YEAR: 1977

SEASON: Winter

STATE: California

COUNTY: Tuolumne County

LOCATION DETAILS: Pinecrest, Sonora Pass, Tuolumne County, California.

OBSERVED: After midnight, I heard more than a minute (possibly 2), a horrible, extremely loud screaming, unlike anything I've heard before or since.

I was in a cabin getting ready for bed, but wide awake. The scream was very loud and seemed to be less than 30 meters from where I was. The sound was not a cat screaming, was not human, not bear. As I was hearing it, I ran through my mind the different animals, what it could possibly be. But it was a large animal, the volume was so loud. And a high-pitched screaming.

I joke with people to whom I tell the story that it sounded like wildcats being fed through a meat grinder, but that only captures the high-pitched loudness and intensity, but it was NOT a cat. I didn't know what to think of it. I had heard of Bigfoot, but didn't know that they had been heard screaming. But 6 months later, I read an account that referred to this horrible screaming, and I knew that was what I had heard.

I went to the store at Pinecrest the next day and asked the clerk if she had heard anything, and remember being astonished that she hadn't heard anything because it was so extremely loud.

TIME AND CONDITIONS: Either late Fall 1977 or Winter-Spring 1978. It was a little after midnight. Don't remember the weather conditions. It was cool. It was off-season, there weren't many other people around in the other cabins.

ENVIRONMENT: The cabin I was staying in is to the left, driving in to Pinecrest Lake. In other words, driving into the Pinecrest Lake area from the main highway, and ignoring any possible "Do Not Enter" signs, one would keep to the left, left, left, so as to end up on the leftmost road tending toward the left of the lake.

The house I was in was on the left side of that road, and the screaming came from behind the house. The house is built on a hill sloping down toward the road, and the house sits about 100 feet up the hill from the road, and behind the house the hill rises a bit more to a low ridge, and behind that [is] just forest, no additional houses. There were quite a few more houses on the road farther out; i.e., my house was not at, or near, the end of the leftmost road. I do not remember the compass directions involved.