The Monster of Iron Bound Bay
A million tales have been told around the crackling campfires of Catalina over the millennia, with topics ranging from sea monsters to ghosts to tales of deranged madmen, one of which may even now be hiding behind those very trees yonder, warns the teller of the tale.
So, it comes as no surprise that some of these accounts were bound to revolve around that gargantuan half-ape, half-human creature we collectively refer to as Bigfoot or Sasquatch or any other number of monikers. One of these stories tells us of a beast that has come to be known in Catalina campfire lore as the Monster of Iron Bound Bay.
For introduction, Iron Bound Bay is a remote carve-out on the backside of Catalina’s West End. Reachable only by sea or hard trail, the bay offers a modicum of protection from the maritime elements for the occasional yacht or fishing boat, particularly in treacherous northeast winds.
But in June of 1933, the bay was the chosen anchorage of a young newlywed couple—John and Elaine—for their honeymoon.
On the fifth day of their romantic interlude, after a day of fishing (now that’s what I call a honeymoon!), they anchored their power yacht—borrowed from John’s dad—in the bay to sit out a sudden squall rather than return to Avalon where John’s father owned a mooring.
For two days and two nights raged the gale. But the couple, blissfully enamored with one another, could not have cared less.
It was on the third night when the seas calmed and the skies cleared, that things took a turn for the Twilight Zone.
Because the night was warm, the couple had decided to sleep on deck. It was then, while they were laying on deck staring at the heavens above and planning their future lives together, that they felt a violent tug on the anchor chain and felt their vessel being dragged to the rocky shore.
Quick on his feet and seeing no other alternative, John cut the anchor cable while Elaine gunned the boat’s engines, directing the vessel away from the rocky shore.
It was then that John, dumbstruck by this sudden peril, turned the vessel’s spotlight toward the shore where they saw a sight they would never forget. Dragging itself from water onto the rocks was a giant of a man, standing somewhere between eight and nine feet tall, John reckoned. Adding to the terror was the fact that the body of this man-beast was entirely covered with hair.
The two quickly returned to Avalon and, given the nature of the event, decided to keep this little secret to themselves. And to themselves this secret remained for five long years until one fateful day when John met an anthropologist named Dave who would unwisely make it his business to try to track this creature down.
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Although the big, lovable guy we know as Bigfoot didn’t become a phenomenon until nearly 30 years later, there had long been tales of huge, ape-like men around the country going back to Native American folklore. In fact, it was only a few years before the Iron Bound Bay incident that the first major magazine article on the subject was printed in Canada’s Maclean’s magazine titled “Introducing B.C.’s (British Columbia) Hairy Giants” written by a Canadian government official named J.W. Burns.
But sightings in Southern California were essentially non-existent and Dave couldn’t help but want to investigate.
John borrowed the Cabin Cruiser once again from his Pop and he and Dave made the trip to Iron Bound Bay, this time with an impressive array of camera gear and lighting equipment. They set up this gear at various strategic locations around the cove and rigged it with trip wires to try to catch this elusive man-beast in action. Think of it as the 1930s version of a Ring camera.
Several days passed without result until one day John was hiking above the bay when he noticed a game trail that was somehow different from the run-of-the-mill game trails made by cattle, deer, bison and whatnot. He followed this trail until it ended at the mouth of a cave, a cave John had not noticed before.
After resting for a spell and gathering his courage, John went deeper into the cave where he was astounded to see piles of neatly-stacked cow bones in one chamber, a small bed made with animal skins in another chamber, and various primitive tools in yet another.
Back at the boat, John regaled Dave with tales of this newly-discovered cave and the two decided to set up the photography equipment near the cave’s entrance the following morning.
But the mysterious resident of the cave beat them to the punch. That night before sunrise, the hapless Cabin Cruiser once again found itself being pulled violently toward the shore just as it had years earlier. By the time the two men had made it topside, the boat was already wrecked against the rocks. But even more startling was the sight of all their Photoflash bulbs on the beach popping off “like the Fourth of July.”
When the morning light finally allowed them to take stock of their situation, they discovered the boat was a complete wreck and all of the photography equipment was scattered around the shore. They determined their only course of action was to gather up the equipment, hide it as well as they could, and then hike their way back to Two Harbors.
But Dave couldn’t resist his chance to have a look-see at the cave, which he himself had not yet seen. Though armed with a shotgun, John wasn’t so keen about visiting it again and said he would meet Dave at the top of the cliff where they could make their way back to the Isthmus.
Dave carefully made his way down to the cave. But just as he reached its entrance he heard the blast of the shotgun up on the ridge. Then another. Then yet a third.
Frantic, Dave raced to the top of the hill, hearing one more blast from the shotgun before getting there.
There before him was the lifeless, mangled body of his pal John. Beside John was the body of a giant ape-like humanoid, whimpering, but evidently still alive. Its fur was matted with blood and in the brief moment that the two beings gazed into each other’s eyes, Dave saw intelligence and felt compassion for the beast.
This primal communication was not to last long, however. The creature suddenly bolted upright, let out a terrifying roar and dashed off into the nearby thickets.
With that, Dave gathered up the body of his companion and headed back to civilization.
In the ensuing years, Dave and his colleagues in the world of academia returned to the site a number of times to conduct what might pass in those days as a scientific investigation into this phenomenon. In one telling, the skeletal remains of the creature are found by the party, its demise evidently the result of one of John’s shotgun blasts. It’s a King Kong-esque ending where we find ourselves feeling sympathy for the creature. We even begin looking askance at the humans, who we initially thought were the heroes.
But I prefer the ending where nothing is ever found: no remains, no animal-skin bed, no primitive tools, maybe not even a cave, as if nature herself had swallowed up all the evidence, leaving us to wonder and leaving us to draw straws to determine who gets to tell the next story around the campfire.
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