Location: Hickeys Falls, New South Wales
Event: Yowie Sighting
Date: Spring, 2010
Time: 1pm
My daughter was 15 at the time and my son was 7. My daughter had 2 friends from Coonabarabran visiting us, and it was school holidays and we were taking her home.
On the way back we decided to visit the falls, which was just after lunch on a Sunday. It is situated between two hills and a gully off the old Highway, so it’s quite isolated.
There is a lot of pine growth with blackberry bushes in between. You have to walk over a rocky outcrop to get to the bottom where the pools are, so it’s not an easy walk.
We pulled into the carpark, and the 3 girls grabbed their towels and took off running and screaming (as girls do), across the rocks to the bottom of the falls. My son was still in a booster seat, so I was unstrapping him when it suddenly struck me about how quite it was. There were no insect noises, no birds, the road wasn’t busy so there were no car noises and we heard what sounded like a little girl crying.
It was very childlike, and sort of what you would expect from a lost child. There was another car in the carpark, and all the doors were open, the trunk was open and there were clothes, gerry cans, utensils and food containers (no food), scattered everywhere all around the car. I thought that’s strange.
When I heard the crying, I thought there was a little child lost, which wouldn’t be hard to do there.
The car was parked next to trail that leads to the top of the falls. I just presumed the little girl had wandered up there and whoever the adult was, was up there looking for her. My son said, Mum, I think that little girl is in trouble, and then it just stopped. I thought her mother must have found her.
I was still thinking how strange it was to be so quiet. All you would hear was the roar of the waterfall. It was weird, and it just felt weird. There was so much wrong, but I was distracted by the girls, the car and the little girl crying that I just ignored that (the weird feeling).
The girls were now at the bottom of the waterfall and my boy is running towards the waterfall, I was carrying his towel and walking along the outcrop of rock. It’s a big semi-circle of rock and the waterfall is very high, so its like an amphitheatre of rock. By this stage the girls are in the water screaming and splashing about.
Hickeys Falls.
We just got around the outcrop of rock, the girls are screaming and having a blast, when suddenly this bellow came out of nowhere and we all just stopped dead and listened to it bounce around and around and around the rock.
It was incredibly loud, it was incredibly aggressive and it was deep and guttural.
It was a type of roar I may have expected from a big bear. We all stopped dead and went, ‘What, in God’s name, it that’. All the hairs on the back of my neck and arms stood up and my son turned around in absolute terror and came flying towards me and the girls took off from the pool. It sounded like it was in there with them. It sounded like it was at the base of the water fall, but its wasn’t. It was incredibly loud. It just bounced and bounced off the rocks. The girls were screaming in a mad panic and flew passed me. I said ‘Get to the car’, and that’s when I thought we were in trouble.
I was by myself, a single parent, had two children who weren’t mine with me and I just said ‘Get to the car, get to the car’. I’m flicking the remote to unlock the car doors and the girls are dropping thongs, towels and clothes as they’re running. I scooped Josh up and he was facing back over my shoulder towards the waterfall as I was running to the car, picking things up as I went.
That’s when we heard the branches breaking and snapping along with ridge above us.
I turned around and watched back towards the waterfall and I was watching the trees bend and snap, and bend and snap and bend and snap and bend and snap, and I was thinking ‘What is Gods name is that’! And I could hear the pounding coming down the side of the hill.
We got back to the car, the girls were in a panic, I didn’t car about seatbelts, I just screaming at them to just ‘Get in the car’. One of my daughters friends swung the door open and hit Josh in the head and nearly knocked him out. I picked him up and threw him in the backseat, no booster seat or seatbelt, threw all our crap on top of them, I came around the back of the car to get in the drivers seat and was watching the trees bending and snapping and heard the pounding coming down the side of the hill, and then this smell came that just took my breath away. I’ve never smelt anything like it. I can’t even describe it, it was the most vile rotten flesh smell that was worse that road kill. It almost made me vomit. We were dry reaching because we had the windows down. The kids are still screaming ‘What is it, what is it, what’s that smell, we’re going to vomit’, and that only increased the panic.
We drove passed where the car was parked and it was parked where this trail was to the top and this thing was coming down this trail. I could see this shape coming through he bush and it was so big and broad.
My brothers are 6’5” and 6’9”. They are big men with broad shoulders and muscular. But this ‘thing’ was a LOT bigger than them, by feet.
I was literally sideways out of the carpark.
It wasn’t until we were out on the highway that I thought ‘Oh my God, what about the other people there from that car?’ and that little girl crying in the bush. It didn’t cross my mind at the time because we were just panicking.
There was a Police Officer coming the other way and he flashed his lights for us to stop. None of us were wearing seatbelts, we are all screaming, Josh is standing there (in the back), like he’s seen a ghost, the girls are hysterical and he said ‘We have a report of an abandoned car down there’. And I just said ‘Oh my God don’t go down there, there’s something there, there’s something there, it’s in the carpark, it’s in the carpark’ – and just drove off…
I watched in the rear vision mirror as he drove in there.
A few minutes later as we were driving (back towards Coonabarabran), I saw the Policeman with his lights on coming up behind me, no siren, just the lights, and flew around us. I wasn’t going below the speed limit and he went around us and was gone.
The kids asked if I saw the look on his face because he looked scared. I said that he probably looked like us 10 minutes ago.
I had to go back into Coonabarabran a week and a half later, and I actually pulled into the Police Station to ask if that Police Officer was ok. He said all he could tell me was that he came back to the Station, he sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, his hands were shaking, white as a ghost and he’s on leave. They never told me his name but I do know (due to the witnesses contacts), that he never went back to work. He left the Police Force and never told anyone about what he saw.
It would have crashed out into the car park just as we drove out, so it would have still been there when he drove in.
Years later Josh came out from his room one night and was reading a book on the couch. Finding Bigfoot was on (which I had never seen before), and they did a simulation. Josh just casually said ‘ That’s what we saw that day at the falls’.
It tuned out that when I picked him up and put him over my shoulder, that’s what he saw stand up (before it ran down the hill). He said it was dark brown with really long arms, it had no fur on its face but it’s eves were black.
I told him what I saw with the tick arms and thick legs, very shaggy and brown. It was juts huge. It was like tree stumps from shoulders to wrist. You could see the shoulder muscles and muscles between the shoulders and neck, if you want to call it a neck because the head was very close to the shoulders. There no defined neck. Big hands. It was pushing trees aside on this track. It would swing its arms up and push, breaking the tress.
It was really angry. It was a feeling that we shouldn’t have been there, like we had interrupted something and it was unexpected for us to be there and we shouldn’t have been there.
I often wonder if the crying was one of their young and we interrupted something.
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