Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “I saw that there are reports for my area, I live in Chico California / Butte county California and it wasn’t until I listened to a recent show of a gentleman you spoke with who is from Paradise / Magalia.

I know the area well that he spoke about and he is correct unfortunately a lot of that is gone due to the campfire that happened in 2018. it did destroy most of the entire town of paradise and the surrounding Forest area. Which is unfortunate because it was beautiful.

My encounter happened in a park that locals call upper Park at the base of a small mountain called monkey face. I included some pictures so you ha e an idea of the area.

My experience, at the time I was 19 – 21 years old and one of my friends and I we used to love going to that Park in the summer at night because it was the safest Park to go to at night. The other park that’s in town we would stay away from because that’s where the homeless and the transients will camp at night and it’s not safe for anybody to be walking alone in that park at night, where this park, it’s too far away from people and the homeless are not going to walk down this road to go there at all. Except us.
I can’t remember the exact month we went or time like I said unfortunately I know it was when I was 19 to 21 years old in the middle of summer and it was summer enough to where the nights felt like day. It was warm but not hot sometimes there would be that perfect breeze.

It was a clear sky the moon was out, I can’t remember if it was a full moon or not but there was enough light from the moon that we could see around us. we decided to go up to the observatory or the parking lot area with my friend’s boyfriend and he brought his friend.

So it’s myself, my girlfriend Nikki and her boyfriend Doug and his friend Josh.

The gates to the park close at 9:00pm so vehicles are not able to access the area I don’t necessarily know if people are allowed back there but there’s never anybody watching so we just would go back into the park almost every night.

The four of us decided to walk down the path and it was probably a 20-30 minute walk maybe and you’re just walking in the middle of the night surrounded by trees.

The entire time we had been going up to that Park we never felt threatened by anything we always felt safe and even with wildlife the most we would see is a deer. The four of us are walking in about halfway through Josh decides he thinks this is dumb and he wants to go back to his car and just hang out.

So myself Nikki and Doug we all continue to go to the parking lot and we decide to sit on a bench that’s closest to the wood thicket that’s at the base of the mountain, so we’re sitting there for hours just hanging out talking enjoying the weather after a while we all come into a comfortable silence.
And after a while sitting in silence we heard walking in front of us.

And what was really weird is the energy shifted not between any of us but the energy around us shifted while we heard this walking and we all know the local wildlife we’ve seen bears we’ve seen mountain lions we know what they sound like we know what they’re vocalization sound like and what was so weird about this was it sounded it was just a few feet away but we couldn’t see it. Like somebody just walking through the grass and the trees. Not necessarily like a casual leisure kind of walk but not a fast determined walking they were just walking, and I’m sorry for putting too much detail into how they were walking but they were definitely walking with a purpose. I sat there looking at the trees in front of me and I couldn’t see anything it was so close, like if I decided to go walk out to these trees it would be 10 paces but I couldn’t see a thing and we just continued to hear this walking it was just too thumps and I say thumps because that was extremely distinctive when we were listening.

I could distinctively hear only 2 feet hitting the ground and when they would hit the ground they would hit the ground with the thumb so at first I thought it was a bear just rummaging around in the grass but that thought quickly left because the closer I listened to it like I said the more it just sounded like two feet with a very distinctive thump on the ground, and because of the thumbs you knew it was something pretty big. it was also dead silent no birds no crickets no deer absolutely nothing made a sound including the three of us because we were so what the hell is in front of us walking.

All of a sudden it just stops and the second it stops something starts growling and this is a growl that I’ve never heard in my entire life and I have been so obsessed with animals since I was little and I’ve never heard anything sounded like this. it wasn’t a bear it wasn’t a mountain lion it wasn’t a bobcat it’s wasn’t a coyote it wasn’t any of those things it was so weird.

It seemed as if it was just walking along until it noticed the three of us just sitting at the bench area and it stopped and started to growl. we have no idea what it was because it’s like all of a sudden the wood thicket and the shadows that it was standing in became darker and I couldn’t explain that either like that was part of why I was so like entranced in this encounter because the moon was out but the shadows were so dark it was like the moon wasn’t even there, and the tree patch that it was in wasn’t necessarily a really thick tree patch. And the trees weren’t too far away. it was like it was standing just on the border of the shadows, if it took one step forward we would have seen it. So it wasn’t normal because normally you could see through those woods you could see some sort of light at least but with this thing there no the shadows. It so dark and this was so weird and abnormal we had no idea and I just continued to lean closer and try and see what the hell was out there I was nervous as hell but I was also curious as hell.

Because I couldn’t understand why the shadows under the trees got so dark it was darker than your normal shadow and I remember I could see things past the shadow like around it because the patch of trees was just under monkey face Rock and you can see around it just fine but in the tree patch it was like a wall of darkness.

And the thing was so close and it just kept this weird guttural growl at us.

When all of a sudden Doug stands up on the bench and he was about 6’2 so he stood straight up and put his arms at his side puffed his chest out but the second he stood straight up the growling stopped and that’s when he told us to get the hell out so I was sitting on the side closest to the trees and i believe my friend Nikki had grabbed me to pull me around the bench, because I was sitting on the side closest to the trees and then her and I kind of linked arms. And we backed away from the bench but we were both kind of hesitant until Doug was like leave again and that’s when I was like okay. And once we got some distance between the benches and us Nikki stopped and didn’t want to leave Doug.

I occasionally talked to Nikki about that night and all she really says is that it was a crazy night and it was unexplainable she doesn’t really comment on what she thinks it was, that’s pretty much all she says.

Doug I never really talked to about it because he and Nikki had broken up shortly after this not because of the incident. And I never got Josh’s opinion on what he thought it was cuz while he didn’t witness anything I found out years later because I ended up marrying Josh’s older brother and I brought this up to my husband and he told me that Josh told him something similar about that night because Josh also ran home and told my husband what had happened to us.

I’m assuming that Doug had explained what happened and the two of them went back to try to see if they could find tracks or anything and they found nothing.”