Suburbia Vs Semi-Remoteness.

[deadpool]

As most of you may know I had several encounters with the LHM when I was living near Redland Bay, QLD. Often at night, when going for walks, i'd hear and/or briefly catch a glimpse of them. I've moved now - and live pretty much in the middle of suburbia. A 7-Eleven not 2 minutes down the road, no foresty bits of any kind even worth checking out. Hell, the closest i've come to something even remotely close to anything related to the crypto world was eyeshine.. from a possum. Sad, I know.

On the upside to this though - I have a much better chance now of getting to places like Springbrook, Ormeau, Kilcoy, Gympie.. pretty much all the hot-spots.

So, on this - I now live in Manly West, QLD; has there been any sightings, weird stuff.. anything at all around this area. My instincts tell me no - but hell, I could be wrong.

Here's a link to my surrounding area. As you can see.. well, you can see what i'm talking about: http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&hne ... 9&t=h&z=12

[Buck]

Hi Deadpool

This is mid seventies, early eighties based events that I know of first hand but it was really before I knew what Yowies were. I lived near Samsonvale dam and it was a lot wilder and less densly popoluated then.

The first time I heard the word Yowie was the mid seventies. My mate across the road had horses agisted up on a property on the western side of the dam. I went there with one day with my mate and and his parents to check on the horses. When we arrived we set to getting some feed and molasses for the horses. His father who is part aboriginal told us not to venture down a dirt track on the property that led to the dam. He said that a Yowie lived down there. I asked what that was, he told me it was a hairy ape man that lived in the bush. I scoffed at the idea, I said that there were no apes in Australia and that Bigfoot lived in America. He told me I was wrong and not to go down the road. I didn't.

Some years later I wanted to get fit so I could impress a girl, so I took to running cross country at night because I was too embarrased to be seen during the day. I was a very skinny lad. I had bee running for a couple of months mosting nights. One night as I running past Forgans cove at the southern end of the dam I became aware of something below the embankment keeping pace. At first I thought it was some type of echo off the water but it soon became apparent I wasn't alone. For the first time that I had run that section, the dogs on top of the hill went beserk. I ran as fast as I could and kept going. I was so scared that after I completed that run I never ran at night again. I thought it was some nutter for quite some time until some other peoples experiences years later.

About a year later when my best mate got his licence, we were up driving around at Dayboro near the Northern parts of the dam. I was in the front with my mate, in the back were two girls and another good friend. My mate was flogging his fathers Datsun 120 Y trying to impress us, but really it was just nerve wrecking. He stopped on the this long section of road near the dam and decide to do a u turn. As he was doing the u turn I saw something tall, go around the back of the car. Both the the girls in the back screamed their lungs out at well as our other mate in the back, there was a terrible smell like garbage or a grease trap smell, sour. My floored it and we took off. The girls were hysterical, they said they someone something at the back of the car. It was just a tall shadowy shape and accompanied with the smell it was a real gripping fear that filled the car. Only the driver didn't see anything but he smelled the stench. The girls wouldn't talk about it and couldn't add anything more to what they'd seen.

I still had no real grasp that this might be Yowie related as i had even forgotton about the word Yowie, it had only been mentioned to me once in one converstation. I just thought we had had sometime of ghostly experience.

Fast forward in time to the mid eighties. I'm at my best mates house and I'm talking to his brothers girlfriend, we're at the sink doing dishes. She tells me this weird story that happened to her brother a week ago. Her brother and her mates were camping at Lake Kurwongbah. Her brother goes to relieve himself away from the fire when he virtually bumps into the chest of this giant creature, covered in hair with glowing red eyes. He stumbles backwards through the fire, the creature follows him. Everything goes nuts and half a dozen scared teenage boys run for thier lives. When they looked back the could still see the outline of a creature with huge legs walking through the campsite.

The boys tipped up at the family home in Petrie, crying, shaking and out of their minds with fear. The girl telling me the account said one minute she was watching TV with her mother then another minute this fantastic story i pouring out from a bunch of boys who normally don't scare easily.

According to her the boys went back later that night with fathers, uncles and other big blokes to sort this thing out. When they arrived at the camp it was turned out, they found giant foot prints were found in the sandy soil around the firepit. It was agreed that they would turn up next mornign with some plaster to take casts of the footprints. They turned up next day to find the place had been swept clean. It was thought that one of the fathers had done this, they didn't want the event to go any further. I still didn't make any Yowie connection, I thought it was an incredible story but I believed her. She remembered the panic in her brothers eyes when he came through the door.

About a month later my best mate was at Forgans cove one night, he had just broken up with his girlfriend and was feeling blue. He went the rock wall and took out a wooden recorder and started to play music across the water. He had his dog with him and she was snuffling on the rocks near by. Suddenly about a hundred plus metres away something was roaring and shaking a tree close to the waters edge, he told me. the hairs stood up on the back of his neck. He just picked up his dog and ran.

My mate is a vet and had never heard anything like that. I told him about my experience years earlier running along the same stretch. We visited the tree in daylight, the one he said was shaking and looked around. The earth was baked hard and we couldn't find any tracks. Baffling... I still hadn't made any Yowie connection as I wasn't familiar with the stories. As far as I knew this stuff was just happening to us.

A week later my mate told me he was certain that he knew what it was. He told me he thought it was a Koala. This is quite possible, Koalas make a lot of noise, the tree was an small 20 foot iron bark, which belongs to the eucalypt family, not sure if koalas go for it. However in his first account, he said the whole tree was shaking violently. I can't imagine a koala moving that tree in the way he described.

Still he's sticking to it and gives me grief when I talk about Yowies now.

Samsonvale Dam and Lake Kurwongbah are about a dozen ks away from sightings in upper enoggera ck.

If I was living back in Queensland again Iw ould be checking out those areas, there has been significant development around the dam but there are still plenty of places to hide out there. It wasn't until around 2003 when I started to read things on the net that made me rethink what I'd experienced.

Hope that helps

Cheers Buck

[deadpool]

Hmm.. very interesting. Just scoped out the surrounding areas on Google maps. There's a place called Journey's End Cottage - about a 7km drive from Mt Sampson Rd which is near the dam by the looks of things. It backs onto Walter Henderson Park & is only about 18km away from Brisbane Forest Park.

Either way, this looks like a prime place for a Yowie to inhabit. Dense forest, a lake looking thing.. that plus the dam itself, which would be a good source of food. It looks like bush tracks criss-cross the entire area.

Now upto the big question: any known sightings around Mt Sampson, Walter Henderson Park or Brisbane Forest Park?

edit: i'm using google to its full advantage, and so far the closest thing I can find was this:

Source: Australasian Post: February, 28th 1980. By Frank Robson.

Mr Bigfoot is on the prowl again north of Brisbane and although he's a friendly fellow some locals are locking their doors at night. Yowie fever has hit a little Queensland town where two youths say they saw a hairy apparition lurking in the shadows of a creek bed.