I have previously mentioned a creature that I, for lack of a better word, refer to as the Fleshgait.

The problem in getting the actual existence of this creature through to the general public seems to lie in the “invented” cryptid The Rake.

The Rake was born on a 4chan message board in 2005 where users came together to create a “new” monster. What they came up with was:

Alright, this is for the people who like the three-eyes, no apparent mouth, pale skin one.

Here’s what we’ve got so far: Humanoid, about six feet tall when standing, but usually crouches and walks on all fours.

It has very pale skin. The face is blank. As in, no nose, no mouth. However, it has three solid green eyes, one in the middle of its forehead, and the other two on either side of its head, towards the back.

Usually seen in front yards in suburban areas. Usually just watches the observer, but will stand up and attack if approached.

When it attacks, a mouth opens up, as if a hinged skull that opens at the chin. Reveals many tiny, but dull teeth. Source

This creature, or at least something very similar, appears however to actually exist.

I’ve written about it in a post called New Cryptid on the Block and also mentioned it a few times, like in the post Masterless Tulpas.

It seems to be pale- yellow- white, with not much in the way of facial features. It’s basically humanoid in shape, lanky, stands around 5-8 feet tall when upright but seems to prefer to crawl around on all fours.

Can move very fast.

Jerky movements.

Usually bald but sometimes with stringy hair.

Its forearms are longer than those of a human, as well as its lower legs.

It is said to be able to mimic human speech.

So what is this white wight? Is it people’s imagination after hearing about the Rake? Did the “creators” of the Rake tap into the collective consciousness of humanity and find a creature people were actually seeing?

Let’s look at a few examples:

Before I could grab the flashlight, I heard rustling outside the cabin and something brushed the side of the wall by the living room. I tried to put on a brave face for my kids and told them that it was probably a coyote and they should just go to their room although from the noises it made, it sounded bipedal and quite a bit bigger.

Pretty creeped out, I grabbed my flashlight and headed out to the generator, shining the light on the ground to find my way. But out the corner of my eye I saw something which terrified me so much I don’t know if I can even find the right words to describe it.

I couldn’t make it out exactly–all I could see was a creature in my peripheral vision. It looked human and about six feet tall with ghost white skin. I knew it was staring at me.

At this point, I was mustering up the courage to look at it and when I shined the torch at it, I got a good look at the monster. It’s so difficult to portray with words but it looked like a man whose skin was too tight for his body; you could see all of his organs bulging through his skin and the bones made it look almost like an insect, with the lower arm extending further up the arm and the shin bones doing the same. Source

The creature seems to appear all over the world. Here’s an encounter from Africa:

One afternoon, on our way back to the girls’ hostel after our chores, three of us girls veered off the dirt road and ended up climbing a middle-sized tree in the bush. I hadn’t climbed as high as the other two girls and was looking in an easterly direction when I spotted a very skinny, lanky, very pale-skinned, naked-looking creature with long, skinny, rubbery arms and legs, with a disproportionately large bald head walking upright and very slowly in a southerly direction approximately 15 to 20 meters away in the bush.

This being was looking at us and I alerted the other girls who saw it as well. It then darted behind a Marula tree, which had a broad trunk. We all stared at the tree waiting for it to show itself — and it did! We saw its head peeping at us from behind the tree trunk.

At this point we decided to vacate the tree and run back to the school grounds, as we were very frightened. Source

The White Thing of Ragland:

For a very long time people have told me about the “White Thing” of Ragland, WV, a small community outside of Delbarton, WV in Mingo county. Several trusted friends of mine have told of their encounters with the thing.

One friend said it could run faster than anything he’d ever seen in his life and that it stood up on two legs like a man and was tall. The other two friends were on an atv beside the railroad tracks at the edge of dark and seen a thing run across their path on four legs like a dog, then jump on a stack of railroad ties that are 4 & 1/2 feet tall on two legs before leaping an excess of 10 feet to the hillside.

These boys (15 or 16 at the time) were very shaken up and crying when they returned home. I don’t know anything else about the things in Ragland other than that I trust and believe my friends 100%. They aren’t the only ones who have had these experiences. Source

The Fleshgait has been seen in forests mostly but here is an encounter in a cornfield:

As I was watching the bats, I looked down at the edge of the cornfield. Something was moving there. It was the size of a small child and very, very skinny. Pale, with something that looked like a head of straight, black hair. It moved in a sort of jerky gait, like someone dancing the robot badly. It moved in chunks: legs, then hips, then torso, shoulders, neck and finally head. It was looking back into the cornfield, or at least I felt like it was.

I felt prickly all over. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was a heron or something at first, but it looked too much like a person. It didn’t move like a person, though. Gradually, step by step, it moved toward me. Letting my curiosity better my fear, I moved toward the edge of the dock, which was raised a few feet off the ground to connect with semis.

When I got within a few feet of the edge, the thing looked at me. I was paralyzed. I could have run, but I was stuck somewhere between terrified and intrigued.

It moved, its “face” still pointed at me. It ratcheted its body in that disconcerting, jerky movement toward the cornfield and went into it. I tried to watch where the field moved as it passed, but the corn remained perfectly still. I noticed that all the crickets were silent. Source

In Hell, Michigan something scary happened. Not that one wouldn’t have expected it, given the name of the place…

Two young men encountered a whole group of these creatures:

After five minutes of yelling, we walked back over to the Jeep. This is when things got really weird. The moment I turned on my flashlight I could see a pale, thin, naked “thing” (I refuse to call it human) peering at us from behind a tree. I got Joe’s attention and tried to focus my eyes, thinking that it was a “ghost” burned into my retina from the flame of my lighter.

Joe jumped backward at what he saw and spat out a string of curse words. As Joe yelled, it ducked back behind the tree to conceal itself. I tried to use some logic, thinking that maybe it was a person and they got scared because one guy shrieked and the other one is holding a small handgun.

“Hey! Come on out here! Why is your car parked in the middle of the damned road?” I yelled. After getting no response, I walked up behind Joe and quietly said, “Okay, now it’s about time we get the hell out of Dodge.”

Then, the thing poked its head back around the tree to look at us and I got a much better look. It didn’t have any hair, was ghost white, had a small, pushed-in nose with a wide mouth with black lips and black eyes. Joe quickly backed up, knocked me into the dirt and I lost sight of it with my flashlight.

At this point, I raised my pistol and clicked the flashlight back on. In the second or two that my beam was off, this thing had moved from 15 yards off the road to 10 feet in front of us without making a sound. Feeling very vulnerable lying on my back and paralyzed with fear, I didn’t know what to say other than “Back the f- up! Now!” Then it faded out of existence.

I scrambled to my feet, shining the flashlight around me thinking that it had just maneuvered itself around me at an extremely quick speed. Joe jumped to his feet and began rattling off at the mouth. I tucked the pistol under my arm, grabbed my key fob from my belt and hit the “unlock” switch to turn my headlights on.

Bathed in light, we turned around in a circle about five times before we decided that we had just seen something not of this world and it would probably be in our best interest to leave. We raced toward my Jeep. I threw the flashlight into the rear seats and handed Joe my pistol.

As we were backing, I counted a half-dozen of these “things” walking toward the parked cars in the middle of the road. Panicking, I turned the wheel without bothering to look behind me while disengaging the clutch and stepping on the brake. My car slid and my plastic bumper hit a tree. The next main road I found, I turned quickly onto, just now bothering to click my safety belt into place and getting my handgun back from my friend. Source

Are these things something to consider?

I believe they are.

I believe they can be dangerous in and of themselves, but I also have reason to suspect they might be connected to Dogmen in some way, which I touched upon in the New Cryptid on the Block-post.

I have read two reports of people seeing a Fleshgait-like creature literally turning into a Dogman. I also read about a strange episode where one man saw a huge dog charging at him, causing him to yell, while his friend, standing next to him, never saw a dog but instead saw a white humanoid shape disappear behind a cabin.

I’ll leave you with The Creature from the Ditch, one of my favorite Fleshgait stories 😉

About three years ago, I was driving to my dad’s house from across state in Pennsylvania. He lived far out in the country, down a desolate paved road that crossed with an old dirt road as well as some unused railroad tracks. The entire area was surrounded by deep woods and unused farming fields. There were a couple of dilapidated old houses, an old well, and a few old cemeteries nearby.

I arrived at those crossroads I mentioned earlier after being on the road for about four hours (it was around 1 or 2 a.m. by this point) and I decided to pull over and relieve myself.

I stopped my truck about 60 feet from said crossroad, close to a small farm shed with some old equipment in it. There was a single light bulb on the side of the shed providing the only source of light in the nearly pitch black darkness of the night. On the opposite side of the road from the shed was a steep drop off into a ditch, on the other side of which were some dense woods.

As I was peeing in the dark by the shed, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a massive feeling of dread, like someone had just punched me directly in the gut. I had been around these woods all my life and used to walk around the area at night as a teenager, and I assure you that I had NEVER felt so scared as I did at that exact moment.

I quickly finished up and, goaded on by my sudden sense of panic, ran back to my truck, got in, and locked the doors. I flicked the headlights on and cranked the engine so badly that you could hear the gears grinding, but all I cared about was getting out of there.

As soon I began to turn back onto the road from the shoulder, my headlights shone over the ditch and picked something up on the other side of the road, about a foot from the asphalt. My stomach immediately sank again.

There was something crawling out of the ditch on all fours. It was hunkered down like an animal, but it’s body looked almost human, albeit a human that was attempting to mimic a stalking animal. It didn’t look hairy, but it was a uniform color. Almost dun yellow, not yellow like a cougar or lion, but a sickly yellow that reminded me of jaundiced skin. Its head was shaped like an oval, but had no hair or ears that I could see. The mouth was very, very wide, and looked like a thin, straight line that extended all the way across the creature’s face. It was very, very slightly upturned at the edges, like a slight smile. The eyes were very small and beady, just like two black pinpoints. It had no nose or any facial features aside from the mouth and eyes.

Since I was around seven feet from it, I’m certain it wasn’t just a person wearing a mask. Even the body sort of seemed “wrong”, but I can’t pinpoint why. I couldn’t see feet or hands, since there was about a foot of grass at the edge of the road. Whatever it was, I’d say it was about the size of a 12-year-old.

As soon as my lights hit it, I could tell by its movements that it had been in the process of slowly creeping up the ditch to the road, and when my lights hit it, it sort of retracted slightly, like it was surprised that it had been discovered. I didn’t stick around long enough to see what was going to go down next. I floored the gas and flew all the way to my dad’s house and stayed up the entire night freaked out.

The part of the experience that still utterly scares me to this day is that whatever I saw was definitely, definitely stalking up that ditch to get to me when I had my back turned to it. Otherwise, I can’t possibly explain what had triggered those emotions when I stood there in the darkness with my guard completely down.

The only thing that came close to that sudden realization of grave danger was when I was nearly struck by a speeding car on a city street many years ago. I don’t know what could have happened if I had lingered around for a few minutes longer, but I’d rather not think about it. Source