Tony Healy and Paul Cropper pass along a new sighting of Yowie that took place this September 2006 (remember, their spring), which has just been written up to be shared.19 Sept 2006. Megalong Valley, Blue Mountains, NSW. 1:30 pm.
As 22-year-old Catherine B., her husband Brendan and friend Sarah were riding along a track at the base of an escarpment, Catherine’s horse lagged behind the others and finally came to a complete stop. Catherine, an experienced rider, simply couldn’t get it to move.
“It was sniffing the air and turning around to bite me and I knew something was wrong. At that point I smelt a real foul stench, like salty blood, and I looked – the ground dropped down to the left - and it was just standing there …10, 15 metres away, if that. [The undergrowth] was quite open at that point. It looked sort of like a monkey, but more human. I pretty much crapped my pants! It seemed like forever that I was watching him, but it was only two, three minutes, if that.”
From her vantage point, she could see the animal from head to foot: “I could see everything. It just stood and looked at me. It was a lot smaller than a person, about four foot … solid … square shoulders … very hairy, long hair everywhere; dark brown, all tangled – like a shaggy dog that hasn’t been washed for a while - and mud all over it.
“It had, like, a pushed-in nose. I distinctly remember two canine teeth out the front, outside the lip. I couldn’t see ears because the long hair covered them. I saw eyes, but not distinctly. The legs were long but he only had three claws on his feet. I saw arms, and I could only see three fingers [because] it had something in its hand …like a dead kangaroo, but smaller …like flesh … like it was skinned … inside out.
“I kept kicking the horse … it took the track pretty quick and began to catch the others. I held on for dear life. I kept smelling [the creature, and] felt like it was watching me.”
Confused, incredulous and frightened by what she’d seen, Catherine didn’t say anything about it to her friends. Meanwhile, both Brendan and Sarah had been aware of the foul odour but hadn’t mentioned it. Thirty minutes later, however, they all heard rustling in the scrub behind and then beside the trail, and Sarah looked to the right and saw, about five or ten metres away, “… a monkey … an ape sort of thing … just glaring at me … real scary.”
She could see the head, shoulders and upper chest as it “just popped out from behind a bush, looked, and took off. It was about four feet tall … hairy … browny, blacky … all long, scruffy … half-human, I reckon, all hairy but human looking. I focused on the eyes and the mouth. The teeth … you could not miss them [about an inch long] over the lip [like a vampire’s]. Mouth sort of half open. I said, ‘What the F’s that?’ My adrenalin went … It was like, ‘Is this thing gonna eat me? I’d better get out of here!’ I was kicking my horse.”
As Sarah cried out, Catherine and, apparently, her horse glimpsed the creature running from behind the bush. “My horse took off, flew past the next two horses; I hit a tree with my shoulder, came off and hit the ground really bad.” The horse bolted away.
Catherine sustained deep abrasions on her right forearm and hip, a fractured right collarbone, two fractured ribs, badly bruised legs and swollen ankles. Brendan helped her onto his horse, led her back to the stables and drove her to Katoomba Hospital.
The next day, when she phoned the property owner to enquire after the horse, Catherine was told that the animal, unusually, was missing all night, and that when it eventually returned it was “all shaken up” and had to be rested. When asked about the ‘monkey-thing”, the owner said that in about 1998 or ’99 another group of experienced riders had returned to camp “all as white as ghosts” to say they’d seen and smelt a very similar animal.
Witness interview with Paul Cropper, 23 Sept 2006. Credit: Dean Harrison.
Background:
Reports of Yowie-type creatures are common in the legends and stories of Australian Aboriginal tribes, particularly those of the eastern states of Australia. The mid to late 19th Century saw a wealth of sightings, most describing a large, gorilla-like creature (albeit usually bipedal), which lived in remote mountainous or forested regions. Reports have continued to the present day with the trail of evidence following the pattern familiar to most unidentified hominids around the world - i.e. eyewitness accounts, mysterious footprints of hotly-disputed origin, and a frustrating lack of conclusive proof. Australian Yowie Research
Yowie