Episode 40 - The Klickitat Ape Cat

In the forests of southern Washington, there are reports of a creature that looks like a black cougar, but with a face that doesn’t belong to any known animal. It’s been called the Klickitat Ape Cat. But unlike most cryptids, this one doesn’t come with decades of sightings, multiple witnesses, or independent reports.

In this episode of Arcane Station, we break the case down from the ground up. We examine the creature’s description, the remote terrain of Klickitat County, and the nearby influence of the Hanford Site, a location tied to the Manhattan Project and decades of nuclear production and environmental cleanup.

We explore theories ranging from radiation-based mutation to misidentified wildlife, including the possibility of a quadrupedal Bigfoot encounter. We also look at cultural interpretations and spiritual explanations tied to the region.

But the deeper we go, the more the story narrows. Most of the information surrounding the Ape Cat traces back to a single location, raising a bigger question: is this a genuine encounter… or a constructed legend designed to turn a small town into a supernatural destination?

This isn’t just about a creature in the woods. It’s about how stories are built, how sightings take shape, and how belief can blur the line between something real… and something created.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Hey everyone, welcome to Arcane Station. I'm your host, Mike Porter. Tonight we are talking about some strange beast that I've heard about, and I heard a little bit of uh information from several different podcasts, and I want to kind of look into it and think about it a little bit, and that is the Click-a-Tat Ape Cat. Now, this is a really bizarre sounding creature, so I'm gonna give you some information about what it looks like, where it's supposed to be, maybe some theories about why it's around, and then I'm gonna start looking into it a little bit deeper. So the the Click-a-Tat ape cat is supposedly this very feline creature that's five feet tall at the shoulder, which would place it much larger than any other known cat, uh big cat. So, and it's meant to be solid black, and it's got a long tail, and what's most notable, and the reason why it gets this name is because it has this ape-like face, which is flat and it has forward-facing eyes. I mean, like most predators do, but very ape-like. And so, um, as a matter of fact, I enjoyed listening to the information about it so much that I actually decided to um sculpt one, and I'll I'll put that in the image of the um the episode so you all have a a look at it. So, this will be one of the few times that I don't draw something, although it is still my artwork. So, alright, so let's talk a little bit more. So, the body, like I said, is very similar to a cougar, it's feline, and when people see it, they see they say that it's like stalking, like very low control movements and and uh almost like sneakily stalking around. And like I said, the face is flat and more forward-facing and ape-like and almost human. And again, the eyes are forward-facing, and uh when when people see it and it sees the people, there's a prolonged um gaze into each other's eyes. And what's interesting about it is there's some people that felt um almost as if there was an intelligent like communication like visually between this cat and themselves, and some people even say that it was um a pleasant experience, that they didn't feel any fear, that they actually felt like this was an intelligent being that they were just observing, and the intelligent being was observing them back. So, where is this thing supposedly at, and why do people think it's there? So, I'm gonna talk about the the Clickatat region in general. So, around Clickatat, there's very dense forests and cliffs in rural isolation. Uh so this is up in Washington State, and um very remote, very rural, and um there are some areas in there uh that are super dense with very low population, and it's an ideal environment for large predators. There's plenty of game, um, it's forested, there's a lot of uh cover for them to move through naturally without being seen well, and so overall it's a place that I think people um hikers would obviously visit, but maybe not necessarily a whole bunch of people. So that might account for the low sightings that there are roughly about 50 sightings, and I'll get into that a little bit more. But um it's very close to this area called the Hanford site. Now the Hanford site's interesting because um it was built as part of the um the buildup of nuclear materials for the Manhattan project, and it produced the plutonium for the nuclear bombs that bombed uh Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And so there this site is actually um very heavily radiated right now. It's got a massive radioactive waste production for that atomic material, and because of that, it's contaminated the soil and the groundwater. And so right now there's this ongoing cleanup, but it's a large uh environmental remediation effort. And it's expected to go on for decades, and it's at billions of dollars in cost to try to re you know reclamate and make sure that this environment is safe. Uh Hanford itself, like it was used, um, it had some underground facilities like uh for for building um sorry, I'm just writing I'm writing it right now, Hanford site. Um what was what's what was done there is um the area itself was for centuries it was Native American land and it was bordering on the Columbia River. And you know, in that area there's still remnants, there's artifacts and burial sites associated with this uh Native American space. But um between the 40s, so 1944, all the way up to 1989, um, basically they were processing and building reactors at Hanford, and workers built two massive processing facilities called the Canyons to extract plutonium from uranium fuel rods after removal from the reactors. So with the end of plutonium production, this is in the early 90s, they began to um in you know, sort of at the end of the Cold War, they began to try to uh go from production to this environmental cleanup. Now there's this small city, the Hanford Camp basically uh includes people from all over the country, you know, around uh this is in the 1940s for the construction. Uh about 51,000 people worked on the Hanford site. Um, and you know, it its peak uh occupancy in 1944. Hamp Hanford was reportedly the fourth largest city in Washington, so that's how massive this facility was. And again, you know, post-World War II, the tensions between the US and the USSR brought about the Cold War, and um that that went on all the way until 1991. And during that time, there was additional reactors constructed next to the Columbia River, which allowed the U.S. to develop and stockpile nuclear weapons. So uh so between the 1990s and the 2000s, there was this river corridor cleanup, and that includes the former fuel fabrication facilities at the Hanfords 300 area, so that was just north of Richland, and nine former petroleum production reactors along the Columbia River. So the reactor area is known as the Hundred Acres, and it's a 2,200 square mile river corridor region that sits adjacent to a 50-mile plus stretch of the Columbia River. So this was the world's first full-scale plutonium production reactor. And in 1989, there was a signing of a tri-party agreement. Weapons production processes left solid and liquid waste that posed a risk to the local environment, including the Columbia River. So for the for more than 40 years, the reactors at Hanford produced plutonium, and then now you know they're trying to obviously clean up because of that. Now, there are people that think this clickat a cat might just be the result of these nuclear programs. So maybe they were thinking that not only was there put um plutonium production, they thought that perhaps there was also some skunkworks type things where they were testing animals with radioactive materials. I mean, that's a possibility. Uh the US government has done some pretty horrendous uh testing and um some off-the-books sort of things that finally have come to light, like MK Ultra and and uh other things like that. And so, and even with MKUltra, they were taught, and they were like, oh yeah, sorry, um we won't do that, but there was never a an official closure, so we don't know if that's been extended, and they're using different drugs or different ways in which they're manipulating people. So, um, and the same thing with this, you know, uh this base, they're thinking it was a production production facility, but also military would have been involved in this, and so they were thinking that perhaps the military were creating these hybrid animals through the process of radioactive breeding of some variety, you know. Um now what's interesting with animals, like we they tend to um they tend to be able to weather the radiation more than we are as humans. So if you look at Chernobyl, there's um there's mutations in the animals there, but it's not like they the it's not like Fallout 4, the video game. It's it's um some of them are quite large, um, like wolves or wild dogs, sometimes they're very quite large, uh very large. There's boars, there's deer, and that area has been uh undisturbed by humans for a while. There are um there are tours that go into Chernobyl, but uh for the most part no one lives there, so therefore the the wildlife has been able to uh re grow and the forest has reclaimed um much of the area around Chernobyl or Priapat actually. And so um there are some mutations there, but for the most part, like when you're using radiation, typically there's a degeneration or a degradation of cells. So um I'm not really sure if that's the process that's creating these animals, or this possibility of creating the animals, but it's interesting that wildlife does fare better with radioactive materials than humans do. So the theory is, like I said, that there's this long-term radiation exposure that could result in biological anomaly anomalies. So, because radiation can cause mutations and deformities, but would that be able to create an abnormal skull shape or a behavior difference? Because a large cat uh typically will hunt humans. Uh a cougar is has been known to attack and kill humans, and so uh if there's this five foot tall at the shoulder creature, they're not gonna be afraid of humans at all, and they're certainly not just just gonna stare at them, and with and the person is not gonna feel safe if something that large was staring at them that you know, because even a even a hundred-pound uh mountain lion is going to be terrifying if you come face to face with one in in the wild. Um there's other thing that's kind of interesting. Uh there's no verified case of radiation-producing hybrid species or eight feline crossover traits. But there has been known to have um mutations, uh, genetic mutations when you interbreed, like lions and tigers. Obviously, you know about ligers from the Napoleon dynamite movies, they talk about ligers, but those creatures are actually quite a bit larger than the tiger or the lion, and that's because of the genetic mutation that those two uh cats produce. Um, it there's an inhibitor for growth that is not adhered to in the genetic makeup of these ligers. So it may, like I said, it may not be obviously uh some irradiated uh monkey from a research lab that mated with a mountain lion that turned into a black cat, right? So that just seems a little bit odd, and um certainly uh crossbreeding uh species, it doesn't work. Um, the other thing is that it's um kind of a scientific fact, and I don't know if it's a hundred percent accurate, but there's been no known melanistic or black mountain lion uh ever seen. So now they're always the same colors, they may be darker or lighter, but they're typically that's uh the sandy brown mixed with gray. Um and it's perfect for their camouflage, like it makes it very easy for them to move through the mountainous terrain in this camouflage pattern. And um, like I said, there's not been a melanistic version of that ever seen. There's certainly been melanistic versions of bears and uh like brown bears um or black bears or grizzly bears, there's been melanistic versions of those. There's been melanistic versions of uh different types of uh ungulates like um deer or goats, obviously. So when there's a black lion, that's a melanistic lion. So there's been no known puma or uh mountain lion that has had or cooter that has had that coloration, so that kind of rules out even if there was like this breeding population of black cooter cats, there's still no way that that would actually ever be um crossbred with a completely with a primate, right? It's two completely different species. So what's interesting is is that there the first time that I heard about the clicket ape cat was a guy that was on a podcast who um was the owner of um Marjorie's general steneral store. It's like an outpart outpost, Marjorie's outpost. And what he was saying, this is the son-in-law of Marjorie uh or Margie, uh, who actually owned it previously, and he took it over um when she became too um too ill or too old to actually do it herself. And he said one time this guy walked into the store and was talking about this crazy experience he had on the Columbia River, where he was paddling on the on the river and happened to see this thing looking at him um inquisitively but not being um aggressive, and it freaked him out. And so he told the store owner about that, which is like typically it's very unusual for people to have experiences and just talk to someone out in the wild about it. Like I've had people tell me their experiences with Bigfoot and with dogman and stuff like that, but I was typically at a cryptid event where people of a like mind are discussing these things, uh talking about their experiences and doing research and having you know um Bigfoot cast or dogman cast at a table and discussing their works or have written books about it, right? So they've done their research. But typically out in the wild, you don't just walk up to somebody and say, Hey, guess what? I saw this monkey cat, and they'd be like, I don't have I have no idea what you're talking about, man. Um like even when I talk about Bigfoot, sometimes people look at me a little strange, even though it's more mainstream than say this monkey cat is is. So anyway, so a majority, if not all, information about this ape cat traces back to the single source of the current owner of Margis. And so I I tend to wonder about that because typically, if you look at Bigfoot or Dogman, there are hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, of um experiences that you can find when you look online from people who are talking about their experience. They have BFRO, there's other like mapping projects, um, the Bigfoot Magic Mapping Project. There's people who go on podcasts and talk about their experiences, there's people who write up their experiences on um cryptid focused groups on Facebook. There's loads and loads and loads of encounters that you can listen to or talk to people about. This creature itself uh is only associated with this one location, and it's like everybody has this experience and runs to Mergis and talks to this man and he writes it up and puts it on a board. So it just seems a little bit odd. The other thing that's happening in there is that he's started adding branding to the store, particularly around this ape cat. And there's just no independent documentation to support, you know, lots and lots of encounters. Now, again, there's supposedly around 50 encounters that have been accumulated at the store. Um, and again, nowhere else on the internet, uh, when I've tried to look it up, I haven't found anything. Um and the only thing I do find is that it points me right to Margie's outpost. And so that that creates a bit of concern for me about it. And then the other thing is that there's no wildlife reports or law enforcement logs or regional databases of of sightings like again with Bigfoot and Dogman, you have these independent um types of people that are talking about these things. You have park rangers, you have hikers, you have hunters. Um I've I've seen more independent, you know, information from people about pale crawlers or these, you know, creepy mutant albino um creatures that scream out in a woman's voice but are appear to be hunting someone. I've seen more evidence of that than I have of this klec-tat ape cat. So I just feel like it's kind of weird that none of the forestry workers, none of the hikers, none of the hunters, none of the park rangers describe that. You know. Um so these cases, all of these other cases, they have independent, uh, unconnected witnesses, and what puts a huge amount of concern on this is that it's just one independent source or one source for all of these um tales of these creatures. And now one of the things that could be happening is that there could be a misidentification of a Bigfoot and because obviously there's an ape-like face, and Bigfoot have been known to walk quadrupedally, but they also have this um movement that has been talked about um on Sasquatch Chronicles for sure, but also other locations where Wes Germer was talking about how he saw a Bigfoot, Bigfoot using this mode of transport called a spider walk, where basically it was crouched down and its arms and its legs were out to its side, and it was just using its hands and its toes, its fingers and its toes to move. So it says super creepy and it moved very well in that respect. So I'm wondering if in low light somebody seeing a large primate moving on R4s could think, hey, that resembles a big cat until the head comes into view, and oh no, it's an ape cat. So that's a possibility, I guess. Um it could be a misidentified cougar, like there could be bad lighting or a brief sighting. Um, but again, there's no melanistic versions of cougars, so it's more of more of a stretch to say that it could be a that kind of cat. It could be um so back a long time ago, uh black panthers or jaguars were more um more into the United States than they are currently. There used to be a far more um far more pushed forward version of that, um up into the you know, the the United States, and now it's it's recessed back into uh Mexico, Central and South America, but there used to be a much larger um habitat than there is currently, but perhaps there could be um there could be isolated pockets of these you know these black panthers or jaguars. And so that is a possibility that they did see something like that, and that that was um it just seemed larger in their mind than it should have been, and uh freak them out. That's an obvious um thing that could happen. Um some spiritual or folklore things around this type of creature. So this is from the indigenous populations, there were shape shifting beings, uh spirits, and because this area is um previous like burial and ceremony. ceremonial lands of indigenous peoples, perhaps there is this forest spirit that's uh unsettled because of all of the things that have happened into it, right? So it could be this uh entity, this forest spirit or this shape shape-shifting being much like skinwalkers, you know, there's supposed to be this shape-shifting being perhaps that's what people are seeing, is some sort of indigenous spirit or forest spirit that is protecting that area and is it just observing to see if you're doing something you should not be doing, right? So that's a possibility as well. That's there's no obviously no direct evidence of that, but there could be something there when you're looking through a cultural lens, you could be seeing something that could be interpreted as a forest spirit. So I I again I think this may just be um a marketing ploy. So there's this centralized source, like I said, Margie's um Margie's outpost um there's certainly signage and um propaganda I'll say put up around this uh creature on the store itself and there's this thought that um what this guy is trying to do the guy that owns the the outpost is he's trying to promote um Benjin or B-I-N-G-E-N uh Washington as a destination for the mysterious the supernatural and like a roadside attraction and if you go to Margie's outpost you will see on their website that it is very exploitive and very much about uh building a culture around these creatures right so I think that's for me that's the possibility that's resonates the most that there's this idea of this creature and it's either going to be uh a misrepresented or a misidentified um hominid of some variety more um maybe there have been there have been reports of dogmen that look more hyena like which would be very uh short and muzzle um and look really odd so maybe they're seeing some sort of dogman or Bigfoot creature um there to be this forest spirit but I feel like mostly because of the way the information is disseminated it's most likely a hoax. Now what I'm saying is I don't I don't want to say that what people are seeing uh is not what they're seeing. Uh but I just feel like if there were more individual uh reports of this outside of just that one location then I would I would think that it would need to have further and more serious looks into the possibility of this being. Um but for now I just I wanna ru I wanna h withhold judgment but I want to say that highly likely that it's just marketing. Alright, so um I'm gonna stop this one fairly short because this is a um a creature that I feel like it is just made up um I'm gonna stop there. But if you do have any reports or if you have seen something very strange like the click at that ape cat, something that defies uh normal physiology or normal um a normal look and feel uh please feel free to write out write to me and and give me your description I would love to see more independent um descriptions and reports than just one location. I lived in Washington State I had a friend that came and visited up there and he was kind of laughing at me for believing in Bigfoot and I was I showed him I walked we were going up to um Wallace Falls we were walking up a trail to Wallace Falls which is a fairly large pathway that's it used to be um like a railroad it was a railroad grade uh trail that led up to the top of Wallace Falls and as we were walking he kind of made fun of me for believing in Bigfoot and I stepped five feet off the trail and I said can you see me? And he goes no and I was like well there's hundreds of millions of acres of this around the world or you know around this state and and adjoining states I said like I what makes you think that there's not things out here that we don't normally see because I'm a pretty big guy 6'2 you know two 230 240 somewhere around there I'm a I'm a fairly big guy so if I'm out in the woods and I step five feet off the trail and you can't see me what makes you think that there's something that couldn't be 20 feet off the trail that you can't see at all that that can still see you.

unknown 27:01

Right?

SPEAKER_00 27:01

So I do believe there could be things out there. I just want to hear more reports about it. Alright so I hope you've enjoyed this episode like I said it's a little light compared to most of them but I think you know when you have a subject that's a little bit um suspect to begin with it makes more sense not to spend as much time or not to spend as much effort looking into it because of the things I did I did my best to find as much as I could independently and there was nothing. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode feel free to write me and um make suggestions about what else to look into. If there's a hoax that needs to be looked into I'm happy to do that. If there's a creature that you've seen that defies what everybody else has seen please let me know. The more that we look into the strange and unusual the more light we can bring to whether or not this is true. Right? So you have a wonderful evening I look forward to hearing from you have a fantastic night