This happened to two friends and mine in August, 2007, twenty miles northeast of Highway 17, near the town of Iron Bridge, Ontario. It would probably help to describe the property that we were on. It is a 750-acre parcel with a forty-foot-wide river running through it. Extending out from this river at both sides are dense marshlands. There is a set of power lines that run through the property, commonly referred to as the “hydro-lines”, and there is a trail that runs underneath them, occasionally jutting out to either side.
The property has a wide variety of animals, including deer, bear, moose and a few ground squirrels. I haven’t had much time to actually check out all of this property for two reasons: the property is too immense to be fully covered, and the property has only been owned by my family for the last two years. That contributes to why I found it alarming to have a strange experience on only my third visit to the property.
THE ARRIVAL
On a Friday morning at 2 a.m., I picked up my two friends, Adam and Joe, and headed up I-75 toward the Canadian border in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. We arrived at the property around three in the afternoon. We dropped the trailer off at the cabin and unloaded the car quickly. I handed my friends the set of keys to the cabin so that I could head back into Iron Bridge before nightfall to get some beer while they unpacked everything.
That evening passed uneventfully. We enjoyed the beautiful views from the hill on which the cabin rests, built a fire, listened to my friend jam out on his guitar, and basically got drunk and swapped stories.
We woke up around eight in the morning and loaded up my Yamaha Rhino ATV, which basically looks like a golf-cart on steroids. We packed all of our fishing gear into the bed, leaving just enough room for my heavier friend to sit down comfortably. After firing the engine and putting it into gear, on a whim I decided to grab my 12-gauge rifle from the cabin. My friend Adam asked me if I was planning on fishing with it, to which I replied with a smile, “No. Wildlife protection.”
After a forty-five minute drive down one-lane trails, between huge stone formations and across dry riverbeds that still threatened to get the vehicle stuck, we finally arrived at a massive lake that my dad had found during his recent visit. We parked the Rhino, took the keys out, unloaded our gear and grabbed the shotgun, as I didn’t want any passerby stealing my weapon, even though there is absolutely no one near that city unless it’s winter and they’re on a snowmobile.
After fishing for the entire day and cooking our catch around lunch-time right on the shore, we noticed that the shadows were starting to come out and that we would only have another hour of daylight left. My friend Adam insisted that this was the best time to be fishing, so I let him do his thing while Joe and I loaded our gear into the back of the Rhino.
As I was securing my rods with a bungee cord, Joe poked me in the side and pointed at a ridge off to our right. “Do you think it’s a bear?” he asked.
FIRST SIGHTING
Unfortunately, I didn’t bring my binoculars with me, so I wasn’t able to get a great look at it, but it looked to me like a bear, most likely attracted to our delicious lunch that we had cooked a few hours earlier. It looked to stand about two-feet tall, black in color and relatively-wide shouldered. I then watched it drop below the ridge and shrugged it off.
When I told Adam about this, he quickly decided that it would be in his best interest to wrap up his fishing before this “bear” decided to get a closer look at us to see if we had cooked a fish for it as well. I also loaded my shotgun. We started the Rhino, loaded Adam’s gear and everyone piled in. I tucked the shotgun between Joe and the gear in the back of the Rhino and told him to keep it handy, because if it was a female bear with cubs, this could get ugly.
Joe later tells me that he noticed shadowy movement in the brush just behind where we were fishing as we were pulling away.
After heading down the trail for only a few-hundred yards, my friend Adam, who was sitting in the passenger seat, put his arm across my chest and instructed me, quite harshly, to stop. He then took the flashlight out of the glove-box and shined it off to our right saying that he noticed something moving quite quickly behind the tree line. I then shouted, “Then why did you tell me to stop!?” and promptly jammed the accelerator while telling Joe to hang onto the roll bar because I didn’t plan on driving leisurely back to the cabin.
STUCK
I took the Rhino all the way up to its governor at 40mph while we were passing between two large rock formations. Usually, wildlife doesn’t spook me, but having my friend tell me that he’d seen something moving quickly alongside us, I was starting to doubt that it was a bear. No bear will chase you when you’re driving a loud, half-ton vehicle loaded with supplies with its headlights and taillights on. This was confirmed after I took a turn around a blind corner too fast. I had forgotten that a heavily-rutted, muddy area was on the other side of the turn and the Rhino fishtailed slightly, luckily didn’t roll and stuck its rear end deeply in the mud. I put it in four-wheel, hit the accelerator and it didn’t move.
At this point, my friend Adam was shouting every curse word in the book, telling me that I’d gotten us stuck and that we were going to get eaten by a bear. I locked all the axles and still was unable to get it to budge, I knew we were going to have to winch it out. I jumped out of the Rhino without opening the door, instructed Adam to get the winch ready and grabbed the shotgun out of the back. Joe looked at me wide-eyed, asking me what the hurry was. I didn’t answer his question and told him to help Adam with the winch controls while I covered them with the shotgun.
Meanwhile, I didn’t notice anything moving around us, but it was pitch black and the engine was running on the Rhino, which would cover up the noise of any creature’s approach. “How’s the winch coming?” I yelled.
“We’ve got it hooked,” Joe yelled back to me. “Just need to get it moving. How’s it looking on your end?”
“Zero movement!” I yelled. Joe tightened the winch and the Rhino slowly pulled itself out of the hole that I had dug it into and back onto semi-solid ground.
That’s when I noticed it in the Rhino’s headlights.
THE CREATURE WATCHES
It stood about four-feet tall, was solid black and looked remarkably like a small person in a monkey suit. Its eyes did not produce any eyeshine in the headlights, and it didn’t move, but I could tell it was looking right at us. I took five steps forward, pumped a round into the chamber, which definitely got my friend’s attention, and ordered them to hurry up, in not the nicest words. Joe, who was working the winch controls had seen it in the headlights and yelled, “Holy ____! What the ____ is that? Is it a bear?”
The creature then squatted down low to the ground and began to rock side to side. This frightened me, as this is the first time I had seen it move and I interpreted that rocking motion as it letting us know that it knows that we see it. It wanted us to move again. I’ve noticed this before while hunting. Deer will often stop what they are doing, look at you and bob their heads up and down and stomp their feet in an attempt to get you to move again so they can get a better look at you.
Meanwhile, Adam turned around to look at us and saw me with the shotgun up to my shoulder and a very terrified look on my face. He then glanced ahead of us and screamed murder at sight of this thing hunched down low to the ground. I told him to pull the winch cable into the cab with us because it was going to take too long for the motor to wind up fifty feet of steel cable. I told him to get into the driver’s seat and that I would ride shotgun. Joe scrambled into the back of the Rhino and I sat shotgun with the door open and my seatbelt loose so I could lean out to the side to get the barrel past the windshield. I instructed him to drive slowly, as this creature was still squatting in the middle of the trail that we were on.
It seemed that when the creature noticed the Rhino rolling forward, it stood up to its full height, but still didn’t move out of our way. When we were about thirty yards away, I instructed Adam to stop and rev the engine in an attempt to get it out of the way. The animal was not intimidated by us, our vehicle or our loud “growl” from the engine. I fired a shot and it let out the most blood-curdling scream and dropped down into a hunched position. This scream started at a loud, deep growl and ended in a quiet clicking, “whiney” noise.
At thirty-yards, I knew that the small “00” buckshot pellets weren’t going to do much damage, but I hoped it would at least move the creature off the trail. It didn’t, so I racked the shotgun and fired another round at it. This time it screamed again and crashed through the tree-line off to our right. I’ve hunted bear before, and bear do not scream like this creature did.
“Drive!” I yelled. We got back to the cabin in record time, just in time for a massive downpour. I stood out by the Rhino with the shotgun while Joe and Adam rushed all of the essentials back into the cabin. We all slept in the main room that night, and none of us slept well.
AFTERMATH
The next morning, we drove to where we had seen and shot at the creature. I had brought my camera in case there were any prints. It had rained too hard the previous night, and everything had washed away. I couldn’t even find my spent shotgun shells as the water had swept everything away. Needless to say, we were very disappointed not to collect any evidence of this being’s existence.
We stayed the rest of the week and didn’t encounter anything else. We didn’t go back to the lake, and no one ventured out alone. We even went out as a group when one person had to use the restroom during the night. The shotgun never left our side, and we were constantly on edge. I often found Adam standing outside the cabin, scouring the horizon with my high-powered binoculars, looking for anything large and black moving through the woods or the marshland.
After speaking with a few locals at the gas station, they said that they had never noticed any creature that looked like our description of the creature; however, there had been Bigfoot sightings in towns to the north. Most people said that I had most likely saw a bear and were quite upset that I had shot at it.
What I had seen definitely wasn’t a bear. Bears do rise up onto their hind legs from time to time, but they do not run on their hind legs or go down into a squatting position. I plan on going up with my same friends this August to do some fishing and sightseeing. We plan on bringing more weaponry and cameras with us this time, though.
Source:Paranormal.About.com
