One summer evening in the late 1970s-early 80s I was camping at Plaskett with my sister, and we had walked across the road to the picnic area to watch the sunset. The place was deserted-- there had recently been a bad landslide a few miles further north that closed the highway for months, so the campground was unusually empty that summer. We climbed up on the stile, right by the trailhead, and were gazing out to sea. Everything was tranquil. All there was to hear was the waves breaking on the rocks. Then something weird happened.The disorientation, the feeling of someone else being there, the sense that you should leave, and a feeling of fear are all features in bigfoot narratives we attempt to explain with the infrasound hypothesis. As we've seen before, we can theorize that bigfoot will use an audible sound as a "startle" mechanism to get the desired outcome from the infrasound, which otherwise can have ambivalent results.
It's hard to explain. My sister had noticed an interesting-looking rock and stepped down off the stile to pick it up and look at it. As she did, I remember hearing a noise. At the time I thought it might have been an elephant seal, calling out from the rocks offshore, but things became suddenly dreamlike. All I was conscious of at the time was a feeling that we weren't alone. My sister climbed back up and sat beside me for a minute, but she seemed suddenly uneasy, so we climbed down the other side of the stile and went back to the campground. Next morning she said she'd dreamed all night of someone walking round and round our tent, and she felt she had to keep whoever it was out.
That would have been that, except that when I thought back to sitting on the stile, my memory insisted that I had seen someone standing right there at the trailhead, staring at us, right at the moment I heard the noise. The thing in my memory most closely resembled the figure in the Patterson film, but it wasn't remarkably tall, maybe six feet. It was partly silhouetted against the sunset but close enough to see its face. The eyes were black and looked human and stared right back at me. It was no more than nine or ten feet away. It stood perfectly still. I don't remember any strong smell. There wasn't a hostile feeling, but a strong sense that we should leave.
This troubled me for years afterward. If I had consciously seen something like that at the time, I'd have been across the highway and back in our car so fast you couldn't have seen me for the dust. Yet the memory of seeing it was incredibly vivid. It still is. Years later, my sister and I were talking about the rock she'd found that night (it looked like it might have been an indian artifact, so she'd kept it). Very hesitantly, I told her about what I remembered seeing. She was dead silent for a few seconds. I asked her if she thought I was crazy and she replied that when I'd told her, she'd experienced the most intense wave of the horrors she'd ever felt. She didn't want to think about it or discuss it any further. She had nightmares that night, too.
My sister is generally fearless and moreover is fascinated by palaeoanthropology, early hominids, Neanderthals, et cetera, so you would think she'd be the last person to have an unreasoning terror of even discussing a possible encounter with an unknown hominid.
As far as I know there's never been any tradition of Sasquatch sightings in the area. Big Sur has plenty of folklore of weird things being seen, little shadow people and the like, but no bigfeet. There are plenty of deer in the woods, plenty of salmon in the sea and a lot of creeks with trout in them; there are also a lot of edible plants, berries and the like, so something large could sustain itself. But did I actually see something? If I did, why all the weirdness and panic?
Have an encounter experience of your own? Let me know.
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2 comments:
I'll tell you that upon reading this, I was struck by how much this is like an encounter with what is commonly called a "shadow person." There is often times a sense of feeling something in your body (like a low frequency rumble when a car blasts its bass really hard). You look up and catch a glimpse of the shadowperson which is often times pure black and short. It startles as if realizing that you just saw it when it's used to not being seen. The sensations that accompany the encounter are an overwhelming sense of dread and doom, the feeling of being watched, and nausea, headaches. I wonder if these occurrences could actually be senses our body has that we aren't aware of that allows us to know when we might be preyed upon? Perhaps a feature from our ancestor's time.
was there ever any feedback about the artifact the witnesses sister picked up? photo, description, anything? i read an account onetime of a sighting being tied to a native ritual object. thanks, t.
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