If you encounter something paranormal and unnerving would your first thought be to call the police? Would you risk ridicule and stigmatization? Or if you’re a hoaxer, would you risk breaking federal laws by making a false report to 911 emergency services, just to go viral?

Most of us would answer with an assuring: No!

I myself have seen strange and unusual things throughout my life. At times these observations were puzzling, and in other times they were damn right frightening. However, I never once thought to call the police. Probably because deep down inside, I know that there’s nothing they can do and more than likely will think that I’m under the influence or something along those lines.

However some people do call for help when they’ve exhausted all possible rational explanations. Hearing a human voice on the other end is reassuring, even if they are told that all is okay and that whatever they saw was just a figment of their imagination. In the following two cases, the people who were witnesses to the terrifying paranormal activity were so horrified that calling the local police was their only hope in having some peace of mind.

The Pender County 911 Call: “It’s not human!”

In July of 2021, a chilling 911 call was made to the North Carolina Pender County 911 emergency services. The caller reported seeing an injured man on the side of the road wearing civil war era clothing and appeared to be bleeding from a head wound. In the call, we hear the man reporting this to the dispatcher and the constant hum of the engine racing down the road when suddenly a loud thud is heard on the phone. We then hear the man say: “What the?…” before screaming out: “That’s not human!…It’s not human!”

The caller was driving northbound on Route 210 near the community of Currie, North Carolina. He had just driven past the Black River area when he spotted a man standing in a ditch on the side of the road. As he got closer, the caller then noticed that the man wore Civil War era clothing and appeared to be in need of medical assistance. Slowing down his vehicle, “T” then places a call to 911 to report what he had just seen near the Moore’s Creek Battlefield area. Here’s where the story turns to something straight out of a horror movie.

As “T” was describing what he had just seen to the 911 dispatcher, something large and heavy jumped into the back of his speeding truck. When “T” takes his eyes off the road for split second to look behind him in the bed of the truck, his eyes come across a large, pale face with dark sunken eye sockets and skin stretched over a monstrous skull.

The map below shows the approximate locations of the encounter with the ghostly image (1st encounter) and the encounter with the non-human entity (2nd encounter).

The paranormal group, Carolina’s Unknown, did the initial investigation into the case five years ago. The group managed to get direct statements from the first responders that were involved in the incident. Below is a screenshot of the responders initial interview via text:

Pender County Sheriff & Carolina Case Files

The Carolina Case Files crew stayed on the case, providing us with a follow-up interview with “T”. It’s an interview that you must watch. The witness seems sincere in what he saw that night. Staring with an archetypical ghostly sighting to an encounter with something out of the science-fiction realm.

Rusty and the CCF crew did a wonderful job on getting straight to the facts and providing us the police case files and interviews with the Pender County Sheriff as well as the first responders at the scene that dreadful night. Like I mentioned, Tyler comes off as someone honest and not “in it for the grift”. To a skeptic, this could easily be explained as a fictional story told by Tyler in order to get some attention. Either for money or as the kids say: “for the lolz.”

There was no video evidence. No second witness… only the sheer terror in Tyler’s voice.

So what do we make of this case? is an official 911 call enough to convince you that something strange happened that night in the woods of North Carolina? Maybe this next case just might.

The little man of Dunn

It happened one October 12th in 1976, about 80-something miles north of Pender County. That October day, Fred Bost, the managing editor for The Daily Record in the city of Dunn, had heard chatter about an eight year-old who had seen a “little man in a cornfield” two days earlier, and whose tiny footprints were causing quite a commotion. Unable to resist a possible engaging Halloween story (along with photographic evidence) he decided to pay the boy and his mother a visit.

Upon arrival at the cornfield. Mr. Bost was shown two sets of tracks that were around 150 yards apart from each other. The first set of tracks were in the area that Tonnlie Barefoot had initially seen the little man. The other set of tracks were discovered two days after by an adult that was helping the boy look for the little visitor. The footprints were 2.5 inches long, by 1 inch in width. According to Mr. Bost, the strange footprints had made several discernible cleat marks in the soft dirt. Following a short path through the cornstalks until finally coming to an end. Where the small tracks just disappear. No continuation of the tracks, no other marks in the soft dirt. Nothing.

This piqued Mr. Bost’s curiosity. He phoned Tonnlie’s mother, Mrs. Roland Barefoot, and asked her about her son’s claims and for more details on his sighting. According to Mrs. Barefoot, it was her habit to pick the boy up from school and take him to play in the field near their home. He’d play for a bit, running through the cornstalks while she picked peas from the family garden. Around 5:00 P.M. that evening, Tonnlie came running up to her excitedly asking her to take a look at the little man that he saw and was “no bigger than a coke bottle.”

Working away in the garden, she dismissed his claims as just a child’s imagination and sent the boy back to the fields. Only for little Tonnlie to come back running minutes later, saying that this time he had “found the little man’s footprints“. Still, Mrs. Barefoot had too much work to do in the garden that chilly evening to pay attention to her son’s over-active imagination. In short, Mrs. Barefoot told Mr. Bost that when they went back home and Tonnlie had repeated the same story to other family memebers and had endured some ridicule and teasing causing the eight year-old to cry.

According to Mrs. Barefoot, it wasn’t until the following morning that her son had made her promise that she would go see the footprints left by the little man. A promise that she kept since that following morning after school, Tonnlie took his mother to the exact location of where he said he saw the tracks. Much to her surprise, the little boot prints were visible in the dirt. She could clearly see the contour of the boot’s sole following a short path amongst the tall stalks of corn.

“I know my son Tonnlie. He’s telling the truth.” She told Mr. Bost via telephone. Standing by his wife, Tonnlie’s father could only affirm that whatever the boy had seen, was real enough to agitate his son. Since it was unlike Tonnlie to come up with something so strange, yet detailed as his story was.

Mr. Bost decided to ask permission to interview the child and with the help of the school’s principal, Mrs. Jennie Brooks, sat down to talk to Tonnlie about his experience in the cornfield just a few days ago.

Tonnlie went on to say that he had been playing with a toy shovel in the dirt when he happened to look up and see the little man standing by the tall stalks, watching him with an open mouth. Out there in the cornfield, away from the safety of his mother, Tonnlie locked eyes with something from another world. Seconds must’ve felt like hours to the eight year old.

According to Bost’s article in The Daily Record, Tonnlie said the following: the creature wore black boots, blue trousers and a blue top made of “shiny stuff” with a black “German-type hat” with something that looked like crossed rifles on it, and “the prettiest little white tie you ever saw.”

Tonnlie told both the reporter and principal that the little man seemed to have been reaching for something in its back pocket, but instead froze for a brief moment, then let out a little squeal like a mouse and ran off, disappearing among the cornstalks.

“Was it fast?” Bost asked.

“Faster’n me” the boy replied. Tonnlie drew them both a picture of the little man he’d seen. Complete with hat and a mustache. Both adults continued questioning the child, trying to find a holes in his story or at least a logical answer as to what it was that the boy had seen. In the end, Tonnlie came out as honest and sincere in what he had seen that day.

Mr. Bost had found out that the only doll that the boy owned was a G.I. Joe action figure, which would have been too small to create the footprints he himself had witnessed in the cornfield. Bost had even gone out to the local toy stores to find a doll that could have left the prints he saw and photographed.

On October 25th The Daily Record’s police scanners picked up a call from the dispatcher asking officers to investigate a second sighting of the little man of Dunn. This time, a 20 year-old young woman was witness to the little visitor. Shirley Ann McCrimmon said that she was coming home from an all-night party just before daybreak. As she entered, she reached for the light switch near the front entrance and upon flipping the switch on, she heard something rustling behind her, right outside her home. When she looked out, she saw the small man standing there…staring back at her. Just like it had done with Tonnlie in the cornfield.

Shirley stood motionless, probably somewhat in fear and somewhat in awe. After a while, she moved a bit as if to get a better look at this thing and all of a sudden the little man shined a small, but extremely bright yellow light into her eyes. She let out a scream, and the little man ran away. It ran towards the west side of her house, towards the back. As it did, the next-door neighbor’s dogs began barking. She described the little man to be wearing a thin garment, possibly naked. If he was naked, his skin was light brown she told Bost. She also said that he did not wear a hat but she did remember he did wear boots.

Shirley’s reaction was to run to her mother’s house next door to wake her up. Mrs. Eula May McCrimmon woke up to the commotion but had a hard time believing that her daughter had just seen the stalking gnome. “She must be drunk…” is what her mother thought, according to Bost.

After not getting reassurance as to what it was that she had seen, Shirley went next door to the house of Mrs. Connie Smith, the owner of the barking dogs. Mrs. Smith told her: “If you really did see something, you should stay quiet or the police will throw you into the looney bin.” Given Shirley’s uneasiness over the ordeal, the advice fell on deaf ears.

Shirley decided that neither her mother or neighbor would be of any help so she decided to go to her aunt’s house down the block and call the local police department from her telephone. It was then that The Daily Record’s scanner picked up the call from the dispatch. The second sighting of the little fella.

The young lady told Mr. Bost that she did try to preserve the evidence by putting a plastic container over the tiny footprints in the dirt. However her baby boy, trying to be helpful, dragged the container across the ground. Clearing out any evidence that was protected underneath. Upon closer inspection of the front yard, Bost found a second set of tracks in the driveway. They were faint, due to the hardness of the dirt, but they were there. Same dimensions as the ones in the cornfield, and they ended abruptly just like the other ones.

Whatever had made those footprints seemed to have disappeared into thin air. The responding Officer, George Robinson, also saw the prints and swore that they definitely resembled a tiny footprint of something walking about. Who or what made them? he could not speculate.

It’s here where the story of the little man of Dunn comes to an end. No further updates from Mr. Bost nor the police department were made that year or the following. Four and a half decades later, I managed to have a brief email exchange with Tonnlie Barefoot’s niece. In an email sent to me in 2020, she said that Mr. Tonnlie had sadly passed away in 2015 but remained convinced that what he saw that day in that cornfield was something real and stood by his story all these years.

The Pender County incident and the incident in Dunn both are two of my favorite cases of all time. It was around the early 1990s when I came across the story of Tonnlie Barefoot. And since then I’ve always remembered it as an honest and sincere eyewitness testimony to something so uniquely bizarre and creepy that in those two ways resembles the horrible creature encounter that Tyler had Forty-five years later, and about eighty miles away.

What do we say to these folks? When two seemingly normal individuals from different homes come across a gnome-like creature that was stalking them? Or when Tyler claim to have stared into the sunken dark eyes of the humanoid THING from Pender County?

What do you say when there’s a paper trail of evidence? When law enforcement and emergency responders are called in because of what these eyewitnesses claim to have seen…do you say: “Where’s the evidence?” or do you just tell them that they are full of it, and write off the report as someone’s imagination gone wild?

Take for example the well-known case of The Dover Demon in 1977. An encounter with a strange Mellon-headed humanoid one late one Spring evening in Dover Massachusetts that left several young people traumatized for decades. Or how about the 1955 Casablanca encounters? In which several children in the small neighborhood of Riverside California came face-to-face with strange translucent ghost-like entities which scared them enough that their parents had to call the police.

Not to be outshined by their neighbors to the north, South Carolina also has had a brush with strange creatures. You might remember the 1988 sighting of the Lizard Man from Scape Ore Swamp, near Bishopville. Where 17-year-old Christopher Davis was on the side of the road at night, changing a flat tire. Alone on a remote road, Davis soon found himself in front of a 7 foot tall bipedal reptilian humanoid. Again this incident was reported to and investigated by local police officials. And just like the previous cases, the responding officers all concluded one thing: Whatever it was that these witnesses had seen…it was real enough to give them the fright of their lives.

You see, strange things are happening all around us, all of the time. When ordinary folks like you and I come across them…what do we do? When our psyche is perfectly in tuned with some strange otherworldly forces, allowing us to catch a fleeting glimpse of something truly paranormal. What do we make of monsters and little men?

“Once in a while you get shown the light
In the strangest of places if you look at it right” – Scarlet Begonias, The Grateful Dead.

Sources:

• PUSUIT PURSUIT Newsletter No. 38, Spring 1977 – Ivan T. Sanderson
• Journal of The Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained (SITU)
• https://www.carolinacasefiles.com