What's so scary about Estacada?

Tales of Bigfoot, UFOs and ghost sightings

By Evan Jensen

The Estacada News, Oct 28, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

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Last year, the Estacada News issued an invitation for readers to share their tales of fact, fiction or folklore about local hauntings, UFO sightings, Sasquatch encounters and other unexplained mysteries, but no one responded.

Perhaps the poor souls who have witnessed such things were too scared to relive the experience and put it in writing, or too afraid that town hecklers would call them crazy and smear their name across the Internet like a loogie spat out the window of a fast moving car. Maybe those who harbor the memory of an unexplained phenomenon only pass on the experience through oral tradition, telling the tale around the campfire, or have subconsciously removed the memory from their mind after alien probing.

It’s possible that no ghostly encounters or strange things have ever happened in Estacada, but it’s unlikely for a town with such rich history dating back more than 100 years since it was established.

Maybe the former Hotel Estacada was haunted by a longtime patron whose ghostly apparition roamed the halls, sipped drinks at the bar and played a favorite tune on the piano.

Perhaps the location of Estacada’s former mining camps are haunted by a larger-than-life mountain man who regularly brawled at the bars and boasted his ability to outsaw, outclimb and outwit anyone who dared to challenge him. Maybe the sound of his saw blade moving methodically or his ax chopping away can be heard faintly in the forest on a windy day when the Douglas fir trees sway gently from side to side.

And then there’s Sasquatch, also known as Bigfoot. The hairy beast is a legend in Mount Hood territory and hundreds of sightings have been reported in the last 50 years, with Estacada considered a hotspot for the elusive creature. Longtime Estacada resident Millie Kiggins shared her 1969 encounter with Bigfoot with the Estacada News last year in the Oct. 1, 2008, story, “Bigfoot lore alive in Estacada,” and she still sticks to her story about close encounters with the beast.

“He was around here for a year,” Kiggins said. “We found footprints all over the farm. Once, they led to a five-foot fence and continued on the other side uninterrupted as if he stepped right over it. Sometimes we would smell him. Smelled like a bad nursing home. We heard loud screams and grunts all at once lasting 10 or 15 seconds. It could be heard miles away. The hair on the back of your neck would stand up. It spooked the cattle.”

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