This day in history: Two Washington kids were behind the separate incidents of a (supposed) bigfoot sighting and an almost-exorcism

From 1974: A 12-year-old boy told sheriff’s deputies that he had spotted a Sasquatch in an unlikely spot: just north of Spokane in the Forest Hills area.

The boy described a creature that was 11 feet tall, covered with brown hair, with “slouchy shoulders and long arms.”

The deputies were not entirely convinced. They wondered if “a TV program this week about such animals had anything to do with the alleged Sasquatch sighting.”

Meanwhile, authorities in Bridgeport, Washington, believed they had solved a different mystery involving strange phenomena. A 10-year-old girl admitted she was responsible for a spate of bizarre incidents in her home, in which furniture moved on its own and the family cat talked.

The parents had been so spooked they called in a Catholic priest to bless the house.

After interrogation, the girl admitted she moved the furniture and used her own voice to make the cat “speak.”

“Even some of my own men were taken in,” the police chief said.

From 1924: Rosamond Lee Shaw, a former Spokane newspaperwoman, 27, was at the center of a scandal in Canby, Oregon, because she had married a 17-year-old boy.

The scandal? She was now a Canby High School English teacher, and the boy was one of her pupils. The Canby School Board was expected to take up the matter at its next meeting.

Meanwhile, the married couple was “maintaining an attitude of sphinx-like silence.”