Florida Researcher Recalls Two-Hour Nighttime Encounter in Green Swamp

# A Florida Researcher Spent Two Hours Being Stalked Around His Campsite — And He Finally Followed It There's something about a Class B encounter that hits differently. No blurry photo to debate, no shaky footage to dissect — just a person, alone in the dark, using their ears and their gut to figure out what's moving through the woods around them. And a recent interview over on The Cryptid Podcast features exactly that kind of story. Jared Low, a researcher and podcaster from central Florida who runs TheLOWEdownFL, sat down with host Dano to share an experience that happened back in April while he was camping solo in the Green Swamp. If you know anything about Florida's wilderness, you know the Green Swamp is no joke — it's roughly 560,000 acres of dense palmetto thickets, pine forests, and swampy undergrowth stretching across Polk County, right between Tampa and Orlando. Jared has been camping and hiking this particular 11,000-acre management area within the swamp for nearly a decade, so he knows the sounds of those woods. That's what makes what happened so unsettling. He was out there alone that Friday night after his brother and buddy had to bail on the trip. He'd spent the evening doing some scouting, came back to camp, and was sitting by the fire in the early morning hours of Saturday when he heard something moving through the woods to the northwest. At first, he figured it was a deer or a raccoon — standard Florida nightlife. But the sound kept getting closer, and the more he listened, the more it sounded like two feet hitting the ground. Bipedal. Deliberate. Here's where it gets really interesting. Every single time Jared would flash his light toward the sound, it would stop. Completely. No movement, no sound, nothing. He'd kill the light, wait a minute or two, and it would start moving again. This cat-and-mouse game went on for somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours. The thing was circling behind his campsite, moving through a stretch of palmettos that were ten or twelve feet tall, occasionally walking off and then coming back. No vocalizations, no knocks, no wood bangs — just that heavy, rhythmic movement through the undergrowth. Eventually, the creature started walking away with purpose, heading back into the thicker woods. And Jared made a decision that takes serious guts — he got up and followed it in the dark, using only the firelight behind him. They ended up pacing each other, walking east along the back of the campsite toward a small clearing and a game trail. Jared said he could feel it — he was about to see whatever this was walk out into the open. They were approaching the edge together. And then it knew. The thing pivoted on one foot, took four or five quick steps, and was back on the other side of the thicket before Jared could even process what was happening. It didn't run. It didn't panic. It just made a clean, calculated decision to not be seen. That kind of behavior — the light-shyness, the deliberate circling, the awareness of being followed, the last-second avoidance of exposure — lines up with an enormous number of witness reports across the country. Florida in particular has a rich history of sightings, often attributed to what's locally known as the Skunk Ape, and the Green Swamp has long been considered prime territory. Jared himself admits he spent years thinking Sasquatch were strictly a Pacific Northwest thing before he started digging into the Florida reports and realized how active the state really is. The full interview is worth the listen — Jared actually brought audio to share, and Dano teases it up pretty heavily throughout the conversation. Head over to The Cryptid Podcast on YouTube and check it out. It's a great example of why experienced woodsmen make some of the best witnesses. They know what belongs out there, and more importantly, they know what doesn't.