YEAR: 1986

SEASON: Fall

MONTH: September

DATE: 1

STATE: California

COUNTY: Shasta County

LOCATION DETAILS: five miles north on hwy 5. turn west on dog creek road. go about 2 tenths of a mile and turn left on the first dirt roadfollow it back about 14 miles you will be heading south on your right hand sid there should be along driveway (dirt) that is the entrance to his place.

NEAREST TOWN: lakehead ca.

NEAREST ROAD: highway 5

OBSERVED: This story was related to me 15 years ago.I used to ranch in northern california 35 miles north of Redding. I leased 640 acres located neat hwy 5 and dog creek road. A friend of mine lived 14 miles south and west on dog creek road. I believe this was on a saturday another friend of mine and myself decided to ride my horses back to see conrad.The ride took about 2-2& 1 half hours. after gettinging there conrad told me a story. it goes like this. "yesterday afternoon he shot a deer and hung it from a tree behind his house. that night as he was going to let his dogs out they started whinning and would not leave.then he heard a scream a type he never heard before coming from the back of the house. he went outside on his back pourch and said he saw a large ape like creature looking back at him. he then stated it grabed his deer and ran off back into the forest area. at first laugh it off then he said come look at this. he showed myself and this other friend where it stood and where ran away to. while it ran away with the deer it had taken out about 20 feet of barbed wire fence and left some hair on one of the barbs. Well I haved hunted all my life and never seen hair quite like it it looked like bear but not really." he never reported because he did not want the publicity as he was avery private person. I don't if you believe me or not but this is his story as told to me.

OTHER WITNESSES: two I forgot about his hired hand. an old indian named Floyd and conrad himself inside the house.

TIME AND CONDITIONS: night time lots of starscloudless

ENVIRONMENT: pine forest his road croses a little creek just before his home

Follow-up investigation report by BFRO Investigator Al B.:

This report corrolates to 6600, has solid footing and should be saved but not published yet. AB 10/27/04

*****

Spoke with witness by phone. Here's more background to his report:

During the 1980s the witness had 640 acres under lease from a group of Los Gatos attorneys in the Vollmers area near Dog Creek and Pollard Flat on the Upper Sacramento River above Shasta Lake, where they had a small ranching operation that included laying hens, horses, cattle, hogs, and a 40 acre apple orchard. To help make ends meet he cooked at the Pollard Flat truck stop restaurant, where he met Chance, a Virginia pig farmer, who owned and was building a home on a 40 acre track of partially meadowed timberland southwest of Dog Creek.

He says on the day he visited Chance in the Fall of 1986, the ground was moist from snow and rain, and what Chance showed him in the ground behind his house at first appeared to be bear tracks, but there was something different about them that struck him as odd. There were no claw marks, he said. Chance showed him where he'd hung the deer in a tree across a small creek, gutted and strung by a rope to air about 10 feet above the ground. The creature that "grabbed" it would have weighed 350 to 400 pounds, as Chance described it, and it was taller than himself (witness) at six feet, and when Chance put his flashlight on it, it had momentarily looked back at him with eyes that were "blood red and piercing," and had "screamed" before running off with the deer. Chance showed him hair taken from the barbed wire, which he thought afterward was too coarse and light in color for bear hair, although he guessed at the time it could have been bear.

Floyd, Chance's hired hand of Hoopa and Navajo descent, showed up at Rick's on "Superbowl Sunday" 1986, yelling that Chance was dead. Rick says he and a sheriff's deputy went to Chance's place and found Chance on the ground there, shot in the head, and he died six days later at the hospital. They also found another person on the ground nearby, who was dead with a bullet in his chest. He was one of two brothers from the Redding area who had been poaching Chance's pigs. Chance was 56, and left a daughter. Witness feels the daughter probably sold the property and moved on, as she was from the city and not interested in ranching or the wild. Witness hasn't been back to the area since 1996.

About BFRO Investigator Al B.:

Geologist who co-author Bigfoot (Bantam, 1976), and is a former Redding, CA Record-Searchlight news reporter who in the early 70s investigated an unusually complex and ongoing story of bigfoot/sasquatch activity in the High Sierras.