BELMONT, N.C. — A woman claims she witnessed a “Bigfoot” in Gaston County, North Carolina.

Belmont downtown. Credit: Christian Ballerstaller

47-year-old woman Tracy Hibberts told Cryptozoology News she was at a restaurant near a wooded area when she spotted the hominid.

“I was going to smoke a cigarette before my family came out of the restaurant we were eating at,” she explains. “The restaurant had a deck out to the side of it that went out over the water where you could feed the turtles and ducks,” she added.

The Belmont woman says that the restaurant was “out in a very rural area” and that she was the only one to see the alleged Sasquatch.

“I was alone and walked down to the water, quietly. As I approached the deck, I saw it bent down in the water. I did not know what it was until it saw me.”

Reportedly, the creature then stood up and ran fast across the water in plain daylight.

“And in an instant, it was completely gone.”

A duck sits on a deck

The alleged sighting, which occurred in a summer of the late 80s, lasted about 30 seconds.

Hibberts recalls the creature as being of “brownish dark color” but admitted that she was not able to see its face “because it was running so fast”.

“I only saw its bent-over body and back. It was fast like nothing I’ve ever saw.”

When she told her husband, she adds, he quickly dismissed it as a deer.

“But deer do not run on two legs,” said Hibberts.

In the summer of 2016, two men in North Carolina claimed to have seen two Bigfoot-like creatures while scouting an area in Guilford County. Three months earlier, a group of children from Ranlo, North Carolina said they came across a primate with red fur and about 10 feet tall.

In early 2016, another man from the Tar Heel State told Cryptozoology News that he had seen a “Neanderthal” in the Kings Mountain area in November 2015.

The city of Belmont, previously called the Garibaldi Station, is home to the Belmont Abbey College and has a population of 11,000.