morning and I woke up from this god-awful sound. My heart jumped up into my throat. The hair on my arms just stood straight up and I immediately started looking around. My first thought it was a cougar, so I grabbed the bullwhip and I started looking around for any signs of something stalking me. The noise was definitely closer. That's when I saw shadows in the bushes sort of moving. Then my eyes met whatever it was.

Its eyes were a putrid yellow. I knew right there that I was dealing with a monster. The adrenaline just took over knowing that this thing was looking at me, knowing that it was tracking me. I accidentally tripped and when I hit the ground that's when I heard the thumping behind me, like something was running. The fear of dying, it's something that I've never felt before and I was determined to defend myself. What I was looking at was nothing that I'd ever seen before. It was humanoid but it was very reptile-like in appearance. It had ridges on its head. It walked forward and I snapped my bull whip again at it. The creature snatched it with that talon-like hand and bit the end off of the bullwhip. I ran! I probably ran faster than I ever had before in my entire life. The only thing that was really going through my mind at the time were how much distance I could put between me and this thing whatever it was.”

Jamie was so desperate to escape he dove into a cold mountain stream:

“When I got to the other side of the river I got out and I immediately started scanning the area looking around for it. I didn't know where it was. Hey, for all I knew it could be in the water, so I decided to put some distance between me and the river. I must have been walking for six hours at least and that's when I ran into a Cherokee native man. I asked if I could get a ride back to the bus station. I looked pretty beat up, scrapes from tripping and I was still shaking from the whole experience.

"What happened to you?"

“Something inside me told me to just tell him and there was a very long pause. I thought, 'Oh, he's gonna kick me out of the car for sounding crazy.' He goes, 'You're lucky you only ran into the one. Let's go.' We just left it at that. We didn't talk about it anymore.”

Source: TV show: “Carolina Reptile Man, Succubus, Napa Rebobs”, in Monsters and Mysteries in America, Season 3, Episode 7, by Blue Ant Media. March 11, 2015.