folklore thursday: not deer of appalachia

Like deer, but not.

Below are stories collected from two friends, years apart, about what they both independently called “not deer.” I should mention that Liz, the narrator of the first story, is a hunter and very familiar with chronic wasting disease. CWD is a prion infection like mad cow, and is sometimes known as “zombie deer disease” because it makes them all messed up and weird. It’s probably responsible for this remarkably horrifying 4chan post:

Anyway, Liz insisted that she knew what deer with CWD looked and acted like, and the Not Deer are different.

Both of these storytellers live in Appalachian Pennsylvania.

Liz’s Stories (collected 2021)

Every now and then people in my town see these things that look like deer, but they aren’t deer, and they scare the hell out of us. The one we saw was the wrong color. It was too dark brown and shaggy for the ttime of year. It looks like a deer but it never stands close enough to the rest of the herd. And they don’t act right or move right.

The second time I saw one — litterally the thing comes out of the woods two yards from us, way too close. That’s the thing with not deer, they’re too close. And it didn’t move right. My brother and I just froze because your brain is trying to figure it out. It’s hard to explain but you feel like you’re holding your breath when you see one. [My brother] super quietly says “what’s wrong with that buck? Do you see it?” Its antler nubs were straight up and forward and it’s too dark and skinny and super fucking shaggy. And it was too quiet. It’s staring at us and its eyes aren’t right, they were too forward kind of? And they were all black, not like normal, darker. And it was way too big.

[…] the one we saw a few weeks ago was weird, it was just standing in the middle of the road at the top of the hill, it was still dusk, and as we got closer it just was weird looking. The neck was kind of too long and it was looking at us, we could see the eyes glowing from the headlights but they were too green and too close together. It slid into the trees and I sped by it, but we both looked in rear view and it slid back into the middle of the road and was watching us drive away. It didn’t jump into the grass. It slid. Not walked, not jumped, it slid like it was on a track. That’s how they move.

You can’t look away from their eyes. That’s how you know it’s not a deer. That, and you can’t talk about it when it’s happening. It’s like this weird forced silence where you just hold your breath until it’s gone.

The odd silence is characteristic of the “Oz Factor,” and will be familiar if you’ve read many firsthand accounts of uncanny happenings in the woods (like, say, the kind you can find on r/backwoodscreepy). It’s usually described as a sense of general wrongness, often accompanying or immediately preceding some kind of paranormal experience. It may include the feeling that the world has gone off somehow, or that you’re not quite in the same place any longer — hence the name.

R’s Story (collected 2013)

I was staying at my grandparent’s house, which is in the mountains over a little lake. I didn’t like the woods there because they creeped me out, but I couldn’t tell why. My grandpa agreed that they were weird, and said he’d seen “weird things,” but he wouldn’t tell me about it. Well, one night — it was a full moon — they were in bed and I was up reading. I looked out the window and on the lawn between the house and the lake was a deer, but it was, like, not a deer. It was standing on its hind legs and it was dancing. That’s just…it was dancing. Like, jumping from leg to leg to leg, jerking its front legs around in the air and twitching its head. It had horns so it was a buck. I watched it for a long time, maybe 20 minutes? And it seemed like it was looking up at the house. And it never stopped.

Bonus: Not Calf

From Foxfire 2, a collection of folklore and general mountain wisdom published in 1973 (p. 344):

The one night across th’road from my house it looked like a litttle calf out on th’side of the th’road jest playin’ around, y’know. And they shot at it an’ever’thing, and it jest kept dancin’ right on — playin’ around — and they never could it hit it’r’nothin’. […] We all saw it. Th’moon was shinin’, and hit was jest across thh’road there. It was jest playin’ over there jes tlike a newborn calf. It’uz jest a spirit of some kind.

Not Deer are a whole thing, with posts and stories going back to at least 2014.