YOWIE: Girls tell of horror encounter at Moore Park Beach

A local family has told of how they are thinking of packing up and leaving after an encounter with what they believe was a yowie

Are there yowies living at Moore Park Beach?

"You know when you've got a burning throat and your belly's sore, and you need to stop? We just kept running through that."

Those are the words of one local girl whose terrifying encounter on Moore Park Beach has led her family to consider packing up and moving.

The girl, who remained anonymous, went walking on the beach with her sister at about 6pm on a recent Sunday evening.

It was then that their encounter started.

"Me and my sister were walking along the beach and further up I saw what I thought looked like a man and it went down to the beach and washed its hands and then went back up into the sand dunes into the bush, she said.

"I thought it was really weird because we never walked past the person that we thought it was."

But it would soon become clear that what the girls had seen was no ordinary man - it was moving on four legs.

"We walked up more and my sister said she saw something tall and hairy and she was like 'run' and she was like 'there's something over there' and then I was looking and I thought it was like a massive cow running at us so I just ran for my life," she said.

It was then the creature switched to two legs.

"I looked back to see if it was still chasing us and it was standing up but moving slower and it was tall and hairy and its arms were long," the girl said.

"My sister was screaming out and really scared and I called mum as soon as it started chasing us."

The girls say the creature looked at them side to side for a little longer before walking up into the sand dunes.

They described it as massive, fast, brown and hairy with arms past its knees and being about nine foot tall.

The girl's mother and her partner grabbed a spear gun and headed to the four-wheel drive off-road car park area to see what they could find.

The girls' mother says when she got there, a woman had been loading her dogs into her car before revealing she had seen a "big looking man" in the distance who she didn't like the feel of, so she turned back to her car, seeing the girls running along the way.

The family says they have been left "creeped out" and that the creature was running "side-to-side" unlike a human.

"None of us want to go to that beach again, we won't go in our own backyard at night anymore, there's no way," the girls' mother said.

The family also spotted footprints that they say were more than 40cm long and very broad.

The ordeal was not entirely over for the family, however.

The following evening, they heard strange screams in the distance.

"The night after, it did not sound like a man screaming or a woman screaming, it was really strange," the mother said.

"I have never ever heard that sort of scream in my life.

"I'm dead-set thinking about moving, my kids are scared."

The family said after talking about their encounter, they had heard about other experiences in Moore Park.

Just before Christmas, a local man was at the back of his property with his dogs when they became frightened.

It was then he heard loud thuds in the bushes as something ran away, but he couldn't explain exactly what had happened.

The family said they'd only ever heard tales of yowies from ancient times, but had never had an interest in them until after their experience.

Reports in the region's outlying areas are not unheard of.

In 1909, a newspaper report on bunyips prompted a man to share his tale of a yowie sighting near the Burnett River, while Childers, Miriam Vale, Fraser Island and Howard have all recorded fairly recent encounters.

According to Australian Yowie Research, who shared the family's story with the NewsMail, a yowie sighting was reported in Deepwater as recently as 2019.

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