A listener writes “In 1974, my mother, my brother and I lived in Sacramento, Ca. In April 1974, we went on a trip up the coastline during which we visited multiple beaches and camped along the way. I remember playing on the beach, collecting driftwood, and being afraid of the powerful waves of the ocean.
We had a 1967 GMC club van with a rear seat which folded out into a bed. This is where we slept as we camped. One of the places we stayed is at Patrick’s Point State Park. What I remember about that place was the campground being way uphill from the beach, and the place was surrounded by redwood trees and was scenic and beautiful. We went to sleep that night in our van. My mother was on the driver’s side. My brother was on the passenger side, and I was in the middle.
Sometime in the middle of the night I awoke. I’m not sure why, but I believe I heard something moving around. When I sat up and looked out the passenger side of the van, I was face to face with a manlike creature. It had stopped whatever it was doing and stood squarely in front of me, facing me.
Though it was the middle of the night or possibly closer to early morning, I could see somewhat clearly. I think it must have been a moonlit night and my vision was always very good, certainly much better than it is now. I thought I was looking at a man. He stared at me very intently and looked very wary as well. I looked at him the same way. I wondered why he was here, what he was up to, and whether I should be concerned with his presence, but he made no move toward us. Also, I wondered why he was so strange looking and so ugly.
He was probably within 25 feet from me. He was a sort of ashy gray. His skin was gray and so was his hair. Mostly, I just stared at his face, but I did notice some things about his body as well. He had bold looking eyes. I can’t remember exactly how his nose looked, but I believe that it had open nostrils from my perspective but was not large. His mouth was large however, and at some point it was agape so that I could see his teeth. They were large, blocky, and had some space between them. Years later, I would describe them as those of a caveman. His facial proportions were off. His eyes were too close to the top of his head from my perspective.
His mouth was closer to where his chin would be, with a longer distance between the nose and mouth. There was no forehead and the top of the head had a crest shape to it. If you were to make a triangle of about 120 degrees and round off the top of it, this is in the neighborhood of what I saw. This shape always really stuck with me for some reason. The hair was fairly short and came forward from the top of the head down and stopped at the brow, except where it sort of came around the sides of the eyes and sort
of blended into the face.
The area around the eyes and the upper part of the nose was hairless. I don’t remember seeing ears. Also, there was some skin showing on the center of the chest. It had prominent musculature on the chest, shoulders and arms. I didn’t even know what that was at the time, but I did observe it. Nothing below the waist or the forearms got my attention. Since he stayed there looking at me during the encounter, which may have been several minutes or more, I never saw his profile from another angle.
Eventually, I tried to wake up my brother, then my mother and that is when the “man” moving very strangely, crept back into the forest. Neither of them wanted to be woken, and I went back to sleep. First thing in the morning, I told my mother that I had seen an “ugly man”. After asking around, nobody else around the campground had experienced anything unusual, and we left. A few months later, when my mother got married and we were moving into a house in Sacramento, I was helping unpack a box of books. One of those books belonging to my stepdad was “Abominable Snowmen of North America…Do They Really Exist?” As I was thumbing through the pages and looking at the drawings of bigfoot, I started asking questions. My mom’s answer is that it is like a hairy man who lives in the woods. A light bulb went off, and I have been a believer ever since.”