The Inhumanoids

by Barton M Nunnelly

  Back then no white man had ever even heard of Bigfoot, and the Beck brothers were no exception. One of them, using the same type of logic that is still being employed today, convinced himself that what they’d seen was simply a large bear. What else could it have been? The other brother, Fred, wasn’t so sure. He’d seen a lot of bears in his time, and didn’t believe this was one of them.

  A few weeks later Fred Beck was back in the neighborhood, this time prospecting for gold with his partner in the Mt. St. Helens, Lewis River area in southwestern Washington. Before they decided to build a cabin, they had lived in a tent beside a good-sized creek in the shade of a small mountain called Pumy Butte. Along the flowing creek there was a sandbar about an acre long where they would go to get drinking water and wash their pots and pans.

  Early one morning, after being joined by some other miners, one of the men came running back from the sandbar and urged his companions to follow him back down to the creek. Once there he led them 160 feet to the center of the sandbar where he showed them two huge, somewhat human-like footprints sunk four inches deep into the sand. There were no other footprints anywhere nearby, just these two out in the middle of nowhere by themselves. Either this thing had a 160 foot stride, they figured, or it had dropped from the sky and went straight back up.

  As the months passed, other strange prints were found; prints that none of the miners could identify, the largest of them measuring some nineteen inches long. After they built the cabin, Beck and four other miners working their claim, ‘The Vander White,’ would sometimes hear a weird “thudding, hollow, thumping noise” which seemed to come from beneath the ground of the area.

  They could never find the cause of the sound, and suspected that one of the group might be playing tricks on the others, but even when the entire group was gathered together, the sound would continue. Beck later described the racket as sounding as if “there’s a hollow drum in the Earth somewhere and something is hitting it.”

  One evening in early July of 1924, a shrill, whistling sound broke the silence, emanating from atop a nearby forested ridge. The sound was answered by another whistle which came from a different ridge some distance away. This sound, along with a booming, thumping noise like a gorilla pounding its chest, continued every evening for a week. The miners, by now, were thoroughly unsettled and unnerved and carried their rifles with them everywhere they went.

  There was a fresh-water spring about 100 yards from camp and one day, as Beck and another man identified as ‘Hank’ were drawing water, they noticed a seven foot tall, ape-like creature standing upright next to a pine tree a hundred yards away. Beck was, no doubt, immediately reminded of the creature he and his brother had seen earlier. Hank yelled and raised his gun as the thing darted behind the tree. When it poked its head out to look at them he fired three quick shots, spraying bark but apparently missing the creature, which then disappeared for a short time. It soon reappeared 200 yards down the canyon and Hank fired three more shots, to no apparent effect, before the thing was out of sight.

  It was dark by the time they reached the cabin. After conferring with the other men, it was agreed that they should abandon the area at daybreak. It would be too risky, they reasoned, to try and make it out in the darkness. They gathered all their belongings together in readiness for their departure at dawn, then settled in for a good night’s sleep. That sleep would never come, however. As fate would have it, it turned out to be the most terrifying night of their lives.

  Around midnight they were all awakened by a tremendous ‘thud’ against the wall of the cabin. Some of the chinking came loose from between the logs and fell on Hank, pinning him. Beck helped him free. From outside came the sounds of many feet tramping the ground and running about. The men grabbed their guns, expecting the worst. And they would not be disappointed, it would seem. The cabin had no windows, so Hank peered out the opening left by the fallen chinking and saw three more ape-like inhumanoids standing together and, from the sound of things, there were many more of them out there.

  According to Beck (shown above years later), the creatures then pelted the cabin with rocks. Beck was badly shaken, though still in somewhat better condition than most of the other men, who huddled together in the corner in shock. He urged his companions not to fire on the creatures unless they were physically attacked. This happened soon enough. The entities apparently grew tired of throwing rocks so some of them jumped onto the roof and began beating on it, as if trying to batter it down. In response, Beck and Hank fired through the roof even as another beast furiously attempted to break down the door. They braced it with a long pole taken from the bunk bed but feared it would not hold, so they riddled the door with bullets.

  The attack continued all night with only brief interludes of respite. At one point one of the “apes” reached through the chinking space and grabbed an axe by the handle. Beck reached out and grabbed it by the blade, turning it upright so it wouldn’t fit through the crack. Hank fired at the thing’s arm, narrowly missing Beck’s hand, after which the creature dropped the axe and retreated. The attack ended just before daybreak.

  As dawn lit the sky, quiet settled about the cabin and the terrified group of men cautiously opened the door and stepped out, guns well in hand. All seemed peaceful as the embattled band headed out of the area. A few minutes after they had left the cabin, Beck spotted one of the creatures standing near the edge of the canyon about eighty yards away. Taking careful aim, he fired three times and watched as the creature toppled over the edge down into the gorge 400 feet below.

  As quickly as they could go, the miners fled the area and headed for Spirit Lake, Washington leaving behind all $200 worth of supplies and equipment. They never returned to claim it. At Spirit Lake Hank told a forest ranger what had befallen the group, then they headed home to Kelso. Soon their story had leaked to the newspapers and it caused quite a sensation. Reporters who soon returned to the scene of the alleged attack reportedly found giant human-like footprints and dubbed the location; ‘Ape Canyon,’ a name that it still bears to this day.

  The incident at Ape Canyon has for decades been touted by researchers and believers as strong evidence that unidentified, flesh and blood primates exist in the pacific northwest, but it is interesting here to note that Beck and his companions didn’t believe that at all, but felt they were dealing with ‘supernatural beings.’

  In a privately published booklet in 1967, “I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens,” Beck revealed that, from early childhood on, he had numerous psychic experiences, many of them involving supernatural “people.” He even revealed that they had found the mine they were working in 1924 with the help and guidance of two “spiritual beings,” one of them a buck-skin clad Native American and the other a female whose name was Vander White, after whom they later named their mine.

  Concerning the “apemen” Beck wrote:

  “...they are not entirely of this world. I was, for one, always conscious that we were dealing with supernatural beings and I know the other members of the party felt the same.”

  Beck felt the entities were from “another dimension” and were a link between human and animal consciousness. Composed of both physical and psychical matter, sometimes one more than the other depending on the degree of “materialization,” Beck didn’t believe that these creatures could be captured or killed by anyone, nor would the body of one ever be found. One odd point to make about this case is that we are expected to believe that an entire troupe of giant, hairy “apemen” (the physical strength of even one of which must be immense) could not succeed in so much as battering down one wooden door on a rickety shack.

  I submit that, if the story is accurate, the creatures didn’t want to gain entrance and hurt the miners, or they would have, but were merely content to frighten them out of their wits. Years later it was proposed that the entire case was a mere prank caused by two men who threw rocks at the cabin from hiding.

  Personally, I must insist that the testimony of any man who
claims to be so stupid as to risk certain injury or death by hiding in the bushes and throwing rocks at a group of armed men in an agitated state of mind should be viewed with extreme prejudice if not summarily dismissed at the off-set.

  One day in October, 1952, a hunter named Lyle Slade, while on an elk hunt, thought he saw a wounded elk on the other side of a clearing. Suddenly, and much to his surprise, the air was filled with intense “screeching and jabbering sounds.” Even more surprising was the creature that suddenly stepped out into the clearing. According to a local newspaper it stood seven feet tall, was covered with brown hair, and wearing a leather belt with a brass buckle around its waist.

  Another hirsute curiosity was seen in Kankakee, Illinois in April, 1959. The witness, a man named David Soucie, claimed to have observed a glowing disc-shaped object land in a rural area and a huge, ape-like creature appear in front of it. The monster then turned and began to walk toward the witness. Terrified, Soucie hid in the bushes and was understandably much relieved when the creature ambled past him and on into the woods.

  Only a few months later, In the summer of 1960, numerous persons from Parson, West Virginia claimed to have encountered a terrifying eight-foot-tall ‘thing’ with long, shaggy hair and huge eyes which “shone like big balls of fire.”

  A man named W. C. “Doc” Priestly had a truly bizarre encounter with a hairy inhumanoid one evening in October as he was driving through the Monongohela National Forest three miles north of Marlington. His car, which he said had previously been “purring like a kitten,” suddenly sputtered and rolled to a stop. “Then I saw it,” Priestly later told reporters for the West Virginia, Daily Mail. “To my left beside the road stood this monster with long hair pointing straight up toward the sky.”

  Priestly had been following behind a group of his friends who were driving a bus. When they noticed that he was no longer behind them, they turned around to look for him. “I don’t know how long I sat there,” Priestly said, “until the boys missed me and backed the bus back to where I was. It seemed this monster was very much afraid of the bus and dropped his hair (which had been standing on end) and to my surprise as soon as he did this, my car started to run again. I didn’t tell the boys what I had seen. The thing took off when the bus stopped.”

  Priestly again fell in behind the bus but soon afterwards his car started acting up a second time. “I could see the sparks flying from under the hood of my car as if it had a very bad short,” he said. “and sure enough, there beside the road stood the monster again. The points were completely burned out of my car.” Once again the creature melted into the forest when the bus backed up. Many readers may note that fluctuations or disruptions in the Electromagnetic, or EM, field is a classic side effect of encounters with UFOs.

  During the peak UFO ‘flap’ period of 1965-67, hairy monsters were also being seen in Brooksville, Florida. A Mrs. Eula Lewis reported that residents in her neighborhood were being disturbed at night by shrill, inexplicable screaming sounds. One night her dogs were extremely agitated outside. She looked out the window and saw a “big, hairy thing standing in the yard.” She could hardly believe her eyes. “The thing was swinging its arms,” she said, “and the dogs were yapping to beat hell trying to get it. It started going back into the woods with the dogs still chasing it.”

  Another woman was changing a tire on a lonely stretch of road in November 1966, when she heard a noise in the bushes and smelled a horrible odor. Then a huge, hairy thing stood up beside the road and glared at her. It had large green eyes and an eerie glow on one side of its torso. She was horrified at the sight, of course, and was most glad when an oncoming car scared the creature back into the woods. Luckily, the car had stopped to offer her assistance.

  Meanwhile, cattle were disappearing in nearby New Port Richey. Strange three-toed tracks had been found at one of the sites, but no imprints of vehicle tires and the like. One sheriff's deputy asked, “Just where does a rustler put a full grown cow? Sure as hell not in his back pocket!”

  D. Douglas Graham writes in Fate magazine’s November 1995, issue of a curious encounter which happened near Peter Bottom, Arkansas in 1966:

  “...Two boys were traveling on horseback in an isolated area when a man in a tractor suddenly emerged from the valley, moving at full speed in their direction. The man was extremely agitated and told them to leave the area, that a “monster” was living in the Bottoms, he had seen it only moments before. The two boys, unafraid, decided to investigate as the farmer drove away.

  As they entered further into the wilderness area, the horses refused to go any further, so they continued on foot. A few minutes later they found themselves in a lush mountain meadow full of flowers and sweet smelling grass. One of the boys then noticed what appeared to be clumps of white fur lying near the trunk of an old tree. It looked like a dead dog or animal.

  Suddenly the clump stood up and ambled toward them. It was a creature nearly nine feet tall, and almost completely covered with thick, snow white fur. Where the skin was exposed it was a strange, pinkish color. Its face and posture was human-like. It also emitted a powerful odor, and made a sound like a radio signal as it slowly approached the two boys. The signal sounded like “beep, beep, beep.” The terrified witnesses fled the area immediately. A posse was formed to hunt the creature down, but it was never found. Dead and mutilated cows were found in the area.”

  It is important to note here that the ‘beeping’ noise sounded like it was coming from the creature itself as opposed to some out-of-sight source. Had the boys seen a robotic Bigfoot? Fourteen years earlier, in July, 1956, a Boise, Idaho man claimed that while he was fishing one day he saw, and smelled, an eight-foot-tall, malodorous, Bigfoot-type creature covered in reddish hair step from the brush and onto a nearby road. The witness stated that the thing was female, flat-faced and gave off a metallic-sounding laugh as it walked. The reports just get stranger.

  One morning in the spring of 1968, Mrs. Alice Allison happened to glance out the window of her home near the small community of Youngstown in Salem, Ohio and saw a strange object hovering above her thirty-foot tall Buckeye tree.

  “It looked like an airplane without wings,” she later told an investigator. “It sounded like a helicopter but it had no propellers.” She further described the craft as black and without lights, with the top half being a clear dome and inside, she claimed, she could see a lone occupant. “He was a man and wore a khaki-colored shirt. He had olive-colored skin, which was slightly tanned, and his eyes were slanted.” Judging by the look on the entity’s face, she got the feeling that he might be worried that the craft was about to crash, since it was ‘rocking back and forth’ and making sputtering sounds. She observed the object for around twenty minutes, she said, before it slowly flew off in a southwesterly direction. Allison’s seven year-old son, Bruce, also claimed to see the object but, due to his view-point, was unable to see the occupant.

  Other strange events soon followed the UFO sighting. That same spring the family began seeing a large cat-like creature three feet high and three and a half feet long. It appeared often and would sometimes sit in the driveway where once, after a good rain, it left three inch tracks in the mud. Claw marks six inches long and half an inch deep were also found on a tree near their home.

  Loud growling and panting noises were heard in the evenings by both the Allison’s and their neighbors and big cat prints, far too large for a domestic, were found atop another neighbor’s vehicle one morning. Panthers, or cougars, had been extinct in that region for over a century, and a perfunctory check of the nearest zoo, seventy miles away in Cleveland, failed to turn up any missing mountain lions.

  Soon after the appearances of the mystery cat, another strange creature arrived in the area. “I don’t know what it was,” Allison stated. “but it was big enough to be a man. A big man. It would stand out in the woods and watch the house. All you could see was a black outline but it definitely wasn’t a bear.” Arriving home one day, the family saw the
creature as it dashed into the woods. “It’s not like a person running through the woods,” young Bruce recalled. “You trip over stumps, branches and rocks. It ran so fast it didn’t even look like it touched the ground.”

  That summer they found a large spot in the woods where the thing was apparently bedding down. After the creature had a run in with the family cat, it stopped appearing to the family, who claimed they could still ‘feel its presence,’ however. Their grown daughter had heard the creature’s growls many times, but had never actually seen it. Her husband wasn’t so lucky.

  In 1971, just as he was pulling out of Salem Heights on his way to work, a “very large man” covered with hair leaped out in front of the car and put its hand up against it as if to avoid being hit. The driver slammed on his brakes but even so, couldn’t avoid thumping into the figure pretty hard. When he jumped out of the vehicle, however, there was nothing there. The creature had vanished leaving behind only a large dent in the fender, some black hairs; and one more believer. The Allison family claimed that they were also plagued by poltergeist-like activity inside their home, as well as further sightings of ‘flying saucers.’

  For weeks during the early spring of 1969, the Lester Kaiser family of Rising Sun, Indiana had observed mysterious lights which appeared in the evenings along a ridge near their rural home. Then, on May 18th, the household suffered a power blackout which plunged the home into darkness for over two hours. The Kaiser’s didn't connect the two events, and why should they?

  Then, on the next evening, the Kaiser’s son George, while walking through the farmyard on his way to a tractor, was shocked when he saw a weird-looking inhumanoid figure standing only twenty-five feet away. He was later able to give a very detailed description of the creature he claimed he saw.