Brit haunted by terrifying ‘dogman’ since childhood tells spooky cryptid sighting tale

A Brit is convinced the terrifying “dogman” is no legend but real, having been haunted by sightings of such a creature since he was a child.

When Cryptids Call is a new podcast hosted by cryptozoology expert Lee Solway that features listeners calling in with their spookiest paranormal experiences in the UK.

A recent episode featured an eerie tale from Colin Keelty, who says he’s had run-ins with a “dogman”, an enormous mythical creature thought to be a dog-human hybrid, throughout his life.

On October 4 1990 he was backpacking his way from East Hull to Hornsey and came across a park in Hatfield.

He was walking down the lane at about 8:30pm with a full moon that “lit the place up like daylight” when he spied something strange in a gap under a hedge row.

“I kept looking at it, like is it a cow? Is it a deer?” Colin recalled.

“I thought it looks like it just looked like a dog’s back legs, but then I thought, hold on, where’s its front legs?”

At that moment a friend happened to be driving past and offered him a lift, and when he got in and looked back at the field he could “see this dog standing there”.

“I said ‘look, look, there’s a dog standing in the gate hole’. He just looked at me and said ‘Col, you’re working a lot of hours, get some rest’.”

Colin went on: “To be honest I had nightmares after that. For years I kept waking up, not every night obviously, but some months would go by and I’d have another one.

“And the recurring nightmare is this thing jumped out of the gate and just ripped me to shreds. And I woke up screaming some nights, with sweat. Even though I’m into that, I just could not believe what I saw.”

From then on he became obsessed with going on solo expeditions to try to catch another glimpse of the creature, but kept it under wraps from his family until September 2015.

One morning he was exploring some private woods when he found an enormous “pile of poo” indicating a large creature had been in the area recently — and that was only the first strange thing.

“As I was coming to the stream I thought, ‘what’s that smell? Oh man that is putrid, really foul’.

“Then I hear this big thud, thud, thud. I thought what the heck’s that? So I stopped and this thing stopped.”

He assumed it was one of the men who work in the forest so called out but got no answer. He kept walking and the thuds kept following him.

“All this time the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. The smell was putrid. I got on all fours to see through the bracken, then I got back up and it got back up. I stated walking slowly and this thing was following me, then I speeded up and it speeded up.

“I thought, bloody hell what is this thing? When I got to the end of the bracken it bowed off to the right of me, and I was going to the left.

“When I got to the end, I just glanced over and there’s this… I don’t know what the heck it was. I don’t know what to say. It was huge, hairy. Why I thought it was a dogman is because of the smell.”

Colin’s convinced it wasn’t a prankster wearing a costume because “nobody knew I was going to be there — they’re private woods, nobody walks through there”. He couldn’t make out the creature’s face, “all I could see was a mass and hair”.

“I wish I’d got my phone out and took pictures of it… what this large thing was, I don’t know. But it wasn’t human, I know that.”

“Another thing was when I was going into the woods, you could hear [animals] moving around but just as I got in, everything went silent like there was a giant bubble. It was real weird.”

It wasn’t Colin’s first sighting of a cryptid, having seen “something” twice as a child and again while out walking in Goathland with his wife.

“About half a mile into these woods she said ‘I’m scared’. She said there’s something up front we shouldn’t see. I said ‘stop being stupid’ but she grabbed my hand, which was unusual at the time because we weren’t getting on.

“But there was definitely something in these woods, and once we got out you could feel the relief. It was real weird, that was another bubble.”

Colin’s also seen “strange things” while out driving at night, but says modern dash-cams are ill-equipped to capture the lightning-fast creatures he’s seen run in front of his car.

Having been dogged by unexplained sightings of an enormous creature his whole life, he’s still unsure of the truth behind it all.

“I like to think these things are real, but I’m open-minded about the supernatural,” he explained.

“I do really think these things move about the country through green belts [areas of untamed wilderness]. I’ve had loads of stories of factories where there’s a green belt out the back and something’s gone crashing through, something large that we can’t explain — bigger than a deer, massive and black.”

Only 30% of the UK’s total landmass is urbanised, with the rest made up of farmland, marshes and forest.

There have been reports of a “dogman” creature fitting Colin’s description in the Lincolnshire area as far back as the 1600s, podcast host Lee told the Daily Star last year.

Lee’s keen to hear from anyone who’s had a strange sighting to email him at whencryptidscall@gmail.com.

You can listen to the show here or find it on Spotify, Apple Music or wherever you get your podcasts.