The Unmysterious Death of Evelyn Rosemann
Did Bigfoot really kill this woman at Nevada Falls in Yosemite National Park?
content note: brief mentions of death and sexual assault.
This post was originally published on the Hayley is a Ghost blog.
In late 2019, I was a speaker at the LAPIS paranormal conference. One of the other speakers, Richard Freeman, delivered a talk titled Death By Cryptid about rare cases when cryptids have supposedly killed humans. It was an interesting talk, but one of the cases that Richard mentioned in particular caught my attention and hasn’t let go ever since.
In 1968, the body of 24-year-old Evelyn Rosemann was discovered at the bottom of Nevada Falls is Yosemite National Park. As her death occurred in a US National Park, the sunsequent investigation was handled by the FBI and sadly her death is still unsolved to this day. Some people claim that Evelyn Rosemann is a “missing 411” case. I have no interest in “missing 411” cases as they’re not paranormal but instead tragic disappearances of people in often-dangerous National Parks. Mystery mongers consider them spooky because maybe it was bigfoot or aliens or something. We all know that Creepypasta are fiction, except for the missing 411 crowd apparently…
Rosemann’s death was included in Freeman’s talk because some people think that Bigfoot might be the culprit. The thing is, to me and at least one other woman in the audience (who stood up in the Q&A and berated Richard) it’s clear that a human man did it. Rosemann was found badly battered and in a state of undress. She had been sexually assaulted after she fell/was pushed from the top of the Falls. Whoever did this to her had moved her from the original point of impact - some accounts say it was 50 feet, others 150 feet. Newspaper clippings reporting on her death at the time detail this:
Mariposa County Coroner Sheriff Norman Garrett said Evelyn Consoela Rosemann, 24, San Francisco, had been sexually assaulted. It was originally believed she had fallen accidentally from the top of the falls.’
It was so shocking to me as I sat there in the conference audience that some people from the paranormal scene could look at this case and think that Bigfoot was a necessary and logical explanation. My concern here is that you don’t have to create more monsters than necessary when human men are quite capable of such savagery. This is the point that the woman in the audience bravely tried to make when she stood up in the Q&A.
The investigators told the press at the time that there were some aspects that need to be cleared up but would not- or could not -clarify the ‘suspicious circumstances’. Some have mistaken this to mean that there’s something potentially supernatural about the death which is being covered up by government agencies. It demonstrates a staggering lack of awareness.
‘Mariposa County Coroner - Sheriff Normal Garrett said he may call a coroner’s jury to try to determine the cause of death because “there are some aspects that need to be cleared up, that don’t look like suicide.” He would not specify the suspicious circumstances.
In an attempt to try and gain some further information on this case so that I could write about what really happened, I hit a brick wall in that the FBI cannot release any information because it’s technically an open case and the case files are not available for release. I had to wait almost a year for a response to my FOI request and when I received it, it obviously didn’t provide any further insights.
This is the thing about facts. They’re often hard to come by, especially when you only have slivers of information to go on. Yet, that doesn’t give you permission to fill the void with your own version of reality. I hate to think that the Rosemann family may ever have to read that Evelynn was murdered by Bigfoot because, although something quite monstrous did happen to this young woman, it’s likely at the hands of a man who has never been brought to justice and that’s awful enough.
To women this seems obvious, perhaps because this a reality we learn to live with from a young age. To many men it is also obvious, but to some it seems that because this isn’t a reality they live with on a daily basis it isn’t the first explanation that comes to mind and because it isn’t a danger that they live with they have the privilege of mystery mongering other people’s tragedies.