Hunters will barely step foot in the woods between Sheffey Hollow Road and Midway Road because they say there is something or someone invisible, that follows them throughout the night.  This creature is recorded in American folklore as a “hide-behind”.

Similar stories come from the hollow.  A hunter will stop when he hears someone walking behind him, but when he turns around and doesn’t see anyone else around.  This cat-and-mouse game continues until the hunter leaves the wooded area.

In North American folklore, a hide-behind is a creature that stalks people in wooded areas and has even been blamed for disappearances in forests.  The hallmarks of an encounter with one of these creatures are said to be the unsettling feeling of being watched and the sounds of being followed.

The creature was documented as a legendary creature in American tall tales as early as Charles Edward Brown’s 1935 pamphlet, Paul Bunyan Natural History.  He described the creature as always hiding behind trees until it was ready to pounce and take a lumberjack deep into the woods, where they would never be seen again.

It would be conceptualized and completely illustrated in Henry Harrington Tryon’s 1939 Wisconsin lore book, Fearsome Critters, where he wrote that it walks on two legs, is about six-feet-tall, can hide behind the smallest of trees because it’s so slender, is covered in long black hair, has a tail that’s bent backward, a canine-like face, and grizzly bear claws.  The writer said it had an aversion to alcohol, and would never attack a drunken person.  He wrote, it could go as long as seven years without eating.

It was further mythologized by the Altoon Mirror on December 4, 1948, where it was described as shy.

Robert R. Lyman Sr.’s 1971 book, Forbidden Land, described it as a creature well-known to Indigenous persons, without citing any sources, which would follow a person walking through the woods until the person turned around.  The creature would hide behind a tree until the person started walking, again, and began following them.  The result, the book says, is unexplained panic which causes the person to flee from the wooded area.