This Family Hid a DOGMAN for 67 Years, Then the Feds Found Out. What They Did…
“The Dogman Secret: A Legacy of Loyalty and Protection”
What would you do if you found something dying in your backyard that the government’s been hunting for decades? Something with fangs, claws, and eyes that understood every word you said? I am 84 years old now, and I’ve been carrying the heaviest secret imaginable since I was 17. In my family’s old storm cellar, hidden beneath our farmhouse, we protected a creature that shouldn’t exist—a dogman. His name was Marcus. At least, that’s what we called him. And for 67 years, three generations of my family kept him safe from a world that would have torn him apart.
But in 2019, everything changed. The feds finally found out. And what happened next will make you question everything you thought you knew about what’s really out there in the darkness.
My name is Robert Chun, and I need to tell you this story before it’s too late. Before I die. And this truth dies with me. What I’m about to share will sound impossible, but every word is true. I have the scars to prove it, the photographs hidden in a safety deposit box, and the memories burned into my mind from nearly seven decades of living with the impossible. This isn’t some campfire tale meant to scare you. This is a confession, a warning, and maybe the most important story about family loyalty you’ll ever hear.
Before we get into this, do me a favor. If you’re the kind of person who thinks hiding a 7-ft creature with the body of a man and the head of a wolf is crazy, hit that like button. And if you’re someone who’d protect a friend, no matter what they look like, go ahead and subscribe because you’re about to hear exactly what that really means. Trust me, by the end of this, you’ll understand why some secrets are worth keeping, even when they cost you everything. Now, let me take you back to where this all started—October 1952, in the mountains of North Carolina.
The Beginning: A Chance Encounter
I was 17 years old in October 1952, just a kid, really, living on my family’s tobacco farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a different world back then. Eisenhower had just been elected president. Nobody had television, and the nearest town was 12 miles of dirt road away. We were isolated, which turned out to be the only reason what I’m about to tell you could happen at all.
It was a Saturday morning when I heard the sounds. I’d gone out to check our fence line where it bordered the deep woods, looking for breaks that might let the livestock wander. That’s when I heard it. Not howling exactly, more like a low, pained growling mixed with something that sounded almost like crying, like someone was trying not to scream. I should have turned around right there. Should have run back to the house and gotten my father and his rifle, but I was 17 and stupid and curious, so I followed the sound deeper into the trees.
The undergrowth was thick—wild rhododendron and mountain laurel, creating walls of green that blocked out most of the morning light. I pushed through for maybe 20 minutes before I found him. He was lying in a small clearing, partially hidden under a fallen oak tree. And I remember my legs just stopped working. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t process what I was seeing because what was bleeding out in front of me shouldn’t have existed.
He looked like something out of a nightmare, but worse because it was real and suffering. His body was humanoid, maybe 7 feet tall, muscular in a way that made our farm’s strongest workhorses look weak. But his head was wrong. So wrong. It was K9, like a wolf, or maybe a German Shepherd, but larger and more expressive. Dark fur covered most of his body, thick and matted with blood and dirt. His hands— and they were hands, not paws— had fingers with claws at the ends, currently digging into the ground as waves of pain ate him.
The injury was bad. His right leg had been caught in what looked like a bear trap, one of those illegal ones that hunters sometimes set deep in the woods and forget about. The metal teeth had bitten deep through fur and muscle, and I could see bone. Infection had already set in, the flesh around the wound swollen and discolored.
What stopped me from running wasn’t just the shock of seeing him. It was his eyes. When he noticed me standing there, frozen like an idiot, he looked at me with eyes that were completely terrifyingly human— brown and intelligent, filled with fear and pain and something else. Resignation. Like he’d been waiting to die. And here I was, probably the thing that would finish him off.
We stared at each other for what felt like hours, but was probably only 30 seconds. I could see his chest heaving with rapid shallow breaths. Could smell the infection, the blood, and something wild, like wet dog, but more complex, more alive. And I made a choice that would define the rest of my life.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, my voice shaking so bad I barely recognized it. “Just… don’t attack me. Okay, let me look at that leg.”
I don’t know why I said it. I don’t know what made me think this creature could understand English. But when I took a careful step forward, he didn’t growl or snap at me. He just watched, those human eyes tracking my every movement with an intelligence that made my skin crawl. I knelt beside him, keeping my movements slow and visible.
Up close, he was even more terrifying. His muzzle had teeth that could have taken my arm off without effort. His claws could have gutted me in seconds. But he lay there shaking with pain and fever, and let me examine the trap.
“This is really bad,” I told him like he was a person who needed to hear the truth. “The trap’s been on for days, hasn’t it? Maybe a week. I need to get this off, but it’s going to hurt like hell.”
He made a sound then, low and rumbling, and I nearly ran, but it wasn’t aggressive. It was acknowledgment, agreement. The trap was old and rusted, which made it easier to break but meant the wound was probably full of god-knows-what kind of bacteria. I used a branch as leverage and pried the jaws open while he made sounds that I still hear in my nightmares.
When the metal finally released his leg, he let out a howl that echoed through the mountains. A sound of pure agony that made birds scatter from trees half a mile away.
“I know, I know,” I said, my hands shaking as I pulled off my shirt to wrap around the wound. “We need to get you somewhere safe. Can you stand? Can you walk at all?”
He tried. God, he tried so hard, but the leg couldn’t support any weight, and he collapsed after just one attempt. That’s when I realized the impossible situation I was in. I’d found a creature that wasn’t supposed to exist. It was dying, and I had no idea what to do about it.
I should have left him there. That would have been the smart thing, the safe thing. But I couldn’t. Those eyes kept looking at me with something that felt like hope, like trust. And I couldn’t walk away from that.
The Hidden Shelter: A Family Secret
“Okay,” I said, making another life-changing decision. “My family’s farm is about a mile that way. We have a storm cellar underground, hidden. Nobody goes down there except during tornado season, and we just had one last month, so it’ll be empty for a while. If I can get you there, I can try to help. But you have to trust me, and I have to trust you not to eat me. Deal?”
He looked at me for a long moment, then did something that still gives me chills when I think about it. He raised one massive clawed hand and held it out toward me. A handshake.
This creature that looked like it belonged in a horror movie was offering me a handshake. I took his hand. It was bigger than mine, rough with calluses that suggested a life lived outdoors, hot with fever. We shook once, and I felt the weight of a promise. Neither of us fully understood yet.
Getting him back to the farm was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a lot of hard things in 84 years. He was heavy, probably 300 pounds of muscle and bone, and could barely move. I had to essentially drag him through the woods, stopping every few minutes when the pain became too much for him. It took us almost 4 hours to cover that one mile. Four hours of struggling through undergrowth, across streams, over fallen logs. Four hours of him making sounds that varied between growls of determination and whimpers of agony. Four hours of me talking to him constantly, like my voice was the only thing keeping him conscious.
Almost there, I kept saying, just a little further. My parents are both at the market in town. Won’t be back until evening. We can get you hidden before anyone knows. Come on, you can do this. Just a bit more.
He understood me. I know how crazy that sounds, but he understood every word. When I’d encourage him, he’d push harder. When I’d warn him about a difficult section coming up, he’d brace himself.
We reached the edge of our property just before noon. I could see the farmhouse in the distance, the barn, the tobacco fields ready for harvest. And most importantly, I could see the storm cellar doors set into the ground about 50 yards from the house, hidden partially by an old oak tree and overgrown with weeds since we rarely used it.
There, I told him, pointing, see those doors? That’s where we’re going. Underground room, cool, dark, safe. Nobody will find you there.
I left him hidden in the tree line and ran ahead to open the cellar. The doors were heavy wood with a chain and padlock that I had to break with a rock since I didn’t have the key. The stairs down were steep and narrow, leading into a space about 12 feet by 12 feet with a dirt floor and stone walls. We kept some old furniture down there, emergency supplies, canned goods. It smelled musty and damp, but it was shelter.
Getting him down those stairs almost killed both of us. He had to move mostly on his own, using the walls for support while I tried to guide him from below. Twice he nearly fell, and I swear I felt my heart stop both times. But finally, finally, we got him to the bottom, and he collapsed onto an old mattress we kept down there, his chest heaving, his injured leg bleeding through my makeshift bandage.
“Okay,” I said, standing there in the dim light filtering through the open cellar doors, looking at this impossible creature now lying in my family’s storm shelter. “Okay, what the hell do I do now?”
The Careful Secret
I stood there for maybe 5 minutes, just processing the situation I’d gotten myself into. My parents would be home in a few hours. If they found him, they’d either shoot him out of fear or call someone who would. And I realized that the only way this worked was if nobody knew. Not my parents, not my younger sister, nobody.
I closed the cellar doors and ran to the house. Grabbed all the medical supplies we had, which wasn’t much—bandages, iodine, some old antibiotics left over from when my sister had pneumonia. Grabbed food too: bread, meat, a jug of water. Grabbed blankets and a kerosene lantern. Made three trips hauling everything down to the cellar while he watched me with those disturbingly human eyes.
“I don’t know what you eat normally,” I said, arranging the food near him. “But here’s what we have. The water’s clean from our well. And these,” I held up the bottle of antibiotics. “These are medicine for infections. You need to take these, or that leg will kill you. Do you understand?”
He looked at the bottle, then at me, and nodded. Actually nodded. Then he pointed at the pills, then at his mouth, then held up fingers. Five fingers. Five. You need five pills. He shook his head, then held up two fingers. Two pills. You need two pills at a time.
“Okay. Okay, I can do that.” I gave him the first dose right then, watching as he swallowed them with water. His mouth was wrong for drinking from a cup, so he had to lap at it, but he managed.
Then I started cleaning the wound properly. It was worse up close. The trap had crushed muscle and possibly fractured the bone. The infection was spreading—red lines of inflammation creeping up his leg. I did the best I could with iodine and clean bandages, but I was 17 and had no medical training beyond basic farm first aid. All I could do was clean it, wrap it, and hope the antibiotics worked.
While I worked, he watched me, not with suspicion exactly, but with curiosity, like he was trying to figure out why this human teenager was helping him instead of running away or trying to kill him. At one point, he reached out and touched my arm very gently, careful not to scratch me with his claws. When I looked at him, he placed his hand over his chest and pointed at me. Then he made a sound, low and rumbling. It somehow conveyed gratitude.
“You’re welcome,” I said, surprising myself by meaning it. “I’m Robert, by the way.”
“Robert Chun. I don’t know if names mean anything to you, but that’s mine.”
He tilted his head, considering. Then he made the sound again, slightly different. I tried a few more times until he nodded approval.
“Marcus,” I said, anglicizing it into something I could pronounce. “I’m going to call you Marcus. Is that okay?”
He looked at me for a long moment and nodded. And just like that, a creature became a person with a name. Marcus.
A Life Saved, A Secret Kept
Marcus and I spent the next 67 years living together in secrecy. He healed, grew stronger, and we formed a bond that transcended species. He wasn’t just a creature—he was a companion, a friend, someone who’d been hiding from the world, just like me. And I protected him, not because I was afraid of the consequences, but because I couldn’t turn my back on someone who had trusted me.
In 2019, everything changed. The government found out. And they came looking for Marcus.
The Reckoning
The feds showed up on my property in 2019. They had ground-penetrating radar, and they were closing in on Marcus’ hiding spot. They knew about him, and they were ready to take him.
I had to make a decision. Protect Marcus at all costs, or let him go to the government where they would study him like a specimen.
I knew what I had to do.
Marcus had been my friend, my responsibility, my secret. And I wasn’t going to let them take him without a fight.
But in the end, they did. They sedated him and took him to a research facility. They promised to treat him humanely, to study him, and to protect his species in the wild.
But no matter how well they treated him, it wasn’t the same. He was still a prisoner, a creature locked away, hidden from the world.
I’m 84 years old now. My health is failing, and I don’t know how much time I have left. But I needed to tell this story before I go. Needed people to know that monsters aren’t always what they seem. That sometimes the scariest thing in the woods is intelligent, kind, and just trying to survive.
That family can take forms we never expect. And loyalty can last a lifetime.
A Legacy of Protection
I saved Marcus. I protected him. And I gave him 67 years of safety, dignity, and friendship. If my story helps even one person understand that sometimes the most important thing you can do is protect someone who can’t protect themselves, even when it costs you everything, then it will have been worth telling.
Because the truth is, Marcus was never a monster. He was a person who needed saving. And for all the years I spent keeping him safe, I learned that sometimes love and loyalty can bridge even the most impossible gaps.
And that’s the legacy I leave behind. A life saved, a friendship forged, and a secret that will never die.
