BREAKING: Social Media Erupts Over “Walking Tree” Caught on Camera — The Truth Behind the Viral Mystery Will Leave You Shook

It started like something straight out of a supernatural thriller. A lone person walking outside in an undisclosed location noticed something strange on the horizon — something tall, looming, and… moving.

At first, it looked like an ordinary tree. But as the witness began recording, the “ordinary” quickly turned into the unexplainable.

Walking tree (Photo via Twitter)

The footage, just 23 seconds long, shows a single towering tree standing in the distance. Yet instead of standing still — as trees have for millions of years — it appeared to glide, slowly but steadily, across the landscape. By the end of the clip, the tree had moved completely out of frame to the right, disappearing from view entirely.

The video, posted to X with the caption “Someone captured unbelievable footage of what appears to show a tree walking”, exploded online within hours. Thousands of users flooded the comments section with theories — from ancient rainforest legends to alien experiments to the set of a “Lord of the Rings” sequel gone wrong.

“This is literally the Ents from Tolkien coming to life,” one user wrote.
“Nope. Absolutely nope. We’re in the apocalypse now,” another posted.

“Guess it decided to make like a tree and leave,” one person said.

“If you look close enough you can see there’s two hobbits on the tree in route to Mordor,” a second person wrote.

“It’s called replanting, where a machine with uprooting capabilities uproot a tree and plant it in a different place. The position of the camera person makes it difficult to see exactly what is going on with the machine. Nothing to see here!” a third fan said of the walking tree.

“You drink enough moonshine and they’ll start talking too,” a fourth person commented.

“That’s what happened in my accident, a tree ran out in front of me. Someone recorded it,” a final person added.

But could a tree actually walk?

The short answer: no — at least, not in the way most people imagine. But nature does have one tree that comes eerily close.

Meet the Socratea exorrhiza, a palm tree found in the rainforests of South America. Nicknamed the “walking tree,” it’s famous for its long, stilt-like roots that can grow in new directions over time. As older roots die and lift off the ground, newer ones take their place in a different location, giving the illusion the tree has moved. It’s not fast — we’re talking centimeters a day — but in dense forests, it’s enough to make it look like the tree has taken a slow, creeping step.

Still, the tree in this video wasn’t in a rainforest. And it certainly wasn’t inching its way over months — it was gliding right before viewers’ eyes.

So what really happened?

Experts and sharp-eyed viewers offered a far less mystical — but equally fascinating — explanation: a tree-moving spade. This piece of heavy equipment, often used in landscaping and construction, can uproot an entire tree and transport it — roots, trunk, and all — to a new location. The machine’s massive steel blades dig deep around the root ball, lift it out of the ground, and allow the operator to reposition the tree without killing it.

Three partially built buildings for the River Preserve project are seen Aug. 6, 2025, in Indian River County. The prior developers of River Preserve received a permit from St. Johns River Water Management District in June 2004 to excavate and destroy 3 acres of wetlands on site, in exchange for restoring 12 acres of native vegetation to nearby Lost Tree islands, according to TCPalm archives.

If the spade itself was hidden behind the tree from the cameraman’s perspective, it could create the perfect optical illusion — a “walking” tree with no visible explanation.

That hasn’t stopped the video from racking up millions of views and sparking conspiracy threads across social media. Because in the end, people don’t just want answers — they want magic, mystery, and a little bit of the impossible to be true.

And for 23 seconds, a tree gave them exactly that.