The Giant Deer of the Redwood Forest
On the night before Halloween, 2022, I was contacted by a man named Perry Peters (no known relation), who told me about a strange experience he had when he was about 12 or 13 years old, in the early-mid 1980s. “We lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California,” he wrote, “and were lucky enough to have a redwood forest as a backyard playground. I was staying over at a friend’s house one night. We’d gone off on an adventure and were returning to his house around 11 pm. We had about a two-mile walk down a very dark road through the woods to get there. Almost immediately, there was this feeling of dread that kicked in. It was too dark and too quiet. I remember the sound of our footsteps and voices sounded muffled – like walking through a soundproof studio or something. The left side of the road had a hill going up, and the right side dropped off downhill.
“About fifty feet down on the right side, we heard a pretty loud snapping sound, like a large stick being stepped on. We mentioned it and just kept going. About a minute later, we heard another one, slightly closer up the hill. This time we stopped and listened. Nothing. Just absolute silence.
“So we kept walking, and the feeling of dread or fear was getting more and more intense. Then a third stick snapped about 30 feet down the hill. Always directly beside us. We both acknowledged it and walked a little faster.”
Further down the road, Peters explained, was a small valley which left a dark V-shaped shadow in the trees. When they reached the start of this declivity, both boys simultaneously looked up and to the right, compelled, perhaps, by some imperceptible sound, movement, or sensation. To their horror, they found themselves staring at the enormous head of a buck deer protruding from the trees, its tremendous antlers disappearing up into the foliage. Peters estimated that the animal’s cranium measured an astounding six feet from nose to back. “The bottom of its chin was three or four feet above our heads,” he told me, “and only about ten feet away from us. We both screamed and started running.
“After only about thirty feet,” he continued, “we both looked over our shoulders, and it was gone.” The massive head and antlers had simply vanished. The boys stopped running, half suspecting that they might have been spooked by some optical illusion rendered by the darkness. On discussing their experience, however, both immediately confirmed that the image they had seen was the head of an enormous deer.
Unnerved, the friends continued down the road at a brisk walk. About half a minute later, another large stick snapped loudly in the forest to their right, only about ten feet away, spurring the friends into a panicked sprint. They reached their destination without further incident.
To this day, four decades later, neither Peters nor his childhood friend know what they encountered that night in the redwood forest of Northern California, and neither is particularly keen on strolling by the woods after dark.
The Antlered Man of Pikes Peak
Peters’ frightening experience evokes a strange phenomenon which this author has touched on several times in the past. On April 2nd, 2020, I published the equally disturbing encounter of my friend and fellow creator Mateo Arguello, who runs the YouTube channel ‘Modern Explorer’. Late one night in October 2015, Mateo went for a nighttime hike with his friend, Austin, on the slopes of Pikes Peak, Colorado. While trailing behind Mateo, Austin caught a glimpse of a strange grey figure watching him from the shadows of the trees.
This figure was vaguely humanlike in appearance, but emaciated to the point of cadaverous. It had dark eyes and seemed to be covered with hair. Its most alarming characteristics, however, were its two deer-like antlers, which seemed to sprout from the temporal bones of its skull. Austin only saw the creature for a few moments, illuminated as it was by the light of his headlamp, before it strode ahead of him on two legs and disappeared silently into the trees.
The Ijirait and the Sonnie-appoos
Incredibly, the ghastly entities encountered by Perry and Austin have ample, if obscure, precedents in native Canadian folklore, some of which this author touched on in a pervious piece published in November 2020. In the High Arctic, the Inuit have traditional tales about mountain-dwelling shapeshifters called Ijirait, or ‘Caribou People, who often assume the form of caribou with strange-looking red eyes. And in south-central British Columbia, the Okanagan Indians tell campfire stories about creatures called Sonnie-appoos, or ‘devils,’ which were said to have the bodies of men, the heads of deer, humanlike faces, and the wings of a bat.
The Alberta Deerman
Dragging such creatures from the misty confines of oral tradition into the light of the present are a series of unnerving sightings made in central Alberta, Canada, in 2018. These bizarre cases were documented by an anonymous cryptozoologist on a blog named after the subject of the encounters, which the chronicler dubbed the ‘Alberta Deerman’. One of the five sightings detailed on the website was made by a married couple in the spring of 2018. One foggy day, while driving on the Alberta Range Road 225 in the County of Lacombe, the husband and wife came upon a deer which they narrowly managed to avoid hitting. To their astonishment, the creature reared up on its hind legs and walked off into the mist.
The Deer-Person of Kootenay Legend
In the five years which have followed my coverage of these stories, I’ve uncovered two more native legends which accord with the disturbing notion that humanoid deer might prowl the Canadian wilderness. In his 1926 book Kootenai Why Stories, Montanan ethnographer Frank Bird Linderman included an old Kootenay Indian legend from the Canadian Rockies and the Kootenay Rockies regarding what his informants called the “Deer-Persons.” This story was related by him by an old Kootenay medicine man named Two-Comes-Over-The-Hill, to whose lodge he was invited through the intercession of his friend, a wizened elder called Walks-In-The-Water.
“Listen!” said the storyteller. “Long ago, the Deer-persons were bad. Everybody was afraid of them… Everybody was afraid of the Deer’s teeth, for he had many, and both jaws were full of them in those days.
“You have seen the teeth of the Deer. You know that he has no front teeth on his upper jaw, and that there is only empty space all the way to the teeth far back. Besides this, you know that the Deer has a few front teeth on his lower jaw, edged like knives, and that between them and the teeth far back there are none at all… Well, once… both jaws of the Deer-person were filled with teeth like those he has today. Only the ones that are missing were many times larger and much sharper. They grew where he has no teeth today.”
The medicine man proceeded to relate a traditional tale in which Skinkoots the Coyote, while napping in the forest, was approached by a Deer-person, who intended to eat him. Roused by the sound of the Deer-person’s hooves on the forest floor, Skinkoots awoke and began grappling with the antlered predator. The Coyote thrust his hands into the Deer-person’s mouth and twisted out all its teeth save for its molars and lower incisors. Now thoroughly cowed, the Deer-person shrank from its would-be prey and transformed into the timid, docile animal we know today.
The Caribou Man of the Montagnais
Far to the east of traditional Kootenay haunts, in the rugged wilds of the Labrador Peninsula, the Innu or Montagnais Indians also tell traditional tales about humanoid cervids. In a 1925 treatise for the Journal of American Folk-Lore, American anthropologist Frank Gouldsmith Speck included an old story from Lac Saint-Jean, Quebec, featuring a mysterious character whom his informant called Atekwabe’o, or ‘Caribou Man’. Originally a Naskapi Indian from the area of Sept-Iles, on the northern shores of the St. Lawrence delta, this man went to live with a herd of caribou when he was about 21 years old, and became one of them.
“Atekwabe’o, ‘Caribou Man,’” Speck wrote, “was the youngest of four brothers. They were hunting caribou and were following a herd near which they camped one night in an open shelter. That night, he dreamed that a female caribou came from the herd and spoke to him, and called him to come to live with the caribou as her husband. The next morning, Atekwabe’o left camp alone and went to the place indicated in his dream. There, he saw a caribou doe which appeared to be waiting for him. He approached her, and when he reached her she led him to where three other caribou stood, evidently watching as scouts. They led him away and joined the herd. Atekwabe’o thenceforth lived with the caribou.
“He still lives, eating the moss just as the deer do. He wanders with them from place to place, sometimes riding on the back of a big buck. His clothing is of caribou skin. When he needs clothing, they permit him to kill several for the purpose. His offspring are caribou like the rest. At night, he lies down, and some of them lie close to him to keep him warm. Thus, he survives year after year, passing his life with the deer as one of them, and as their chief and protector.
“Atekwabe’o is occasionally seen by the Indians. When they are hunting caribou and encounter his herd, they refrain from killing the deer. Several times, people have had conversations with him.
“It is reported among the Indians that this strange being was last seen several years ago by Montagnais hunters led by [an] old man named St. Onge, from Bersimis. The place of the encounter was up near lake Mitchikamau.”
In a footnote, Speck wrote that the Caribou Man was also familiar to local French-Canadians, who referred to him as la Roi de Caribou, or the Caribou King.
According to several of my readers, there are other Deerman stories endemic to the United States, including the legend of the Deer Woman of Ponca City, Oklahoma, who is a deer from the waist down and a woman from the waist up; and tales of a cervid humanoid which was said to have been spotted in southern Maine in the 1920s and 30s. If you have your own Deerman story, please feel free to share it in the comments below.
Sources
Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (1875), by Dr. Hinrich Rink
Account of the Similkameen Indians of British Columbia, by Susan Allison, published in the 1892 issue of The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
Kootenai Why Stories (1926), by Frank Bird Linderman
“Montagnais and Naskapi Tales from the Labrador Peninsula,” by Frank G. Speck, in the January-March 1925 issue of The Journal of American Folk-Lore
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