Fictional Mimicks

The Shadow of the Torturer is a science fantasy novel by American writer Gene Wolfe, published by Simon & Schuster in May 1980. It is the first of four volumes in The Book of the New Sun

I don't remember what the creature is called, but that book series has a fictional creature that can mimic human speech. I believe it can exactly recreate the voice of someone it has eaten.

A search turns up alzabo as a thing that matches my recollection. This is an alien bear with red fur. I didn't remember it as a bear, though I did remember it having red fur.

In the movie Annihilation, there is also a bear that mimics human speech. Somewhat similar to the book series above, this is about an alien invasion. 

The mutant bear returns and lures Anya away by emitting a cry for help in Cassie's voice. The bear kills Anya, while Josie frees herself and shoots the bear.

Please note that alien can just mean strange or from a different country, a fact behind the joke in Aliens about "she thought they meant illegal aliens."

Fiction frequently exaggerates but is often based on something real. In Japanese Anime, it's common for someone excited to get a gushing nosebleed. 

Japan is mountainous. Getting a nosebleed more easily at altitude is something real. It's probably a known phenomenon in Japan that strong emotions can trigger that but it's probably depicted as a gushing nosebleed to make it visible to the audience. That's probably an exaggeration. 

Fiction routinely includes things like psychic phenomenon that many people believe in but it's something hard to prove and not taken seriously by many other people. If you include psychic phenomenon and say it's a true story, you will be given a hard time, but if you include it in fiction, no one bats an eyelash. 

So those animals in the above two stories convincingly mimicking human speech to lure people and trick them may well be based on something that really happened that the authors would be dismissed for if they told it as a true story.

Maybe something happened to someone they knew and it sounded cool and fascinating and terrifying and they weren't sure how seriously to take it, but thought "That makes a great story. I'm including it in my book or using it in some fashion."

I'm not a big consumer of horror stories in part because it's frequently just bad writing and not believable. Werewolf stories and vampire stories just generally don't hold water and don't typically scare me.

A book called The Wolfen was a gripping novel that scared the hell out of me. It essentially posits a species of wolf of human-like intelligence capable of communicating with humans, opening doors, etc. as a plausible explanation for werewolves. 

And I do know animals have been known to eventually figure out things like how to unlock a door.

None of these stories use the term skin walkers but the partial description of skin walkers I noped put of the other day reminded me of these fictional stories.