A woman who spotted something moving in her yard couldn't believe her eyes when it revealed what it was.
Neoma Monro, 23, lives in Pennsylvania, where you would not usually expect to see emus wandering the streets. But that's exactly what happened—and Monro managed to catch the interaction on video.
"I didn't think I'd look outside and see a giant bird running around, so it genuinely scared me," she told Newsweek. "I couldn't believe what I had seen, especially without my glasses on."
A video shared to Monro's TikTok account, @glasshoneycomb, on October 24 captured the moment she noticed the huge animal moving outside, complete with a backing track of sinister music.
Her hair wrapped in a makeshift towel, Monro says to the camera: "I think an ostrich just ran in the yard? I looked over and screamed because it was this big thing, I thought it was a human."
She stood outside her property and recorded with her phone in case it came back. In the distance, the huge creature can be seen moving through the trees. Flitting in and out of sight, it comes ever closer until it's running through Monro's yard as she exclaims, "Oh my God. What is that?"
Monro told Newsweek: "I knew I had one chance to get footage, so I ran outside with my phone hoping I'd see it again to prove I wasn't going crazy.
"The best thing I could've done with the sighting is catch it on video.That way everyone else can join in on the chaos and laughter," she said.
TikTok users responded in a big way, with the clip being viewed 4.2 million times and racking up over 630,0000 likes.
One person wrote: "The fear, the sinister music, the drama, the demon emu ostrich emerging from the woods as if bringing the depths of hell with it. 10/10 video."
"The way this was a low budget horror film," another said. "The music, the video pans... cinematic gold, ma'am."
"It's having the absolute time of its life," another said.
One user wrote: "I love emus but it skittering in the distance awoke a prehistoric fear in me."
The common emu is one of the biggest birds in the world, reaching up to 6.2 feet in height, and is capable of running up to 30 miles per hour, according to National Geographic.
They are common in Australia and also found in New Guinea, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands and the Philippines. But they are not, despite Monro's viral video, found in the wild in the United States.
Monro, who is new to the area, told Newsweek she heard there is "a small farm not too far from us that has emus," and she "found out later that the owners were out trying to catch it."
"It did not reappear after I caught it on video, so I assumed they managed to wrangle it back in."
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