I recently received the following account from a third-party:
Please note that these are my mom's stories, from when she was young to her early fifties.
When my mom was young, she lived on the border between the towns of Calistoga and Napa in California, nestled on the base of a large hill. Her house, connected to the main highway by a long, winding driveway, was built directly on an old Native American campsite. We know this from local history, and, the many obsidian arrowheads we found scattered in the creek bed along the driveway and in the dirt in the backyard. The backyard had a pool, then a small lawn, which trailed off into the wild, dense hillside. My mom, who was a bit of a tomboy, loved to explore up in the hills with her two older brothers.
She recalls one time while they were walking up in the hills, (she was around ten-eleven) when they started hearing their mother's voice. But something was off about it. First of all, it was coming from deep in the woods, and secondly, it was oddly slow, and the words sounded forced. And most unnerving of all, it was calling for them (each by name) to come to the “bear cave”. This is what they called a small cave up in the hills, not far from where they were. She and her brothers immediately turned back. Thankfully, they weren’t that far from her house, so they were able to get back safely. She tells me this happened (voices calling to her that sounded like her mom/dad/brothers) as well as hearing sounds that she described as a “growl, like if a bear and a cow had a baby and it got mad.”
Now, skip forward around forty years. My mom has turned the place into an inn after my grandmother died. The first signs that something weird was happening was when she found a dead buck in the backyard. Now, living in the hills, there were a lot of deer and a couple dead does and bucks weren’t out of the ordinary. But the buck looked like it had been ripped apart. Flesh was scattered everywhere, In the pool, on the pool deck, in the grass. But what my mom thought was odd was the fact that only the heart and stomach was missing..
The last story I’ve heard happened a couple months ago. She was outside with our Labrador dog, cleaning up around the pool. It was twilight, and the sun was nearly set. She suddenly starts hearing the same bear-cow cry up in the hills. It’s getting louder and louder and so is the Lab's barking. Our Lab, usually a sweetheart, is going ballistic. She’s barking and growling as loud as she can, nearly drowning out the cries. My mom immediately takes her inside, and locks the doors. The cries stopped after an hour, but she was thoroughly shaken.
So far, these are the only stories she’ll tell me about. She still doesn’t let my brother and I up into the hills, though she claims the noises and deer were only mountain lions, and the voices just her young imagination. JB
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