Location: Clyde Mountain, New South Wales
Event: Yowie Roadside Sighting
Date: Summer, 1980
While driving between Braidwood and Batemans Bay, Sheila Eden and her husband started the steep and winding Clyde Mountain descent at about 10 pm.
On about the second or third bend they saw a large creature that had apparently come up from the right hand (downhill) side of the road and was now crossing it on all fours.
Their first impression was of an enormous dog, but they soon realised it was more like “a huge monkey”. As they braked and came closer it turned towards them, raised itself to a “half crouch” and ran up the road past the car. “It was solid, thickset, bigger than my husband. It was not a normal animal”
It was all over very quickly. Sheila doesn’t remember seeing a head, just shoulders and long arms that were “hanging, moving but not swinging”. The hair, which shook as it ran, was “browny-black” and about three or four inches long.
The car had almost come to a stop as the creature dashed past the driver’s side window, “so close that my husband could have touched it.” Even in a half crouch, it was taller than the vehicle: “Its shoulder would have been level with the top of the window.”
A strange smell lingered for a few moments afterwards, but Sheila wasn’t sure whether it was related to the creature or to burnt rubber from their tyres.
Shaken and suddenly rather scared, the couple hurriedly rolled up their windows and drove away. Sheila is now too frightened to drive that stretch of road by night.
It is interesting to note that in the summer of 1996, about a kilometre further down the mountain, Peter and Belinda Garfoot of Elmore Vale, Newcastle, saw a seven-foot-tall, hair-covered ape-man cross the same road in broad daylight. (See The Yowie: In Search Of Australia’s Bigfoot, pp. 57-58)
Witness interview with Tony Healy, 27 Mar 2006. Credit: Karen Vickers.
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