Woman Hears Scary 'Scream' In The Night — Then Realizes Who It Is
“It can get extremely loud and very spooky if you don't know what you're hearing.”
Going for a walk around rural New York, Kimberly DeFisher heard a terrifying sound.
“It almost sounds similar to a woman screaming a lot of times,” DeFisher said. “This is what people hear at night, and they're like, ‘What is that? Is somebody getting murdered?’”
She saw the little culprit soon after hearing him. It was Tundra, a friendly arctic fox.
DeFisher is the president and founder of Arctic Fox Daily Wildlife Rescue, where she helps house and rehabilitate wildlife, including foxes. The sound DeFisher heard was a fox alarm bark. These barks don’t always sound like screams — sometimes they’re a low grunt or more of a traditional barking noise.
DeFisher recorded a video highlighting and explaining the different barks:
Alarm barks are used when foxes need to send an alert to other animals. In this case, Tundra thought he sensed something unfamiliar in his territory and wanted to let the other foxes at the sanctuary know what was going on.
“It's very funny, because an alarm bark is something that nobody would ever expect to hear coming from a fox,” DeFisher said. “It's exactly what it sounds like. It's a type of bark. And a lot of people have no idea that a fox can bark like, you know, a dog.”
DeFisher’s sanctuary also houses wolfdogs, who were rescued by New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation and re-homed with DeFisher, since she has the proper licensing and training to care for them. DeFisher mentioned that sometimes life at the rescue can have quite the spooky soundtrack, which comes in handy during Halloween.
“I could probably stick my phone out there and record a perfect howling,” DeFisher said. “You hear all sorts of crazy noises coming from my house at night.”
