The great outdoors can be beautiful, but it can also be dangerous as heck. Seasoned hikers and campers know – the moment you step into the woods, you have to be extra careful. A strange sound, a suspicious-looking person, or a surprising encounter with the wildlife – anything can be on the table.
Some reports show that around 4,661 people in the U.S. get lost in the woods per year and need some kind of assistance. That's roughly 13 people a day. Search and rescue teams also perform around 50,000 missions each year, so even the most knowledgeable never know what's going to happen.
We recently came across a thread where people shared their scariest experiences while out in the woods. When one netizen asked, "Rangers, forest workers, hunters, and other woods-people of Reddit, what is your scary experience in the woods that you still can't explain?", people flocked to share their creepiest and most unsettling forest experiences. So, we're sharing the most unhinged with you below!
#1
Not my story, but my younger sister's (early 20s). She was in Colorado last year and went hiking with her friend. The plan was to hike up the mountain, stop midway and camp, then finish the hike the next morning. They started their hike and stopped for camp midway. She said it started dumping rain that night which meant the top would most likely be snow. The next morning they continued their hike, but it started getting complicated. Her friend only wore Chaco sandals and not proper hiking boots as they didn’t expect the snow.
They stopped at a creek and were deciding if they wanted to turn back on account they weren’t prepared properly when they heard a faint “help me”. They both stood still. They heard it again. They decided to follow up the creek to the woman’s voice. They got to a clearing that was covered in snow and found a woman laying in it in basic athletic clothing (leggings, light pull over jacket, and athletic shoes).
My sister said her legs were swollen, discolored and had nasty cuts on them. My sister asked her how long she had been out there and the woman said only a few hours. My sister was like okay we need to get you down this mountain. The woman was like “no I need to go up the mountain that’s where my car is parked”. My sister was like, no, there is no driving access at the top of the mountain which was a sign that this woman was confused.
They get her down the mountain and my sister just kept saying how confused this woman was. They get to the bottom and they find this woman’s car. My sister couldn’t get cell service to call 911 during this btw. Anyways, my sister tells this woman she’s going to drive her to the hospital but the woman is standing strong that she would just like to go back to her bed and breakfast. My sister takes her there while driving this woman’s car.
Once the woman is at the bed and breakfast she thanks them and goes in. My sister spoke to the owners and was like you have to call a medic, she is severely confused and not acting normal. They call a medic and transport her to a hospital. Turns out this woman is from Chicago, has low blood pressure and it was her first time ever hiking a mountain - she was also alone. She had passed out during her hike, then it dumped snow on her. She was hypothermic and only thought she’d been out for a few hours - she was out overnight in the dark, cold and alone. I couldn’t imagine the terror she must have felt. Anyways, my sister went and saw her at the hospital and the woman thanked her for saving her life. They still lightly keep in touch.
Image credits: AmySaysGetBent
#2
We have a camp that we visit during the hunting months and about every other weekend in between that. To get to our camp, you have to turn off of a major road onto a gravel road, drive about a mile, then turn onto another gravel road for about a half mile. It’s set between a few other camps, plus some residents that live out there. It’s quiet, for the most part. There are some coyotes and bobcats. Bobcats are the worst due to their terrible scream. It sounds like a woman crying for help. There has also been a black panther and wild dogs.
2013 we were at the camp for Thanksgiving. We hunted, fished, cooked, drank, all that good camp stuff. One night, we’re sitting around a fire, swapping funny stories and just listening to the silence of the woods. As we’re talking, we all hear, “Help me!”. At first, we thought it was a bobcat. We listened some more and heard it again. It was a man’s voice yelling “help me!” repeatedly. Now, our first instinct was to grab our guns. Second was to go towards the voice, BUT you never know what you will encounter in the woods. It was dark and cold. The hunters knew the area very well.
We called the police, and explained everything to the responding officers. The weird part was that we NEVER once heard it while the officers were with us. Not once. The officers left and we heard the man again, repeating “help me”. About half an hour later, the officers came back and we didn’t hear any call for help. Again, silence. We all decided it was best to go inside our camp for the night. We never did find out anything. I’ve only been back to the camp once since then. Really freaked me out.
t_skullsplitter:
What is freaky about being in the woods like that is, people can be watching you, and you would never know... Just beyond the light of the fire.
Image credits: redink85
#3
Friend and I were hiking in the woods. He was at the camp and I went to check on things about half a mile away. Suddenly, as if someone flipped a switch, the woods became silent. No wind, no russling leaves, no birds.. Just the most eery silence I've experienced. After a few minutes, it suddenly went back to normal forest noises.
Thinking I must have had a seizure or temporary deafness or something I hurry back to camp, only to see friend standing there with a confused/scared look on his face.
I must have had a similar look because he immidiately asked if I heard the silence. We tried to come up with an explanation, but absolute silence in the woods seems impossible. Even more so that it was so sudden.
ThatDamZoomer:
Sometimes, the woods will become silent when a predator is nearby. But what happened to you and your buddy I can‘t explain. The fact that it went dead silent so quickly and happened over such a wide area is quite bizarre.
al4crity:
An earthquake can do that to animals, even ones we can't feel. The waves coming from a quake travel through the air and supersonic speeds and animals will sense that before the ground moves, IF it moves at all. Just a thought!
Image credits: hmfiddlesworth
Stories about people getting lost and never returning from the woods abound. Perhaps the most well-known is the tragic story of the American adventurer Chris McCandless, which was turned into a movie, Into the Wild, in 2007. McCandless aspired to live Thoreau-style – simply living off the land in the Alaskan wilderness.
Soon, however, he discovered that the wilderness was harsher and more ruthless than he had thought. Those who met him on his way said he had minimal supplies and wasn't prepared to survive the Alaskan bush. He hunted for game: squirrels, ptarmigans, other birds, and even a moose (which he wasn't able to preserve properly), but he wasn't exactly eating a well-balanced diet.
#4
About 20 years ago I had just finished my degree and was bummed because I couldn't find a job. A former roommate/good friend and I went on an overnight backpack trip near Burr Oak State Park in Southeast Ohio. About 2 am we were awoken in our tent by the sound of dozens of horses being ridden all around us. We could hear muted conversation, harness jingling, hoofs clopping and we could feel it shaking the ground. We laid in our tent and the sound just kept on, like a whole convoy was passing right beside us. After a few minutes we unzipped the tent and the sounds immediately ceased and nothing was there. It was freaky, we were afraid they were going to ride over us it was so intense. I have no idea who or what it was but we're camped on a trail that had been used by John Morgan Hunts Confederate raiders during the civil war. Not a logical explanation but it was deafening there were so many horses. I can still hear men's voices murmering as they rode by. Next morning not a single hoofprint to be found.
Eleventy_Seven:
Yeaah, I think this one's pretty easily explained.
Ghosts, dude. It was ghosts.
Image credits: T*rd_Fergusons_
#5
When I was younger, around 14 or 15 years old. My family used to camp at a state park. Every night my friend and I would walk through the woods. We called this "the ritual" this particular night we decided to walk further into the woods than usual. We had flashlights be we liked to try and navigate through the woods with them turned off. We were about half a mile from the nearest camp site when we heard soft whispering behind us. Obviously we hit the flashlights and spun around. Didn't see anything. So we kept walking and we hear it again. This time we stop and look around a bit before we decided to head back to our campsite. Then we see what's whispering. It's a lady crawling on the ground whispering just random words. She was wearing dark clothes and was covered in dirt. When she sees that we notice her she stands up and declares that she is looking for her campsite. We ended up walking her back to the campground and tried helping her find her group. Turns out she was just super drunk/high and got lost trying to find a bathroom. Her friends didn't even notice she was missing and if we didn't go that far into the woods she would have been lost all night. It was pretty creepy.
Anon:
I’m picturing a witch crawling on the ground calling you “my pretties”.
Image credits: KMIAOFFICIAL
#6
I was once canoeing the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada. These aren't your normal backyard ponds. The boundary waters are thousands of enormous lakes interconnected with each other (think mini-great lakes). We had been canoeing and camping along the lakes for about a week at this point. We didn't really have an itinerary, just planned to boat and camp, fish, and live off the land two weeks. We had a GPS and a sat phone to call a helicopter for pickup whenever we were done.
Anyway, about a week in and we were set to canoe a few hours to the next lake. An hour or so in and we are in the center of a extremely long and narrow lake. Unfortunately, a storm started to blow in and the waves on the lake swelled to 2+ feet. Too much for our dinky canoes. We pull off to a random clearing on the shore and setup camp in rush to avoid being totally thrashed by a rainstorm. We just setup camp and hunker down for the night.
By the next morning it had cleared up. We started walking up the coast of the lake about 200 feet from our camp looking for a good fishing spot. What we actually found was another campsite. However, it was ABSOLUTELY wrecked. Trash strewn everywhere, tent collapsed and torn, clothes on the ground. At first we were just like disgusted like what a******s did this? or left their s**t out to be bear food?
The more we looked around though, the weirder things seemed though. For one, their garbage was still hoisted into a tree to keep it safe from bears, but the whole bag was ripped open despite being 30 feet in the air. Second, literally everything except the canoes were still at the campsite. Clothes, packs, food, rope, pans, like a serious set of hiking equipment. Enough for 2 or 3 people. Half of it was trashed and torn open, mostly the packs, tent, and clothes. The other half was totally untouched but thrown on the ground. Like somebody NOPE'd the hell out of there in nothing but their long johns ditching hundreds of dollars of gear in the process. We waited a couple hours and eventually called it back to our helicopter crew-- but they hadn't been aware of anybody else or gotten any distress calls. We eventually just left everything and moved camp. Everybody was pretty upset by it and a day or two later we ended the whole trip early because it seemed like nobody wanted to be out anymore.
It was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen. First thought was bear attack, but there was food left uneaten, and I've seen bear attacks on camps before, but nothing like this. Bears rip open packs and go after food, and are generally pretty easy to scare away. What still sticks with me is why all their clothes and packs were still there with half being totally destroyed and half being untouched. I still don't get it.
I've done a lot of other camping and hiking, rafting and biking, all around the country and I've never had any other weird experiences like that.
Historical-Regret:
I mean, the fact that the canoes were gone just makes it sound as if it was a camping party that just left their stuff behind rather than deal with packing it up. Some combination of wealthy+drunk+lazy+not liking the camping experience = leave your stuff behind. Unfortunate, but it happens.
The random destruction was just because animals destroyed some of it after the fact, but not all.
Image credits: n0bel
Today, many people believe that the reason McCandless passed away was that he was malnourished. People have proposed different theories, but the most popular one today is that consuming wild potato seeds (or Hedysarum alpinum, as botanists call it) contributed to his becoming so weak that he eventually starved.
Writer and mountaineer Jon Krakauer, the author of Into the Wild, proposed in 2015 that the antimetabolite L-canavanine (that's found in the wild potato seeds) contributed to McCandless's passing. As multiple studies note, "L-canavanine is highly toxic to a wide range of organisms, including bacteria, fungi, yeast, algae, plants, insects, and mammals."
Krakauer suggested that the seeds may not be toxic for healthy individuals who are consuming a well-rounded diet. But for someone like McCandless, who was on the brink of starvation, a small dose of the seeds might've been enough.
#7
I've spent a lot of time in fairly wild places and never had an incident that I couldn't explain.
Doesn't make them much less scary, though. When you figure out it's a cougar, bear, moose, or strange human, it's not like you exhale and relax.
Scariest moment for me, to date, was the grizzly that was circling our camp in the dusk at about 20 meters. Packed my family into the car as fast as we could move but it wouldn't have been fast enough if the bear had attacked. I really regret it - I feel that I failed as a parent, because it's only luck that nothing horrible happened. I don't think I'll ever forget seeing its green eyes bobbing and swaying in my headlamp. It briefly rushed our vehicle as we left, too. Scary as f**k.
The closest I ever came to an inexplicable moment was when I was walking though trail-less black spruce up north in the fall and suddenly hit a wall of odor the likes of which I'd never smelled before. Stopped me in my tracks. Some instinct told me that it was a bull moose, and sure enough, in about 20 more meters, there was a clearing with a massive bull. It was rutting season so I got the hell out.
LookAtMeImAName:
Bro, I know the feeling. Had a run in with the biggest black bear I’ve ever seen in a remote area in Canada, while taking a nature walk with my wife and newborn daughter. Scary as f**k.
Image credits: Historical-Regret
#8
We lived on the Hopi/Navajo reservation growing up. My mom and I were feeding the horses very early in the morning before I went to school- it was still almost completely dark out- when we hear this low, dim humming noise. The horses start acting really nervous, ours included. Sweating, pacing, nostrils flared, eyes showing white- the works. We feed them and walk out from the barn/shack trying to figure out what’s happened. We look up after scanning the horizon for anything (squinting as best as we could) and there is a black triangle like thing hovering right over us. It was almost completely silent. It was perfectly over us so you couldn’t see it unless you looked straight up and it felt like it was so close I could touch it. It was pretty d**n large too- like a long triangle. Smooth and black. Thinking back, it was actually quite impressive and beautiful.
Mom mom grabbed me and ran back into the shed. This was before cellphones were really a thing so she just clutched me and told me not to make a sound. We waited for what felt like ages but was probably only 2-3 more minutes. The horses weren’t even eating, they just paced the shed inside back and forth. Finally the horses started settling down to eat and my mom went outside. It was gone.
We felt like we had the flu the rest of the day and I stayed home. We never told my dad. I think it was some sort of military aircraft since around the reservation there are quiet, secret military set ups but who knows.
Anon:
Definitely military, I know people want aliens but the military is big on triangles for their aircrafts. Which makes sense, obviously, because it's aerodynamic. Stealth bombers and stuff that literally look like a flat black triangle in the sky. And they're quiet too. And that's only the ones that we know about, we don't know about the crafts that haven't been released into public knowledge yet.
Still scary obviously. Always gotta be the military being a***oles and scaring the s**t out of people.
Slartibartyfarti:
I've spent a lot of time researching UFO on the internet, not for the past 6 years though, but the triangle shape is very common in sightings.
Image credits: anon
#9
I come from a big country family. We live on a farm, we raise our own food and meat animals, and we hunt and process. My dad’s first cousin is even a licensed taxidermist. So we get a lot of hunting in. For a bit more backstory, on the homestead I grew up on (and still live on), it was my parents, my Pops’ first cousin and his wife, me and my four sisters, and my four female second cousins. So four adults and nine kids. And sometimes my Pops’ brother comes to stay with us too, especially when hunting season is starting up.
So hunting season (deer) is going on, and my Pops, his brother (Uncle K), and the cousin we live with (Uncle V) are all getting ready to go hunting. Some of us kids decide to tag along: me (12), my sister S (15), and my cousin A (14). We go out further into the woods than we normally do, set up camp, etc.
Important fact: during the time we’re setting up, my pops and uncles are being quiet, while the three of us kids talk. My voice hasn’t changed. This is important.
Us kids keep chattering away, while the adults are just letting us get our energy out while they check the survival equipment, make sure the guns are clean and working, etc. Strong silent Southern types hahaha.
There’s a rustling in the thick brush around us, and suddenly three creepy looking guys enter the clearing. They stop dead. One of them has a hand on his knife on his belt. They are clearly drunk as f**k. They keep looking between A and S and my pops and uncles, like they're debating something.
My pops and uncles stand up. Last bit of backstory: every dude in my family is f**koff huge. I'm 19 now, and I'm 6'5". My dad is the biggest at 6’10”, 280. Just deeply intimidating man, and so are Uncles V and K. The guys laugh nervously as my Uncle V picks up one of the freshly cleaned rifles and points it at them. These dudes start running out the clearing like the devil was after them.
My Pops immediately says we’re clearing out. My uncles don’t even question it, and neither do us kids. We’re freaking out, and we totally take things down sloppy but my pops doesn’t say anything about us messing up his camping equipment. We get back into cell service and my dad calls the cops about seeing those f*****s but the cops don’t seem to think it’s serious since nothing happened.
It’s at that moment I realized: A, S, and me with my unchanged voice were the only ones these guys could hear talking. They thought they’d come across a camp of three girls by themselves.
I don’t want to even think about what would have happened if my dad and uncles hadn’t been there.
yuhboy_matt:
That’s f**ked. Where was this?
raleighwh2001 (OP):
We're from Louisiana, but apparently, my Uncle K got approval for us to hunt on a friend's land in Mississippi. These guys were not friends of the land owner; we checked.
Had to text my dad to get confirmation that I remembered it correctly. He wanted me to add that they did tell the owner of the land about this, and he took it more seriously. But since the landowner is a friend of my Uncle K and not my dad, he doesn't know what the dude did about it.
Image credits: raleighwh2001
McCandless went into the wild with a purpose. But some people simply go for a hike and never come back from the woods. In 2023, 29-year-old Jonathan Van Deursen went hiking with his dog Bagho in the Wentworth Valley, Whangamata, New Zealand, and never came back. His disappearance was reported by a campground employee who noticed that his silver Toyota was parked in the lot overnight and found it suspicious.
#10
Backwoods hiking/camping trip up in Maine. Trail intersected overgrown logging road. Checked topo map. Saw logging toad lead to isolated pond. Hiked to pond. Found small clearing. Perfect spot to camp. Went to bed shortly after sunset (8:30pm-ish) woke up around 1:30am to distant but loud noises coming from all angles around us. Up the logging road both directions, across the pond and in the woods. Deep bass-y groans and hoots, occasionally hitting higher pitched noted. Been in the woods for most of my adult life. Have come in contact with just about all the larger mammals of the North East and have never heard those noises before. Haven’t heard them again either. Will never forget that sound.
biglebowshi:
If I'm not mistaken, this had been a phenomenon all around the world, if it's the same sounds. Kind of like large pieces of metal moving?
TalesFromThe (OP):
Yes, very similar. But at the time, it just sounded like many different creatures all communicating around us.
Image credits: TalesFromThe
#11
I spent a few nights in a lean-to. I fit snugly inside, underneath a widowmaker, falling asleep atop a bed of pine foliage.
In the middle of the night I hear and see this long black appendage impact, and then slide down the tarp. I had no weapons, save for the hatchet, and I wouldn't make it out undetected so I watched the entrance intensely for a few hours. Turns out I had leaned my bow against the shelter, and the wind blew it over in the night.
Anon:
When I was a boy scout(back in 1985), we spent a night in lean tos while earning our winter camping badges.
In the middle of the night, we awoke to the sounds of rapid fire gunshots right outside. We couldn't see any muzzle flashes or anything like that, just bang bang bang, over and over again. There was nothing to be done about it but cower together and wait for the sun to come up.
It turns out the cases of pop we had outside did not fare too well in the deep cold of the Canadian winter. The gun shots were cans of pop exploding.
Image credits: jankDemes
#12
I've lived in the Smokies most of my life. Anywhere I've lived in the Smokies, I've been completely surrounded by woods, naturally. One night at like 1 AM I was sitting on my porch drinking a beer. If you haven't lived out here, during the summer time, nature is loud. It isn't quiet. Cicadas humming, frogs belching, etc. Its like the ultimate white noise. While I was drinking my beer, I had noticed that everything in the woods had gone quiet. Which is pretty easy to notice when you live here because that doesn't happen.
Suddenly, I heard the most terrifying noise I had ever heard about, mmm, I think maybe a good 30 or 40 meters away from me. It was a loud, shrieking, literally blood curdling scream like shrill. It sounded...non human. It wasn't a mountain lion because I've heard them before, and they're rare in the area I lived. I stood up, audibly said "nope.", and walked the f**k inside. That was the one and only time that ever happened. I still live in the same house, and still drink the same beer on the same porch.
Mattitude75:
Possibly a barn owl?
Dreazzzy (OP):
Dude. I think you actually just solved it. Explains why everything went quiet. That's spot on, thanks!
walnut_of_doom:
I had one of those make that exact noise directly outside my open bedroom window one time.
I may have pissed myself awake.
Image credits: Dreazzzy
Nine weeks after his disappearance, a twist occurred: Van Deursen's dog Bagho came out of the bush in a rural area 6.5 km from where the pair entered the trail. The dog had bloody paws and had lost some weight, but was otherwise okay. Unfortunately, he didn't provide investigators with any clues about Jordan. The rescue team even tried to take the dog back into the bush, hoping he would track Jordan down, but the search was fruitless.
#13
Inventory arborist tech here. I've found a cow tongue sliced open down the middle, wrapped in different vibrantly colored bands, and stabbed to the trunk of an oak tree with a knife.
banditkeithwork:
Sounds like a spell to silence someone or something. most folk magic isn't exactly subtle. Where was this, I'm curious about the culture the curse-user comes from.
Image credits: LackadaisiesForDays
#14
Stumbled across some some kind of...witch circle? Backpacking off trail in the Colorado Mountains.
Cobblestone circle, bones hanging from the trees, burned out candles and creepy pictures in a tree trunk that my family didn't let me get a good look at before they dragged me away. Never did figure out exactly what was going on there.
That was a fun trip.
Metalbass5:
If it means anything: Most Wiccan/Pagan/Modern Druidic rituals only look creepy.
Anon:
Yea thats what I was thinking. If it's just their usually meeting spot, no point in cleaning up bits that arent straight up trash and will be used again. I wonder if it becomes more popular and accepted people will start posting signs so they dont creep random hikers out. Like "Blank Covens witch Circle, please don't touch!" And "we dont grafitti and steal from your church, please dont desecrate ours."
Image credits: The_Random_Persons
#15
Not anything like this myself, but a friend told me this story.
So he goes with a buddy to hike a trail near our town. Northern Washington state, so lots of woods and trees. When they get to the trailhead, there is one other car there, and he remembers seeing a person in that car. The person in the car was just staring at them, with what he described as a really white unchanging face. He kept staring right at them without trying to hide it or look away. My friend got creeped out, and decided to leave.
In the next week or two after that, a couple of hikers and a ranger turned up dead in that same area. Pretty sure they caught the guy, but I don't remember if his photo was posted.
Super creepy.
Image credits: addelorenzi
Such stories just emphasize how careful and on guard we have to be when out in the wilderness. Even a simple hike can turn into a scary or even deadly experience if we're not prepared and careful enough. If you're a beginner at backcountry activities, take this advice for your own safety. And if you're a seasoned backpacker and camper, reflect on them with us!
#16
Couple good friends of mine fight fires and in WA state summers business is usually booming. This year a fair sized crew of about ten of them are miles and miles deep into the Cascades doing dig lines. I'm talking like 60 miles away from anything, middle of nowhere.
As they're hiking through they come to a clearing and there's two landed Blackhawk helicopters and about 7 fully armed military personnel. They all point their rifles at the fire crew and demand to know what they are doing there. My friend tells them they're doing fire digs and they're scheduled to be up there. They are told to turn around and forget that they saw anything up there. My friend says, "But this is government work, we have to do this, this is our job". Military guy says, "Not today, you're done, get the f**k out of here now". Some serious Chronicle type s**t. I've never wanted to know so badly about what the hell was going in out there.
Deadmanglocking:
Could have been a Blackhawk that had mechanical trouble and was set down there. They flew a team out to provide security for it while waiting on the mechanics to get there to prep it for a sling load flight out back to joint base McChord.
downwiththechipness:
Washington State is home to survival (SERE) training for most branches of the military, esp West and East WA. It was probably a specialized ftx.
Image credits: Cidermonk
#17
I love to share a story my uncle told. TLDR at the bottom.
In 1992 he owned about 150 acres in a remote area of East Tennessee. On this land he had a large fishing pond and a stream running through it and he used to leave lines out at night to pull in big catfish. This pond was accessible by 2 small game trails through thick patches of woods and he would need to drive to the trail entrances from his house near the front of the property and walk about a half mile in with his gear and nothing but a head lamp for light. This was something he did pretty often and my uncle was a lover of the outdoors so this was business as usual for him. Vietnam vet as well.
Anyway this particular night in July 1992, he went down to the pond at about 9:30pm to check his lines. As he was doing so, he heard a loud splash and assumed it was a fish jumping. He carried on with what he was doing and then heard a low, gutteral groan and what he described as "monkeys flighting" just on the other side of the pond (it was about 70 yards across). Multiple loud splashes occured and he also heard a loud crash in the woods just yards away to his left. He talked about how he immediately felt a sense of panic and was attempting to get visuals using his head lamp but whatever was producing these sounds was behind tree cover.
He said that the woods then erupted in continued sounds of "fighting monkeys" and he opted to drop his gear and run down the trail toward his truck. Apparently, even in his adrenaline fueled state, he could hear foot fall on his left as he was being "hunted". He got to his truck and hauled a*s out of there to the road and back to his home (which mind you, sits on the property about 6 miles away). He went inside and locked every window and door, grabbed a gun, and stayed up and vigilant the entire night but nothing more occured.
He called my dad the next day who sort of just laughed it off. Well, for my uncle whatever he experienced scared him so badly that he put his land up for sale and sold it a few months later. Until he died in 2017, he would maintain that he believes that he walked into a group of Sasquatch and they erupted in territorial displays to get him out of there. He never enjoyed the outdoors after that. This wasn't a man who I took for a liar.
TLDR; my Vietnam vet/outdoorsman uncle claims he was chased out of the woods by a clan of Sasquatch and it scared him so badly he sold the property.
Image credits: bloodyboppa
#18
Not my story, but my dad's. When my dad was in his 20s, he was staying with my mom at a small cabin in the woods of Colorado. It was fairly remote (there was another cabin about a mile away and a camp ground maybe 3 miles down the valley.) Late one afternoon, he was out fishing on a nearby river by himself.
As the light started fading, he decided to call it a day and head back to the cabin for dinner. As he was walking back through the woods, he got an eerie feeling that he was being watched, but he couldn't see anyone or anything. He kept walking back, and then suddenly he heard a stick break behind him. He stopped, looking back for the source of the sound, but still didn't see anything.
He nervously kept walking back, a little quicker, and then heard another stick break, whirls around and still - nothing. This happens like three or four times, but every time he stopped to listen and look, there was total silence and nothing else moving. By the time he finally made it back to the cabin, it was nearly dark. He never did find out what was following him, but whatever it was left him alone after that. His best guess was a mountain lion stalking him or something. Really unsettling though.
magiccigammagic:
Mountain lions are the worst. I was talking to a group of guys at Philmont(boy scout camp) and they said they felt like they were being stalked. They turned around a few times and saw nothing. Turned around again and a lion was just walking behind them. Spooky shit. They were a Christian group and prayed so hard. Luckily nothing happened.
Image credits: rocketotter109
U.S. national parks experts stress the importance of planning ahead. Doing your homework on these three things might even save you from life-threatening situations:
- Know your way around beforehand. A map is a must in the wilderness. Whether it's print, digital, or GPS, be sure to know where water sources and campsites are and plan accordingly.
- Know how to call for help. If you'll be in an area with cell service, a phone will suffice. Just make sure you have a battery-operated charger. If you'll be in a remote location, get a satellite messenger.
- Inform someone about your whereabouts. Tell a person or multiple people about where you're going and how long your hike or journey will take so that someone back home knows when to expect you.
#19
Two stories.
First was the year I met my wife (ten years ago) we were 17 and I was a hunting nut. Decided to go camping in the sand dunes behind my suburb, just off the beach. We live in rural west Aus, so nothing happens. Anyway, pretty local area, lots of people around, we decided to just hang around the beach, go walking and settle down for the night. A few hours passed and we had a small campfire going, jumped into our shared sleeping bag and went to sleep. Woke up to thudding all around us and a huge 'grock grock grock noise". Ok, it freaked us out because I was half asleep. It was an emu that basically stood on us and honestly the big fella was as shocked as we were and he took off. So we settled to sleep and hear it. People everywhere. They walked past us, we didn't see them though. They weren't talking, we could just hear them walking. They broke into a run and started laughing. We heard them run over the dune to the sea side, and then the chanting started. People weren't taking the p**s, they were chasing someone and loving it. There were a group of people running up and down the trails around us, with a group chanting. At that stage we noped the f**k out. Called my partner's parents and the came with their rottweiler and gun to pick us up. We walked back to the parking lot that lead to the trails with our fog snarling at everything. We could hear people running out of the darkness behind us laughing at us, some of them even taunted us to come back to the dunes.
Never figured out what it was about but it wasn't the local Aboriginal people (my wife's extended family) and it wasn't the local m**h heads, but it was over 50 people at around three AM.
The second tale.
We were homeless for a while at around 20. We rescued mastiffs and I had an opportunity to train in Melbourne and represent a gym for MMA. We drove across the Nullarbor with our three dogs and my wife's mother. Halfway across we got tired and saw a dilapidated roadside stop. It was just some younger woman's house with a shop attached. We pulled up and talked to the female owner and an older bloke. They looked at us and asked if we were tired. I said yeah and they asked us if we wanted to park around back. Sure, stop for a rest cause these folk seemed nice. Drove around the back to a carpark equivalent of car bodies. Ok sure, that's odd already, because you know... The nearest town is a days drive. Anyway, one of our dogs was unwell and needed a strict diet and to poop regularly. I get her out of the car and the other dogs jump out too. The rottweiler takes off to explore. The dogs poop and I call our big girl back. No response. That's pretty normal she was ignorant sometimes. I go to look for her and she is sniffing a sleeping bag. Ok fine, the place is a wreck with s**t everywhere. I didn't give it a second thought. Then I looked up and saw a massive tarp wrapped up around.. something.. and it is strung up between a few trees. Completely suspended. And behind it a few sleeping bags suspended between some trees. Bout ten in all including the big one. Then I noticed the absolute swarm of flies. Got the dogs back in the car and left. Saw the woman and old bloke on the way out. Waved at them and acted natural. Nothing. No smile or wave, all former charm was gone. We dodged some Ivan Milat level s**t because my dog was picky about where she pooped.
Never reported this because we honestly have no idea where on the Nullarbor it was. We just kept heading east on the biggest road we could. I am sure as day we were going to be k**led by some hillbilly mother f*****s.
Image credits: DollarPhilanthropist
#20
Absolute silence. It kind of freaked me out. I was on a short day hike by myself. I was walking down a trail near a stand of pine trees and came around a bend on the trail and all of a sudden everything got really quiet. No wind. No birds chirping. No rustling leaves. Only the sounds of my own footsteps and breathing. I kept hiking, but it gave me chills. I've since been back there and the woods seemed "alive" again.
Image credits: Extrasherman
#21
I was hiking through the remnants of a remote, long-abandoned town and the surrounding area. To get to as far into the woods as I was, you had to cross fallen trees over a creek three times. I had just crossed the third "bridge" and was about five miles in and something blue caught my eye just ahead of me.
There was a man, in his sixties at least, wearing blue satin pajamas, sitting in a tree. The closer I got to him the louder he laughed; it wasn't a maniacal laugh, but it set off all the alarms in my head nevertheless. He also wasn't wearing any shoes and looked well-groomed/cleaned.
I gave him a friendly nod as I passed and he just kept laughing. Then it stopped. I turned and he was gone. There was no branch cracking, plants rustling, nothing... He was just gone.
Still rubs me the wrong way. The area I was in was a pretty rough hike, very secluded. Not very many people venture as deep as I was that day. No idea what was going on there.
Image credits: mrwitch
Clothing is also a big part of proper preparation. The weather can change quickly depending on your location and the time of year, so it's always smart to pack layers. Hiking boots, a waterproof jacket, and pants, as well as proper cold-weather attire like hats and gloves, are the basics, but things like thermo base layers and extra socks can come in handy as well. You can call me paranoid, but I believe it's always best to be over-prepared!
#22
I was hiking with my cousins in Guatemala when we came across a MASSIVE field of burnt forest. We decided to explore it and didn’t find anything interesting until we found a burnt car. I still can’t figure out how a car could have gotten there since we were hours away from any road.
Image credits: Yaboiz77
#23
My best friend used to have a job as a research assistant on an owl census project in New Mexico. This basically involved systematically hiking through remote forests for two weeks at a time, and charting where owls were sighted/owl sounds were heard/pellets were found. Then you'd get two weeks off, then two weeks on, etc. The job required that two research assistants hike together for safety. Unfortunately, the guy she was paired with was slow and out of shape, so he generally trailed some distance behind her.
One week into a hike, she started to develop the feeling that she was being watched. She stopped in the middle of a clearing to wait for the other guy to catch up. Thankfully, he wasn't too far behind and realized there was a mountain lion in the trees, watching her. They both put their arms up and screamed at it until it went away.
She said the most terrifying part of the whole experience was knowing that it had been following her for an entire week or longer, and was just waiting for her to be far enough away from her companion to attack.
Anon:
Damn that's terrifying, and there's no way in hell that i would be able to stay out there like that for 2 weeks, the pay better be good, and they sure as hell better be giving you a f**kin assault rifle or something!
Image credits: sovietsatan666
#24
I live in south Spain, near some really ancient forest called "Los Alcornocales", which has some kind of trees that are almost extint and only grow here and in another two or so places.
It's a bit of a rocky terrain, and if you ever are walking on the forest and try to climb some rocks, you should be really careful, because usually you can have caves and hollow spaces under your feet and you can fall easily.
So, my father and his friends usually go hiking on thursdays so they dont find anyone on the woods, besides maybe a sheperd or a forest worker, and on this day they decided to climb a really large and rocky hill. My uncle Frank remembered that when he was young he slept on a little cave when he went hunting and got lost, and he wanted to try to find that cave.
After a few hours, they find the cave. It was covered in moss and grime but It was surelly the same cave. One of my father's friend, John, tried to get as far as possible into the cave, because he was in a really good shape and wanted to see all of it. The rest of them waited outside.
Suddenly, John started screaming and calling for my father. He went inside and turned on his torch. Inside of the cave was a really weird shrine or something like that, with candles, two apples, bones, pieces of coal and ashes on the ground, a pair of gloves, a pot and a pan, etc. Everything looked really old and dusty and it was clear it haven't been touched in a long time.
My father went to the shrine and it had a little bowl, and when he looked inside, there was something that looked like human teeth.
When they got out, they packed up all their things and got out of there really fast. My father refuses to hike around there anymore, and they started hiking on the other side of the hill and into the woods.
All of this was really strange, and I've never heard of something like this before. I don't know anything about voodoo or this kind of things, but my father said it looked like some voodoo shrine or some stuff like that. If any if you guys know something like this, I would appreciate an explanation 😂.
Image credits: ryulis99
Do we have any wilderness enthusiasts among our Pandas? Let us know your wildest experiences in the land of Mother Nature in the comments! Or share a story of a friend, family member, or acquaintance – you never know, some stories might be really helpful to some people in the future!
If this post has got you into the mood for creepy and unsettling stories from the wilderness, check out another post of ours about the most terrifying things people have experienced in the woods!
#25
We always built a tiki house in our woods, (just some normal kids) and had loads of fun. But every week when we came back, it was destroyed and we were sad as hell, and always built a new one. One day we saw a guy in a black hoodie taking our sticks apart. We never came back.
Image credits: Chokelz
#26
A couple years ago while hunting I went out before first light and climbed into my deer stand like I’ve done countless times. Right at about 5am. My favorite part of the day is when the light starts to break into the sky and the forest wakes up.
The nocturnal creatures retreat and the day creatures stir and become active. That morning, as the light started to appear, nothing happened. And I mean nothing. No rabbits or raccoons retreating to a den, no squirrels searching for breakfast, no deer, no hogs, not even a single bird. The weather/temperature was unremarkable and the air was mostly still. There was just no movement and no sound throughout the woods that morning. Not a chirp nor a rustle.
As time passed I started to get an unexplainable sense of dread. Not a “this is weird” feeling of observing something strange but more of a “death is imminent” feeling that I’ve never experienced before. I stayed until about 8am (still early for deer hunting) until I was literally trembling with fear and I stormed out of there. I went back that afternoon and I found the woods to be completely normal with all the usual sights and sounds. Weirdest and most uncomfortable experience in the woods that I’ve ever had. Almost like a dream but I absolutely was not dreaming. I have not been scared in the woods since I was a boy going out the first few times with my dad. He would joke, “We’re hunting. We have nothing to fear. The forest is afraid of us.” Not that morning, dad. I was scared sh**less and I don’t know why. I was 45 years old at the time.
sodacanned:
This kind of reminds me of infrasound, which I learned about on the Astonishing Legends podcast (so, not an expert). They were discussing an area with plenty of strange occurrences, Point Pleasant, and mentioned John A. Kelly's book - Mothman Prophecies. In it he discusses how he was exploring a stretch of road in the town and as he drove through a certain area he experienced this incredible feeling of dread and absolute silence, but it passed in a few seconds. So he reversed and drove back to where he felt it and was able to map a boundary to what he described as an invisible field full of low frequency soundwaves that are almost impossible to perceive and has been found to trigger the fear response in some (not all) humans who hear it.
Image credits: chairmaker45
#27
I was out hunting with my older brother and his best friend a few years back, want to say 2016.
We had been walking along a trail for a good 5kms at least. On one side of this trail is a decent drop and then a river and on the other side is a decent uphill section and a huge pine forest. It was about 1am by this point and we were just sort of quietly talking to each other when a horrific noise split the air. We all froze and looked at each other with the expression on our faces doing all the work. “What the f**k was that.” We knew it came from up in the pine forest and where we are there aren’t any big predators or really anything out there that we should be “scared” of. So we shouldered our rifles and headed up to find out exactly what made this sound.
I wish we hadn’t. We got to a clearing and the trees were thinning out and my brother flicked on his spotlight. Big bright f****r, excellent range. Way up ahead of us was the strangest looking figure I’ve seen. Like the general shape of a wolf but just... off. It was just stopped on the edge of another tree line further up the hill looking right at us. Pacing side to side. My brothers friend and I had our rifles trained on it trying to get a good look. We couldn’t count out the fact it was another hunters dog that was lost so we (against my gut feeling) went up after it. As we went up after it it became increasingly obvious this thing was watching us very intently. The closer we got, more we realised this was definitely not a hunters dog. It was big. Really big and just the way it moved and it’s entire demeanour was just so unsettling. We kept two rifles on it and one the opposite direction, slowly made our way back down and haven’t been back there since.
Don’t really talk about it either as we still don’t know what we saw and people usually jump to the ‘B******t’ conclusion because like I said before where we live there’s not really any big predators.
TL;DR went hunting, saw what I can only describe as some kind of werewolf looking f****r.
Image credits: wine-dine-and-69
#28
As a kid, I lived by a decent sized conservation area in southern New Hamshire. Me and my friend from the neighboring town would go there during hunting season, because you weren't allowed to hunt on it, unlike the forests he and I usually hung around. The area spanned a river, and there were a lot of little islands and sandbars that only appeared during parts of the year thanks to snowmelt. So we ford the river, and ended up on a peninsula not that far off the trail, maybe a quarter mile at most, but across water. You'd have to swim to it most of the year. So we're checking it out, climbing the embankment and what have you, and then we both spot a camp at the same time.
It was set up in the middle of this peninsula, just hidden well enough that you couldn't see it if you went boating. The d**n thing had bones *all over*. It looked like your typical homeless camp, with some garbage, a shopping cart of all things, and a tarp "tent" with a really grimy pile of blankets, but what stuck out was the bones. Hanging from branches on strings, strewn around a firepit, just generally littered about... I'm pretty sure they were deer and other animal bones, but I don't know because once we both saw that, my friend wasn't listening to my d*****s self who wanted to check it out anymore and f****d right off, and I followed. Never saw a person, never saw a boat, nothing. Just the camp and the bones.
It's worth noting that the enforcement of conservation there is strict enough that you can get in major trouble if they even *suspect* you're there to hunt or fish without permission, and they're really vigilant about it. We also later realized that you could lay on the embankment we climbed up and watch people on the more popular trails without even needing binoculars, and there was a pretty good view of the river as well. Whoever lived there could watch people and not get seen. Friend and I agree, his gut instincts were right. It's very probable the camp's owner was there, watching us from hiding. I shudder to think what would have happened if we got closer.
#29
A few years back (When I was around the age of 14 and my brother was 9), my dad, my little brother, and I all went out deer hunting in the afternoon right before sun down. While we were walking through the woods, before we even got started, my little brother tugged on my arm and asked me if I saw "that". I said that it was probably his imagination and he let go of my arm. A few minutes later, I couldn't hear him walking behind us anymore, and turned around to find him gone. I quickly told my dad and we looked for him for, at the least, half an hour, when he walked over out of nowhere towards the both of us, he was covered in mud like he'd fallen somewhere. I worriedly asked where he'd gone and he just stared at me, telling me that he couldn't remember and thought that he had never left. He acted normally afterwards just as nothing had happened, I don't know if this is really scary to anyone else, but it shook my entire family, including myself, quite a bit.
Edit: To answer a few of your questions. Several of you have been asking whether or not he could tell or show me where he had been and the answer is no. As I said, (although I hadn't specified, so that might've been on me) he told me that he couldn't remember a thing. Not what happened, not why he was covered in mud, not why he had walked away in the first place, nor that he had walked away at all. The only thing that he said he could recall was walking a few steps away from us, after seeing a doe from behind him, and that's it. He told me that he genuinely hadn't remembered walking away from us and acted like no time had passed. Also, one of you had asked how muddy it was. I distinctly remember that we had several flood warnings and heavy rains before then, but it wasn't like knee-high deep mud. It had been in the middle of fall and I can remember myself being irritated at the mud and leaves sticking to my boots. He wasn't drenched in mud, after we found him, but his knees and the palms of his hands were coated in it, along with having a few splotches here and there on his clothes. I had one other question on whether or not I asked him what he saw in the first place. He had initially told me after the entire event that he had saw a glimpse of a tall person standing next to a tree, which I, to be completely honest, doubt. As a kid, I also had one hell of an imagination, and was very paranoid, which I believe was passed down from my mother to the two of us. Lastly, someone had asked how I had found him? I'm not sure if that's the right way to word it...? Anyways, all three of us had been walking North and later on, when I did find him, he had trotted out of the woods, avoiding trees, from the West. Before he had gotten to me, he hadn't really spoke, until I ran up to him and hugged him, asking if he was okay. I hope this answers most of the questions you had.
Image credits: SoManyQuestions24747
#30
Walking through the woods in a state park. Saw a bunch of branches perfectly twisted in a vortex manner that resembled a swirling portal maybe 10-15 feet high. Obviously know that somebody made it but still creepy and you get that feeling that you dont know if your mind is tricking you because it almost looks hazy in the center of the branch-portal. Kept walking a bit further but then it got dark abnormally early and abnormally quickly. Semi jogging back (didn’t go too far deep) and somehow didn’t pass the portal again but felt a pretty worried even though I knew I was on the path. Got back to the parking lot and it was suddenly day time again as it had been since it was only mid afternoon. Still not sure if my mind fed into all of it because I love horror especially creepy pasta and everything creepy or cryptid in nature, but also definitely knew some weird s**t happened.
#31
Mine was not of monsters but of humans.
My friends and I were high in the woods deep in the Sierra Nevadas in the California back country and decided to travel a few miles off a path to reach a river and shoot at targets with our 22. The path is littered with deer bones and claw marks from bears so we're freaking out a bit but finally make it to where we set up camp.
I notice off in the distance about a half mile upstream the river there are two men walking towards us in the exact direction we are firing our gun. I yell at the guys for them to stop shooting and we just watch these men, wide-eyed and in their late 20's and early 30's walking quickly alongside the river when suddenly they both decide to jump in.
I should say at this point that the river is moving very quickly and could easily sweep you under and is definitely not safe for a casual swim. We watch as both the men are swept away towards us downstream. One of my friends, we'll call him Mike, decides to be brave and get close to the edge and extend a piece of wood for them to grab as they're about to pass us. Both the men latch on and Mike is the hero pulling them to shore.
When everyone catches their breath we asked the men what they were doing out here as it's super remote and they were at least 3 or 4 miles from the nearest trail and why they both jumped in the deadly river they give us short answers like "Oh we were just having fun boys" and "Just free swimming the river!" while they're leering at us.
Immediately the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and every fiber in my body tells me they mean us harm. We tell them we're going to head back to the trail and they say they're coming with us. Given that we're so far off from civilization and these guys are clearly high on something and a danger to themselves we reluctantly agree to allow them to follow us.
It was the most quiet hike of my life. I felt them trying to feel out if they could take us in a fight. There were three of us and two of them and we had a 22 but were young squirrelly adults. I don't know how to explain it but the hike was us constantly positioning against each other with body language without ever directly fighting. They would get close to the gun and try to both be near it then we would counter by getting between them and the gun as naturally as possible while hiking up a path that was littered in bear claw marks and dung. We finally make it to the car and they decide we weren't suitable targets and moved on. No idea what two random guys were doing risking their life in a freezing cold raging river in the Sierra Nevadas, or why they felt the need to size up if they could attack three random teens but I'm glad nothing happened that day.
Tldr: went hiking in the woods with friends as teens. Almost shot some random crazies. Crazies fall into river and we save them. Then crazies proceed to position themselves to fight us. Eventually get away.
#32
Walking down this long street that was completely downhill surrounded by woods. This place was known for king Phillips war, Native American burial ground. I was with a couple friends and we stopped to get drinks out of our bags and all the sudden the moonlight in the sky disappeared above the clouds that rolled in out of nowhere. It got eerily quiet and I looked down at my feet and noticed I was standing on the words “GET OUT” painted in red and after that it immediately started down pouring. Creepiest experience of my life. We ran back home and it stopped raining. They didn’t want our company that night.
Image credits: anon
#33
I was driving from Tucson to Denver in the middle of the night. Got tired, was pulling off and crawl in a sleeping bag in the desert far away from the two lane blacktop I was on (highway 666 btw) (it’s since been renamed because everybody was stealing the signs. Anyway pull off the road, onto a dirt road and then a little further. Kind of hid the truck behind some vegetation and toss down a sleeping bar and pad in the middle of pitch black huge star New Mexico night.
No one around, no light, nothing at all.... visibility for miles. I’m completely f*****g alone in pitch black nothing and getting wound down in my eyes are getting droopy. Then I hear it. It sounds goofy to say but it’s the same Indian music you’d hear in old black and white westerns. Native music, voices and a drum. I literally think I’m dreaming and when it starts I’m f*****g petrified because that noise just appearing out of nothing simply put ice in my veins.
Relax a little and unfreeze, and try to be logical about what I’m hearing, which has no physical manifestation of its origin... so..thinking logically... now instead of pure panic..... I could be on the reservation at this point. Perhaps it’s coming from behind a previously unseen hill... I get up, look around. I don’t see anything at all. It kind of comes and goes in volume. Doesn’t seem to be coming from a direction. I have no clue. I looked for evidence and didn’t find any. Crawled back in the bag because I’d been driving for hours, and they sang all night. Logic tells me it had to be a group of people I didn’t see. But I looked, and there were no ancillary noises like talking or stopping or anything. Just that Indian drum. And the “hiyaya HI Ya....” What was originally terrifying became calming and I ended up sleeping fantastically. Later learned that was a terrible stretch of road for very bad things to happen, it sort of lived up to its 666 moniker for wrecks and bad s**t occurring apparently.
#34
Kinda creepy thing happened to me when I was a student forester this summer. So, the forest I was working in was about 20 kms from the nearest town which contained around 1200 people and we usually set out for what ever task we have to do in the forest at around 7:00am. So we are at the forest at around 7:30am and we are about 12 kms up the road when we turn a corner very slowly and see what I initially thought to be a weird looking bush or statue but it was in fact a person, sitting on a carved out stump on the side of the road, just sitting there. What really threw me off was the fact that this person had a parka on and a balaclava underneath it IN THE MIDDLE OF SUMMER. We drove by this person real slow and he lifted a hand to wave slowly as we drove past and it was just super creepy. Never saw them again after that but it did make going out on excursions a little more uneasy sometimes when alone.
#35
I'm a landscaper and we manage some pretty big accounts in the woods. Well I stepped off a hundred feet or so to take a leak. I started peeing and looked up and around and off in the distance I see someone in a red hoody just fckn staring at me from behind a tree. This lot of land is next to a road but its all commercial and not residential so besides us there really shouldn't be any other people out here but us. Especially this deep out there. I cocked my head to the side to make sure that it was in fact a person in a hoody and not something else my mind distorted into a human. Well once I move they move back behind the tree. I yelled at them hey what are you doing and they took off. I'm pretty sure whoever it was did not have pants on. They could have been flesh colored but I don't believe so. And no shoes. I was shook by the all thing so I just called my boss man and told him what's up. We all went to do a quick search together and we never saw the person again.
Image credits: orphancrippler2219
#36
I distance hike when I can. Sometimes this means getting up early, or staying out late, to get as many miles in as possible. Sometimes, walking in the pitch dark with a low light headlamp gets spooky.
I grew up in the woods of this area. I’ve slept under our canopy of stars more nights than I can count. I’ve trekked thousands of miles of trail, river bank, lake shore, ridge, bottoms, bogs, and creeks. I’ve hunted the game. I’m establishing this because it’s important you understand I‘ve heard, seen, and smelt about all this region has to offer in the way of wilderness.
My scariest experience though happened at about 0430 in the morning. It was late spring, so the first morning light wouldn’t be visible in the tree tops for another 30-45 minutes; another hour past that until sunrise. I was on mile five.
I’m in a low bottom that’s wedged between two steep ridges. The trail I’m on was narrow, muddy, and completely hemmed in by thick underbrush, young maple, and old oak growth. I’m focused on the small light from my headlamp, just one step after the other, zoned out. Then I heard a loud CRACK! And I froze solid.
This is the part I have trouble describing. 0430 in springtime means I’m the only thing making noise. No birds chirping, nothing. Dead quiet.
Mid-step I froze. When fight or flight kicks in you have these immediate instinct thoughts. The thought that instantly flashed in my mind as I stood there balancing myself into silence was, “If I hear that again, I’m turning around, and I’m going back the way I came in a hurry.”
Why? Because that sound was not a branch breaking. It wasn’t deadfall. It wasn’t a widow maker. I was d**n sure I had just heard something intentional. Hearing it twice, well, that meant get outta here. To describe it as best I can, it sounded like a decent sized wooden stick being violently whacked against a smallish tree. More a fungo bat sized stick, than a baseball bat. The distinction in my head being that this sound was a crack, and not a thud or thump. And I have described it as, “explosive,” in the past because it was so sudden, and so terribly loud. I had the sense that it was about fifty yards directly in front of me, and it was loud, and clear.
Now, as I stood there, completely spooked, I realized the soon-to-be worst part of my situation. I knew where the sound came from. And I knew where the trail went. In about thirty yards, I was going to come to a 180 degree turn and start up the ridge going away from the creek. This meant, as soon as I got the courage to move towards this noise, I was going to have to turn my back to it, and get up that ridge. This made me very nervous. My heads somewhere between m**h fiend murder, and bigfoot bludgeoning.
Minutes pass. I just breathe my foggy breath into my glasses, and listen. Nothing. Dead quiet. I’ve got about 20-30 minutes until first light. I crank up the headlamp, and start to slowly creep to the 180 turn. When you wear a headlamp in the woods at night, every tree branch in front of you casts a big black moving shadow on the trail. It didn’t help.
I get to the turn, and quickly make the bend. I’m moving pretty fast at this point. Trying to be quiet. Taking tiny, shallow breathes so I can listen while humpin it up the trail.
And then I smell it. A stench hits me that I can’t describe. I just imagined wet, rotten, death. I’ve actually worked scenes where humans have expired in a past life as a firefighter. This was like days old decomposition, but it just smelled, strange.
I kept walking fast. By the time I made the top of that ridge, I was huffing, and the first light was showing. I didn’t stop moving until full light was out, and the birds were chirping.
I’ve heard it all in our woods. I’ve smelled it all. I’m telling you, I don’t know what the hell that was. Deadfall, and especially leafed out branches, make a lot of noise on the way down. I’ve heard it many times.
I don’t know.
#37
Background about where my dear stand is. To my back is woods, then field, to my front is a field that turns into a hill that I chose to kind of act as a berm in case I miss, to the left is more woods, right is more field. This area is my family’s farm and has been for a long time. Before that it was not really a forest, but slight wooded, the trees were planted by settlers, before that it was a clear area. I’m not a superstitious person, but it says can’t explain and I can’t.
I was sitting in my stand on a Saturday morning. I will never forget this, it was raining barely, sun just above the horizon. Suddenly I felt like I was being watched, I’ve never felt like that with deer. I looked into the woods and there were wolves on the edge of the woods, neat. Those d***s just stood there and watched me, you better bet I stared back. I know they take that as a challenge, but I’m in a tree, bring it. The wolves they just stood there, staring, watching. They stood there for three hours. I just started ignoring them, they scared away the deer anyways. All of the sudden they leave, double time and some big, black thing appears from the woods. Size of a black bear, skinny like a dog, head like a bat. It stood where the wolves were. I pointed my gun at it and shot into the ground (on purpose, I don’t wanna be the guy who k**led the last of whatever species). It looked at me, I chambered a new round, it ran. I have no idea what it was, but I asked my dad and uncles and they said they saw it too.
#38
Used to live across from a large wooded area. One day some friends and I were exploring, and we came across a big pit (probably 6' deep and 8' across) filled with ashes and charred bones. Never went back...
#39
TL;DR at bottom.
I‘ve got one. When I was in Boy Scouts, my troop would always go to a camp called Camp Tahquitz for our yearly summer camp. That specific year, they had had abnormal bear activity in and around the camp. It was a pretty sizable camp, but was still way out in the boonies, so an encounter with a chipmunk was just as common as it would be with a California black bear. Wildlife management was done by some crazy old Gunnery Sergeant that we called Gunny, so you can see the situations you might find yourself in.
So anyway, I was tenting with my friend who had just joined the troop, lets call him James. So James and I are sleeping in our tent in the middle of the night, probably around 1 or 2 in the morning, when I was abruptly awoken by something. Everything is dead silent, aside from a plasticky creaking sound. Then I see it, right above my head. Something was pushing the tent in so hard that it began to cave in right above my head, like if someone was leaning into it with all of their weight. Except, these tents were relatively strong, you (I mean, I could as a preteen) could jump on them and you would just bounce right off.
So, being the scared little thirteen year old that I was, I began to smack whatever it was with all of my might whilst simultaneously clubbing James with my fist to get him to wake up. Mind you, James is an incredibly deep sleeper, so this in effect does nothing. Whoever or whatever it is is leaning so hard that it is almost touching my head when James wakes up from the nightmare that he was having and let out a blood curdling ten-year-old-girl-being-m******d-in-the-woods type scream. Whatever it was stopped leaning on the tent and vanished silently into the night.
So, for a few years, James (who has no recollection of the event whatsoever) and I always assumed it was a bear after the meds in my daypack. But, after staffing at the camp and getting to know the lore of the grounds a little better, I think something else might have been afoot. There have been many strange happenings in and around Camp Tahquitz, both paranormal and just normally unexplained. Theres the usual Bigfoot and ghost stories, but older scouts and even administrative higher-ups claim to have seen things. Claims of wendigo-skinwalker hybrids (things that look like both, not actual hybrids), some dead guy called Dragthump, and a bunch of Native American myths (Tahquitz has the biggest and most active Native American program West of Oklahoma).
The fact that there were no tears in the tent flap from the bear claws, we were the furthest away from the bear box, the fact that there was absolutely no sound from the supposed bear (black bears make a heck of a ruckus), and the fact that it was just persistently leaning into the tent instead of just clawing at it like most bears leads me to believe that it was no Yogi or Smokey. It just didn’t behave like bears do, and even if it was some older scouts attempting to play a joke on us, they wouldn't have been heavy enough to lean that far in on the tent and probably would have erupted into laughter right afterward. Plus, my troop isn’t like that. Its full of a bunch of mild mannered city boys, perfect Eagle Scout material, (of which I am one). Everything just seems so off.
I don’t claim to know what it was (hence the unexplained part). Let me guys know if something similar happened to you.
TL;DR: Strange thing attempted to break into my tent in the night, thought it was a bear, but I don’t think so anymore.
#40
We have dense woods behind my house, and one evening I hear my dog barking up a storm. I ran out side to see what it was, and near our grape vines stood this wolf-like creature that was about the size of a huge bear. I freaked out when it made eye contact with me. It just stood there, about 10 yards away from me, just staring. I grabbed my dog and ran inside to tell my parents. They wrote it off as my imagination since I was about 10-12 at the time, but ever since then when I go into the woods it feels like I'm being watched.
I'm now 17, and still have the vivid memory of it.
#41
Hiking part of the NCT north of Grand Rapids, MI. We hiked around 25 miles in a day and by the time we made camp I was in a huge amount of pain (hadn’t hiked for almost a year so going that hard was a mistake). I was starting to get sick and couldn’t get warm no matter how I layered up. I barely ate and then went to sleep. I woke up in the very early morning to slow footsteps walking around camp. They were pretty heavy and lumbering so I knew it was a bear. I didn’t dare move and tried to slow my breathing as much as possible to stay quiet. After around 20 minutes it started moving away again and I passed back out. When I woke up the shrubbery around camp was disturbed and a friend had also woken up and heard the same thing. She was somewhat new to hiking though and had no idea what it was so she was a little spooked when I told her. We got the f**k outta there as soon as we could.
#42
I used to work as a fire spotter in a remote tower deep in the woods, on any given day I would be the only human being for miles around, TLDR at the bottom.
For a couple of weeks every time it approached sunset when I’d finish for the day, everything would go eerily quiet, almost like clockwork, it stood out as it wasn’t normal, there’s usually more noise around that time of day, along with this every time I left the cabin to climb down there was the unnerving feeling of being watched, but for a while it was only while climbing down.
After that i started getting the same feeling while on the ground, and it somehow felt much closer and more menacing, can only liken it to knowing you’re being hunted/stalked, not overly great when it’s a 100 metre walk back to the car with nothing to put between you and whatever else might’ve been out there.
This continued on for another few weeks, but started hearing sort of chirps & calls, they stood out as everything was dead quiet, then one day walking back across the clearing to the car there was a long, low guttural growling somewhere behind me, and I noped the f**k out as fast as I could, and afterwards started parking the car at the base of the ladder, because f**k walking on open ground with angry sounding probably bitey things lurking about.
A few days later I was driving back out and spotted a movement on the upside of the road, looked again as it disappeared into the treeline, large, long & dark, it seemed to hang around until the end of the fire season as the quietness and eerie feelings were gone at the start of the next.
TLDR: worked alone in forest in buttf**k nowhere, got stalked by large nope for a couple months.
#43
So I live in the pacific north west, I spend most of my time outside. Usually I hang around what me and my friends call, “the island” it’s in the middle of a river, and can be traveled to when summer rolls around and the water goes down. One day I was out on the island, and I was hearing some strange noises, I knew it wasn’t a deer because you get to know the noises animals make after a while. I was getting pretty freaked out by the fact that it was moving around me like a predator would. When you spend a lot of time in the woods you learn when an apex predator is on the hunt, they seem to control every aspect of nature, the wind stops blowing, trees stop creaking, and time stops. This began to happen when the creature was moving around me. Something felt wrong about this creature, I had heard story’s of nez perce legends, and never really took them to heart until I began to spend time outside. There are things you experience out in the woods that can’t, or shouldn’t be understood. A lot of nez perce tried to explain those things. When I looked around me I couldn’t see a thing but trees and brush, but I could hear the movement of something around me. When you know something it’s superior in strength it’s a law of nature to treat it with respect, so I began to walk away from the area. When I left the sound followed, this is never a good thing, it means that YOU are the object of there hunt. I began to fiddle with my pocket knife even though I knew it would do anything against a predator that would want to hunt a human. At this point it was getting dark and I was moving faster, that’s when I herd it, the screech. Now there’s no way I could explain it it just was wrong, I started running and anyone who knows anything about wildlife knows that you never run. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I didn’t make it to my little row boat. I would rather not know.
#44
I grew up in a house that was surrounded by woods, so I’ve heard my fair share of different animal noises/howls/shrieks/etc.
It was the night before I was moving away to college. Everything was packed, except I realized I left my headphones out in my car. It’s around midnight, and I go outside to snag the headphones. I decide to give myself a moment to “take it in” and appreciate the peace and quiet of the woods I’d grown up in.
After 2-3 minutes, I hear this noise unlike anything I’ve ever heard in my life. It was a howl at first that sorta slurred into this scream / roar. I could tell directly where it was coming from, about 30 ft away just beyond the foliage but I couldn’t see anything.
I froze for about 15 seconds before sprinting back inside. Both parents and friend heard the noise too but nobody knew what it was.
#45
I've lived on the high dessert for most of my life (6000' above sea level if you're wondering). I was out riding my horse alone in the absolute middle of BFE in the Badlands (no trees, and hardly any brush to speak of so sounds carry a long way and there is nowhere to hide for long) when all of a sudden his ears perk up. I feel my skin start to crawl like we're being watched. My normally mellow gelding, starts to panic. I start to feel really dizzy, and my horse stumbles. I black out.
I come to an hour or so later about 3 Miles away from the inciting incident still on my horse. He is frothing with sweat and shaking all over. I'm still not sure what happened. I had plenty of water and snacks. It was 65ish Degrees and breezy, so I don't believe weather or dehydration/hunger were a factor. I have never before or after had a fainting spell, and that was the most reliable, quiet horse I've ever owned.
I now have a serious case of the heebie jeebies again just thinking about it.
#46
Lived the majority of my life in the mountains of Sweden.
1. This one is my dad's. But he was out hunting, and he and the dog came upon a concrete house that had two storeys. A week later or so, one of the storey's where gone, and the house was just one floor. Like it had been like that allways. Further more, concrete is not used for the buildings up there. Its always wood, not concrete. That house should not be there.
2. Me and my dad were deep in the mountains fishing. I start hearing whispers in the night, I can almost make out what they are saying. I look at my dad, who smiles, and says: "You hear them too, don't you?".
#47
One time on a hunting trip we were in a tree stand when across the clearing we see someone standing just in the middle of the field we grabbed a scope to see what they were doin my buddy looked at me and said it was a kid we were in shock that a kid would be out in the middle of. The Montana woods in winter so we climbed down and started heading towards him. Well as soon as we got about 100 yards away the kid giggled and took off running the other way I yelled and started sprinting towards my bud right behind me but no matter how fast we ran we couldn't catch him when we started getting into thick bush we lost track of him and couldn't find a trace of him all we kept hearing was his child like giggle. That's when my buddy just turned and said we should go something ain't right. We got back to the tree stand and never saw him again. We stopped off in pray and asked some people if any kids were missing cause we saw a little boy in the woods but he ran from us, they said no one was missing from there. It was the closet town to us so who knows.
