The Man on the Beach

Gold Coast, Queensland Australia

1991

I was living in a caravan on Queensland's Gold Coast from 1989-1991, and in that time I worked in a steel factory. One day while operating a giant mesh-welding machine, my glove caught on a spinning shaft and pulled my arm into the machine. As my arm was wrapped around the shaft, both bones broke near the wrist and my elbow rammed into a sharp metal edge. All this resulted in three months of free time, fully paid. Which was nice!

Lucky it was my left arm, because during these three months I would sleep all day, and draw all night. When I got tired of drawing I would go for a walk along the beach which was about 5 miles long. I never walked the entire length of it though, only wandered for an hour or so, before turning back. At that time of night (around 2 - 4am) there was nobody else on the beaches or roads. Amidst the most touristy part of Queensland with the fastest growing population in Australia, all that space was dark and empty. I truly felt like I was the last person on the face of the planet and these are probably the most amazing memories of my life.

One night, I was walking and thinking about flying, when above the sound of the wind I heard a distant splash. I peered out and saw movement on the water. There were the lights of Surfer's Paradise across the water, and silhouetted in the reflections of those lights I saw a man's head and shoulders. He was just wading there in the water and looking about. Reaching up to wipe his face, push his hair back, stuck his finger in his ear, just looked like a normal guy.

But there was something wrong with what I saw and I didn't notice it straight away. He dived under and resurfaced further from shore. Now I noticed. From where I stood and judging the distance, all the reflections and ripples around him seemed quite a bit too small.. It appeared to me that he was too big. I'm not talking about a man of six, seven or even eight feet high. I'm seeing this guy and his head and shoulders look about three feet high.

My stomach did a backflip and I suddenly felt the throbbing in the ears and the tingling of the scalp. I quickly crouched down. If I could see him in the dark water, he could probably see me on the white beach. I was at least fifty metres from him though, and he didn't appear to have noticed me at all.

I watched him for about a minute, before he dived again. I sat still, holding my breath and peering into the darkness, waiting for him to resurface. I didn't see or hear anything for probably five more minutes. I thought for a moment that he might have seen me and I had these visions of him leaping from the water in front of me and dragging me back into the sea.
Gah, scared..! I got up and started to leave.

Suddenly I heard a big splash right behind me and with the fear in me, I sprinted across the soft sand toward the street without even looking. I made it to the stairs and halfway up, I turned to look. There was nothing. Earlier, I was certain I'd seen a giant, but as I walked back home along the road I began to doubt what I'd seen. How could I possibly trust my judgement in that light? He was probably a lot closer than I'd judged, not fifty metres. My fear slowly left, and over the next couple of days I dismissed it as an illusion.

A couple of weeks later on another night walk, I was walking along that same stretch and I was thinking about what I had seen. Suddenly, in the same spot it all seemed real again, but I told myself it wasn't. I kept walking beyond where I had seen the man in the water and my thoughts turned to other things.

Fifteen minutes later, I was walking along a particularly dark section of beach, where two suburbs are seperated by a few acres of scrub, and I heard some bushes rustling.
I was walking close to some large rocks and the rustling sounded nearby, so I crouched in the sand at the base of a boulder. It was too dark in the scrub and I couldn't see what was making the noise. I had no idea what I was hiding from or why, it was probably a cat or dog. As I was thinking this, another rustling sound made me peer into the darkness.

What I saw next, I will remember on my deathbed.

A man in his late twenties, naked, impossibly tall and with black hair down to his elbows came striding out of the trees. He walked in a direct line from the scrub toward the water's edge and I shrank against the boulder as he walked past me. He turned his head and for several long strides, gazed silently at me as he passed, but he didn't stop. He continued on to the water's edge and waded waist-deep, before diving under.

I sat for a long time, frozen to the spot with fear, staring for long periods of time at the water, and the footprints he left behind.
I eventually got up and measured the footprints with my hand. Just over three handspans long.
When I got home I measured three handspans in centimetres.

It was 66. Based on this, I estimated him to be nearly 4 metres tall.