The Pacific Northwest is teeming with legends, folklore, and stories passed down from not only the Native Americans who lived there for centuries before European settlers, but also from the settlers themselves.
Some legends, turn out to be true.
I was six years old when my parents moved to a small town at the base of Mt. Rainier in Washington State. For the first two years, we lived in an apartment while my parents finished building their new home. It was a beautiful three-story modern masterpiece on ten acres at the edge of thousands of miles of dense forest.
It was so dense, I could hop on my horse and hit the trail just behind our house, and ride for more than 20 miles without seeing a road or hearing a car… deeper and deeper into the woods.
The silence was deafening.
Shortly after moving into our new home, I was on my way home from grade-school, making my way from the school bus up the long gravel driveway to the house.
As I came to the top of a gentle rise in the road, my attention was drawn to some movement out of the corner of my left eye. Upon turning to look, I saw a large brown, hairy blob in the middle of our garden, just 50 feet from where I was walking. It was broad daylight, and this blob had very long, dark brown, thick, long hair covering its entire body. It was almost black. It would have been hard to spot in the forest where the tree trunks are typically wet and dark brown/black, but in the middle of our garden, it stood out like a raisin on a piece of iceberg lettuce.
It suddenly stood up, enormously tall and on two legs and began walking away, towards a hill that would take it down further below our house. I had never seen anything like it, and assumed it was a bear. I ran for the house.
My second encounter came over the course of three nights. Our home was three-stories tall and mostly square shaped with a flat pitched roof. We had a large deck that extended off the second story. My bedroom was in the back corner of the house that faced
the woods, on the second floor. The basement was a walk-out basement in the front, but was buried up to the bottom of the windows on the back-side into the hill. If you were behind the house where my bedroom windows were, it would have been between 8-9 feet from the ground to the bottom of my bedroom window.
Us kids loved to have slumber parties out on the deck. We would drag sleeping bags out and sleep on the deck overnight whenever we could. It was a blast. One night I remember being awakened only momentarily, and through a thick mental fog by my father dragging me in through the sliding glass door into the living room. I remember he had on a short-sleeve yellow button-up shirt, but that’s all I could recall before dropping back into a deep sleep upon being placed on the floor. I had no idea why he was bringing us in, and was too tired to care.
The next morning, we found out.
My parents bedroom was a huge master suite that occupied the majority of the third-floor with a balcony overlooking the living room. The only other room on that floor was my brother’s room. The previous night, while we were dead asleep on the deck, both my parents were awakened in the wee hours by a high-pitch, otherworldly scream, the likes of which neither of them had ever heard before. Both so startled they sat bolt upright in bed, staring wideeyed at one another.
My father was a seasoned hunter and had spent his childhood living full-time in the mountains of central and southern Utah logging with his family every summer. He was no stranger to the noises animals make at all times of the year, as they were often in the woods throughout the fall, winter and spring as well. But this was nothing he had ever heard before, and it made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
Once awakened by the sound, both my parents heard it again and they realized all four of their children were outside with whatever was making that sound.
Dad hurried and put his clothes on and ran downstairs to get us all in the house and was startled to find that every one of us had slept through it. Almost as though we were in a trance, not one of us really awoke, even when he was dragging us inside the house and then locking the doors.
Mom and Dad sat up the rest of the night listening to it along with the growling they said was some of the deepest growls they had ever heard. It wasn’t like any bear, elk, deer, or any other large animal he had ever encountered. He said it was a deep, guttural growl.
The following night, I was sleeping in my bed. I woke to see the flood lights on that corner of the house had been turned on. My bedroom windows faced both West and North. The flood lights illuminated the 20 or so feet of cleared space between our house and the forest. I was on the second floor. The first floor was a walkout basement, and on the back corner of the house where my room was located, the room below me was buried in earth up to the bottom of its window. The windows on the bottom floor were all standard height. There were no egress windows. They all looked straight out onto the ground. I stared out into the night that was now illuminated as bright as day when I saw a black figure streak past my windows. It came from the west side of the house into the clearing, right past the corner of the house and disappeared just North of it. It was traveling in a Northeasterly direction. I could only see the top 1 or 1 1/2 feet of it.
It was lightning fast.
For me to have been able to see it at all, it had to have been standing at least 10 feet tall. It was 9 feet from the ground to the bottom edge of my window. I was still laying in bed when I saw it.
Several years later, I was riding my horse through the woods. As I would often do, I rode bareback with just a bridle on. He was a show horse and he was voice-trained. I loved riding him because he was so well trained. I spent a lot of time as a kid trying to read his thoughts, to understand what he might be thinking… to communicate with him somehow. He took great care of me. He was a beautiful bay with a black mane and tail. He was half Quarter Horse, half Thoroughbred. They call it a “Running Quarter.” All I knew was… I loved him.
We were riding down a trail in the woods about a mile behind our house when suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks. He was normally not sky or skiddish of much, so it really surprised me that he would react that sharply or quickly. His head came straight up in the air and his eyes widened, looking off to his left, with his ears pointed high and directly in front of him.
I stared off through the trees in the direction of his line of sight to see if I could make out what had startled him. Was it a deer? A bear? I couldn’t see a thing. I looked and looked. All I could see were the base of tall evergreen trees, the ground covered in pine needles, and the trunks of a few deciduous trees. It had rained recently, so the trunks were blackened with rain.
I stared off in that direction for quite some time, trying to listen for any sounds of an animal nearby. He never moved. He just kept staring straight ahead, nostrils flaring, silent as stone. He didn’t even breathe hard. It was almost as if he was trying to make it look like he wasn’t even alive.
I whispered very quietly to him. “What are you looking at?” He turned one ear back to listen to me, but then turned it straight ahead again. He wouldn’t move. I thought I saw some movement out of the left corner of my eye, so I looked back. The only thing I could see were the tree trunks. At one point, however, it looked like one of the trees had disappeared, but when I looked back, it was there again. For a moment, it looked like it was swaying.
“I must be imagining things,” I told myself–trying to make something there when it isn’t. My horse never moved. After about 10 full minutes of peering into the forest and not seeing or hearing anything, I picked up the reins and gave him a gentle squeeze with my legs and a soft kiss.
Trusting me as much as he did, he started walking forward as normal. About 10 paces later, he stopped dead in his tracks again, his head held high, eyes wide, and staring in the exact same direction. I looked through the trees again to see what I could see. I still couldn’t see anything, but it did look like there was a tree swaying in the wind somehow. It was too far away for me to really tell.
Finally, I just had to trust his instincts over my own. I laid the reins down across his neck, let go of them, and gave him a squeeze again with my legs. Knowing he could go where he wanted now, he did an immediate 180 degree turn and took off in the other direction. He was trained in the Australian Pursuit, which is a walking race. That’s what he did all the way home. In fact, he was walking so fast, I had to lean back to keep from getting bounced off him. He kept that pace without stopping until we were at the corral gate, and he was pushing at the gate the whole time I was trying to open it, desperate to get in.
I still don’t know what he saw that day… but ever since I have started seeing videos and documentaries on TV about the phenomenon, I have wondered…
The reason I believe that encounter was a Sasquatch, is because that area was littered with small saplings, both ends stuck in the ground, bent over one another forming a sort of dome shape when looking from the side, and forming an X when looking from the top. There was always two, crossing over one another. I always thought it was someone messing around in the woods, but there is one location I knew no one had been in a very long time. I had to use a machete to cut through the brush to get to that area. The cross was fresh.
I saw them everywhere near the trails where I would ride my horse.
A Random Journal Entry…
March 15, 2006
I had a dream last night that I made friends with the Sasquatches that had previously haunted my dreams, and that I would be taking Dad’s place in London because he was being called somewhere else to do something more important.
I still dream of Sasquatch.
In my dreams, I am usually at the edge of a thick forest, seeing them all around me, but they are hidden from everyone else. People tell me they don’t see them, or believe in them. I’m quite matter-of-fact about it. I tell them. Look over there, and point directly at one… and then another, and then another. They wonder at why they couldn’t see them before when they’re in plain sight.
I shrug my shoulders.
I know they can tell when I’m near. I know I attract them somehow. It’s as if they come closer because they want to hear my thoughts more clearly. I telepathically draw them in.
Who knows? I still dream about them.
In my dreams, they are a form of human, extremely intelligent, and telepathic. Which is why they escape detection and capture so easily… They can hear you coming.
