Feb 4

“Strange noises” in the woods

A listener writes “I thought I’d send you a couple of recordings that my ex husband and I made back in 2006 and in 2017. I will attach them at the end of this email along with a loop and spectrograph from David Ellis at the Olympic Project. This is what he said.

“One of the vocalizations you captured is a call I have been following for quite some time. I haven’t gotten into the detail just yet but suffice to say I saw the visual marker in a spectrogram that indicated this specific vocalization.”

The first recording was in Southern Oregon and we were camping up at Willow Lake which is near the small town of Butte Falls.

It was the first week of October and there was no one else in the campground except the camp host and us.

On a couple of nights, we were woken up by a strange, high pitch screaming/yelling. On the second night, after the first few screams, we remembered that our camera had a video setting and started to record it.

The camera microphone was extremely sensitive! You can clearly hear the water faucet near our tent dripping and the heater clicking.

After the first few screams, the coyotes started howling, then it became intermixed with the screams. We also heard loud growling, grunting sounds. These grunting sounds are heard at 12, 27, 46, 1:02, 2:02, 2:11, 2:45, 3:04, 3:34, and 5:07.on the recording.

After the first night I went 35 miles into town to buy a cassette recorder. We turned it on recorder at 4:00 minutes into the camera recording but it was too noisy!

A couple came to the campground the next day to use the showers and we talked with them a while. They were doing the fire watch at a logging site a couple miles from the lake.

When Robert, my ex husband asked them if they had heard anything strange, the guy said hell yes we heard something strange! And he said he got up and got his gun ready just in case! He said he half expected to have something come flying through the door of their RV!

This was not my first encounter with “strange noises” in the woods, which I have believe was Bigfoot.

In 1976, me, my first husband, Dave, his brother and his brothers wife, all went deer hunting in October of that year. We went to an area off Grizzly road, near 37 road, called Short Creek Burn, to camp and hunt.

The area to me, has always been kind of creepy. One of my sister-in-laws had actually gotten lost over night in the area the year before. It is fairly deep in the woods, and has a large open meadow that has a drift fence on 3 sides and a little creek at the end of the meadow. There is an old, abandoned forrest service cabin in one corner of the pasture near the tree line and we set up camp about 20 yards away from the old cabin. After we set up camp, my husband and his brother left in one of the vehicles to go scouting and see if there were many deer in the area.

They left my sister in law, I will just call her T, and myself in camp sitting around the campfire.

It was a damp night, so we put the guns in the canopy on the back of the pick up, all except for T’s 270 and her 22 pistol. (I don’t want to use her name. When my daughter, after seeing one, asked her about this years later, she looked at my daughter and said “I don’t know what you’re talking about”.)

It was now very dark and we had a huge fire going. About 20 feet from the fire was brush and saplings that stood about 15 or 20 feet tall and probably 20 feet deep. The fire we had going was quite large, the place was lit up almost like daylight and all the birds and squirrels in that brush were going nuts chattering and squawking, rustling around making so much noise that I yelled “SHUT UP” really loudly.

Well they did shut up, but almost instantly, something else yelled back! And it was close, real close! And really, really loud!

It was a sound that I had never heard before in my life! And I grew up in southern Oregon running around in the woods.

This was a sound you could feel, that made every hair on your body stand on end! It started out like a deep moaning, screaming wail, then went higher pitched, then went down into a growling roar! It lasted what seemed like an hour but I’m sure it was not more than 10 or 15 seconds.

We looked at each other and I’m sure my eyes were just as big as hers! T, (who was a city girl) stuttered, “wha….wha….wha….what was that?”

I don’t really know why, but I immediately thought of Sasquatch, but I didn’t want to tell her that, so I replied,

“I don’t know, but I’m getting in the truck!”

But we didn’t have the keys to the truck, her husband had them in his pocket! Luckily, it wasn’t locked so we just sat in the cab with the doors locked, trembling with fear!

I can tell you for a certainty, if either of us had known how to hotwire a car, we would have been long gone! And we wouldn’t have stopped to open the barbed wire gate either!

We were not hiding from anything though. The truck was an old, early 60’s chevy pick up with and old wooden canopy on it, and we were shaking so hard the whole truck was rattling!

And we were both crying. T wanted to turn on the headlights (the truck was facing the pasture so our backs were now to the fire), I actually told her that if she turned on those lights I would shoot her! I did NOT want to see what made that noise. It all seems rather comical now, but certainly wasn’t at the time!

When our husbands finally showed up, the fire was down to coals, and they got kind of scared because we weren’t in the tent or any where around! They yelled our names but we were too scared to yell back. They finally walked over to the truck which was parked about 20 feet from the tent. We wouldn’t open the doors till they were right there next to the truck.

They were laughing because we wouldn’t get out of the truck because we were so scared. We told them what had happened and course, my brother in law tried to say it was an elk, or a mountain lion, anything but a Sasquatch. But I know what all the bigger animals around here sound like, and believe me, whatever made that sound had to be very big! There was no way he was going to convince me it was an elk or cougar!

We wanted to leave right then, but they finally convinced us to go ahead and spend the night there, after all, we had several guns in the tent with us. But that wasn’t very comforting to either of us.

The next day, we refused to hunt there, so we drove several miles away to hunt.

Both her and my abs were really sore from shaking so hard the night before! I felt like I had done several hundred crunches! All my muscles ached!

Also, later, Dave my husband told me that when he got out to open the gate when they came back, he heard a large limb break up the fence line from where he was. He didn’t mention that the night before since we were already so frightened.

Now before this happened, I wasn’t particularly interested in anything that had to do with Bigfoot. But that was the first thought that popped into my mind when I heard that scream. It was almost like every animal noise I knew went through my mind in a split second and the noise we had just heard didn’t match any animal I knew of!

But that was not the end of Sasquatch at Short Creek Burn!

In 1992, once again, my husband Dave and I, the same brother in law and his (new) wife went to camp at Short Creek Burn.

Only this time we were in travel trailers !

My husband and I had arrived late in the afternoon. We set up camp, built a fire, ate dinner, and were waiting for his brother and sister in law to arrive. They were bringing their own camp trailer up after he got off work, which we knew would be quite late since he was a bar tender.

When it started to get dark, My husband and I went inside and went to bed.

It was still early, just getting dark, but we knew we would need to be up early to hunt for elk.

After we had been in bed a little while, but were not asleep yet, I heard a familiar sound!

NO! Not again I thought!

Yep, it was back, only farther away this time. So not as loud.

I sat up and said….”Did you hear that?”

My husband, in a matter of fact voice replied, “Yes, I heard it!”, almost like he couldn’t believe that he was really hearing it!

I opened the window nearest our heads so we could hear it better. I was not scared this time though. Maybe because my husband was with me, or that we were inside an RV, or because it was farther away, or maybe just because I was older and wiser, but it did not affect me the same as the first time I heard it all those years earlier.

It kept screaming for an hour or so and seemed to move around and come from different directions like it was circling the meadow. Or maybe there was more than one. I couldn’t tell for sure.

Anyway, it finally faded into the distance and we fell asleep. A couple hours later, we woke up when his brother and sister in law arrived, so we got up and visited with them for a little while before going back to bed.

The screams soon started up again but we went back to sleep since they didn’t sound too close!

The next morning I asked my brother and sister in law if they had heard anything the night before. My brother in law said he didn’t hear anything, but my sister in law quickly answered “I heard it!”

I haven’t been camping at Short Creek Burn since then, but in 2017 me & my ex were going to meet up with my daughter and her husband up there to do some squatching, but the road down into the burn itself has been blocked off. And was grown over. Looked like no one has been down there for a long time. We drove on past the burn area on an old overgrown logging road till it was blocked with fallen trees and we had to turn around. We didn’t hear the usual forest noises, birds and small critters rustling the leaves on the forest floor.

It was extremely quiet. But we did hear one bird, or what we assumed was a bird. Although I have never heard a bird like that around here before, but I’m not knowledgeable of all the bird calls around there, so that doesn’t mean much. But it was the only sound we heard and it was reminiscent of the mocking jay in the Hunger Games movies! And very echoey sounding, but not a repeating echo, just eerie sounding. Was it really a bird? Maybe, maybe not.

After my daughter and son-in-law arrived we sat there near the burn listening for anything out of the ordinary. We did a couple of tree knocks and some whoops. We had a parabolic mic with a digital recorder on which we captured a very scary roar on! After that roar, we left the area!”

 

Here are some clips of the audio:

One Response to ““Strange noises” in the woods”

Leave a Reply