EXCLUSIVE: Speaking to the Daily Star, Deborah Hatswell described her run-in with a hairy, ‘strong-jawlined’ apeman she now believes to be the mythical cryptid, Bigfoot
The legend of Bigfoot is usually reserved for the United States. For the mythical beast to pop up in Salford – that’d be really bad luck. But for Deborah Hatswell, this turned into a “horrifying” reality after a day bunking off school led her face-to-face with the giant apeman.
Speaking to the Daily Star, Hatswell described the fateful day from 1982. Aged 15 at the time, Hatswell and a mate had skipped school due to some lovely weather. They found themselves in Buille Park, a mass of greenery in Salford.
“There was this large wall of ivy and rhododendron, so we dipped in there behind it, because nobody could see you. No teacher, or anyone like that,” Hatswell told this publication. “We were just hiding.”
She added: “I wasn’t out in the wilds, or the middle of nowhere. I was on the edge of a pretty busy town. Maybe naughtiest thing I’d taken, was maybe a cigarette?”
Hatswell’s blissful day-off was ruptured by an unexpected guest looming out of the large bush she was crouching behind. “This thing, just leant out the greenery. It’s the only way I can put it – he didn’t step out, so I didn’t see his body. I saw him from mid-chest up,” she said.
“And he was horrible! It wasn’t a spiritual experience. It was terrifying, I’d never seen anything like that, and then I acted primally – I pushed my friend to the floor, to protect her, and then we ran.”
Describing what she now believes to be Bigfoot, Hatswell said: “He was far too hairy to be a caveman, but he had that Neanderthal vibe.
“I remember his jaw muscles, I remember his eyes. He looked like a cross between a big, muscular man and an ape. Like if someone had shoved the two together. Really thick jawline.”
She added: “His teeth were normal, like a human being’s. He had long hair, very dark complexion, you could see a lot of skin through the hair. Like a bloke who’d worked on the roads their whole life, that heavy tan.”
The experience shook Hatswell, who said she needed counselling afterwards to understand exactly what she’d seen.
It was a few years later, when she “stuck her head above the parapet” and started reaching out to others who’d experienced the same thing, that she began to find a community who also believed in the existence of Bigfoot.
Hatswell eventually got a police officer to sketch out the face she’d seen come out of the bush in Salford.
Hatswell now runs the YouTube channel BBR Investigations , as “a way to bring a spotlight to the hundreds of people left out there in society believing they are alone”.
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