Greetings,

This is a story my mother told me a few times while I was growing up. I recently asked her to tell me the story again so that I could post it online. I would appreciate any thoughts on what it could have been.

My mother was one of twelve children who were turned over to an orphanage in Turnagain Alaska, about thirty miles outside of Anchorage. There were no other children in this home, and it was apparently run or managed by a priest. We do not know the year the children were surrendered to the orphanage.

In or around 1955 my mother would have been around seven years old. The bedroom assigned to the female children was in the attic, with an attic storage access door leading from either side of this bedroom. There were four children in this room, two of which slept on a bunk bed, and two on a full sized bed. My mother was on the top bunk.
The people who ran the orphanage had started saying to the children that if they saw or heard anything upstairs in their room to wake them immediately and they would kill it. My mother's sisters had told her several times that if she ever saw 'the creature' to not be afraid, it would not harm her. She thought they were trying to scare her.

One night my mother was awakened by a noise. As she looked down from her top bunk she saw a small creature walking upright across the room. She describes it as "no more than two and a half or three feet tall, shaped like a human, completely covered in very dark long hair, with limbs not disproportionate with its body". Because it was night and she was only able to make out features as the moonlight through the window allowed, she was not able to clearly see its face, hands, or feet.

She watched this creature in terror while it walked about the room. She saw it struggling to reach the covers on the lower beds to apparently cover the children up. When the creature started trying to climb to the top bunk where my mother was she yelled, "stay away from me". When she did this, the creature appeared shocked that she was awake and that she had yelled at it. It abandoned its attempt to climb the bunk and was later seen by my mother trying to take the skeleton key out of the bedroom door. It apparently really wanted that key because it stood there a long time trying to get it out of the door, but never succeeded. She did not see the creature leave the room, however, one of the attic storage doors was out of her line of vision.

A few weeks later the children were told to bring some Army rations out of the attic storage space. When they went to retrieve them, they found several ration cans opened and discarded in the far corner or one of those spaces. She thinks there were more than twelve but less than twenty. None of the children had reason to sneak food so they were not likely suspects for the presence of the empty cans.

That was the only encounter my mother had with the creature, much to her relief.
My mother isn't one to tell fantastic stories. She is now sixty-two years old, educated, and a very hard worker. She has no illnesses and takes no medication. She has never told any other wild tales. She has also never tried to seek any attention with this story. In fact, there are only a very few people she has told it to.

My mother was adopted when she was nine and taken from her siblings to Oklahoma. She never again saw or spoke to her siblings until 1997 where she had a purely chance encounter with her older brother at a tribal meeting. When they began talking they did not know they were siblings until one of them mentioned having grown up in an orphanage in Turnagain, Alaska. It didn't take many more sentences after that for them to learn that he was the child born before her.

Within hours of this meeting, while they were still talking about the orphanage, I asked my uncle if he remembered seeing the creature. His face lit up and he described, in detail, the same creature my mother had. They had only been talking for a few hours, and did not have time to coordinate a fabricated story.

I have always wondered what this creature was, and so has my mother; any ideas?

Tina Clark
 
In early 2009 - this story was turned over to Rob Alley, an author of bigfoot in Alaska with the promise he would follow through on it, but to my knowledge, nothing was ever done to investigate it. I further decline his request to add this report to his second book... B. Short

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