My first encounter happened late at night, while driving home to Snohomish from Sultan...the two towns being about ten miles apart. I was with my mother and we had just finished dropping a friend off at her home in Sultan. It was late October and there was an unusual storm going on that night that everyone talked about the following day. Tremendous cloud-to-cloud lightning and a very cold dry wind with no rain. Bright flashes of light, loud thunder and lots of leaves blowing around. After dropping our friend off, we were on a stretch of the road that's very dark, with farmland on either side of the highway (Hwy 2) and both sides having densely wooded hills. We were driving a 1991 Honda Accord and at this one particular spot in the road, somethingcaught my eye, off to the left side, which was a farm field and there was a break in the guard rail for a dirt road going into the field. Right when we were even to this break, I saw what looked like a huge dog coming up, and right then, it ran in front of our car and I hit it...we could see the top of it's back, which we both swear looked more like a hyena at this point than a dog! It had to be huge to see it's back over the hood of the car, when you're sitting pretty low to the ground in a Honda Accord! It's fur was shaggy brown and mottled with dark spots, just like a hyena and it's front seemed higher up than its back. The headlights lit it up as it ran right in front of our car and we could feel it get hit, but didn't see it go either up in the air or off to the right side of the car. It was running from the left side of the highway to the right. We were driving westward. It sent my car into an uncontrollable swerve back and forth into the oncoming lane and I just prayed that I could get it under control, to keep from getting into a head-on collision with what looked like maybe a Ford Aerostar van. A calmness came over me and I felt like my guardian angel had taken control of the steering, because we missed the van by just a few inches.

 

After going a little ways further, we were both so shook up I pulled off to the side. My mother wanted to go look for the "dog," because we both love animals and felt bad about hitting something...BUT...I had a bad feeling about looking for this "dog," because it had looked so strange and I was afraid of it. It was dark and stormy. It didn't feel safe and I just wanted to get home. We got back in the car and stopped at a little gas station, when we first got into Monroe, which is the next town between our town and Sultan. We got out, to look at the front of my car, thinking surely there would be some evidence of hitting something that large (we were going the highway speed when we hit it which is 60mph), like a dent, some fur or blood, but there was NOTHING there. Not a scratch! The whole thing had a very supernatural feel to it. The look of this "dog" which was huge and looked more like a hyena just didn't seem right. Neither did the timing of it running in front of us, like it WANTED to make us stop on that dark stretch of road and get out of my car, which we did, but we got right back in! I never saw it on two legs. It ran on all fours, but there was something so calculated about the way it came up to the highway and looked at our car and ran in front of it. It seemed planned. It was such a strange electromagnetic type of storm that night too. The next day, people we knew that lived miles and miles apart in many different directions all talked about the storm and one particularly loud thunder clap, that shook everyone's homes. They all thought it was directly over their house but they were all miles apart. I have three more encounters which occurred after this first one. I'm pretty sure this happened October 1997...no later than 1998.

 

Ruth T.