Speaker 1: Late on Saturday. I had finished working on my four
wheeler and I wanted to check it out to see
if it was running any better. I had recently put
a new light bar on it and had not yet
tried it out. My son and I decided to go
on some trails about a mile from the house. We
have ridden these trails many times and we were very
familiar with them. It was getting pretty dark, you know,
twilight just before dark, and you can see, but you
know it's about to get real dark. We rode about
a quarter of a mile from the hard road. I
noticed a smell that was like a bunch of hunting
hounds mixed with bad bo my son was leading when
I noticed that. My son sped up quite a bit.
Then he caught movement off to his left. I sped
up also to see what it was, and then I
I saw it. Evidently my son saw it too. At
first I thought it was a big bear, but it
was clearly running on two legs. It had long, reddish
brown hair, and was very tall. This thing was running
beside my son and running over trees and tearing through brush.
After almost wrecking several times, we made it out and
back to the hard road. We then got home as
fast as I could drive. Once we were back at
the house, my son asked me if I saw what
he saw. I wasn't sure what he thought he had seen,
so I asked him about it. He was shaking. He
paused him a minute, thinking it through, and then said,
I think it was a bear. Dad. I am fifty
years old and I have never seen a bear in
this country. He asked me, Dad, what did you see?
And I looked him straight in the eyes and I said, son,
that was a bigfoot. He said, yeah, that's what I
thought it was. I had plans to deerhunt this season
in that spot. Those plans are on permanent hole. In
the nineteen thirties, my mother lived with her parents on
a ranch in South Texas. The ranch was somewhere between
San Antonio and Laredo. There are still hundreds of square
miles of mesquite and cactus that cover that area. In
the nineteen thirties, this area had a very small human population.
There were more cows than people in those days. They
didn't have indoor plumbing because of the smell, so the
outhouse was placed far away from the house. My mother
and her sisters and a cousin lived in the ranch
house with my grandparents. My mother was around twelve years
old at the time. My grandparents had not even heard
of TV, and the kids stayed outside all day and
at night they would play card games, staying up late
having fun. One night, after playing their card games, the
girls needed to use the bathroom in the outhouse before
they went to bed. It was a beautiful star filled
night with the full moon, and like the saying goes,
the stars were nice and bright deep in the heart
of Texas. I think there's a song like that, isn't there.
They still took a lantern so they could see once
they got inside the outhouse. The four girls were inside
when suddenly the outhouse began to shape. The girls were
not scared until they opened the door and saw this big,
hairy arm blocking their way out. All they saw was
a big, dark arm with long fur. The girls were
terrified and began to scream so loud that they scared
the creature away. The girls thought they had seen the
devil because they had been playing cards all night. When
my mother told me the story, she was trying to
tell me that she had seen the devil. She knew
nothing about bigfoot in her mind she had seen the devil.
After she told me the story, I knew she had
seen a bigfoot, not the devil. The next day, she
said they checked the area around the house, but the
ground was so hard there there wasn't any sign left
by the creature the night before. Also, there are no
bears known to inhabit this area. I'm sorry this story
is so short, but that is how my mother told
it to me. The year was two thousand and three
and I was living in a small town in North Carolina.
I lived in a modest brick home in a somewhat
secluded area in a heavily wooded area in Iredale County.
My closest neighbor was two hundred yards away through a
small patch of pine trees. Everywhere else was older hardwood
trees and two cornfields directly across the road from my house.
White tailed deer were abundant, and almost every evening they
would come and feed at the edge of the fields.
I made it a habit to sit on my porch
and watch the deer before dark most evenings. Twice I
remember the deer getting spooked and scrambling across the field
after hearing an extremely loud sound that I can only
describe as part moan and part scream. I remember wondering
if mountain lions were in this part of the country.
My nearest neighbor was a few years older than me
and had a beautiful one hundred year old Victorian style
farmhouse that was situated on fifteen acres beside my land.
His name was James, and he had recently gotten out
of the military. We were pretty close friends, as I
had always taken care of his animals and property when
he was away, and he always returned the favor for
me when I had to leave town for work. James
called on a Saturday afternoon and asked if I wanted
to do some target shooting with my new air rifle.
I said, of course, squirrel season was coming up. James
had an old barn directly across the road from his house.
The barn was approximately seventy yards from his front porch.
We hung an old cast iron frying pan from a
tree that overhung a four wheeler trail beside the barn.
This was usually used for our twenty two rifles, but
we thought it might be fun to try air rifles.
It was early October and I walked over to his
house at about five o'clock that Saturday evening. We took
turn shooting at the frying pan, and after dialing in
the scope, it proved to be an easy task to
make it ring pretty loud with each shot. I had
just made it ding three times in a row and
had the rifle in my lap when we heard it
ding again. James looked at me and I looked at him,
trying to figure out what was going on. It dinged
three times and stopped. James took his rifle and shot
and dinged it twice. He rested the rifle on his
knee and the pan dinged twice. It was starting to
get dark, and James says someone was messing with us.
He went in the house and came back with a
huge battery powered spotlight. He said, let's go find out
who's in the woods messing with us. We crossed the
road and he shined the light into the edge of
the woods where the trail started and the pan was hanging,
but we didn't see anything. He yelled out, who's there,
and we heard limbs crunching About twenty yards to the
right of the trail. He spun the light over where
the sound came from, and we both saw eyeshine that
was impossibly large and at least seven feet in the air.
It was then that we heard no. We felt a
really low, menacing growl that vibrated into our chests. It
felt like a jake break on an eighteen wheeler, rattling
my insides. James looked at me and we both decided
we needed the safety of his porch. The next day
he went to the frying pan and found several smooth
rocks on the ground beneath our target that had to
have come from the creek that was a quarter mile
down in the woods. I guess sosquatch like target practice too.
I lived there until twenty fourteen, and I never forgot
that experience. Only once after the pan incident do I
remember hearing a strange, laughing type Powell late one night.
It feels good to finally tell my story. I'm sure
I'm not the only one in North Carolina who has
heard these creatures. Thanks again for letting me get this
off my chest. I had hoped it would be forgotten,
but I will never forget that growl that shook my
Here's a story from the outback from Australia, from one
of my mates in Australia. And I'm gonna tell you
up front this first is a good story. But second,
there's some words in here I'm gonna mispronounce. So everybody
get right by their keyboard and get ready to correct
me right away, because I'm gonna blow it. I'm gonna
I know I'm gonna blow it, and I'm telling you
ahead of time. I'm not real smart, but I'm not stupid.
But sometimes I mispronounce some words. And sometimes I kind
of like mispronouncing words. I don't know, it's kind of
fun to do. But here's what he wants to be anonymous,
and here's what he writes, and get ready for a
good story here. I'm almost forty seven now, but this
happened many years ago. I think I was eighteen at
the time. While some details are a bit fuzzy, others
are as clear as yesterday. Things were different when I
was growing up than they are today. Back then, kids
seemed to have a lot more freedom to run around
in the bush from a young age, and with a
lot more care free ease. It doesn't seem the same today.
It used to be nothing to go off in the
bush on a motorbike and disappear for a week. Mine
was a family of hunters, fishermen, and shooters. I learned
all these things from a young age, so I was
always comfortable in the bush. Be it just poking around
with my mates, or enjoying all the outdoor sports, or camping,
or getting up into mischief, nothing scared me day or night.
The wildlife caused no fear. There were things for which
we had a healthy respect for, such as brown snakes
and cranky bores, but there was nothing that would stop
us getting out there and having a great time. One
of the things we loved doing as kids was to
load up our dirt bikes and head off into the
bush camping and riding. Our parents would happily haul our
bikes out to the drop off points and send us
on our way. We tied our school bags together to
make saddle bags, and we loaded our backpacks with anything
that wouldn't fit in the school bags, and we had
our eskies sitting on our fuel tanks between our legs.
It must have been a sight. I'm not sure what
an eskey is, and I think I pronounced that right,
but they had esk's on their fuel tanks between their legs.
If we planned to be out for a while, we
often had to make two trips, or we would visit
the town of Utiloh, about ten kilometers away, for more
fuel and supplies, much to the disgust of the local
cop from palm Wood's, another nearby town, who never managed
to catch us riding our bikes on the road, try
as they might. E'd Looah is located out behind the
Sunshine Coast in the hinterland in Queensland. It used to
be a lot quieter than it is these days. It
was a rural area with thick bush everywhere. We'd set
up camp in or near a large cave that was
just below the top of the ridge line system that
ran between the glen View area and the Eudlau area,
maybe a good half hour bike ride between the two.
We had always camped at the Uloh end in or
above the cave, but this time we came in from
the glen View side and we decided to make camp
on top of a spur that was on a branching track.
Now by track I mean a bike or a horse trail.
It was just a small clearing before a steep decline
into the north. The track ran south and back up
to the main ridge system, where we would access the
track that we liked to ride to the east and west.
The landscape also fell away into deep, heavily wooded valleys.
We used to rough it, but it was still quite
a comfortable camp. We set up in a triangle formation,
with the three man tent forming one corner, the fire
formed the second, and the third formed by blue tarp
and hammocks hung from trees. We were surrounded by knee
high blady grass. My girlfriend at the time was living
in Utlah, so it was inevitable that I would get
her on the back of the bike and bring her up.
It was toward the end of the trip and two
of the guys headed into town for supplies. It was
late afternoon and I was glad to have time alone
with my girlfriend. It was quiet, and we hung around
camp and enjoyed each other's company. As the day drew
to a close, we lit the fire and cooked what
little we had left. We had thought the others would
have been back before dark, but we weren't concerned. They
knew their way back and forth very well. Some time
after dark, we decided to jump in the tent and
enjoy what a long time we had left. A long
time was not what we got. We couldn't have been
in there long because the fire was still burning well
enough to throw a fair amount of light on the
side of the tent, and something moving around in the
grass to the west of us got my attention. I
figured it was one of a myriad of animals that
make up the night shift in Australia, and at worst
I thought it might be a couple of wild dogs
drawn to our camp by the cooking smells. My girlfriend
was the one who said, I think I can hear
someone talking. Let me do this in my Australian. I
think I hid someone talking around the tent. It's not
a very good accent, but I gave it a whirl.
My first reaction was to tell her that it was
the night sounds of the bush and to ignore it.
But then I really started listening. That was when I
heard the sounds that she was already zeroing in on,
and she was right. It was bipedal footsteps that we
were hearing, steady, sure and certain footsteps through the blady grass.
First it was four or five steps, and then a pall,
and then some more, and then in another pause, it
was circling our camp. Who would be out this false
circling our camp in the dark, I wondered aloud. At
this point she was becoming a little afraid. I was
running through possible solutions and trying to figure out what
kind of animal it might be. Not a loss for
anything else. I now believe it was someone who, for
whatever reason, was walking around our camp. Although I don't
remember exactly what we were saying throughout the encounter, we
were whispering back and forth so quietly, we were barely
making a sound. Mainly we were intensely concentrating on the
activity around us. The only real loud statement I made
was we can hear you, mate, you better get going
because we have a knife. After that, the walking got heavier,
with no more pauses. It was almost like whoever it
was decided that they'd been sprung and no longer had
to hide their intent. When it went around to the
west side of the camp, I quickly unzipped the screen
and pushed back the flap and grabbed the tomahawk from
its place just outside the entrance. Meanwhile, whoever was continuing
his march around the camp without breaking stride. Step step step, step,
step stop. My girlfriend jerked the tomahawk from my hand.
Now I didn't argue with her. If it was giving
her some comfort, then let her have it. I quietly
fumbled until I found a buck knife among my things,
and the knife and the tomahawk were our only defense.
We didn't have guns with us, but by now I
was becoming more and more concerned. I thought about opening
the tent, making a break for it, thinking the two
of us could slip out into the dark and hide,
and I'm so glad we didn't. Whoever this was wasn't stue.
They would swing right in close to the back of
the tent on the west side, where it was darker,
and then move wide and more down the slope as
they circled to the east, where the fire was. I
remember too that I could hear all the crickets in
the grass stop chirping progressively as it made its way
around the camp. All of these little details are coming
back only now as I write this. I worked up
the courage to peer out of the little gap between
the screen and the flap on the back window of
the tent, and what I saw froze me in fear.
Nothing in the bush does that to me, and my
girlfriend saw it too. I heard her gasp, and then
I couldn't even hear her breathing. All I could hear
was my heart thumping in my ears. I felt my
girlfriend move, so I put my hand on her to
keep her from getting out, but that wasn't necessary. She
positioned herself in the dead center of the tent and
sat there, shape in the dim light and clutching the
tomahawk to her chest. I thought about that tent. We
may as well have been wrapped in paper. I couldn't
even speak, and I wanted to say to her that
I was sorry and let her know that I was
about as scared as she was, but the words wouldn't come.
The image of what I had seen kept running through
my mind. I'm almost certain that it saw us looking
out at it, because it stopped and it stood there,
still as a rock. I peered back out, hoping that
it had been a trick of my brain, but it
was still there, and it wasn't moving. There was enough
light from the rapidly dying fire to make it out,
and it was no man. I couldn't see its face
in the dim light, but there was no mistaking it.
It was seven feet tall, maybe taller. It was covered
in hair or fur. I couldn't tell what color it was,
except that it was dark. Its round, wide head was
stuck right on top of its shoulders that were twice
as white as me, with no sign of ears. Its
arms were long and thick, with hands that dropped down
to its knees. I couldn't make out any details in
the hands, but I could tell they were hands. The
chest was as white as the shoulders, but it tapered
down to the hips a bit. It didn't make a
sound as we watched it. It didn't move. I couldn't
smell anything like I've heard with a lot of yowie stories.
As far as I could tell, there was only the one,
but it wouldn't have fittered. If there had been ten
of them, one would have been enough to roll us
over like a truck. I think it was waiting for
the fire to die, and in my mind, going out
there and building up the fire wasn't an option. It
was a real damned if you do and damned if
you don't situation. It was about the and that I
heard a bike off in the distance to the south
of us. I didn't take my eyes off the creature, though.
I couldn't tell what my girlfriend was doing, but I
could feel her tents behind me and stop shaking for
a couple of seconds, so I knew she'd heard it too.
I saw this thing turn its body toward the south.
I didn't know what was going to happen. Was it
going to rush in and have us. The noise of
the bike got slowly louder, and there were flashes of
light through the trees that were beginning to bounce off
the tent. Still, I didn't take my eyes off of
this creature at that moment. It gave off a growl
that lasted quite a long time. It vibrated in my chest,
and despite the fact that it wasn't ear piercingly loud.
Then it turned directly west and strode down the slope
into the low country beside the spur, and as the
lights and the full noise of the bikes round to
the top of the hill, it was gone. It wasn't
until then that I felt like I started to breathe again.
My girlfriend showed signs of calming, but she was still shaking.
The bike stopped at our campsite, and I heard one
of my mates say, you idiot, the FII is almost dead.
I went out first. My girlfriend didn't come out until
five minutes later, when the fire was roaring again and
her violent shakes now were a slight shiver. My other
mate looked at us and asked, what was wrong. Did
you have a fight of something, mate, he asked, I
uttered one sentence, there was something out here walking around
our camp. When it got dark. They both laughed and
called us names. My girlfriend gave me a look before
moving over to whisper in my ear that she wanted
to go home. All the while the other two were
exclaiming how treacherous it was riding the tracks in the
dark and how stupid they'd been for starting the run
back so late. My one mate even said he'd considered
pulling up and lighting a fire to camp for the night,
and my girlfriend looked at me and I could see
fear in her eyes, and I said I would build
a fire and not sleep all night, and that led
to more ridicule from my mates. Years later, the older
mate said that it was shortly after this point that
he could see we were serious, but it wasn't until
morning that he had to admit something was amiss and
he couldn't explain it. That night, I had the fire roaring,
and I gathered up every bit of timber I could
find near the campsite, constantly flashing my camp torch in
wide arcs as I did so. My two mates were
convinced I'd gone mad. My girlfriend curled up and slept
in the open entrance of the tent, and my back
mere centimeters from her. I didn't sleep a wink. As
the sun came up, I was both mentally and physically exhausted.
Did I had spent the whole night sitting up, straining
my ears for every little sound, but there was nothing.
It never came back that I know of, and as
soon as it was daylight we looked around the camp.
There it was a well trodden path in the grass,
just like I described its movements earlier. Every now and
then we could see where it had strayed from its
path and would make big strides in the blady grass.
My girlfriend wouldn't come and look. She gave me a
look that said I want to pack up and leave here. Well,
I felt the same quickly. That was exactly what we did.
I never told my other mate what we saw and
find detail. He asked once and suggested that it was
probably some feral hermit that was tramping around up there.
They aren't that uncommon in places like that, and I
was happy to leave it there. But I know what
we saw. Our friend and I never discussed it again either.
She eventually moved to another state and we lost touch.
I've tried a couple of times to find her on
Facebook without success. It was more out of curiosity than anything.
I have no idea what I'd say to her about
it now anyway. Apart from that, I've never told this
story in its entirety without anonymity to anyone other than
my dad, my best mate, and my now ex wife.
My dad my best mate have their own stories on
the subject, but that's for them to tell. You don't
spend as much time in the bush as we have
and not have some weird stories to tell. As for me,
I've never seen or heard anything like it since. But
and there's always the big butt. About twelve years ago,
I was hunting a block in Upper Kabulcher c A
b O U L t U r E Culture Kubulcher
Assi's helped me out another place in Australia that's yielded
a lot of yowie stories. I was hunting right up
on the flowing gully that was thick, looking for wild
pigs or wild dogs, when as I crept along, I
noticed that the whole place went dead silent. There was
not a sound. I had a terrible feeling of dread,
and I'd only had that feeling once before the night
that I just related to you. I had a gun
on this night with good hot loads, but looked on
it as being inadequate, and immediately I racked one, put
the hammer in half cock, and I walked out of
there at a fast pace, my thumb on the hammer
of the whole way to the car. I didn't bag
that gun until I was out of the gate and
on the main road. After that experience, I never went back.
I still head out a fair bet by myself. It's
the most effective way to hunt wild dogs. But when
I do a two seventy WSM everywhere, I don't go
off into the bush without a good center field rifle
in my hands. It's easy to explain away as I've
never known when a dog or big boar will be present,
but it's also because I never want to feel that
helpless in the bush again. Well that's my story and
I hoped you liked it. And some people will put
it down as rubbish, but I lived it