The Watchman
Recent Activity
Sightings and Encounters
February 11th, 1998 — The Woodland Beast Next Door
We went the two of us, into
The woods behind our little school
We didn't go in there alone
Two went in and one came home— Traditional Cedar Creek Schoolyard Rhyme
Living with their father in a house off Forresters Drive, the headmasters' cottage of what used to be Cedar Creek Elementary, Dakota Sanders, 10, and her sister Emily, 4, were well used to spending their afternoons in the Grizzly Bluff Woods. Their father, Alex Sanders, a professor of English Literature at the Cedar Creek State University currently on compassionate leave, had taken the girls on many a forest hike the previous summer, and now that the worst of the winter was past the younger of the Sanders children was eager to explore once more.
So it was, that while their father marked term papers one unremarkable, overcast Wednesday afternoon, Dakota and Emily decided to embark on their own adventure into the woods. It wasn't until two hours later that Alex realised the front door was unlocked… and open… and that his girls' shoes weren't by the front door.
Three hours later, a search was underway. Fifteen square miles of the Grizzly Bluff woods was to be combed over by police, forest rangers, and volunteers. As the first of the search parties was about to head into the woods, Dakota walked out of the forest alone.
She said that Emily had wandered off following some kind of small animal — describing something like a two-legged mouse — but that she had lost sight of her sister in the undergrowth. Eventually she'd turned a corner at a large tree, and Emily was nowhere to be seen.
Leading her father, a forest ranger and one of the CCPD police sergeants to where she'd last seen Emily, Dakota seemed to spot something. "She just froze," Alex recalled later, "crouching low to the ground like a cat, hunting. I tried to see what she was looking at, but then she took off into the bushes at a tear; I lost sight of her."
Pushing through the brush in a panic, Alex Sanders tripped on a root and tumbled down a hill, landing in the muddy valley of an almost-dry creek, scratched and scraped by branches, rocks and roots during his unexpected descent. Dazed and on the verge of tears, he looked up to see Dakota, with her back to him, standing looking up at an immense, darkly-furred creature.
With stubby feet and arms, and an enormous spherical body, it did not look like the sort of animal capable of quick or quiet movement. Its mouth was huge, stretching across its entire face, with enormous teeth bared below its small, black eyes. "It was growling something at Dakota," Alex told me later. "But she didn't seem frightened. She spoke to it in a low, calm voice and it seemed to be listening to her — but I couldn't make out her words."
Turning to see the sergeant and forest ranger sliding down the hill behind him, Alex Sanders didn't see the monster leave, but neither of the officials were willing or able to corroborate his description. Neither did anyone hear the beast depart, apparently melting into the forest without a sound and leaving Alex, Dakota and the other two men alone in the quiet woods.
Returning to the search effort's base camp to get medical attention for his wounds, Alex Sanders was shocked to find Emily sitting, safe and sound, in the grass. Apparently no worse for wear, she told her father all about the new monster friend she'd made in the woods, how he'd looked after her, and how he'd brought her home.
January 19th, 1998 — Trevor Davis meets the Sasquatch
It was a cold, stormy night like many others in the north California winter, as Trevor Davis drove home from his shift as manager at Poppa Joe's on Main Street. His 1988 Ford Taurus had been acting up for weeks, but Trevor had been putting off bringing it to the garage, so he wasn't entirely surprised when the engine finally gave up the ghost shortly after turning off Grizzly Bluff onto Williams Creek Road.
The woods around Cedar Creek are not a welcoming place to find yourself alone at night - but, familiar with the route he took home every night after work, Trevor wasn't worried. He gathered up his flashlight and briefcase, wrapped up in his thick winter coat, and began the mile-long walk back towards the Texxon gas station he'd passed at the city limits, where he knew he'd be able to find a payphone.
As he walked, Trevor became aware of someone - or something - moving through the trees to his left. Initially assuming it was a bear, Trevor grabbed the Grizzly-B-Gone spray canister out of his briefcase (Trevor insists he never leaves home without it) and popped the cap off.
But as he turned to get a better look at his uninvited travelling companion, he did not see a bear. Trevor found himself face to face with the Sasquatch.
Paralysed with fear, Trevor Davis could only stand helplessly as the creature stalked towards him.
"I could smell its breath," Trevor told me. "It got so close, I could have counted its yellowed, worn teeth if I'd been able to think straight. I feared that it was about to take a bite out of me!"
Unable to look away from its fiery gaze, Trevor only vaguely felt, somewhere at the distant edge of his terror, as the sasquatch gently took the Grizzly-B-Gone cannister from his grip! And with its prize in hand, the wood ape growled at Trevor - a thank-you? a threat? we shall never know! - before slinking back into the shadows of the undergrowth, out of sight.
November 2nd, 1997 — The Haunting of Alice Chiang
Prank phone calls are a common occurrence in small towns, as kids attempt to stave off the boredom with childish jokes and crass japes. Cedar Creek is no different, and the constant flow of new applicants to the CCSU fraternities and sororities provides numerous footsoldiers in the war on tedium.
And so it was with resigned good humour that Alice Chiang, alone in her home on McKinley Avenue, received a barrage of boisterous and bawdy calls on the night of November 2nd. With classes scheduled to resume the following morning, she assumed the deluge of calls was a last-minute grasp by a frathouse freshman to earn some valuable kudos from his abetting brothers.
It was only in the closing minutes of that evening that she began to suspect more was at play; at 11pm the usual flavour of false names and euphemism had abruptly ceased, replaced by a series of brief messages that all followed the same spooky structure: Alice would pick up the phone, there would be a series of three clicks, and a voice spoke a single number before the line went dead.
And the numbers were getting smaller.
At seven minutes past 11, the voice spoke, "eight". At seventeen minutes past 11, "seven". At twenty-eight minutes, "six", and at forty-one minutes past 11pm, "five".
By this point, Alice Chiang was getting unnerved by her peculiar caller but, preparing for an early morning, she had little time to unravel the meaning of the persistent countdown. She tried to put it out of her mind, and ignored at least two of the calls - though she did note that they were increasing in frequency.
By the time the voice had reached "one", at one minute to midnight, Alice was openly concerned about what would happen next. She was understandably startled when, at exactly 12am on the morning of Monday, November 3rd, her doorbell rang.
When Alice's sister arrived at her house the next morning to take her to the airport, she was concerned to see the front door lying open. Entering the front hallway, she called out for Alice, but received no reply. She eventually found Alice in the back yard, completely unresponsive, and frozen in an upright standing position - suspended, percisely four and three-quarter inches above the ground.
When Alice's sister touched her shoulder, Alice immediately collapsed to the grass. She spent the next several minutes vomiting a deep green liquid that disappeared into the ground almost immediately - and then, Alice passed out.
When she awoke twenty-three minutes later, surrounded by her sister, paramedics and worried neighbours, she could remember none of the previous night's events.
August 16th, 1996 — Crop Circles at the Hansen Farm
The Hansen Farm, located just a few miles to the west of Cedar Creek, is a local institution. Primarily growing spring wheat, many a local highschooler or CCSU student has taken a summer job helping Eric Hansen and his sons to maintain the equipment, mend fences or walls, or prepare for the coming fall's harvest and field rotation.
So well-respected are the Hansens, that the apparent destruction of the crops in their northernmost field, on the August 21st, was significant local news. Fingers were variously pointed at the summer workforce, the CCSU fraternities and football team (go Lumberjacks!) - but no conclusive evidence could be found, and the prime suspects had reliable alibis.
Of course, the location of the Hansens' farm makes it difficult to view its fields from above, so it took a second field's vandalisation for anyone to suspect that the exact pattern of destruction might have more significance.
This time, it was the field directly to the south of the farmhouse that was targeted, with a series of obviously intentional straight lines intersected by a flowing curve. Local interest (and confusion) continued to grow, and when a third pattern appeared on the eastern side of the farm, light aircraft enthusiast Jody Chalmers took his Glaser-Dirks DG-300 on a flight over the farm.
What he saw astounded him.
The three patterns were obviously part of single larger design, a series of concentric circles and converging lines with the farmhouse directly at the center, as seen in the photograph above. More worrying, Chalmers could see more patterns being carved as he watched - and without any apparent cause.
After the pattern was finished, at 12:24am on August 16th, dozens of people turned out at the farm to walk through the fields, and to attempt to decode the meaning of the pattern. Maps were compared and theories shared, but as the sun set no concensus had been reached.
Eric Hansen's body was discovered by his eldest son, 29-year-old Jake, in the farmhouse basement later that morning. The coroner's official report put his time of death between midnight and 2am on the 16th: exactly when the pattern was completed. The cause was recorded as acute heart failure.
Which leaves this observer with just one deathly important question: was the alien pattern a warning, or a threat?