Mike Conley's Tales of the Weird: An unexpected encounter with a hairy visitor

Sixty-eight years ago this month, a family in British Columbia had a scary visit from an unexpected hairy visitor.
At that time, the Chapman family lived in a small community named Ruby Creek, 30 miles up the Fraser River in British Columbia in western Canada. The family consisted of George and Jeannie Chapman and their three young children.
One afternoon in September 1941, George Chapman was at work with the railroad while his wife and children were at home. At around 3 p.m., the eldest son, who was 9, came running into the house saying there was a cow coming down out of the woods at the foot of a nearby mountain. The other children, a 7-year-old boy and 5-year-old girl, were still playing in a field behind the house bordering on the railroad track, according to a Web site.
Jeannie Chapman went out to look at what her son was talking about. Together, they saw what at first looked like a very big bear moving about among the bushes on the other side of the tracks. Mrs. Chapman called her two children to come back to the house immediately. Then, the creature walked onto the tracks. At that point, the mother and her kids realized it was standing upright like a man. Mrs. Chapman later reported that the creature was almost totally covered with a brownish-ochre colored hair and stood more than 7 feet tall. It had a small head and a short neck. The creature's face and hands were much darker than the hair and were almost black.
The figure walked directly toward the house. Mrs. Chapman later stated she had "too much time to look at it" because she bravely stood her ground. She told her eldest son to go into the house and get a blanket. When the boy came back with the blanket, the creature was about 100 feet away from Mrs. Chapman and her children. She spread the blanket and held it up so that the children could not see the creature. Likewise, the hairy figure could not see the children as well.
Together, Mrs. Chapman and her children ran down through a nearby field and followed the river downstream to the village.
"I used the blanket because I thought it was after one of the kids and so might go into the house to look for them instead of following me," she later stated.
Indeed, the weird creature did enter her house. It also rummaged through an old outhouse and carried out a 55-gallon barrel of fish. The creature broke open the barrel and scattered the dead fish around the place.
Later that evening, George Chapman came home from his work on the railroad. When he reached his house, he immediately saw the woodshed door battered in and spotted enormous humanoid footprints all over the place. He called for his family and got no response. Then he spotted the footprints of his wife and children heading down to the river. He retraced their steps and headed to the nearby village where he found them. He asked his father-in-law and two others to return with them and help look after his family while he was gone at work, according to a Web site.
Every night for the next week, the Chapman family would be terrorized by nightly visits from the Sasquatch. The creature did not attack them or even touch their house. But the weird sounds in the darkness and the awful barking by their dogs proved to be too much for the Chapmans. They moved out of there and never came back.
On a tragic note unrelated to the Sasquatch sightings, all three of their children would be dead within three years. The two sons died of drowning and the daughter died of a disease.
Years later, George and Jeannie Chapman could recall the "awful funny noise" that the creature made. They could imitate the sound and it matched perfectly the descriptions of other people in other parts of the world who have heard the call of the Sasquatch. Once you've heard it, they say, you will never ever forget it.
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Several readers who enjoyed last week's Tales of the Weird about a West Virginia man who was found guilty by a ghostly dream were quick to point out that a similar incident happened here in McDowell County more than 100 years ago. I wondered if anybody would notice the similarities between the two stories and sure enough they did.
In January 1881, Joshua Young experienced a disturbing dream. A young woman with a broken neck appealed to him for help in his nightmare. The next morning, he stopped a funeral procession that happened to be passing by. When he saw the corpse's face, Young was astounded to see that she was the woman that had haunted him in his nightmare. He told the mourners that the woman in the coffin had been murdered. Because of this dream, the woman's husband was tried, convicted and hanged for the murder of his wife. It was the only legal hanging in McDowell County, according to some versions of the tale.
This story appeared in Tales of the Weird several years ago. If you want more information, I recommend the book "Hanged by a Dream? The Facts Behind the Legend" by Perry Deane Young.