Possible mimicking behaviour?
When the teller was seven, his family began an annual week of summer camping at a campground on the western shore of Lake Tahoe. His father always tried to get a site in the back loop, the most forested and most beautiful part, which borders the trailhead into the Desolation Wilderness and the famous Rubicon off-road trail. The boy grew up comfortable sleeping out under the stars. Even so, he remembers feeling uneasy whenever he rode his BMX bike near that trailhead, without understanding why. Over six summers, from about 1978 to 1984, a string of odd things happened.
Before dawn one morning, rocks and debris came flying sideways into the tent. Another pre-dawn morning, they heard footsteps on two legs circling the tent, close. He unzipped the window and saw nothing.
One night around nine, walking to the lake along a very dark, densely wooded stretch of bike path far from the campsites, they heard something walking upright in the trees to their right. When they stopped, it stopped. When they walked, it walked. They never saw it.
One evening he and a friend played a prank on two girls at the campfire. Each would slip off into the dark, pick up a ten- or twenty-pound rock and heave it into the air so it landed with a heavy thud, and the girls would shriek and laugh. Eventually the girls caught on. The next morning a boy in their tent said that late in the night he had heard a scream "like a woman being murdered." Then the girls came over and asked why the boys had kept throwing rocks around their tent all night, about 150 feet away. The boys hadn't. He still wonders whether something was copying them.
On a hike into Desolation Wilderness with his father and uncle, he was overcome by a fight-or-flight panic and cried to be taken back. He didn't feel watched, he says, only that he had to get out. At another campfire, a girl stood up when she saw red eyeshine about ninety feet out in the dark. A boy stood up and said he saw it too. The girl was so shaken she went straight back to her family's RV. Another time a rock was thrown sideways into a fort the kids had built by a creek, far from anyone.
And once, at check-in, the ranger at the kiosk mentioned that they had been hearing Bigfoot screams at night. The boy stared at him, baffled.
At the time none of it added up to anything. He believed Sasquatch lived only in Oregon and Washington. Only as an adult, reading other people's accounts from that same area, did the pieces start to look like a pattern. He says he remains on the fence.