On the spur of the moment last night (March 21, 2015) I decided to do a late night run to an area of which I have visited a hundred times before: a large, old-growth covered hill just north of the Chehalis First Nation Reserve, which is named Morris Mountain.

This large hill has a place in Sasquatch history and lore as a place which, according to the Chehalis people, is where, in years past, the Sasquatch would gather and light fires, to look down upon the land they had lost to the Chehalis people in battle – generations before.  Mount Morris was for many years considered where semi-civilization ended and true wilderness began.

It is the location of another ‘Classic’ tale of the Sasquatch, the story of Serephine Long, who was a young woman of 17.  In the year 1871, it was said that the young 17 year old was carried off by a Sasquatch and taken to a cave on Morris Mountain.  After having her eyes covered with pitch, she was held captive by a number of the creatures but was mainly the possession of the large male who had kidnapped her.

Her story was not made known until she told it to J.W. Burns (whom coined the term Sasquatch in 1929) when she was a very old woman, during the 1930s.  She stayed with the Sasquatch family for about a year and, in failing health, had kept pleading with her captors that she wished to return home before she died.

I suppose the continuous nagging was too much, even for a Sasquatch, and the creature again put her over its shoulder and dropped her in the same area he had found her a year before.  When she was found by her people, she was said to be close to death, unable to tell of what happened to her and later that same night gave birth to a deformed baby which died soon after birth.  I have only seen one photograph of Serephine Long, taken in 1941, when she was about 87 years old.  She died not long after that.

Another Classic tale in an area of Classic history – a place of continued reports until this day.  In fact, I was on Mount Morris when a lady had her sighting at Weaver Lake, August  21, 2014 – only four kilometers away.  Having only found out about it after I returned home and heard her phone message on my answering service later that evening, I went to the scene the next morning with a colleague, Brad Trent, to investigate.

So Morris Mountain continues to be an area of interest to those investigating the Sasquatch mystery; every bit as much today as in the distant past.  Such thoughts kept going through my mind as I drove slowly over the mountain around midnight last night, through thick patches of dense fog, then no fog at all, then a second patch, wondering would this trip result in a personal sighting?

Stopping by a pond area where the frogs are like a choir with the chirping of hundreds; suddenly all going silent at the same time and me wondering: why?   After about 60 seconds one frog starts up, and in a few moments they are all going again, whatever it was which caused them to go suddenly silent, was no longer considered a threat.  After about 20 minutes, I went back to the vehicle still wondering what caused the sudden silence, as my movements didn’t seem to cause the same effect…

Like all my other visits to Morris Mountain, I come home having seen nothing myself but still having the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, a Sasquatch was watching me. I will be going back.

Thomas Steenburg