The scratches on Hunter’s back told a different story than his mind wanted to believe.
Standing in his bathroom that Saturday morning in early 2022, the Tennessee pastor and contractor stared at his reflection, trying to reconcile what his wife was seeing with what he remembered from the night before. Three distinct claw marks raked across his back, still raw and angry. His right shoulder bore the purple-blue bruising of what looked unmistakably like finger marks—three or four of them, pressed deep enough into his flesh to leave their testimony.
“I thought it was just a dream,” Hunter would later tell me, his voice carrying the weight of a man whose reality had fundamentally shifted. But dreams don’t leave physical evidence. Dreams don’t mark you.
Or do they?
The question would haunt Hunter for months, reshaping his understanding of reality itself. As a deacon in his church, a successful contractor running his own business, a father coaching his children’s sports teams, Hunter had built his life on solid, tangible foundations. You measure twice, cut once. You pour concrete on level ground. You trust what you can see, touch, and verify. But those scratches on his back challenged everything he thought he knew about the boundaries between the physical and spiritual worlds.
The Vision That Bled Through
Hunter’s experience began in what he called the dream state, though even his description of it challenged conventional understanding. “It’s more real than real life,” he explained during our first conversation. “I can smell things, I can feel things. I feel the wind blowing. It’s just as real, if not more real than me sitting here right now.”
This hyperreality of the experience sets it apart from ordinary dreams. Neuroscience tells us that normal dreams, while sometimes vivid, lack certain sensory details—we rarely smell in dreams, rarely feel texture or temperature with clarity. But Hunter’s experience contained all these elements and more, suggesting he had accessed something beyond the typical dream state.
In this vision, Hunter found himself in his front yard on what seemed like an ordinary day. His wife sat on the front steps of their home while their children played nearby. Hunter had walked over to the creek that runs through their property with his son, examining something in the water—a moment of simple father-son connection that could have happened any weekend.
But when Hunter looked up from the creek, his son had already walked back to join his mother and sibling. That’s when Hunter noticed it: across the street, behind a large hedge, stood something that violated every law of nature he knew. The figure was massive, black, wolf-like, but fundamentally wrong—standing upright like a man, its form partially concealed but unmistakably predatory.
“I remember thinking, I’m seeing things,” Hunter recalled. The creature wasn’t looking at him. Its attention was locked entirely on his family with an intensity that triggered every protective instinct in Hunter’s body. He yelled for his wife and children to get in the house, but they couldn’t see what he saw. To them, their husband and father was shouting about nothing, gesturing at empty air.
The Speed of Darkness
What happened next revealed the true nature of the threat. The creature moved with impossible speed—not running but somehow flowing, “like a freaking blur,” as Hunter described it. In the space of two or three seconds, it had circled around, positioning itself between Hunter and his family.
Hunter didn’t hesitate. In that moment, whether in body or spirit, Hunter embodied the Scripture: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13 KJV). He charged at the creature, attempting to intercept it before it could reach his wife and children.
The physical contact was visceral and specific. The entity grabbed Hunter’s right shoulder with what he distinctly physically ill for days after his visions. The apostle Paul wrote of being “caught up to the third heaven,” unable to determine if the experience was physical or spiritual: “…(whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth)” (2 Corinthians 12:2 KJV).
The spiritual realm has always had the power to affect the physical, but we’ve trained ourselves to ignore or explain away these intersections.
The Physical Gateway
Hunter’s case presents a fascinating physiological component that may explain his susceptibility to these experiences. His heart rate regularly drops into the 30s while sleeping, some-times dipping as low as 32 beats per minute—a condition that places his body in a state remarkably similar to the threshold between life and death.
“Your brain will kind of begin to shut down,” Hunter explained, “and it releases a certain chemical which is the same chemical that is released when you’re in REM sleep or when you die.”
This detail cannot be overlooked. Modern science has identified dimethyltryptamine (DMT) as the chemical released during death, dreams, and near-death experiences. Some researchers call it “the spirit molecule” because of its apparent ability to facilitate experiences beyond ordinary consciousness. Hunter’s naturally low heart rate may trigger this release more frequently or intensely than normal, creating an involuntary gateway between realms.
Hunter’s near-death heart rate may serve as an involuntary opening, thinning the veil between our realm and what Scripture identifies as the second heaven—that contested spiritual territory where dark forces operate. Unlike those who deliberately pursue astral projection through forbidden occult practices, Hunter found himself pulled into these experiences without invitation or intent.
His Apple Watch, which he wears constantly to monitor his condition, has logged over 250 low heart rate warnings. The pattern became clear over time: when his heart rate drops below 35 beats per minute and remains there, these experiences intensify. The correlation is too consistent to ignore.
Two Months Later: The Woods Confirm the Warning
The early spring air carried the promise of new growth as Hunter and his 11-year-old son ventured into the woods behind their home. These 800 acres of Tennessee wilderness weren’t just property—they were legacy. Hunter’s sister had married into the family that owned this land when he was just 10 years old. For 25 years, these woods had been his sanctuary, the place where his father taught him to track deer, where he’d learned patience in tree stands, where generations of his family had walked before him.
That afternoon started like countless others. Father and son checking trail cameras, looking for signs of deer, enjoying the simple pleasure of being outdoors together. Hunter had been passing down the same traditions his father had given him—teaching his boy to read signs, to move quietly through the forest, to respect the land and its creatures.
The light was already beginning to fade when they reached the hollow where their tree stand waited. It was maybe 4:00 or 4:30, Hunter recalled, that golden hour when the afternoon sun slants through the trees at sharp angles, creating long shadows that can play tricks on your eyes.
The whispers began subtly, so faint at first that Hunter thought it might be wind through the early spring leaves. But wind doesn’t form words. Wind doesn’t sound like conversation just beyond the range of understanding.
“It sounded like gibberish or like another language,” Hunter recalled, his voice still carrying wonder and fear at the memory. The unintelligible vocalizations seemed to shift positions—behind them, then ahead, then surrounding them entirely. Father and son stood frozen, trying to locate the source, but the whispers seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
The Language of the Fallen
This phenomenon appears throughout cryptid encounters worldwide, crossing cultural and geographical boundaries with disturbing consistency. The Sierra Sounds, recorded by Ron Moorehead in the 1970s in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, captured similar unintelligible speech attributed to Sasquatch. Witnesses across hundreds of cases describe this same element: a language that sounds structured, deliberate, even conversational, but remains completely incomprehensible to human ears. Could these be the remnants of pre-Babel communication, when the whole earth spoke one language? Or perhaps something older still—the tongue of the Nephilim, those hybrid beings from before the flood whose very existence violated the boundary between Heaven and earth? The book of Enoch, while not canonical, suggests these beings possessed knowledge and abilities that blended the spiritual and physical in ways that threatened the created order itself.
As darkness settled through the trees, the whispers ceased. The sudden silence was almost worse than the voices—that heavy, expectant quiet that falls over a forest when a predator is near. Every seasoned hunter knows this silence. Birds stop singing. Squirrels freeze on their branches. Even the insects seem to hold their breath.
Then came the sound of breaking branches, not the random noise of wind or small animals, but the deliberate sound of something large moving through the underbrush. Hunter motioned for his son to be still. On the count of three, they would shine their flashlights toward the disturbance.
“One…two…three.”
Their flashlight beams pierced the darkness, and two orange-red orbs rose from behind the undergrowth—eyes that didn’t just reflect their lights but seemed to glow with their own inner fire. As the creature stood to its full height, Hunter’s mind struggled to process what he was seeing.
“The only thing I can tell you is a werewolf,” Hunter said during our interview, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper. “This thing…it was just a black wolf standing up on two legs.”
The Recognition
In that moment of terror, something else happened—recognition. This was the same creature from his dream two months earlier. The same impossible blend of wolf and man, the same predatory focus, the same overwhelming sense of evil. But this time it wasn’t targeting his family. This time, it was looking directly at him and his son.
The creature released a sound Hunter struggled to describe even months later. He first compared it to what he imagined a dinosaur might sound like—something primitive and terrible. Later, he refined the description to the deep, guttural roar of a crocodile, that prehistoric bellow that speaks to something ancient in the human nervous system, triggering fear responses laid down in our DNA millions of years ago.
The apostle Peter’s warning took on visceral meaning in that moment: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8 KJV). This wasn’t metaphorical spiritual warfare—this was a physical manifestation of something that should have remained in the spiritual realm.
Hunter’s son reacted faster than his father. While Hunter stood transfixed, his mind reeling from the impossibility of what he was seeing, the 11-year-old boy was already tugging at his father’s arm. “Dad, dad, dad, we need to go.”
The boy’s urgency snapped Hunter back to the present danger. They began backing away slowly, fighting every instinct that screamed at them to run. Every hunter knows you don’t run from a predator. Running triggers the chase instinct. Running makes you prey.
Divine Protection in Dark Woods
The creature didn’t charge immediately. Instead, it paced them as they retreated, maintaining its distance but ensuring its presence was felt with each deliberate step. It would take a few steps parallel to their path, then stop. They would back up further. It would move again, always keeping them in sight, always maintaining that careful distance that suggested calculation rather than mere animal instinct.
This restraint appears repeatedly in dogman encounters across the country, suggesting these entities operate under divine limitations. The book of Job provides biblical precedent: when satan sought to test Job, God set clear boundaries: “Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand” (Job 1:12 KJV). Even the fallen must operate within boundaries set by the Almighty. They can manifest, they can terrorize, but something—Someone—prevents them from taking what they seem to want.
Hunter and his son continued their careful retreat until they reached the edge of the woods where it opened into a 50-acre hay field. The moment they broke from the tree line into the open space, they ran. That’s when Hunter heard it—the sound of something large crashing through the underbrush behind them, no longer pacing but pursuing.
Without breaking stride, Hunter drew his pistol and fired several shots behind them into the darkness. He doesn’t know if he hit anything. In that moment, accuracy didn’t matter—only escape. Father and son ran across that field faster than they’d ever run before, not stopping until they reached the safety of their house.
The Aftermath of Impossibility
Inside, as Hunter and his son caught their breath, his wife’s words brought everything full circle: “Didn’t you have a dream about exactly what you’re talking about?”
The connection hit Hunter like a physical blow. The creature in his dream, the one that had left physical scratches on his back, wasn’t a projection of his subconscious or a symbolic representation of some psychological fear. It was a real entity that could operate in both the dream realm and physical reality. The warning had been literal. The threat was real.
The Multi-Origin Mystery
The complexity of the dogman phenomenon reflects the multifaceted nature of spiritual warfare itself. Through six years of documenting these encounters on The Confessionals, I’ve identified several potential origins for these creatures, each supported by eyewitness testimony and patterns of behavior.
Nephilim Spirits: Genesis 6 speaks of the Nephilim, the hybrid offspring of fallen angels and human women. The phrase “and also after that” suggests these beings continued to exist even after the initial hybridization event. The book of Enoch, though not canonical, provides additional detail, suggesting these beings’ spirits were condemned to remain on Earth after death. Could some dogmen be these disembodied Nephilim taking physical form?
Government Assets: Multiple witnesses have reported encounters with government agents after dogman sightings or shootings. One particularly compelling case involved a trucker who shot and killed a dogman that was pacing his vehicle. Shortly after, unmarked vehicles arrived, and agents told him he had “killed their asset.” This suggests at least some dogmen might be products of classified military experiments—biological weapons or genetically modified organisms created through dark knowledge, whether ancient or modern.
Human Shapeshifters: I’ve documented cases of humans who transform through occult practices. One source described dating a woman who was part of a group of shapeshifters, and detailed territorial wars between different factions across state lines, including specific conflicts between Tennessee and Kentucky groups. This transformation ability brings to mind the boundary between human and beast being violated through spiritual means.
Interdimensional Avatars: Perhaps most disturbing is the possibility that some dogmen are biological vessels—meat suits, as one witness described them—created in other realms and inhabited by fallen entities when they need to operate physically in our world. These would be purpose-built bodies designed for specific missions in our reality.
The variety of origins suggests we’re not dealing with a single phenomenon but rather multiple types of entities that share similar physical characteristics. They may serve different masters, operate under different rules, and pursue different agendas, though all seem aligned against humanity in some fashion.
Pull Back the Curtain on the Paranormal—and Discover What’s Really Behind It.
Have you ever wondered what’s really behind encounters with UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, dogman, shadow figures, ghosts, or interdimensional beings? Do stories of unexplained phenomena intrigue you—but also leave you uneasy, sensing there’s more happening than science or pop culture can explain? Have you noticed that Scripture speaks openly about spiritual beings, yet the modern Church often avoids these conversations entirely?
You’re not chasing fiction—and you’re not alone. The Bible has always acknowledged a populated, active supernatural realm. What’s changed is our willingness to confront it honestly.
Through years of uncensored conversations with eyewitnesses, researchers, and experiencers from around the world, Tony Merkel uncovered a sobering truth: many paranormal encounters—alien abductions, cryptid sightings, hauntings, occult manifestations, and supernatural attacks—share striking spiritual patterns the Bible warned us about long ago.
This revealing resource exposes unexplained phenomena through the authority of God’s Word, not speculation or New Age deception. Drawing from real encounters featured on The Confessionals, personal experiences, and Scripture, this book connects the dots between ancient biblical truths and modern supernatural events most people are afraid to name.
Prompted by Scripture and real-world testimony, you’ll discover how to:
Discern the spiritual reality behind UFO and “alien” encounters
Understand Bigfoot, dogman, and cryptid sightings through a biblical lens
Recognize how occult practices open doors to oppression and deception
Identify why ghostly and shadow-entity encounters mirror ancient spirits
Separate cultural myths from genuine spiritual warfare
You were never meant to fear the unseen—but you were also never meant to be ignorant of it. The enemy thrives in confusion and silence, yet his power is limited and his defeat is certain. This is your wake up call to test every spirit and confront the paranormal with biblical clarity and courage.
