Estacada Girl Brings Home Mysterious Creature from Creek

A first-hand account out of Oregon that's been making the rounds recently has got people talking, and for good reason. The story comes from a woman named Connie Moore, who lived on a 40-acre parcel about 11 miles outside of Estacada back in the late 1980s, and what her 9-year-old daughter Amy brought home from the creek one October afternoon in 1989 is the kind of detail that sticks with you. Connie tells it straight, no embellishment, the way someone does when they've carried a memory for 35 years and have already tried every word in the English language to make it make sense. She was at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes when Amy came through the back door trying to be quiet, which she only did when she had something to hide. Whatever was bundled inside Amy's jacket was moving. Connie could see it shifting against the flannel. When Amy opened her jacket, Connie came face to face with something about the size of a large house cat, covered in fine dark hair the color of wet bark. And here's where the story takes the turn that separates it from every other "weird thing in the woods" tale out there. It had a face. Not an animal's face. Not anything Connie had a framework for. The eyes were closed, the nose was broad and flat, the mouth small and pursed, and the hands curled up against its chest were oversized for the body, with fingers longer than they should have been. And it was making a sound so low Connie felt it in her sternum before she heard it. A hum coming from somewhere deep in its small chest. Now, here's the part that really got me. This didn't come out of nowhere. A month before Amy walked through that door, the family dog, a 4-year-old Australian Shepherd mix named Cooper, stopped going near the eastern fence line. Overnight. No gradual change. One morning fine, the next morning planted in the yard with his ears flat and his tail low, refusing to move toward the treeline for any bribe. A dog that had been raised on that property and knew every inch of it. Cooper had been going to the creek with Amy every afternoon since she was old enough to walk that far. Now he stopped at the gate to the east pasture and turned back. He started barking at the east-facing window in the middle of the night. Connie also heard something in the second week of September that she couldn't place. She was on the back porch after dinner with a cup of coffee when a sound came from the direction of the creek. Lasted about six seconds. Low and resonant, carrying across the pasture with a force that seemed wrong for the distance. Not a coyote, not any bird she could name, and she'd lived next to that forest for five years and heard elk, black bear, and the occasional cougar. This was something with structure to it, a pattern that rose and held and then dropped, produced by something with a chest large enough to make the air move. She told herself it was an elk. Said it out loud on the back porch to nobody. Then went inside and locked the door. The setting matters here, too. Estacada sits at the edge of the Mount Hood National Forest in Clackamas County, about 40 minutes southeast of Portland. The Clackamas River runs through town, and the forest behind it runs for hundreds of miles in every direction, getting wilder and more remote the farther east you go, up into the Cascade foothills and then the high Cascades themselves. The Eagle Creek drainage, where the family's unnamed tributary ran, is the kind of terrain that has produced reports for generations. Clackamas County has long been considered active territory, with the kind of dense old growth and remote canyons that make the area a natural corridor between the lowlands and the high country. What Amy found was at the creek, on the far bank, which she wasn't supposed to cross. She had been watching a water ouzel work the shallow riffle below her usual boulder when she heard a small sound from the far bank. Thin and high, like a bird call but wrong, like the idea of a bird call. It repeated three times. She pushed through the alder brush and found something small and dark caught in the root tangle of an alder that had undermined and begun to lean over the creek. One leg caught between two roots, lying on its side in the mud, one small dark arm reaching up trying to grip the root above its head. The whole small body twisting with the effort of trying to get loose. Making that thin, high sound, calling into the alder brush in every direction. When Amy reached in to free the leg, it grabbed her wrist with both hands. A grip much stronger than its size should have produced. And when it looked at her, Amy said later, it just looked at her the way something very young looks at whatever is in front of it, completely and without fear, because it did not have enough experience to know what fear was for. Connie ran through every rational category she could reach. Some kind of infant primate, but there were no free-ranging primates in the Oregon Cascades, none that anybody acknowledged. An abnormally developed infant of some known species, a bear cub with some developmental anomaly. None of them fit. The hair was dark and fine and dense, not the coarse banded hair of a bear cub. The hands had five fingers with defined knuckles and proportional fingernails, not claws, not pads. The face had a brow ridge over closed eyes and a nose that was flat and wide with nostrils that flared slightly with each breath. And when Connie touched its hand, the fingers tightened around hers with a deliberateness that was not reflex. Whatever was in there was deciding to hold on. The full account, including what happened after Connie put the little one in a cardboard box in the basement and what was waiting at the treeline, is worth the listen. Connie tells it the way people tell things they've never been able to stop thinking about, and the details she gives about the sound, the grip, and the face are the kind that stay with you long after the video ends. Definitely one to queue up if you haven't already.