The Machermo Yeti Attack on Lhakpa Domani Sherpa

Machermo sits at about 4,470 metres in the upper Dudh Kosi valley of the Khumbu, Nepal, between Dole and Gokyo. In summer, herders bring their yaks up to its open meadows. Today some trekking maps mark the stretch between Dole and Machermo as a yeti attack site.

11 July 1974. Lhakpa Domani Sherpa, a yak herder described as 19 years old, was with her animals in the pasture. Years later she remembered the first sign. "I heard a whistle." Then something seized her from behind.

To Tony Healy, who interviewed her in December 1979, she said it "grabbed her by the hair and swung her around. Fortunately, some of her hair pulled out by the roots and she fell into the creek." The creature was "about the height of her brother", roughly 5 foot 8 inches, and "tremendously thickset: as broad as a yak." Accounts describe thick black hair below the waist and brown hair above, a "small, wrinkled face, like a very old man's," large eyes and "thick stout fingers with long nails."

Then it turned on the yaks. "It looked as if a couple had been hit so hard that the yeti's fists penetrated right through their thick, hairy hides and also their ribs. Others had broken necks." It moved on all fours, but could walk faster on two feet. Finally, "it crossed the stream and walked off with a strange twisting motion." She was essentially unhurt. But she fell seriously ill afterwards. Her elderly mother said the family had to call several big lamas to the house to cure her.

She reported it in Namche Bazaar. Police Inspector Ramje Bahadur Khatri sent Sergeant Chatra Man Rai to the pasture. He arrived five days later. Rai verified the yak injuries, the ribs punched through, the heads twisted around. He recorded two kinds of print, one with four digits and one with five, and followed them, with occasional handprints, for some distance. The investigators ruled out a bear. The case appeared in the newsletter of the Nepal Nature Conservation Society in February 1975.

The story travelled fast. A wire story printed on 19 July 1974 said the creature knocked her unconscious and killed five yaks by twisting their horns around their necks. Later versions counted three. Her daughter, Dawa Yanji Sherpa, told Geographical in 2023 that it killed two by splitting their heads open, then licked the blood from one skull. Blood drinking first surfaced in the 2011 National Geographic film Hunt for the Abominable Snowman. The producer of her 1997 A&E interview was clear. "There was no mention of bloodsucking."

In 2011 Loren Coleman set out the shifting details. "She was touched? Hair pulled? Neck grabbed? Was she thrown down? Thrown in a stream?" He wondered whether she had become a practiced interviewee, performing for the camera. Across sources her creature stands anywhere from about 4 feet to 5 feet 8 inches. Some say a photographer recorded the footprints. Others say none were taken. A bear is the usual answer for Himalayan livestock kills, but the original investigators rejected it. No one has ever accused her or the police of a hoax.

The case has been retold on A&E's Ancient Mysteries, in a MonsterQuest recreation, in a BBC Radio 4 podcast and in a children's graphic novel, Mountain Attack: A Yeti Encounter. Bernard Heuvelmans is listed among those who covered it, and it is told alongside older Himalayan stories such as Eric Shipton's 1951 footprint photographs. Decades on, the Yeti attack at Machermo is still remembered for what it combined. A named victim. A police inquiry. Dead animals on the ground.