Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “My wife and I recently had a very interesting experience on Swan Lake in Washington.

We were simply looking for a new lake to explore with our paddle boards and have a picnic. It’s a long drive from the Spokane area, but we thought it would be worth the trip. We arrived at the lake around 2:00 p.m., maybe a little earlier. There weren’t many people or campers around. We noticed one fisherman in some kind of individual floating device where his legs and feet were in the water but the device kept the rest of him above the surface.

He was sitting in a cove. The lake isn’t particularly large, and as we started paddling along the shoreline, something caught my attention.

I heard a huge WHACK.

My wife was about 15 to 20 feet ahead of me, and I immediately joked, “Oh, Sasquatch is out here!”

I wasn’t being serious. Most of the encounters you hear about seem to happen at two or three in the morning, which I always find a little suspicious. But the sound was so loud that I couldn’t help wondering what had caused it. Had a tree cracked? Had a large branch fallen? It sounded almost like something had struck a tree.

We laughed about it and kept paddling.

Then something even stranger started happening.

As we continued along the shoreline, I began hearing owls. One after another.

At first, I didn’t think much of it. But then I noticed what seemed to be a pattern. We’d hear an owl somewhere offshore near us. We’d continue paddling along the shoreline, and then we’d hear another owl farther along our path. Then another. And another.

It seemed like they were following us. It became increasingly eerie because we aren’t accustomed to hearing that many owls during the middle of the day.

But here’s the really strange part. Whenever I called out to my wife and said something like, “Do you hear those owls?” everything would suddenly stop.

Complete silence.

No owl calls. No other noise. Nothing.

Then we’d paddle for a while, and eventually we’d hear another owl.

This happened several times. I can’t explain it, and maybe it was all coincidence, but it was definitely creepy. The combination of the enormous crack or whack against the tree, followed by what seemed like a series of owls tracking our movement and then everything going silent whenever I called my wife’s attention to it really stuck with us.

I’m curious whether this is actually normal behavior for owls. Are multiple owls commonly active during the middle of the day? Is it normal to hear them calling one after another along a stretch of shoreline? Or could there be another explanation for what we were hearing?

I’m not claiming that what we experienced had anything to do with Sasquatch. I honestly don’t know. I’m just curious because of the sequence of events and how unusual the whole experience felt. Since moving to Spokane from California, I’ve become much more aware of the stories coming out of this region, especially around places like Priest Lake and Colville. Interestingly, this experience also reminded me of something that happened several years earlier.

In 2019, I took my son hiking in the Colville area near the Canadian border. I don’t remember the name of the trail, but something happened during that hike that I didn’t think much about at the time.

My son was about 11 years old, and at one point, something off the trail started growling at us. We couldn’t identify what it was.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about Sasquatch at all. I grew up in California’s Central Valley, and although I’d hiked extensively along the coast, in Yosemite, and in the mountains above Sonora, Bigfoot was never really on my radar. I had never given it much thought.

It wasn’t until I moved to Washington and, especially, around 2023 when I started listening to your show that I became much more interested in Sasquatch stories. Looking back now, that experience with my son seems a little more interesting than it did at the time. Whatever was growling at us was close enough that we could clearly hear it, but we couldn’t figure out what animal it was.

That might be a story for another time, though.

For now, I’m more curious about what happened on Swan Lake. Is the owl behavior we experienced normal? Has anyone else reported something similar in that area?

Thanks for listening. I’d love to hear your thoughts.”