The Trail Camera Took Forty Photos Of Nothing And One Of Something
58% BELIEVED
CASE FILE #318
FILED: Mar 25, 2026
CLASSIFICATION: Cryptid Encounters
WITNESS ON RECORD: akavak
JURY OF 258 READERS HEARD THIS CASE: 149 believed it, 47 had doubts, 62 weren't buying it.
I put the camera out for foxes. I am not a hunter. I like foxes.
It takes a frame on motion and a frame every minute regardless, which is a setting I chose because I like time-lapses, and which turned out to matter.
The night of 14 November, the camera took forty consecutive minute-frames of an empty clearing. Nothing moving. No fox, no deer, nothing.
Frame 41 is the same clearing, same light, same everything, with a face in it.
It is at the right of the frame, at the height of a branch that I know for a fact I cannot reach, and I am six foot one and I have stood there and tried.
The face is not clear. I want to be honest, because I have watched what happens to people online who oversell a picture. It is grainy, it is monochrome infrared, and the eyes are just eyeshine, which every animal has.
But the head is the wrong shape for a bear. The head is too high and too narrow and the shoulders — there is a suggestion of shoulders, sloped and enormous — are not in a bear place.
It takes a frame on motion and a frame every minute regardless, which is a setting I chose because I like time-lapses, and which turned out to matter.
The night of 14 November, the camera took forty consecutive minute-frames of an empty clearing. Nothing moving. No fox, no deer, nothing.
Frame 41 is the same clearing, same light, same everything, with a face in it.
It is at the right of the frame, at the height of a branch that I know for a fact I cannot reach, and I am six foot one and I have stood there and tried.
The face is not clear. I want to be honest, because I have watched what happens to people online who oversell a picture. It is grainy, it is monochrome infrared, and the eyes are just eyeshine, which every animal has.
But the head is the wrong shape for a bear. The head is too high and too narrow and the shoulders — there is a suggestion of shoulders, sloped and enormous — are not in a bear place.
THIS EXCERPT ENDS HERE. The remaining 153 words of the testimony — and the reader jury — are on file at:
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https://www.swearithappened.com/cryptid-encounter-stories/the-trail-camera-took-forty-photos-of-nothing-and-one-of-something-318/
Votes on record: 149 believed · 47 unsure · 62 didn't · 58% of readers believe this story