A listener writes “I grew up with my Grandparents since 6mths old in a rural designated suburb of Ipswich in Queensland, Australia called Ironbark. Ipswich itself is a 45 minute drive from Brisbane. Out here most of the houses are plotted upon at minimum 20 acres and during the 2000s when this happened, we only had just gotten the roads around all blacktopped and not yet had any street lights placed up so high beams on cars are used to help seeing and avoiding Kangaroos and Wallabies when they came up along side the road to eat the grass.
I was an outdoorsy kid running around in the paddock barefoot, climbing trees and so for a little while at this time I had been apart of the local Scouting group in a nearby town where for a couple hours on a Tuesday night we’d drive there to then go learn first aid or field craft and or getting ready for upcoming events like Operation Night Owl or going out across South East Queensland to go hiking or camping in National Parks like O’Reillys. I deeply enjoyed Scouting and ended up doing it for 8 years till finally I decided to take up Cadets.
We had left this one Tuesday night in Late May when it was getting cold for Winter and it would take us 25-30 minutes to get from the nearby town back home. We had a 1992 Toyota Camry at the time and was a good little run around car for my Grandma to use for getting me dropped off to school and grocery shopping but itself was only a small car height wise of 1.4m (4.5ft) so really only came up to my shoulders at the time (I was 10 soon turning 11).
When we had crossed the Highway and just got into our road to travel up to our house at the intersection (1.5km road long) we had to turn the blind corner to then drive the straight road that took us to our drive way. When we had turned the blind corner, we had our high beams on as along this road had a couple houses between but mostly open areas along side to road with grasses which nearly every night Roos, Hares and Wallabies would come out so to avoid hitting them when they started we from afar would turn the beams on to give them notice, this one night however we had noticed that the reflective marker that lined this none lit road seemed to be a bit higher up and seemed to not reflect red (the markers themself had like red bicycle reflectors on them) and this seemed to be glowing a bright off LED yellow. We seen this both from a distance of 400m (430+ yards) so we got a sight of this for a good 25-30 seconds as the speed limit on the road is 60kmph (35 miles) but because my grandmother was wary of kangaroos we would drive slower by being 5km under the limit.
We started to ask each other what it was? if it was an owl or someone near was playing with Glowsticks and had gotten on stuck in a tree next to the road. It wasn’t till we drove up and realised that it wasn’t a tree as this being had turned its full body to face us and was standing at 8.5ft – 9ft tall. It had been side on to us (so we were seeing its left side) to then face front onto us, it was standing in a yard appearing to be looking towards the house and when it had turned to see us it was standing about 10 yards from the 3 lined barbed wire fence line that this house had running by the road.
When we had gotten to about the persons driveway, we would have been no more than 12 metres away from the car itself before it had turned again facing to us its right side and then walk over the fence line in 2 paces, my grandmother had slowed down to a crawl and we had met head on with it with the front bumper of the Camry being 3m (10ft) away from this thing.
Now the interesting thing was that we had seen the eye glowing and off yellow LED colour before our camry’s highbeam had lit up all of the red reflecting markers alongside the road and even when we had gotten to a slow crawl and was inline with it as it had walked over the fence line and was crossing the road in front of us and clearing the road in 3 paces, our highbeams were directly on it however the amount of hair that this figure had was still unable to clearly define the thing. The longer hair itself would shimmer like that of a cloud silverlining but the jet black hair of the figure seemed to absorb the light.
I panicked and had told my grandmother to hit it with our little sedan but she quickly answered back with ‘no, it’s just a man, just a man in suit’ to which I followed up with ‘how many tall men around here live with a Gorilla costume’. It had actually shaken my grandmother up during this encounter after we both had to move ourselves forward in our seat just to look up and see this figure’s head.
It proceeded to clear the fence line in two steps and then made another 3 paces across the road infront of us all in a steady pace like it was willingly taking its time and showing/presenting itself.
We have passed by this spot down the road from us many times over the last 2 decades and the only significance of that exact spot is that when it rains head the dam that the property this encounter happens at has water come across the road where you’d find both turtles, crayfish which we call Yabbies and small fish like Black Perch. So i figure that perhaps that it has been to that area before to gather food but had gotten caught up with looking at the house and we disturbed its evening viewing of the neighbours house.
Once it had passed infront of us, we then tried to look out our window to see that it had cleared up the right side bank and into another neighbours property which then after a few seconds we just got out of there and made it up the road to then tell my grandfather which he didn’t believe me, but started to ask questions to my grandmother to if they had seen something which my grandmother at the time only did mention a little before going all quiet.
She still today doesn’t like to mention about how a large possibly 9ft dark figure with long jet black hair passed close infront of our car unphased.
In 2020, I started to dip down again into the whole bigfoot/yowie rabbithole and had found that a man in Ipswich was trying to put dots to locations from old newspaper and eyewitness reports similar to how Australian Yowie Researcher (AYR, the guys on the Gold Coast who had the thermal footage of the two large figures at night in Springbrook National Park).
I contacted Paul whom I told my account to of which he followed up with that he had a report by my neighbour whom I put 2 and 2 together to know who it is and the report he took stated that she was coming home one evening in 2016 where as she was turning into her driveway, she had seen a large man in black in the tree line watching her drive in and the turned to turn into the bush and walk away. She happens to live about 100m down the road from us so this was alot closer to home.
There’s been a few times both as a Kid and Teen that you’d feel like there is someone watching you but nothing enough to show signs or see anything, just an uneasy feeling in both my paddock and neighbouring areas which I’d jump fences and walk into the bush to go look for animals and or cut through paddocks when bikeriding my bicycle around.
I don’t have any incidents with Min Min lights however my aunt and cousins when living in the Northern Territory have seen twice, if that is something you’d like to also cover and talk about id be more then happen to talk about their encounters as the second encounter is very abnormal but not unheard of for these balls of light out in the Outback.”
