[UA] Screams from nowhere

[Timothy Toner]

Found this on a mailing list.  Comments below.


Screams haunt town


But Saint-Constant search yields only more mystery
ALLISON HANES
The Gazette

The first desperate cries were heard on the outskirts of Saint-Constant
around 9 p.m. Tuesday.

They drew police to a wooded area on the edge of town and prompted them to
scour the bush all night for their source.

But by dawn, an exhaustive search had yielded only mystery.

The first shrieks - what sounded like the distress signals of a terrified
woman - alarmed a resident of the small South Shore town enough to call 911
and report an emergency.

Just after 10 p.m., police began to search a wooded area and field adjacent
to a new housing development near St. Regis St. and Petit St. Regis St. S.

Several drawn-out screams, each lasting about 10 seconds, resounded in the
ears of rescuers, deepening their urgency to find the source.

"There were five or six cries," said Michel Labreche, territory supervisor
for the Rousillon intermunicipal police. "There were no words spoken, but it
was like the voice of a woman."

Upon hearing the cries, police launched a full-scale search-and-rescue
operation.

Residents in a neighbourhood of new, stylish single-family homes overlooking
the wooded area could hear the whir overhead of an RCMP helicopter that was
shining down its search beam.

Ambulances and fire trucks lined the still-unpaved streets of the
neighbourhood. A sniffing-dog team was let loose to comb the overgrown
field. Searchers on all-terrain vehicles traversed the broad expanse of open
territory on the west side of Saint-Constant.

But by yesterday morning, the cries had fallen silent.

And searchers had turned up nothing.

Police called off the search and said they have no plans to resume it.

"We found nothing," Labreche said.

"There were also no reports of anyone who had disappeared or was missing."

In spite of the large-scale operation, police are writing off the alarming
cries as nothing more than the calls of wild animals.

"We have now concluded that it was coyotes," Labreche said. "We have heard
of this happening before."

But residents of the neighbourhood are not satisfied. They have several
theories of their own.

Jacinthe Rivard and her cousin Claudette Champagne, who moved in only a week
ago, wonder if their own little mystery might be connected to the cries.

"Someone knocked on the back door (Tuesday night) and then left," Rivard
said. "It was just one knock. But when we went to check, there was no one."

A half-hour later, police descended on the field behind their house.

Another neighbour, who gave her name only as Marie-Therese, said: "Sometimes
kids play in those woods, and teenagers go there."

She worries that police called off the search too early and that someone
might still be out there frightened, wounded - even dead.

"You never know what could have happened. It could have been a rape."

Most neighbours expressed skepticism about the coyote theory.

"I think (the police) have to say that to save face," said Julie Deslippe,
who has lived across from the search site for a year. "I've never seen
coyotes anywhere near here."

Fernand Bonneaux, who for 40 years has lived in a house backing onto the
woods, agreed. "I've never seen or heard coyotes around here," he said. But
"honestly I hope it was a coyote and not a woman who is hurt."

---------


It reminds me a bit of those apocryphal tales of people vanishing 'into thin
air' right in front of witnesses.  The most dramatic concerned a farmer who
disappeared in front of his house while his wife and children watched.
While he was nowhere in sight, his voice continued in anguished screaming
from somewhere under them.  They first thought he had fallen into a
sinkhole, but all attempts to dig found nothing but hard packed earth.  Over
time, his voice began to fade, not from exhaustion, but rather as if he was
moving father and farther away.


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