Location: Mt Kembla, New South Wales
Event: Audible
Date: Nov 1999
I have been having a look at your site and have decided to let you know about a strange encounter I had about 10 years ago in the bush around Wollongong NSW.
As it was a fair while ago I can’t remember all the details but it was around November 1999 and back then I used to spend a fair bit of time wandering around in the bush. On this day I was in an area I had never been, on a ridgeline and down into a small valley just to the north of Mt Kembla.
As I remember it was about 2 or 3 in the afternoon, sunny, reasonably warm and apart from my dog I was alone, I was probably about 2 km’s from any road, house or anywhere you’d expect to find another person. I was just walking through the bush when I smelt a terrible smell, I immediately thought it was a dead animal but after about 3 or 4 mins of looking failed to find anything and so I kept moving.
The smell was gone as well. About 15 mins later I smelt it again and as before I looked around but this time I found the source. In a small natural sort of clearing I found the body of a dead cow, the odd thing was that the cow was missing its head and there were cow paddocks in the area but I looked on a map and the nearest paddock was probably 1.5 km’s away.
There was no reason that a cow would have wandered into the bush as the vegetation was quite thick and there was no grass or anything it would have been grazing on. After spending only a couple of mins there I started to feel spooked and decided to get out of there, that’s when I had the strange encounter.
On one side of the clearing was a large very dense thicket of lantana about 2.5m tall and on the other side ( the direction I had come from ) was a large tree where the ground had washed out around the roots with a log lying across the ground making a natural hide. I started to walk back towards the direction I had come when I heard something moving through the bush on the other side of the lantana. I didn’t see it but I got the impression it was rather large and I had never heard anything make that sound before, and I had been wandering the bush most of my life so in a word I sh*t myself.
I jumped into the hide and looked over at my dog, he was staring in the direction of the sound in the attack position. I called to him a quietly as I could be he didn’t budge so I sat a listened for a few seconds and realised that the bush was silent, not even any wind. Whatever had made the noise was silent as well, I just sat there waiting, I can’t say how long it was but it seemed forever.
After not hearing anything else I stood up to leave and without any warning something charged at me through the thicket of lantana. The lantana was dense, very dense but whatever it was getting through it, in a panicked I pulled my machete and jumped on top of the log ( maybe making me look about 2 feet taller ) and stood there with my machete raised above my head.
Whatever was there was smart enough to recognize a weapon and stopped dead still, and once again silence. After a few seconds I grabbed my dog and ran nonstop until I reached the road, I went home and mentioned it to my brother and a couple of mates who dismissed it as a drug dealer trying to scare me away from his plantation.
Some years went by until I mentioned it to the husband of one of my wife’s friends and he told me I had run into a Yowie. I was skeptical and somewhat I still am but looked up your site anyway, and I have seen other things in more recent years that have increased my interest.
I don’t know what it was in the bush that day but when I think back I smelt the foul smell well before I came near the body of the cow and there was very little wind that could have carried the smell.
I also never saw anything but for some reason I felt that what I heard wasn’t human, just a hunch maybe. I’ve never been back into that area but there is new housing sub division heading that way so maybe we’ll have another encounter sometime.
I just thought I’d send you the story and let you make up your own mind as to whether or not it could have been a Yowie, I would appreciate some feedback regardless.
Regards
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