Location: Mungay Creek, New South Wales
Event: Numerous Sightings
Date: 1960's onward
Source: Michael Hardcastle
My parent’s bought a rural property at Mungay Creek, about 30klms west of Kempsey. Before we moved to the new property, my sister had a very interesting chat with the owners of one of the corner shops in Quirindi. She just happened to mention to them that we were moving to a property west of Kempsey and their ears pricked up straight away. The wife of the shop owner said, “watch out for the yowies”!
My sister straight away asked them what they knew and if they believed in them. They both said that they fully believed that they existed and it turned out that the wife’s family came from the Kempsey area and that many of her relatives, including her own father had seen them. She said that when her father was a boy, he and his brothers used to ride their horses all around the district just to travel from place to place etc, as was common in that era.
He had told her how he and his brothers had seen what appeared to be a family of yowies, including young ones, down in the creek, as they rode down to cross it.
One of her cousins, when he was just a boy, was ill and stayed home in bed while the rest of his family went into town. While on his own in bed, a yowie apparently entered his room, before taking off again outside. I believe Scott has got in touch with a family member still living in the Kempsey area and recorded greater detail of these encounters.
When we moved onto our property, it wasn’t long before we discovered evidence of activity at the back of the property. There was a large back paddock made up of quite thick bush with a lot of lantana growth and a small seasonal creek running through the middle. The back boundary of this paddock backed onto some more private property that consisted also of very thick scrub and this block then backed onto the Collombatti State Forest.
There was an old, overgrown vehicle track that ran from one end of paddock, in a semi circle and came out at the other end. It would descend down into the creek where the lantana was thick and it was quite rainforesty, and then it would come up out of the creek and onto, what was once an open creek flat but was now reverting back to bush. The track would then descend back down to another creek crossing before heading up through the bush and emerge at the top of the hill and into an open paddock.
We used to go for walks through this back paddock quite regularly, sometimes sticking to the track and sometimes leaving the track and exploring the thick bush. My sister used to always take our red stumpy tailed cattle dog bitch with her when she went for walks and always kept her on a rope so she wouldn’t chase the roos.
One day, she went for a walk along the old track and she had crossed the first creek crossing and had made her way to the second, when the dog stopped dead, suddenly raised her hackles, growled and stared intently down into the bush in front of them. My sister could sense something too, and was quite scared but was determined to quietly return the way she had come, without showing panic. She couldn’t see anything but could sense something was there. Just at that point, I came up the track behind her, unaware that this had happened. As soon as I appeared, the dog stopped looking and relaxed as if whatever it was had gone.
At a later date, my sister was in the open paddock below the bush paddock, when she saw some of our horses that had been grazing at the edge of this bush paddock, suddenly run down the hill, snorting and looking back as if something had suddenly appeared up there. It wasn’t roos as there was already roos grazing amongst the horses and they were used to them. My sister walked up to the edge of the bush paddock but couldn’t see anything, but the dog was glaring down into the scrub and was so nervous that when my sister moved her foot, the dog jumped.
We had also seen our mob of horses come galloping at great speed, up out of the creek and into the open, stop and wheel round and stare back down into the bush, snorting.
We found any number of both sapplings and full size tree branches snapped off in various areas of that paddock, even before the horses had been allowed to go in there, so we knew it wasn’t stock breaking the trees, and many of the bigger branches were broken well over head height. In one corner of the paddock, a little way away from our neighbour’s house but in sight of it, there were a whole line of sapplings broken over at ground level and all facing towards our neighbour’s house.
It looked just like a bulldozer had pushed them all over in a swaithe, but the ground around them wasn’t disturbed and no vehicle of any kind could even get in there anyway as the bush was too thick. This same neighbour, at first declared that he didn’t believe in yowies, but in the next breath said that some time before we came, his son was visiting and had walked out the back of the house only to see a very large, dark brown coloured yowie standing in the back yard. Apparently it had such an effect that he vowed never to return and apparently hadn’t! This neighbour also had some sows that he ran in the paddocks down the back, adjacent to our paddock.
He complained to us that he had been losing piglets and blamed dingos for taking them, but there were no sign of dingos in the area and we had never heard any howling in the area, as we had in other places that we have lived. We kept an open mind on what was taking his piglets.
One morning I went for a walk, and as I was passing the dam just below the house, I came across the remains of a dead kangaroo. Only the bottom half of the body was there. It appeared to have been ripped in half at the waist and all the internal organs were gone.
There was no sign of the top half anywhere in the vicinity, no blood, nothing. The impression was that it had been killed elsewhere and the remaining bottom half, with both legs and tail completely intact dumped their near the dam. The grass was too long and thick to see any prints. I have attached a photo my sister took of the remains.
I have also attached a picture of a black wattle tree that I used to pass regularly when I went for walks out the back of our bush paddock. This tree had been untouched until one day when I went for a walk, I discovered it had been virtually demolished overnight! The photo shows the damage it had sustained. I had seen it the previous day and it was untouched. There had been no storms or strong winds so I could only draw the conclusion that something didn’t like my regular visits there! I used to often sit near that tree when I went for my walks.
On another occasion, my eldest sister came to visit. Both sisters and the dog went for a walk down into the back paddock. As they came up out of the creek, they heard what sounded like wood knocking. They followed the sound but it stayed ahead of them. Eventually they came to the back boundary fence and the knocking stopped.
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