New South Wales
Location: Blue Knob, New South Wales
Event: Yowie Sighting
Date: Summer, 1975
Time: Late
[Male Witness]
I'm 77 now, so forty five years ago or so would make it about summer of 1975. It all happened at the bottom of the Blue Knob mountain. Probably only about four or five miles west from Nimbin.
We were about thirty at the time, something like that. A bit older maybe.
Me and a mate of mine came up from Newcastle. He's dead now, Ivan.
I went up there to buy some land up around that area, and I also needed somewhere to stay at the time.
Ivan had a big black dog with wolf head. We went into Lismore and he bought a young Alsatian pup. It was about a foot and a half long or about eight or ten inches high, beautiful little pup.
We were in the pub one night, and I was asking around. Some bloke mentioned Brendan and Julie who had lived at this old farmhouse. I think it was an old dairy farm years ago, but it was, it was just left with not much there, not even any cows or nothing, just this old house.
They were at the Pub one night and I got talking to them. They warned me about renting that farmhouse, because “there's a yowie there that'll come down. Only if you got dogs. They hate dogs”.
They said they had a bad time with it.
We didn't take any notice of Brendan and Julie, but they said they had a terrible time there and they had kids, and that's why they just bolted out of the place.
We moved in.
It would have been early in the night, and myself and Ivan were still sitting up.
Then the dogs started barking at first. You'd never hear that big dog with the boof head, or my dog weren’t frightened of anything, but they were going off.
I thought, oh, I wonder what they're on about. The big dog came running in the house. Just ran in whimpering.
It in and under Ivan's feet where he's sitting on the lounge, whimpering. My dog was right behind and he ran under my legs. Just then, we heard all this commotion right under our feet. The house was a pole home, and was built on a little bit of a slope.
Under the lounge where we sat was about seven foot high from the ground. There was all this bumping under the floorboards, and I thought, shit, what's going on here?
Then there was this sound under there. Not a growling sound - I wouldn't know what sort of a sound, and we went, shit, what's going on under there?
We didn't know what the bloody hell was going on. The dogs didn’t want to go back out, they were shit scared.
There was all this thumping under the house, and a sound, not a growl, but this thing was making real low, guttural, guttural sort of noise.
It's hard to describe, I've never ever heard anything like it.
That went on for three or four minutes, then it all just stopped.
I had a single barrel shotgun with me. I walked down the hallway and got to the back door and looked down the stairs with a torch, and here's this little dog's head sticking out from under the step.
It was only a couple of steps down and his head was sticking out, so I reached down to pull him out.
I only pulled out his top half, but he's still alive, this poor bastard. He was in half. Split right in the gut. Just pulled apart. Whatever did it has grabbed his thighs on one end and his head and front shoulders and just pulled it in half.
He was still, sort of, semi attached, but in half. We had to hit it on the head to end it.
He was just about dead anyway, the poor bastard.
There were no bite marks or nothing on it. I thought, what could do that to a dog?
We eventually went to bed and daylight the next morning I went out and straight under the house to see what was going on down there.
Blood everywhere where this little dog has been pulled apart. I looked up under the house floor boards where this thing was banging up against, and the blood must have been from the dog being banging up against it.
There was all these clumps of this reddy brown, thickest, of thickest hair you've ever seen, caught all in the splinters.
There were handfuls of it and I'll tell you what, I've never smelt anything like it. It was just that off. I got one of those the big brown shopping bags and about half filled it with this hair.
It was like steel wool. I put it in this bag, and we got the dead dog and put him in a bag and took him straight to the vet in Lismore. We showed him what happened and he wasn't even the slightest concerned or interested.
We took the dog away and buried it.
We reckoned it had to be a yowie that's done this. It's got to be something like a yowie because the people before us who were in this house told us there was a yowie living there, that terrorised them.
They said on the full moon, this thing will come down if you have dogs. They hated dogs in this valley. On a full moon, if you have dogs, and they’re barking, which was the case, they said that thing will come down. It didn't like dogs.
It would come down and frighten the shit out of us. I'm not scared of anything, but I'll tell you what, that thing frightened me.
The hair, or if you want to call it hair, on that thing, it must be a bad ass. Must be eight inches thick. It could run straight through the lantana.
The only way to catch one of those things, I worked it out, is to get a helicopter and put them cameras everywhere up through the scrub up there to monitor it. It’s too thick to walk around up there.
Looking at Google Maps, the farmhouse was on Suffolk Road. It goes up to several farmhouses. There's now a couple of new roads in there.
There's another bloke named Ray S******n. He took a cast of a big footprint up there one day. Big footprint. He came out to the house a few times.
Brendan and Julie, who had that trouble with that thing before us, were terrified.
After they first Encountered it, the next full moon they had, they took the kids into town to be minded, and when they got back, they tied the dogs up down under the house and walked up the side of the hill a little bit to an old dairy shed and sat in there.
They just waited, they waited and waited. Next minute they could hear this thing walking down the hill beside the fence and they reckon it stopped about 10 yards to where they were. They were huddled in this hole inside.
The door opened a little bit and they reckon it must have smelled them or heard them because it turned around and just bowled back up the hill. It knew they were there.
There was a woman down the road from us, I was talking to her, and I asked, do you have any trouble here?
She'd be dead now, she was old, and she said, oh the bloody thing, she said, my little fox terrier was out just on daylight this morning, out in the backyard and it started barking its head off. She said, I ran out there and the Yowie was getting over the fence to get to the dog. She ran out there with a broom waving it around and the thing ran back up the hill.
She told us, you know, no need to tell lies about it.
Another couple who lived out that area, they'd be dead too, and they lived out that road right out past us. They left the Nimbin Bowls Club one night and they said they were driving along, and this yowie came out of the bush and began running along beside their car.
They slowed up, and they reckon it just run alongside the car for about a hundred yards before jumping over the fence and taking off up into the scrub.
There's nothing else they could have ripped that dog in half that night or do what it was doing to us. No way.
Nothing in that bush that can bang under that floor which is seven foot off the ground and rip a dog in half without biting it or terrify the other dogs. They just shit themselves.
If it was any other animal out there, it wouldn't matter if it's a six- or eight-foot kangaroo or a big pig, that huge dog of Ivan's would have had a go at it.
But those dogs were terrified.
© Copyright AYR
Australian Yowie Research ® - Data Base
www.yowiehunters.com
Location: Lightning Ridge, New South Wales
Event: Yowie Sighting
Date: 2001
Time: 9pm
[Male Witness – Interview with Paul Cropper]
Paul:
Walk me through what you were doing, what happened, what you saw… just take me through the whole experience.
Brett:
One day, my close mate Greg said: “ come out to Lightning Ridge, start opal mining with me and rebuild your life”.
I went out to the Ridge and from that point forth is where everything started.
[He was out mining alone for some weeks]
I started to feel a presence…having been a bouncer in nightclubs. I've always had this situational awareness. I had [felt] this presence from about two weeks in and it was non-stop. It was every time I come up out of the (mining) hole. I'd be sitting on my log near my fire…behind me was fairly thick forest.
[One evening he encountered a creature]
I'd finished mining for the day and I was lying down (in my caravan) and I hear these footsteps. I'd left the fire going. I was watching the stars because you’d have this incredible (view) of the Milky Way. I hear these footsteps… I'm like what the hell's outside? It was coming from the north side of the caravan.
These footsteps were huge. I knew the sound of my own footsteps on the dead leaves on the ground. You get a gauge of the timing between each footstep and this thing was huge. It was taking footsteps that were easy four or five foot between each step. It was crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.
I've got all sorts of stuff racing through my head, because I'm in a caravan. I'm naked on my bloody bed, I'm reading a book and I'm thinking, my god what the hell is standing outside my van. It then moves around the northwest of the van towards my fire. It comes around then walks to my fire and stops and starts to take a leak. It sounded like someone had started a fire-hose and at that point I'm like, bugger this.
I get up I open the door and there he was, not six feet from me. Looking at me with this grin on its face. I'm butt-naked, he's standing there doing what he's doing and we're looking at each other in disbelief. I've got no words. What the hell do I say to this other than, I was thinking.. I'm so sorry, I should have put that fire out. At which point he turns and walks.
Paul:
What did this thing look like?
Brett:
Hairy, face covered in hair, body covered in hair, arms covered in hair. Incredible structure, mostly muscle. Would rip you in half in a heartbeat. Huge feet, huge arms, huge hands. He was monstrous, this thing was monstrous, standing there. He was looking at me with half a grin and it was more telepathic.. I swear we were talking to each other. My first thought was, my god, so sorry, this is careless, I should have put that fire out and he's turned and walked off. No threat, no intimidation, nothing.
Paul:
Did you get a sense of its face like a human face or a non-human face or an or a monkey face what sort of face were you looking at?
Brett:
It was it hard to say - that's a great question - human facial features but covered in hair
Paul:
The hair on it was it short hair or long hair?
Brett:
Relatively long yeah…probably safe to say around the four to six inch mark
Paul:
Was there a colour?
Brett:
Brown, a really deep brown.
Paul:
Was the hair the same all over?
Brett:
The density was consistent all over it.
Paul:
Was this a lean thing or was it like a rugby player?
Brett:
Legs like tree trunks a chest and arms on him like a bodybuilders. He was immensely powerful… to the point where I'm a big man, like, if you know, I put the wind up an awful lot of people, I'm nearly six three, I'm a hundred and thirty kilo, fit, built like a brick shit house. I'm an immensely powerful human being and he put the wind up me. He could have just played with me like a kid plays with a Barbie doll.
Paul:
Did you get a sense of how many kilos that thing would have weighed?
Brett:
He'd be probably closer to 250 to 300 and probably even bigger than that in all honesty
Paul:
When you said you communicated with it and you sort of were saying sorry for leaving the fire on because it was pissing on it… did you get anything back from this thing or was it just you had that reaction it was telling you that that you shouldn't have done that?
Brett:
Exactly how you describe it because you know what's insane about this is not an hour later the wind blew up like you would not believe and it's absolutely pouring down rain and lightning everywhere that wind would have caught that fire because I'd left it going.
Paul:
So this thing walks off you're still butt-naked well what did you do?
Brett:
I just stood there in disbelief how do you comprehend something like that. I (eventually) left the Ridge then moved to Queensland and I've been up here since.
© Copyright AYR
Australian Yowie Research ® - Data Base
www.yowiehunters.com
Location: Yanderra, New South Wales
Event: Yowie Encounter
Date: Jan, 1998
Time: Day
I would like to relay an event that occurred in 1998 at Yanderra, Southern Highlands NSW, when I was 12 years old my brother was 9 years old.
My father owned a property at Yanderra which had an old log cabin and was one of the first buildings in the tiny town.
I was in the bush all the time especially on weekends. My brother and I would ride dirt bikes. My father brought the property when I was 3 years old and my brother a newborn, so we spent years in the same area of the bush.
One day in summer around January 1998 myself and my brother were going down one of our usual bush tracks, walking our push bikes about 200m in bush from the house. I stopped because I could see a body imprint in the grass. I stopped and my brother and said “hey look at this, it looks like somebody has been laying here.”
Sketch by Danny Lund of the grass impression.
It looked like a massive person; I could see the head/neck area coming down to long arms and the back impression in the grass. As it got down to the legs it faded into the grass and the top of the body must have been heavy because the shoulders we’re about 3 & 1/2 foot wide.
As my brother and I were looking at the ground impression I started to smell a bad diarrhea smell. I looked at my brother and said you stink, go to the toilet. The smell became so thick that my brother and I ran down the track.
We ran down the hill and stopped at the bottom. We then heard 5 loud footsteps crashing through the bush from where we just came.
I looked back up the track and the bushes on the left started going side to side. At first I thought was a cow running though and falling over the ground. I was trembling. I could hear it walking, and I’m looking at the bushes thinking what is that? Then CRACK. I heard a large gumtree limb snap.
As soon as it snapped, there was a roar that sounded like a lion.
I could hear a clicking sound, like its tonsils were clicking because of the pressure that was coming out of it. This was so loud I could feel my insides moving. I froze and couldn’t move until it stopped.
The roar lasted about 5 seconds and as soon as it stopped, I saw the snapped gumtree limb go spearing though the top of the tree canopy.
The branches and leaves were still attached. Nobody could throw that far and hard. It was unbelievable.
I turned to scream ‘RUN’ to my brother, but he was already running 30m ahead of me. I ran as fast as I could following my brother. I heard it take 3 big leaps behind me as I was running, and something said “Don’t look back keep going”.
I got to about 100m from my father’s house and my brother was there waiting. He said as soon as it roared, he was out of there.
I can’t explain how loud this thing was. It would have taken an enormous strength to break a gumtree limb that is about 250kg, and throw it 50 meters straight through a bush canopy. It went crashing though the tops of the trees.
We told my father, who was working on the property at the time, and he said “It’s a Lyrebird - they can imitate sound”.
I had no idea what I encountered and never heard of YOWIE’s before. I kept it to myself for years until one day about 15 years ago I heard a recorded of a YOWIE roar on the internet. As soon as I heard it, all the memories came flooding back.
In hindsight, there were a lot of indications of YOWIE’s living in the area. I would be alone sometimes and here whistles and stop, then hear another whistle parallel behind me.
I have since had contact with a few people who also have had encounters in the area.
I would love to hear from anyone else who has had an encounter in the yanderra/ southern highlands area.
Thank you,
Danny Lund
Youtube - Yowiesdownunder
© Copyright AYR
Australian Yowie Research ® - Data Base
www.yowiehunters.com
Location: Diamond Head (near Crowdy Bay), New South Wales
Event: Yowie Sighting
Date: 1983
Time: Day
[Male witness]
I was 15 and it was 1983.
I lived at a place called Johns River about 35 kms north of Taree.
Behind the village and east of the north coast trainline, there is a dirt road leading down to Diamond Head Beach. It's about 4-5 miles through dense bush.
I used to ride my bike along there then. Often with a few other teenagers or just by myself.
One Saturday afternoon I was riding along alone and heard a loud rustling sound. I stopped and just looked around, saw nothing and kept going. One side of me was dense bush the other was the trainline, and past that was the village.
Soon I heard the noise again, but this time louder.
I stopped and looked into the bush, and about 20 ft away was a creature I believed to be a yowie or yeti. It was shaking the hell out of a tree.
It was around 6 ft tall and extremely hairy but it's hair was a light brown almost tan colour.
I wasn't close enough to see his facial features, but it had large eyes. It was shaking a tree but I wasn't close enough to see the hands.
Witness sketch
The hair was very very thick and long.
It stared at me from around 20 ft away, and I was staring back at it. I was petrified.
It made no attempt to come towards me and no noise just stared.
I was totally scared and took off at a huge rate of knots!
I kept looking over my shoulder, but it didn't follow me. I rode home and mum told me I looked like I'd seen a ghost. I said no ghost, but I saw a yowie and she laughed at me and told me there was no such a thing.
She said I imagined it and maybe I should stay away from the area (which locals called "the run").
I’ve never told anyone for fear of them laughing at me.
I'm Glad I found your group. This was something I kept to myself for nearly 40 years, because of fears of people thinking I was crazy. It's good to talk about it.
I really did happen. I will never forget it.
© Copyright AYR
Australian Yowie Research ® - Data Base
www.yowiehunters.com
Location: Krambach, New South Wales
Event: Yowie Sighting
Date: 1990
Time: Day
When I cast my mind back over the decades of research and expeditions, one of my earliest memories of the Yowie was in 1992, when I watched a Channel 7 News episode about a Yowie encounter in a remote New South Wales town, they only referred to as “Bach".
The story was compelling enough for me to search for this town on maps, however the name didn’t exist.
In the following days, the Channel 7 TV show “The Extraordinary”, featured the full story.
The prior News story was simply a prelude.
The event transpired in 1990, involving a young girl named Julie Clark riding horseback down a sandy creek in a town called Krambach.
While riding, her horse became irritable and flighty. Sitting on a rock on the side of the creek was a bipedal hominid that suddenly stood to his feet, standing taller than the 14ft height of her horse.
In shock, Julie galloped away in fear, not looking back.
The reported Julie Clark incident on Channel 7, arose from a magazine article, written 2 years prior.
In a small rural town where everyone knows each other, talk travels fast. Like School yard.
Someone always knows someone, and before the Clarks knew it, word had spread out of town and suddenly there was a Reporter with a rather fertile imagination, at their door.
A trashy magazine syndication called ‘Australia Post’, a crude publication full of super embellished titles and silly storylines, wanted to run the story. It also ran images of the odd scantily clad woman – ok, perhaps a lot.
The Reporter, who fails to put his name to the story, wrote an article to grip the readers. Let’s just say, facts weren’t at the forefront of his journalistic ventures.
In the story, one witness became two girls, involved in a harrowing chase - and then a third child - with a story of rocks being thrown and landing all around him.
Once this story broke, Julie was subject to ridicule wherever she went. Even her friends turned against her. Sometimes just walking down the main street would result in harassment.
Fast forward to 1992. Producers of The Extraordinary had stumbled over the article and lined it up for an Episode in their new hit TV show.
It was agreed to by Julies mother, without Julies consent. The show was filmed, but somewhat more realistic than the magazine article.
After the show aired, Julies life in town became even more difficult. In fact, the ridicule became so bad, shed left town and vowed never to speak of it again.
Now today, Julie resides in Queensland with her family, and I consider her to be a very close friend.
Julies story was very real, and the impact it had on her life was dramatic.
I don’t know why her story back in 1992 tugged on my heart as it did at the time – however I found out - less than two years later…..
~ Dean Harrison
© Copyright AYR
Australian Yowie Research ® - Data Base
www.yowiehunters.com