Spooky Encounters in High Falls, New York

Some time ago, I did a post here at Haunt Jaunts about the new History Channel show called The UnXplained. Hosted by William Shatner, each week discusses a different topic, from evil places to bizarre rituals to the mysteries of the mind and our own death. I was particularly interested in this show because I was interviewed for their third episode, “Strange Creatures.” I was specifically asked to talk about a set of experiences I had back in 2015 in High Falls, New York. Unfortunately, very little of my interview was aired, as I’m guessing the scope of the episode shifted between filming and airing. Nothing new for anyone familiar with working on these shows. Sometimes they’ll use one soundbite multiple times, and sometimes you do a 90-minute interview and they air all of 12 seconds of it. Par for the course, I guess. I’m hoping that if there’s a season 2 (and there’s already an indication on their website that there might be), they give my story a bit more airtime. Either way, I promised Courtney I’d offer a more detailed account of what I experienced, as it was perfect for a Haunt Jaunts post.

My wife and I were attending a wedding for one of her friends back in August of 2015. My wife chose a beautiful little bed and breakfast in the town of High Falls, New York, for us to stay in for the wedding, as it would have been way too far to drive home to Brooklyn after a night of celebrating. It was a secluded little cabin not too far from a main house on a large, beautiful property, with a creek running out back, and beyond the creek, a high, steep ridge. The room was small, quaint, with no TV or any other amenities other than the basics. Now, my wife is a wedding photographer, and even though she was attending this particular wedding as a guest, her friend asked her to photograph the “getting ready’ portion of the wedding – getting her hair and makeup done, putting on the dress, etc. I drove her to the wedding venue to drop her off, rode into Kingston to get some cigars, and then returned to relax at the cabin.

Shortly before 5pm, I went outside to explore the property, and to call my young son. I followed the creek back, away from the cabin where it turned and sort of abutted the ridge. As I was wrapping up the phone call with my son, I started to get the feeling that I was being watched. But from up on the ridge, maybe 100 feet up and just about at the top. My eyes started scanning the ridge line, but I couldn’t really see anything. I said goodbye to my son and hung up the phone, and remained in that spot at the bend, still scanning the ridge line. It was a strong feeling of being watched, and as a paranormal investigator, I’ve learned over the years not to ignore my instincts. It was hard to hear much, as I was literally on the banks of the creek, and it was flowing just quickly enough to provide a good bit of white noise. Suddenly, as I stood there, I heard two very sharp, loud knocks, wood on wood, from up on the ridge. It sounded like someone took a baseball bat and hit it as hard as they could against a tree, in quick succession. I thought I saw some movement, something dark, but it was hard to tell. I figured this was as good a time as any to head back to the cabin, as it sort of felt like I wasn’t welcome there any longer. So I walked back to the cabin to do some reading and pass the time until the festivities were ready to begin.

The wedding was lots of fun, and we returned to the cabin at around midnight. I told my wife what I had experienced, which we just chalked up to maybe a branch falling, or perhaps just someone dropping or chopping wood at a house nearby, but perhaps out of our line of sight. We woke up the next morning, had breakfast, and drove to the nearby town of Rosendale for lunch and some shopping at the local businesses. My wife and I had a great time, and decided that we needed to come back soon, for a little getaway where we could really explore the parks and surrounding towns at our leisure.

We returned to the same cabin two months later, in October of 2015. This time we were staying for two nights, arriving Saturday and leaving Monday morning. We hiked and walked the Rosendale Trestle, sampled the local cuisine, and just enjoyed being out of the city for a few days. On Sunday night, my wife and I decided to head into Kingston to catch Sunday night football, which featured the Patriots (she’s from Massachusetts) playing against the Colts. We went to Applebee’s and watched the entire game while splitting appetizers. The Pats won, we were happy, and we stopped off at a convenience store on the way home to get some chocolatey snacks. A great night overall.

Back in the cabin, we were sitting in bed, talking about the game, enjoying our snacks with the windows all wide open. It was a beautiful, crisp autumn night, and the sound of the bubbling creek was soothing. As we were talking, we heard something we will never forget. From the top of the ridge, we heard a noise. It was an animal of some sort, of that we are sure. It started off as a very deep, low grunting, and sounded like a large gorilla. The deepness of the sound hit us in the chest, almost like being at a concert and feeling the bass speakers make your chest vibrate. It went on, and as it did, the pitch changed, the bass becoming more of a high-pitched, monkey-like howl. My wife and I stopped our conversation mid-sentence and just stared at each other in shock. We both jumped up out of bed to grab our phones, in an effort to record it. But by the time we did, the howls trailed off, and the woods went silent again.

“What the hell was THAT?” we both asked each other. We honestly didn’t know. I’m an avid camper, and my wife grew up on a mountain in central Massachusetts. Neither one of us had heard anything like that before. Not in the woods, at least. It wasn’t a coyote. It wasn’t a deer, and it wasn’t a bear. But it was loud, loud enough where we could feel the vibration in our chests, and weird enough where two people, who have heard all sorts of woodland creatures over the years, were momentarily paralyzed. “It sounded like a gorilla or big monkey,” I said. My wife agreed. We stood by the open windows for a while, startled but also curious, phones at the ready in hopes that we’d hear it again. But we didn’t. We discussed it more, as we laid in bed, turning it over in our minds, trying to think of what kind of animal, in upstate New York, would sound like an enormous gorilla, yelling at our cabin. It was unsettling, because there really are no such creatures that we knew of that could make that sound. And no human being could make a sound so deep, so guttural, yet so loud. Not without an amplifier or speaker, and as a musician, I could tell this was a purely natural sound. We didn’t sleep very well that night.

We asked the owner of the cabin the next morning if she had ever heard anything like that in her years there, and she said she hadn’t. Never even heard a coyote, much less something as loud as what we experienced. Over breakfast, a man overheard our conversation and tried to convince us we had simply heard an owl. We tried to tell him that we have heard owls before, that this was louder and deeper and more powerful than any owl could be. Yet he was adamant that it was an owl. My wife and I Googled around and pulled up dozens of different animal calls when we were home, of all the different types of wildlife that are known to live in the area (yes, even owls) and nothing came close to what we heard.

I haven’t used the B-word yet, but the implication is clear. So…was this Bigfoot? We don’t know. And I’m not prepared to say 100% that it was. All I am willing to say is what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a bear, or a coyote, and it certainly wasn’t an owl. The tree knocks on the first trip, plus a primate-like howling on the second trip, tells me that maybe, just maybe, this could have been a Bigfoot. High Falls isn’t the type of place that screams Sasquatch country. There are homes, there are surrounding towns. But it’s sparse, and certainly more squatchy than our Brooklyn apartment at the time.

We haven’t been able to return there since 2015, due to numerous life-changing events shortly thereafter, and vacation time is always a rare and valuable commodity. I’ve been camping since, twice deep in the Adirondacks, much deeper into the woods than High Falls, and have not experienced anything like this again. I did hear an owl one night, and as creepy as it was, it was clearly just an owl. To this day, my wife and I can’t explain what it was we heard.

Jason Stroming