Jun 29

A Large Human Silhouette

A listener writes “This happened in 2003. I was 11 years old, at the time I had an older brother and an oldest brother, a younger brother, and an oldest sister living at that house.

No mother, dad was gone for weeks at a time trucking, so it was mainly just us. This house is located in Washington state, Thurston County, in a heavily wooded area. The house was located down Bald Hills Rd, then near the end of Johnson Rd, SE. We had a friend over that night, and we’d all usually just play video games all night when he was over. My oldest brother would always be in his room and my oldest sister would always isolate herself and do her own thing. Around 7pm we heard our dog barking in the woods.

Being the little bundles of testosterone filled boys we were we got excited and wanted to see what the dog was barking at. Me, the friend, and my older brother went out to check it out. We kept the dog in an old chicken coop, very spacious. He was pretty aggressive and he attacked me one day and I almost lost an eye, but that’s unrelated. The house and the yard was enclosed with a chain linked fence, outside of that on the west side was like 30 feet of grass then a barbed wire fence to the wood line that stretched all the way south for several acres.

East side is just a bunch of fields and a neighbor.

The dog was located on the west side of the house, next to the barbed wire fence and the woodline. So we go out there with our flashlights and this mean dog looks freaked out, ears down, whining, pacing around. Normally he’s super excited to see us. We shine our flashlights into the woodline and they all make out what looks like a large human silhouette, all black like a shadow. We got scared and ran off back into the house. I don’t remember seeing a human silhouette, I remember seeing something big and very dark, I couldn’t make out what it was.

We were asking ourselves what we thought that was, none of us really had an answer. I was thinking maybe the shadows from the branches made a human shape with our flashlights. OK whatever, excitement dies down and the friend and I go stand on the deck outside the front of the house, I don’t remember why. The deck circled the house all the way around and was probably 5 ft off the ground in front and 8 or 9 ft in the back, the house sat on a hill. Odd I know.

Anyways outside of the chain fence to the north was the garage and big gravel driveway. The porch light only lit up half off the driveway and half of the garage. Anyway friend says he thinks he sees someone walking near the garage in the driveway in the darkened area. He shouts out that they’re on private property and whoever was walking stopped for a few seconds. The gravel footsteps seemed like they were going our direction.

So we get scared again and go inside. We tell my big strong older sister that someone’s walking around our property, which would be unusual considering we were literally in the middle of nowhere. It could be our older neighbor but what would she be doing walking around in the dark in our driveway without a flash light? If you drove to our house you’d think you were in a horror movie and were going to get murdered with how secluded it was. So my sister goes out with a flashlight and starts walking around. She exits through the chain fence gate on the west side and is walking along the woodline. The friend and I stood outside and watched from the deck.

As she is clearing a shed used for storing firewood we hear the most horrific scream I’ve ever heard in my entire life, it sounded like it came from the woods behind the shed. It was really loud, the sound bounced and echoed off the trees. That moment is burned into my mind, as soon as the scream happened I saw my sister quickly shine her light at the shed and my friend and I bolted back into the house. It sounds bad, but I was a kid thinking there was a monster outside and the scream shocked me. I honestly wasn’t thinking  and my legs just moved.

My sister came back inside and said she didn’t see anything and said maybe it was a raccoon. I’ve looked online, listening to all sorts of different sounds that Pacific Northwest animals make at night and nothing sounds close. The best way I can describe how it sounds is if you clench your mouth shut, and you start screaming with all your might, starting with a lower frequency and then very quickly racing the pitch higher, and higher, a very throaty scream. And that horrific sound was loud enough to make an echo.

Anyway excitement dies down and my sister goes to sleep, she has the upstairs room. The upstairs is one room. The rest of my memory about this night is a bit fuzzy, I only remember patches from this point for whatever reason. The next thing I remember is all the lights in the house are off, we’re on the deck and we’re shining our lights in the woods and the field. We shined our flashlights into this large pine tree and saw it filled with eyeshine. The eyes were spaced fairly well apart, I don’t know if this is related to what we were experiencing, or if families of raccoons stay in trees like that.

I remember just focusing on one of the eyes and I saw it shift positions, like a side to side movement and it didn’t break eye contact. My first thought were monkeys in a tree, I kept thinking monkeys. But please note that the entire time this was going on I didn’t know what Bigfoot was. If you know if that was raccoons or owls, it’d be nice to know what that was.

Again, I don’t know if that is related to the hairy man or just a family of animals but I haven’t seen anything like that again since, after that night the tree was always empty. Also at the base of that tree we later found a 5ft teepee right next to it, but that’s later in the story. The next thing I remember is we’re crawling around the floor, in the dark house, I don’t know if it was a fully moon but the moon was very bright that night. I remember we were avoiding the windows, and we had windows like… Everywhere. Large ones, and large sliding doors that didn’t lock.

I remember my younger brother crying in a corner and my older brother comforting him. I remember my older brother said he saw something walking by the windows. We’ve all had enough fun so we decide we should all go wake up our sister after being terrified and telling her to call the police but she just gets mad that we woke her up and tells us there’s nothing out there and kicks us out of her room.

So at this point, I remember feeling like we’re going to die. We’re all scared, my little bro won’t stop crying, and there’s a monster walking around outside, probably wanting to get into the house. Those were just my thoughts that I remember, I felt so trapped. My oldest brother was in his room in the basement the entire time, he’s always in there on his computer.

He comes up and has no idea what’s going on, and nonchalantly goes into our dad’s room, turns on the light and starts playing GTA Vice City. OK, so now we’re thinking maybe we’ll be OK because this brother doesn’t really scare easily and it’s another body that can help us if any more creepy stuff happens. At this point it’s like 2am,and we’re in my dad’s room when the oldest brother pauses the game and tells us to shut up.

There were footsteps just outside the sliding glass door in our dad’s room. It was covered by a curtain thankfully. He just looks at us and is all like “uhhhhh do you guys want to go downstairs?” He never let’s us in his room. So now we’re all huddled in his room and he brings out his baseball bat, he knows something is up. Now we’re all watching him play the classic Aliens vs Predator on window 2000 or XP, I don’t remember. I laid on the ground exhausted and fell asleep. When I woke up I was on the ground at the foot of my dad’s bed.

So I’m thinking why the f am I back in here. There was a large window at the head of the bed, pointing to the north, the driveway. It was daylight, cloudy forecast. My heart started beating like crazy because I was there by myself and I was afraid something would be watching me from the window. After what felt like forever laying there I slowly crept up and peaked over the bed, but didn’t see anything in the window.

After everyone was up we looked around outside and our chain fence gate was broken, the handle was bent. We had a picnic table outside that was destroyed into pieces. I don’t remember seeing footprints but my brothers and friend said they found a bunch. To be fair I didn’t care about footprints, I thought “that’s boring, just look at the destruction this thing made” My friend and older brothers said they heard violent pounding on the house after I fell asleep. Not having any idea what this creature was, my friend suggests it was a yeti.

So we go onto a Bigfoot website and sure enough there are structures on that site that look like what we have in the woods near the house. (the tree with the eye shine I mentioned earlier, we found it before the encounter that night but thought nothing of it) It looked like a teepee. I remember we knocked it over prior, and it was rebuilt when we went back there again. We were back in that area a lot, every time I saw that thing I got bad vibes. We used to love going into the woods and exploring, but after that day we didn’t do it anymore. My dad came home from trucking and we told him what happened and he smiled at us and didn’t seem to believe us, though he did lay his guns out on his bed so he probably believed our story for the most part.

Like a month later the friend came back over and asked if we wanted to go exploring and my brothers and I all said no. My friend got mad and said how we’ve had no sense of adventure ever since the Wookie (Star Wars reference I guess) showed up. Several months later it was summer, me, my younger, and older brother went swimming in a river nearby. At this point we’ve gotten over what happened and assumed it was done with and the yeti was gone. We started calling it the yeti.

So the 3 of us are in the river when my older brother says something is moving through the brush up near the river bank. It’s like a 4 foot drop from the bank into the river very steep, dirt and rock. (This is Deschutes river by the way) My older brother grabs a big stick and is slowly walking up to where he saw the movement. He’s moving like Samurai Jack, ready to beat whatever comes out. My little brother and I are watching, I’m thinking nothing is even there, then there was a very deep vibrating sound.

The best way I heard it described is a very deep bass sound. Like some asshat stopped at a stoplight next to you blasting his bass. It was really loud, I was so confused at what that was I wasn’t sure if it was real at first. The brush started going crazy, my brother threw his stick at it and ran. My younger brother and I quickly followed.

Another summer night, my older brother and younger brother and I loved camping in the yard. West side of the property. We set up our tent on the west side beside the chain link fence.

We’re in there, with our flashlights and books and food, just being kids. We were startled by a swatting sound on the roof of the tent. We all go dead quiet and are looking at each other, then I see a hand swat the tent. I’m scared stiff I can’t move and all I’m thinking is that the monster is back… and this time I don’t have a house to protect me. It swipes the tent again and my older brother slaps it through the tent. We pause for like 10 seconds, nothing happens. Older brother calmly tells us to run.

So we slowly open the tent and then dart into the house. We tell our sister and she says it was probably a cat ???? OK. The last experience I was in my yard at night with a flashlight, feeling brave. I went to the back southwest corner of the yard in the dark and was shining the light around the woodline. Just outside the woodline I caught a glimpse of a pair of amber eyes, it turned to me and started bobbing its head up and down as it walked up to the barbed wire fence and stopped.

It just stood there and stared, and I just stared back with my light. I so badly wanted to hop the fence and get closer to see what it looked like, my legs wouldn’t budge. Every time I built up the courage to hop the fence my fear would shut me down. I don’t know how tall barbed wire fences are… 4ft? The eyes were double the height so probably 7ft or 8ft. Anyways I started walking back to the house and shined the light back to get one last look and it was still there.

That was my last experience, we had to move shortly later. My sister still believes nothing happened. I asked my brother about the loud vibrating sound recently and he says he remembers it. My dad told me one day if I heard “those noises last night” I said no, he said it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. I wasn’t sure if he was messing with me, because there were a few times he blew his elk call outside, so I didn’t ask what the sounds were. I lost contact with my friend and oldest brother, and my younger brother doesn’t remember these events.

I remember a lot of nights seeing our dog staring out the window in the dark at the head of our dads bed, hairs on end, silently growling into the dark. It happened a lot.

So just me and my older brother are the ones still in contact who remember that scary night and events following. If my kids ever tell me they see something unusual outside then I’m going to be on high alert and take them seriously, I wouldn’t want them to feel fear like I did. I now live like 10 minutes from that property, I’m in a more populated area. I’ve thought about going back there but I’m sure someone owns it and I don’t want to creep around other people’s property.

Thanks for taking the time to read my story.”

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