YEAR: 2006

SEASON: Winter

MONTH: December

DATE: 18

STATE: Georgia

COUNTY: Haralson County

NEAREST TOWN: Draketown

NEAREST ROAD: Highway 120 and Seabreeze Lake Rd.

OBSERVED: My family has an 800 acre farm in Haralson County, GA. Our farm is on the border of Paulding County, GA., near the small "town" of Draketown (it's more of a settlement than a town). We typically spend about one weekend out of the month at our farm where we have a nice cabin (house). The land consists of pasture (no cattle), pines, hardwoods, swamp, and five pretty large lakes. Whenever we are down there we go spotlighting at night to look at deer. We don't hunt the deer on our land and usually see 50-80 deer a night just riding around and looking at them. Being only about 1.5 hours from Atlanta this area is EXTREMELY remote and secluded. It's all private land and not much activity occurs around there.

During this past Christmas holiday there were 6 adults in our group in a Suburban riding down the dirt roads through our farm after a cookout at the cabin. As we neared the main pasture near our barn where we feed corn to the deer we were puzzled to see a large herd of deer "flying" out of the pasture into the hardwoods. This was shocking because they know that headlights mean new corn and they usually stand around waiting on the new feed. As we rounded the bend that opens up into the pasture we saw a large, "black", two-legged creature cross the dirt road, see our lights, and then turn around and enter the heavy pines it had entered the road from. We have no idea what we saw and don't have the time to really investigate, however, we know that it was at least as large as a large grown man, walked on two feet, had weired looking long arms, and didn't show it's face to us. It was uniformly black and couldn't have had clothes on to look like it did. It seemed surprised to see our lights round the bend but did not seem worried or in a hurry to get out of sight (though it did in about 3 seconds). We rode around the loop we were on and came back to the point where we had the sighting and nothing had changed. No deer, nothing. We discussed this for several days and decided it had to have been a bear, but we all know that it couldn't have been. Considering the latest events within 10 miles of here we decided we should post this.

TIME AND CONDITIONS: 10:00 pm, cold (40 degrees), partially cloudy though not overcast, no fog. No rain, dry, and could clearly see our barn in the background of our headlights about 200 yards away.

Follow-up investigation report by BFRO Investigator Leigh Culver:

The witness didn’t have much more to add than what was originally presented in the report. The area where the sighting occurred is actually geographically closer to Buchanan than Draketown. Seabreeze Lake Road does connect to Hwy 120 and there is a small lake in the area. This location is directly 10 miles east of Hannah Swamp and the February 2007 sighting on Hwy 101 (BFRO Report 18044).