March 25th 2026
Allison Meigan Champ
allisonchamp@berkeley.eduAllison is a fourth-year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley double-majoring in anthropology and psychology. Her area of focus is the social lives (e.g. hierarchies, gender roles, art) of Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer communities in Europe and North America. In her free time, she enjoys reading urban legends, movie analysis, figure skating, and trying new ice cream flavors.
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re driving alone on a country road late at night. It’s been miles since you’ve passed another car. The moon is a mere sliver of light in the sky and you can feel fatigue settling into your bones like a rot. As you fight to stay awake, you suddenly spot something in the distance. It’s standing right in the middle of the road, eerily still as your car approaches. Feeling a trickle of fear down your spine, you press your foot against the brake pedal and come to a slow stop in front of…a deer.
You breathe a sigh of relief, internally chastising yourself for being afraid of something so common and harmless. But as you look more closely at the animal, you slowly begin to realize something is off. The deer is twitching, like a marionette being pulled by its strings. Its legs are spindly and misshapen, almost like they’ve been broken off and reattached. And its neck…have deers’ necks always been that long?
A horrible sense of unsettlement overcomes your body, and you freeze as the deer’s head suddenly jerks in your direction. And as it stares you down with the forward-facing eyes of a predator, there’s only one thought that runs through your mind:
That’s not a deer.
Fortunately for us, the Internet’s already got a well-suited name for the creature you’ve just encountered: the “Not Deer.” Said to roam the Appalachian region of the United States, every alleged sighting of the Not Deer is slightly different, but common characteristics have quickly begun to emerge: crooked or emaciated-looking limbs, forward-facing eyes, jerky or aggressive movements, and wide mouths full of sharp teeth. Other users report that these Not Deer have human-like hands or stand on their hind legs. Creepiest of all, the Not Deer seem to be fully sentient and unafraid of humans.
From my research, the first online mention of the Not Deer phenomenon originated from Tumblr. In August of 2019, user @will-o-the-witch made a post claiming that “anyone who spends decent [amounts] of time in Appalachia knows the Not Deer,” describing how “it doesn’t move like a deer” and that people encountering such a creature “sense intelligence that [they] shouldn’t.” From there, stories about the Not Deer quickly began gaining traction on Tumblr and Reddit, gaining hundreds of interactions. On TikTok, the phenomenon is even more popular: the notdeer hashtag has over 2,200 videos, many with hundreds of thousands of likes and countless comments describing their own encounters with the so-called Not Deer or vowing never to visit Appalachia.
Of course, as with any cryptid, the validity of the Not Deer has been called into question. Wanting to provide a more rational answer to these strange occurrences, many Internet users have noted the similarity between the appearance and actions of the Not Deer and Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a prion disease affecting the Cervidae family. Symptoms of CWD include stumbling or abnormal movements, extreme weight loss, and a lack of fear of humans. Skeptics conclude that those who have claimed to see the Not Deer are really just seeing a deer infected with CWD. Others in the non-believer camp insist that the Not Deer was never real Appalachian folklore at all— just a spooky, made-up story taken too seriously by those who can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality. To lend credence to this theory, the original poster has since admitted her claim that “everybody” in Appalachia knows about the Not Deer was exaggerated for dramatic effect. This statement suggests that a legend previously limited to a small town has since been blown out of proportion to suit the needs of the notoriously dramatic Internet.
I must confess, I feel inclined to agree with the skeptics in this case. While I do love the concept, I consider the story of the Not Deer to be little more than a sensationalized urban legend borne out of a fear and misunderstanding of the unknown. Still, I acknowledge that I could be wrong. Maybe the Not Deer is something different than a disease, something otherworldly and unexplainable. So if you’re ever alone at night and see a creature that looks a little too strange to be real…well, you know what it isn’t.
