Location: Blackheath, New South Wales
Event: Yowie Encounter
Date: Sept 2006
As 22-year-old K. Bolton, her husband and friend Sarah were riding along a track at the base of an escarpment, K’s horse lagged behind the others and finally came to a complete stop. K, an experienced rider, simply couldn’t get it to move.
K States: “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.
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, K 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...
Sarah states: “… 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 focussed 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, K 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. K 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, K 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".
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