What was it?

[From “Crypto Journal”. 1998.]

I saw the strangest, scariest thing ever. I was on a small man-made bridge built by my grandma and grandpa, and this bridge was connected to the river. This is isolated since I'm on 85 acres, but listen to my sighting.

My best friend and I were going to jump off the 25-ft.-high bridge at about 12:30 p.m. into the river. We were already on the outside of the rails, shirts off, trunks on, ready to go when we heard a HUGE splash about 100 yards away from the bridge. Suddenly, we heard splashing in the sound of running through the water toward us and I was like, "Shawn, do you hear that!!!??" He said, "Of course I hear it. I'm looking right at it."

And it was really dark, besides a little moonlight, so we couldn't see what it was. This river area is very narrow, maybe only 50 feet across with two huge dikes on each side, making it hard to get up. It kept running through the water toward us, but we felt safe on the bridge, and I'm not the kind of person to get scared, so we actually kept on staring, hoping it would come closer. When it reached the water too deep to run through anymore, it absolutely flew up the cliff. This cliff is steep and it just ran up it like it was nothing. We then heard running on the dike toward us, which was scary because the dike is as high as we are on the bridge, making us now vulnerable if it came too close.

It sounded like someone running in very wet aqua shoes, like almost running through squishy mud. Then it jumped off the dike clear into the river again, which must have been a 15 ft. jump down into the water, which most animals would climb down. It just jumped completely off the top, like a human would do. We felt safe again, knowing it was 25 feet below us in the river again and it was now swimming, now maybe only 15 yards away from us. We were getting concerned that it was getting so close to us without getting scared of our loud voices. Starting to think this was no animal, it jetted up onto the dike again. Now clearly able to hear its running, we were FREAKED OUT.

It again jumped clear off the dike back into the water and it was VERY close now. Maybe 5 yards away and almost coming underneath us below the bridge. Then I saw the scariest, craziest thing of the night. In pitch dark practically, I saw two extremely bright lights, which had to be its eyes. I said, "Oh MY GOD! What if it's a human holding two flashlights?" But then we thought, Impossible; a human can jump off that dike 15 feet into the water then swim as fast as a otter back to the dike and run up a almost straight up steep hill out of 10 feet deep water. Then it ran up the dike again and was maybe 10 feet away from us, so we ran like hell away back to the house for a knife. I got a knife for me, a big kitchen knife for Shawn and two flashlights. We ran all the way back to the bridge, taking about a minute and four minutes total from running away from the animal to get the knives and back to the bridge.

Then we thought we heard and felt vibrations underneath the bridge and we thought, oh GOD it's under us. Then it stopped. Twenty seconds later we heard HUGE swishing in the bushes on the bank. Finally, another splash into the water and it took off up river away from us. We don't know if this creature was after us or just going from down river to up river, but what animal possibly the size of a small bear able to swim like a otter, climb like a monkey and jump like a kangaroo wouldn't run away at the sound of our LOUD, LOUD human voices? You decide.

*A special thank you to Alicia MacKinnon for sending this article to us.

WCSRO, 2006.