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.
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