In this edition of the paranormal alphabet we are back at it again with another apeman bigfoot-type cryptid this tall-boy hailing from the land down-under… Australia! As has been said there are many legends and tales of apemen or primate-like cryptids from around the world… the most famous being the Sasquatch.
Featured Photo: By Seo75 from Wikimedia. License.
The Australian bigfoot is well-known by the populace and also the indigenous Aboriginals who have told of the creatures in their legends or creatures that are very similar to Yowie’s and many believe it is where the creature originally originated from in oral history. The creature also has various other names, many of them region-dependent, such as Ghindaring, doolaga, yaroma and jimbra among various other names but the name Yowie is how it is most popularly referred as.
There are often many sightings of alleged Yowie’s in Australia every year. The Yowie is described as an ape-like creature with hair/fur all over its body and that it can stand anywhere from 7ft to a monstrous 12ft in height and that it is bipedal, meaning it walks and runs on two-legs instead of four, like the vast majority of apparent bigfoots. Of course, the Yowie also has massive feet as well which also establishes it into the realm of a bigfoot cryptid. The Yowie’s behaviour seems to vary from shy and timid to aggressive and violent… possibly even dangerous. Some reports also say that the Yowie’s eyes can glow red, specifically during the dark night-time hours.
The first ever recorded Yowie sighting is alleged to have happened as far back as 1795 according to a column from the July 31st, 1987 edition of The Sydney Morning Herald and alleged that since then and up until 1987 there had been as many as 2,999 sightings allegedly catalogued or reported, although gives no source to confirm this and merely states “I wonder who compiles these statistics?”, interestingly enough I am also wondering the same thing, but I guess we are going to be left hanging on that one.
There are though some actual organizations that catalogue and investigate Yowie sightings, one of them being the aptly named Australian Yowie Research organisation. Most recently the organisation’s head, Dean Harrison, has claimed that the recent bushfires have sharply driven down the number of reported Yowie sightings to almost zero. The organisations website, yowiehunters.com has the vast majority of catalogued sightings happening in the Australian states of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. The website also has an article that talks of a wildman, similar to a Yowie, that dates even further back than 1795, to 1789. And I think we can also safely assume that Yowie sightings or whatever they were called back then have been going on for even a much longer period of time than that, probably even before colonists arrived.
There is belief and some limited evidence that the Yowie may have actually been a corrupted name from another or even the same cryptid called the Yahoo, with claims of encounters with it from both Aboriginals and from very early colonists settling in Australia. It is said by some that at some point, perhaps in the 1970s, a misunderstanding had led to the Yahoo being incorrectly referred as a Yowie and which has stuck ever since. Some also claim that the Yowie doesn’t at all exist and it is only the Yahoo which is being wrongly named. The biggest advocator of this mess-up is the Australian Historian Graham Joyner who also catalogued incidents in his 1977 book “The Hairy Man of South Eastern Australia”.
The Yahoo is said to be possibly some kind of undiscovered marsupial that went extinct by the early 20th Century. Reports of Yahoo’s were common in the 1800s and earlier in Australia, often called Australian apes by the colonists. Now a days many people just accept Yahoo as one of many names for the Yowie or vice-versa.
An instance of the Yahoo was talked about in a newspaper called the Australian Town and Country Journal where a column for Milburn Creek talks about a creature called the Yahoo-Devil or Hairy Man of the wood and mentions that the earliest settlers had overheard the “blacks” (which is probably referring to the aboriginals) talking about such creatures found in the isolated or hard to get to mountains and gorges in the country.
The writer of the column appeared to believe in the creature and take the superstitions into account. The column goes on to talk about a sighting towards the head of the Lachlan River in a very secluded area. Witnessed by a boy called Porter. The sighting happened when Porter was herding his father’s sheep when he saw an unearthly-looking being moving directly towards him from rugged nearby rocks. Dogs that were out with Porter would become timid on witnessing the creature and crouch around Porter’s legs, seemingly afraid of whatever it was.
The boy and his dogs would run home and relayed what he had seen to his father and others at the home. Upon later going out to look for whatever it was, nothing was found.
The column then goes on to talk about another sighting of a similar creature but that was witnessed by many more people occurring on the previous Saturday in the Lachlan area. There was a fishing party attended by young men and women at the Rocky Bridge waterholes. At two-hours before sundown most of the people went to check and set their fishing lines at the waterholes while a younger woman remained behind to prepare the supper. The younger woman would then be startled by what at first, she thought was a man, one apart of the fishing party, returning to the fire, but on closer inspection the humanoid being was seen as something unsightly and inhuman.
It was described as having a big red face, hands and legs that were covered with long shaggy hair. The woman would scream at the sight which caused a number of the men to race towards the area leaving their fishing lines. When they reached back to camp, they observed the beast 50-yards away of which eventually turned away from them and made for the rocks.
Two of the men would then decide to arm themselves, one with a tomahawk and another with a cudgel and follow the beast for a short distance up the rocky mountain. The beast would then suddenly turn around and observe the men following, standing about 60-yards apart. Further description of the beast here said that it was untidy/dirty, big and had dark grislily hair, the face also with shaggy darkish hair and that the back, belly and down the legs was covered with hair of a lighter colour.
The beast would eventually charge back towards the fire where the women were staying, causing them and the men to become fearful, but before reaching the camp it sided off back towards the inaccessible rocky mountain. The column mentions that in response to this encounter, neighbors planned a hunting party to hunt down the creature, dead or alive.
Another well-known case was reported in 1882 by an amateur Naturalist called Henry James McCooey. He reported seeing a creature between Bateman’s Bay and Ulladulla after his attention was attracted by the cry of birds which were pursuing and attacking the unknown creature. The man said that the beast was standing on its hind legs and distorting its face and blinking its eyes while looking at the birds and that the creature was also making a “chattering” noise. He estimated that if the creature was standing perfectly upright it would be about 5ft tall. He said the creature did not have a tail and was covered in very long black hair and that it had small restless eyes that were partly hidden by matted hair. He noted its arms and legs seemed to be out of proportion with the rest of the creature’s body.
He would say that it was an uncouth and repulsive looking creature although it likely possessed a lot of strength and Henry would say he would not care to come into close quarters with the creature. After a while of observing the beast he threw a stone at it causing it to run away into a nearby ravine while still being pursued by the birds.
McCooey would get into a spat over his sighting with Edward Pierson Ramsay, Curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney leading to Ramsay to offer McCooey 100 pounds to bring in a creature that he saw, either dead or alive.
McCooey would later say that the position the Curator took was untenable and said that indigenous apes existed in the colony and named places such as Bateman’s Bay, Mount MacDonald, Jingera Mountains among others where people had sighted them and also talked about how the Aboriginals had feared these apes long before the museum was founded in the colony or even long before any colonists arrived.
An article from NT News that was posted on April 21st 2009 told of a Yowie researcher called Andrew McGinn who believed that the Yowie was possibly responsible for killing a seven-month-old puppy that had its head ripped off, although the family who owned the unfortunate dog believe it instead to have been Dingoes. But the researcher claimed that the manner the puppy had been killed in was typical of a Yowie, according to his experience.
The researcher, who had been investigating Yowie’s for about a decade up to that point (guess it would be about two decades now if they are still investigating them) further went on saying that over the past 100-years, dogs had been killed or decapitated and that people had reported feeling watched, having goats stolen or seeing a big “hairy thing” in the days beforehand.
The article also talks about a sighting of a possible Yowie in August 1997 by a mango farmer called Katrina Tucker who lived in Acacia Hills, where many other residents have alleged common sightings of the Yowie back in the 1990s. The terrified mango farmer said she spotted the creature, described as a big hairy humanoid, standing just meters away from her on the property. The next day photographs of the creature’s large footprints were taken and were examined but concluded to be a hoax.
On the yowiehunters website (which is a part of the yowie research organisation headed by Dean Harrison which was mentioned earlier on in this post) there are dozens of sightings on the site recorded down and pinpointed on an interactive map that allows further information to be viewed on each sighting found here. There are also dozens of newspaper clippings going as far back as the late 1700s and still even being updated now.
There is still much more to go over with the Yowie that can be put into many blog posts but I am going to round this off here before I get carried away.
Sources
“Dog Killed by Yowie” – April 21st, 2009. Matt Cunningham, NT News. Found on the Wayback Machine.
The Sydney Morning Herald, July 31st, 1987 – “It’s spot the yowie time again” – Margaret Jones.
Australian Town and Country Journal, Saturday 18th November 1876 “Milburn Creek”. Found on Trove.
Mysterious Universe – “Yowies Fled Inland to Escape Australian Fires, Expert Claims” Feb 25th 2020 – Paul Seaburn
ABC – “Batemans Bay yowie sighting an Australian first” 9th Dec 2014 – Ian Campbell
www.yowiehunters.com – a number of recorded sightings and newspaper clippings/articles can be found here.
Next up we will finally reach the final part of the Paranormal Alphabet series by going on to Z where we will be talking about zombies! And creatures that are similar to zombies or cryptids that are similar… basically whatever I find that is zombie-like. And then on that post I will announce the next Mystery series that I have planned!
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