SC EP:1053 Never Going Back To That Area

Kip writes "I guess I'll get right to it. Back in the late 90's I had 3 separate terrifying encounters with some type of large black creature over 3 years. The first two encounters were roughly in 1997 & 1998. I was in high school at the time and 16-17 years old. And the 3rd was in late 1999 so I was just about 18. I can honestly say that they were so disturbing that I have thought about them often ever since. Two of the encounters I had multiple buddies with me and the most disturbing encounter I was alone exploring the mountain behind our home on our 4 wheeler.

I grew up in a Southern California city called Corona. Its roughly 1.5 hours north of San Diego and next to Riverside. At this time the upper portion of the city had miles of orchards extending from the edge of the housing developments all the way to the base of the mountains that separated us from the coast and Orange County. As a kid myself and my family spent a significant amount of time on this mountain range hiking, mountain biking, exploring the various canyons, and a few of the abandoned tin mines. Although there were known predators such as mountain lions and coyotes that we would see from time to time, I never felt scared being in this area but always knew to be cautious.

At the time of what I would consider my first encounter our town was changing a lot. Hundreds of acres, if not thousands, of the orchards were being leveled to build more homes. At this time being of high school age this was a total bummer. All of the cool places we would explore or hang out were going away every week and being replaced with massive housing developments.

Because of the size of one of the housing developments, there was a large storm drain project that the army core of engineers was in charge of. This project was situated near the mouth of one of the larger canyons and was intended to divert stormwater underground to who knows where? This area was completely fenced off with barbed wire fences and they even had an on-site security guard at night. This entire area was surrounded by thick orange groves and also avocado groves. Knowing that there was a massive underground tunnel being built and also being obsessed with exploring abandoned mines, there was no choice but to explore this.

I did some recon during the daytime hours and figured out the best way to sneak in at night hopefully without being detected by their on-site security guard.

Late on a Friday evening my buddies and I drove my truck on a dirt road deep into the orange groves and parked it behind a large pile of dead orange trees that they had ripped out of the ground. This was an area that I was very familiar with. In this area, they also had bulldozers, graders, and loaders parked near a water tank. We snuck through the trees, scaled a barbed wire fence, and at this point the Avocado Grove began. We easily made it in and explored these tunnels which were kind of a disappointment because there was really nothing to them other than concrete and scaffolding. Feeling somewhat underwhelmed we decided to head back to the truck which was roughly a half mile from the tunnel. Upon exiting the range groves we saw headlights coming our way so we quickly jumped behind some of the heavy equipment thinking the security was coming to bust us. To our surprise, it was a two-door Honda Civic with two chicks. Being curious teenage boys we were immediately wondering if they were hot. Lol. After spending some time checking out all of the cool heavy equipment we made it back to my truck. Knowing that the road they were driving on was eventually a dead end we were surprised to see that they still had not come back out. We decided to investigate to make sure they were ok. We assumed the girls were probably drinking or smoking weed because this was not a well known place and was quite creepy especially at night due to how secluded it was. The three of us piled back into my single-cab Chevy truck and started heading in their direction. As we rounded a sharp turn on the dirt road we could see their car parked at the dead end off in the distance. As we got within 100 yards of their car we could see something black crouched down behind the car. The first we thought we had was that maybe one of them was behind the car but as we got closer we could see that it was definitely not a girl and appeared to be completely black and hunched over as if it was hiding and watching them. I had one of those Walmart special 12 million candle spotlight that plugged into the cigarette lighter in my truck. My buddy Aaron turned that on and hung out the window shining it down the road. We then thought that it must be a bear of some other creature but it was not looking like anything that we were familiar with which was kind of a weird sensation seeing something that we were not even sure what it was. As we were now within 50 yards or less, to our horror, this creature slightly turned to look towards us and stood up. This was nothing that we recognized. We immediately began freaking out yelling at one another "what the hell is that thing?!!" I hit the gas and we accelerated towards their car while keeping the light on it!

To the south of where the girls were parked was another barbed wire. (To clarify, all of these fences were roughly 7' tall chain link fences topped with like 18" of 3 strands of barbed wire. A sizeable fence). The fence was within 15 feet of the edge of the road only separated by a small ditch that may have been 2' deep. Beyond the fence was a wide open field that had already been scraped of all vegetation. The base of the mountain was probably 400-500 yards away from this location. This creature which I would estimate was between eight and 9 feet tall took two steps towards the edge of the road and literally vanished before our eyes. We saw this happen from maybe 50 feet away. I slammed on the brakes and we slid on the gravel road stopping about 10 feet behind the girl's car. We jumped out paying no attention to them and immediately started shining the spotlight into the field. When the creature vanished we could not understand what we really just saw. Our minds were thinking of rational explanations like maybe it dove into the small ditch just out of sight and squeezed under the fence somehow. Or, maybe it climbed over the fence really fast and somehow we didn't see that which makes no sense. We were grasping for any explanation besides it literally vanishing into thin air. In reality, we should have seen the creature maybe 20 feet away on the other side of this fence running across the wide open field if it had somehow jumped this fence but like I said it had vanished. We had all become very animated at this point yelling and freaking out at what we had just seen. Probably thinking we were absolute psychopaths, the girls in the car immediately started the engine lipped around and just took off. I did hear one of them yell "what's your F-ing problem???" Rightfully so. We calmed down after a few minutes and started to collect ourselves. There was no sign of the creature at all, and because it was a gravel road there were no visible footprints. We stayed shining spotlight for probably a half hour, absolutely shaken by what we had seen. We saw nothing, absolutely nothing. It was now close to 1 am and we rushed back to my house and immediately woke my dad up from a dead sleep and told him what we had witnessed. A little back story on my Dad, he grew up in Starvalley Wyoming. He spent most of his years as a youth as a youth and teens in the mountains hunting. In his late teens and into his 20's he was a hunting guide. He guided hunters from all over the world into the backcountry on horseback. My Dad was tough and fearless, and if anyone would have encountered something like this before it was him. He immediately got out of bed and once we settled down a bit he wanted to entire story, every detail. After listening to our story