OLL LEWIS: How the West Learnt About the Yeti: Part 1.

Some crypids have a long history and sightings of them are often recorded in poems and folklore going back centuries. For example, the Avanc of Llagorse Lake in Wales has been recorded as far back as the 15th century, when it was the subject of a poem by a Welsh bard. Others make relatively recent appearances like Bownessie, where the earliest sightings date back to around the time of World War 2 but were not reported outside of a select few friends and family of the witness until a few years ago.

The Yeti was known of in the folklore and beliefs of the people of Asia, where it is more often reported, for centuries, even to the extent that several monasteries are reputed to have kept what were claimed to be yeti body parts and the cryptid is regarded as a sacred animal or entity/tulpa by several local peoples. Europeans, Americans and other western civilisations were for the most part completely unaware that such an animal was reputed to exist until 1832.

In 1832 the 'Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal' published an account by British naturalist Brian Houghton Hodgson about his experiences in Nepal. Within this account he told of the time when his guides had encountered an unusual animal. The animal was tall, bipedal and covered in long black hair. The creature ran off in fear of the guides soon after being spotted and Hodgson thought that the creature may have been an orangutan. However, unknown to Hodgeson, as not as much was known about orangutans in the 19th century as today; Nepal is a long way away from where orangutans are found, and according to the fossil record they only extended from Indonesia to not much further north and west of the Thai-Malay Peninsula on the mainland.

The next to mention the yeti, or at least a creature that sounded like it could be the same animal, was Laurence Waddell in 1889 who reported in his book Among the Himalayas that his guide had seen a large ape-like creature. The creature left tracks and upon examination Waddell concluded that these tracks looked like those of a bear. While in the Himalayas Waddell heard several stories about people having seen bipedal ape-like creatures but upon investigation these turned out to be vague 'friend of a friend' stories and the actual witnesses were never found.

I encountered a similar thing when investigating witness sightings of the Ninki-Nanka in the Gambia; very often even the most vivid stories of that particular cyptid would turn out to be based on the sighting of the friend of a family member who then died, it was thought, as a result of telling people about their sighting. It is also a similarly held belief among some parts of the yeti's reputed range that sighting a yeti or telling somebody if you do will act as a catalyst for your own demise so it is entirely possible that the vague and flaky nature of the stories Waddell encountered could be due to the original witnesses being purposefully vague in order to escape this supposed curse. It is also possible that he was asking his questions in an area where nobody had actually seen a yeti, or animal that could fit its description, for generations, if at all, and the locals were just trying to be helpful or having a laugh at his expense.

Either way, knowledge of the yeti was starting to take hold in the west, and when westerners started to make serious attempts at tackling the more difficult mountains of the Himalayas they also began to report back sightings of strange bipedal animals and unusual tracks.