The Bluff Creek region of Northern California was well known by its residents to be home to more than normal wildlife. The first event that got headlines across the continent happened when bulldozer operator Jerry Crew found footprints of one of the creatures near his equipment in 1957, but other encounters took place much earlier that went with little notice.
The following account happened in 1952 near the small community of Orleans, not far from Bluff Creek:
This person’s encounter was so shocking that he blocked it from consciousness for a time, he did recall the events however and this is what he related:
“I began to remember more and more of what happened. I had me a bad case of the jitters as the memory uncoiled.
The first part of the story took me back to 1952, when I had gone to Orleans to start preliminary work on a logging operation with two men by the names of Lee Vlery and Josh Russel.
One evening Josh told me Lee had gone up to Happy Camp, but not having transportation back, wanted me to take the Mercury and go up and get him. I had driven the extremely crooked and dangerous road up there, but not being able to find him started back alone to Orleans.
It had been raining very heavily and after going back a few miles I found there had been a slide across the road. There was a man with a flashlight there who told me I could still get back to Orleans by way of a detour across the river. He said it was a dirt road that went through Bear Valley and would come out at the mouth of Bluff Creek a few miles below Orleans.
I had been driving slowly down this road for about twenty miles I guess, sort of daydreaming, when I saw it….. dimly in the headlights and the rain was a shaggy orangutan-like apparition of a human. For an instant I had the impression the shaggy hair of the creature was a hoary blue gray in the headlights. An ogre! I remember thinking, but the thing swiftly back pedaled off the road and behind a tree. I automatically passed it off as imagination and drove on by the spot.
Suddenly, without warning, the car went into a violent and unreasonable skid. I brought the car back under control, but for some reason glanced into the rear view mirror. In the dim light of the tail lights and license-display bulb, I thought I could see a savage looking face looking through the rear glass. I continued on, and when I looked again there was no face, so again concluded it was imagination.
I had gone another quarter mile I guess, when across the road was a small six-inch sapling, I stopped the car and got out, intending to drag it aside if possible. Suddenly I head the swift thud of flying feet of something coming down the road. Reality was upon me and I remember cursing myself for not paying attention to what I had previously seen. It was the shaggy human-like monster I had seen in the headlights.
It at once started circling around me, snarling and acting very menacing. It kept this circling up for some time and once came up quite close, and I could see its face reflected by the headlights much better. The eyes were round, and rather luminous, the hair on top of its rather low and rounded head was pretty short. Its eye teeth were far longer than a humans, also the chest and upper part of its torso was rather bare of hair, and also leathery looking. It wasn’t too tall, not much more than my own 5 feet 9 inches, although it had a stooped, long armed posture.
Then suddenly it changed tactics, it would stalk off down the road but would come charging back, like a bat out of hell, when I started toward the car. The hour was late, the thing was becoming more and more menacing, and I was almost paralyzed by this time, paralyzed by fear.
Suddenly a plan of escape, born out of desperation popped into my mind. Since the monster seemed to think I couldn’t get away, why not, when it went down the road again, playing cat and mouse, try to get in the car and smash through the sapling. This I did, and sprang for the door of the car a dozen feet away. No sooner was I inside when there it was, trying to claw through the window. I jerked the car into gear, floored the accelerator, and can vividly remember the wet sapling glistening whitely in the headlights as the car slashed it aside.
I remember the scream of rage and frustration it then gave. It was a curious trumpeting sound like the scream of a stallion and the roar of a mad grizzly.
The car then felt as though it were being held (I had this happen once to my own car!) back by something half riding and attempting to stop it, but the powerful Mercury proved too much for it, and after a couple hundred yards I felt no more resistance.
To top this unbelievable experience off, believe it or not, I promptly forgot the whole experience. Then and there it went out of my mind. Not even the next day when Lee asked me if I had seen anything unusual on that road last night did I remember. (He had come later from Happy camp with another man hired to take him to Orleans).
A few days later an incident happened that should have brought the experience back but didn’t, Lee noticed a big dent in the grill of the car and asked me how it got there. I told him I didn’t know. Incidentally, Lee told me that something had tried to push them off the road, when they came through on the detour. He said there’s something strange going on around here and let the matter drop.
This encounter was not unique according to one of my neighbors in Vancouver Washington. Ron Birdwell told me in the late 1980's that he had been employed for a time as a driver of a water truck in that region. The purpose of the water trucks was to spray the dirt roads, keeping the dust down caused by the passing of truck traffic. He told me that it was difficult to keep drivers employed, due to similar encounters as related above, the creatures coming out in broad daylight and menacing drivers. This is one aspect of the Sasquatch that many would do well to consider before haphazardly entering the wilds in search of a Sasquatch. The results may not be what one has in mind!