BFRO #7382: Various incidents along the Kalama River

📍 Location

📝 Description

Up until last year I owned a bait and tackle store on the Kalama River in Kalama, Wa. I guess I would have to say that there were some strange things happening to several of my customers who would fish directly upstream from my store at a hole known as Beginner's Hole. For instance, one of my customers, Steve and his girlfriend Tasha, arrived on the river a couple of hours before daylight and decided to get some rest in there car before the usual crowed arrived. They laid there seats backed and turned up the radio when all of a sudden something hit the driver's side window with enough force to almost break the glass. Steve later told me that he thought it must have been a rock of considerable size as it shook the whole car. He immediately started the car and turned on his lights only to find nobody could be seen in the large parking area and Tasha was so shook up by it that she made him leave and spend the rest of the night parked under the lights of my store. I guess I really didn�t think much of to until approximately a week or so later at about 9:30pm after just locking up for the night and being startled by someone frantically pounding on my store door only to open it and find a very scared fisherman who had claimed to have seen a Bigfoot within a block of my store just standing on the riverbank looking at him walk by on the road 75 feet away. It was late May or early June (2001) so it had just gotten dark. I can�t remember ever seeing a grown man so afraid of a wild animal in my life as Jason was at that moment. He just kept saying that he just witnessed Bigfoot and to stay inside for fear it was going to get us. I grabbed a flashlight and tried to talk him into showing me where he had seen it but he refused to go outside, insisting I was crazy because he said it must have been at least 7 foot tall. A week or so later I went up to Beginner's Hole at about 10:30pm with my beer distributor Travis to do some glowballing for summer-run steelhead as I had for many years in the past when it started to get warmer and the fish seemed to get more active. We pulled into the parking area and I ran over the bank so I could get the first cast because it was usually payday and Travis stood in front of the headlights still rigging his pole. I had taken several casts with no luck when I noticed the fish down river in the deep hole were jumping like I had never seen before. I climbed up the bank as Travis was just finishing and told him to come on. We were going to walk down and see what was going on. As we arrived at the hole about 200 yards down stream, we quickly climbed down the bank and began casting. Travis was located 50 feet below me behind a large bush when I heard a loud splash from his direction. Thinking he must have fallen in I yelled to see if he was alright when to my surprise we were face-to- face and he was yelling for me to run in a very panicked voice! I wasted no time following him up the bank because it must have been something pretty serious to scare Travis as he stands 6ft tall and weighs over 220 lbs. As we climbed in the car, he was yelling something about a giant ape-like figure that had porpoised, went under and then came back out of the water and jumped. What ever it was, it must have been very large judging by the sound that I had heard and seeing that Travis was very wet from the splash that it had made. I guess that�s when I started believing that maybe Bigfoot was real! Being very knowledgeable of the river and the fish runs, I came to the conclusion that combined with the fact that for the last few years the woods had been closed to public entry 90% of the season and that the summer-run steelhead where being let go out of the lower hatchery and almost all of them stopping at Beginner's Hole because that�s where they had been released that maybe it had come down from up river looking for food and quite possibly had found a steelhead paradise. It took several days before I or Travis had found the nerve to venture back up there but the thought of those fish made us finally give in to our fear. What a mistake! Arriving at the hole, I as usual ran over the bank to get the first cast and Travis as usual stood rigging his pole in the headlights. As I started to cast I felt very uneasy and continued looking up and down the river trying to see in the nighttime darkness when directly across the river from me I heard a baseball-sized rock hit the water a few feet off the far bank. I strained my eyes to see what had thrown it thinking that after telling several of my customers of the earlier incident that maybe someone was playing a trick or something. That�s when I heard it! A low, deep moan-like sound that turned into a high pitched scream. I have been in the woods enough to know that there is no animal that could possibly make the noise that I had just heard and it surely wasn�t a customer. As I screamed for Travis I felt reassured to see him already coming over the bank asking what the hell had

🔍 Circumstances

Many

🌤️ Weather Conditions

10:00pm - 4:00am

ℹ️ Additional Details

10:00pm - 4:00am

🔗 Sources (1)

👥 Community Contributions

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