A wildlife biologist in Mozambique recounts a chilling late-night encounter with a pale, clawed humanoid clinging to the ceiling of his home. With glowing yellow eyes, inhuman movements, and strange prints left behind, the creature defied explanation—raising unsettling parallels to the notorious “Crawler” phenomenon reported worldwide.

So I never thought I would find myself writing this. For context, I hold a doctorate in wildlife biology, reside in Mozambique, and spend a considerable amount of time in the ocean. As a result, I've encountered a fair share of everyday yet unusual phenomena. The night before last, I couldn't sleep, so I went down to the living room sofa so I wouldn't wake my partner. Sitting on the couch, I hear rustling in the front room. We have cats and two large dogs; we leave the front door open so they can come and go as needed. The house complex is guarded, but this incident occurred around 3:30 a.m. the night before last, and the guard is likely half asleep in his hut. I think the rustling is the cats and think nothing of it, but start to feel uneasy. Some slight movement in the mirror by the room's door catches my eye. I smashed my head around and saw something bipedal in the mirror. I see a head with large, glowing eyes, shoulders, and two arms ending in what appear to be claws, devoid of any coloration. The whole body seemed the same, pale gray, except for the yellow eyes that seemed to glow or reflect the light from the room I was in. This was hanging from the roof on the other side of the door, seemingly watching me through the mirror. Our eyes locked for about 3-5 seconds before I leapt up, pulling my groin in the process. I shout Nope, nope, this is not real, this is not happening, as I run out of the room. In my head, I want to ID it sensibly so I don't go crazy. The thing immediately moved fast, exiting the house around the same time as I exited the room. I then see a tremendous shape on the deck, running left to right, before it literally appears to jump off into the night.

I go upstairs and explain what happened to my partner. My hair is standing on end, I have constant shivers down my spine, and I end up in tears. I'm a big boy, I've chummed water for sharks, jumped in and tagged them with a speargun, sampled whales with a crossbow off a speedboat, been around baboons (we don't have them here, and they are much smaller than what I saw), and I am familiar with the smaller animals that we see rarely at night here. This terrified me. What terrified me more was the thought of the white cement ridge/beam/row of blocks on the ceiling that it was hanging from on the roof, and the two dirty marks/prints I found the next morning. No fingerprints or monkey paws, just what is usually marked from the bottom of the palms of your hands are dirty. Usually, animals wouldn't dare enter the garden due to the large dogs (which were sleeping in the bedroom with the cats the whole night, again weird as the dogs usually are perfect guards).

I've asked some locals, and they have a name for it in the local language (they reportedly see a lot of unusual things in the communities). They said that sometimes you see them running far ahead of you, and then they disappear, and you turn around to find them coming up behind you. We've never seen anything before, save for an odd blue light out at that sea we couldn't explain a while back, but nothing like this! There has been a spate of dog killings in the area lately. It was terrifying, but I didn't feel in any danger, or likely wouldn't have gotten up. As a biologist, I've always been interested in overlooked signals. For example, many plants that appear dull in visible light can look quite unusual in infrared or other wavelengths of light. Something like that, specific times and light levels allow things to be seen that usually can't be. From the UK originally. Never seen anything close to this. The guys I work with knew what it was and had seen similar before. The only thing I recall is that it looked caught, like an animal with a light in its eyes, and froze for a second too. Either that or took a moment to figure out if I could really see it." E