Audio circulating in September 2025 was from a real 911 call in North Carolina, in which the caller was heard shouting: "That's not human."

In September 2025, various social media accounts shared videos of what sounded like audio from a 911 call in which a man shouted "That's not human!" 

Depending on the portion of the call audible in the video, a male voice could be heard telling a 911 operator about a bloodied man he saw on the side of the road, before the conversation is interrupted by a thump and the caller's shouting. The thump, according to the caller, was something not human that fell or jumped into the bed of his pickup. The caller eventually described getting the thing off of his truck by speeding up and then slamming on the brakes, hurling it over the hood of his vehicle.

The audio was shared in several (archived) TikTok (archived) videos (archived) collectively (archived) viewed millions of times. The call audio was also shared to other social media platforms, such as Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived) and YouTube (archived), where the videos received many more views and comments.

The audio shared on social media was from a real 911 call made in Pender County, North Carolina. The driver did not have a dashboard camera or any other video footage from the incident; the videos posted to social media used unrelated footage as background to the call.

The call appeared to first start spreading online with a video posted by the YouTube channel Carolina Case Files on Sept. 13, 2025. That video identified the call as taking place in Pender County at 11 p.m. July 31, 2021, although a timestamp incorrectly used a.m. instead of p.m., according to a follow-up video from the same account. The video included an interview with Pender County Sheriff Alan Cutler and a man who was reportedly the caller. The caller's face was not shown on camera and he was identified only by the initial "T" to protect his privacy.

In an email to Snopes, the Pender County Sheriff's Office confirmed the authenticity of the call and its date, and also confirmed Cutler's participation in an on-camera interview for the documentary video. The sheriff's office also provided a full, unedited copy of the call, which was approximately 11 minutes long, and the command log for the incident.

Near the beginning of the call, about 45 seconds before the thumping sound could be heard, the caller said he was traveling on state Highway 210 east toward State Highway 53 and had just passed the Patriot's Watch community. That location can be found on Google Maps Street View and is located in Pender County. Later in the call, he told the operator he passed Porter Road and eventually pulled into the parking lot of the Malpass Corner Store. There were about six minutes in the call between the caller naming the first location and the last location, which aligns with Google Maps' estimated drive time of about seven minutes.

The command log shared by the sheriff's office stated that no one who responded to the scene was able to find anyone or anything struck by a vehicle and that a drone search was unsuccessful. 

The man who produced the Carolina Case Files video was Rusty Martin Sr., an actor based in Wilmington, North Carolina, which neighbors Pender County. In an email to Snopes, Martin said he first heard the entire 911 call in May 2025 and it took time to put together the video. Martin said his biggest challenge in making the video was getting the caller to talk about the incident.

It appears as if the call had at least been referenced online prior to May 2025. Although the details of the story itself don't fully align, a Facebook page called Carolina's Unknown posted (archived) in December 2024 that it spoke with a Pender County first responder regarding a 911 call in which an "unknown humanoid" jumped into the back of a moving pickup on Highway 210 near Currie, which is a community the 911 caller drove past during the course of the call. That page later commented that a documentary was being made about the call and then linked to a teaser video from Carolina Case Files.

While Snopes could confirm that the call was real, we could not confirm what it was the man saw during the call. The call does not confirm or refute the caller experiencing something supernatural, which many of the videos on social media have suggested.

In the Carolina Case Files video, "T" described what he saw in the bed of his pickup as a pale figure with sunken eyes, no nose or ears and elongated limbs like a stretched-out human with its face pressed up against his rear windshield. He said it was taller than his six-foot tall pickup and it ran into the trees after he knocked it off his truck. 

During the call, the 911 operator asked the caller if it might have been a turkey. The caller denied it, saying it had no feathers and was pale.

In the command log shared to Snopes by the Pender County Sheriff's Office, the caller was recorded as telling first responders that he believed he saw a "skinwalker" or something like it. Skinwalkers are figures in Navajo mythology believed to be evil, dangerous witches capable of shapeshifting into animals, according to EBSCO, a provider of research databases.

A copy of a deputy's log notes that appeared at about 5:20 in the Carolina Case Files video said that scratches found on the truck were "consistent with tree branches." An iNaturalist database of vertebrate animals native to Pender County did not include any large, featherless, pale creatures.

Martin told Snopes that he has no idea what the caller saw or experienced, but that he believes the caller was "convinced that he saw/experienced something terribly frightening." 

Sources