If you’re anything like me, you’ve read enough stories about weird or murderous things happening in the wilderness that you’ve pledged never to spend a lot of time in the woods.

These people clearly don’t watch enough true crime (or bigfoot documentaries), because they stepped into the trees and were not prepared for the creepiness they found there.

Like an eternity.

Absolute silence. No wind, no animals, nothing. One second there were all the sounds of nature, then nothing.

Lasted for a few seconds that felt like an eternity.

An evolutionary response.

Walking in the pitch black out to a deer stand. So dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Heard some circling around me of something large, it was trotting along.

No big deal, figured it was a deer. Then it stopped and let out the most bone chilling howl i have ever heard. So loud it was like it was inside of me.

A few wolves howled back in the distance and it ran off. Needed new underwear.

Like a heart attack.

I was wild camping and testing out my new hammock I usually take my dog with me but as it was a new hammock I thought I’d go solo

I set up just before it got dark, I couldn’t get comfortable in it for the life of me so I get on the ground (uk so nothing to eat me)

Stupid o’clock in the morning and my dog was sniffing my ear, I thought wtf is he trying to do its way to early.

I remember my dog is at home and bolt upright, turn on a torch and see the back end of a small badger running away (must of been young)

In the morning I see all the signs of a badger run that I was right in the middle of, no idea how I didn’t notice it before!

Tiny dinosaurs.

I was backwoods camping in Canada with my ex. Deep forest, we’d been out there a day or two and hadn’t seen anyone. That evening we were in the tent playing cards and heard something in the bushes, making a giant racket.

It was getting steadily closer. It got to the area we were in and stopped. We debated what to do but finally opened the tent, both completely freaked out, and found… chickens.

Three chickens, en route home to an organic farm we didnt know was nearby.

A literal nightmare.

Was in my twenties growing pot in the coastal mountain range of california.

Found a trash bag partially buried with a human torso missing its hands feet and head.

Lucky to be alive.

An afterdark flash flood that roared through camp.

Twelve of us…five of them were sleeping in the canyon bottom.

It’s amazing nobody died.

That was 32 years ago and I still sleep lightly and always pack clean underpants.

That’s a nope.

2 guys wearing military gear with sneakers in the middle of the desert…
(In Mexico, that’s one of the easiest ways you can tell the difference between an army soldier and a cartel criminal)

Absolute chaos.

As a Boy Scout, we found a bunch of scorpions in our adirondack. We ran outside screaming our heads off, and then lightning struck a tree like 20 yards away.

We turned on our heels and ran straight back to the scorpions

I hope she’s ok.

I was wild camping in the middle of a dense forest and at around 2am I was woken up by a girl crying not too far away. I didn’t know what to do so I just waited, she carried on crying for like 15 mins and then I heard a guy say “oh come on now, let’s go home”. I didn’t hear anything else after that.

It scared the hell out of me.

This cannot be real.

When i was about fifteen yrs old me and some of my friends decided to go camping at a nearby lake. It was a 3-4 hr hike, and the nearest house was Maybe 3 hr away. We brought some homemade wine and drank the whole night and ate poorly grilled hot dogs. Life was good.

We all shared the tent so it was crowded as fuck in the tent but we all fell asleep around 2 am. At 4 i wake up because i can feel someone Running their hand down my forearm. Not that unlikely that someone brushes up against me since there wasnt any space to move around in the crowded tent. But this is the arm that is facing the tent.

So someone touched me from the outside of the tent. I sit up and gets instantly horrified to see that all my friends are sound asleep in the tent with me. I put on my deepest voice and shout «whoever the fuck you are you need to leave»

And a manly low voice answers me «you should pack up your stuff and leave» not threatening or aggressive. Just calmly and in a dead kinda way»

By now all my friends are awake and are just looking at me. No words just pure horror in their eyes.

I say: Okay, we will go, but you need to leave.

“Hurry up”

When we get out of the tent this man, who is fucking huge btw has taken the little row boat that was laying at the bank and gotten into it and is just sitting in the middle of the lake and watching us pack up our stuff and trying to get the fuck away asap.

We had to walk around the lake at our way back and he was just sitting there watching us.

We never went back.

This was 17 years ago in a rural scandinavian country. We have a «free to roam law» so we were not trespassing. We knew our way around the small town we grew up, everybody knows everybody. There have been no people missing and or found dead. Never.

There hasn’t been a murder in generations. We told our parents who at first tried to calm us down and they said that we were probably overreacting. But the way he caressed my arm before he told us to go was not normal. When we told them everything and What he said to us we were told to never go back.

After covid we all met up and the subject came up and we tried to do some digging. There are no houses or cabins anywhere near. The lake is way to small to fish in. When he was sitting dead center in his little boat there was Maybe 60 feet to land on all sides. no one has ever seen this man before or after.

Fighting every instinct.

Backpacking the Maryland/PA section of the Appalachian Trail around the age of 17. Four of us were sleeping under a tarp tied up with paracord so we only had protection from the rain. I’m guessing around 2am I’m woken up by hearing branches breaking and movement nearby. Nothing out of the normal.

This time of year the worst it could be is a lone curious black bear and they don’t really pose any real threat. The sounds start getting closer and more rhythmic. Definitely something walking. I turn on my side to see if I can see anything.

As the walking is getting closer I start to see movement in the leaves with nothing making it. I perfectly hear a person walking towards us and eventually making its way around our make shift shelter.

I’m freaking out and lay in complete silence for what felt like an eternity until my friend laying next to me finally says “you heard that shit too, right?” Nearly jumped out of my sleeping bag but also confirmed I didn’t dream the whole thing.

Still have no explanation and half convinced we just had a collective fever dream.

On a non paranormal sense and way scarier than what I typed above. I was stalked by a mountain lion in the Rockies a few years ago. The unease that turns into full terror when you realize what is happening. Then fighting every instinct not to run like a mofo is a unique experience. Having that primal feeling that you are prey is fucking terrifying.

At least the ending isn’t terrible.

Many years ago, when I was about 14, I was hiking deep in the woods behind my house with some friends. We were miles away from home- further than any of us had ever gone before. And we came up to the edge of a clearing and a little further down the treeline, we saw a lump of clothes underneath an old deer stand. We got a little closer and we could make out legs and arms and boots…

They were wet from rain and had been there for a while. Obviously, our first thought was that it was a hunter who had an accident and fallen out of his stand and was dead. We were freaked out and it took us a little bit to get up the nerve to get a better look.

It wasn’t until we were practically on top of it that we realized that it was a dummy. We had wandered all the way up to the edge of a big Christmas Tree farm’s property and the dummy was part of their decorations from a haunted hayride thing they did.

They must have forgotten about it when closing up for the year. We had a good laugh but we were all scared shitless for a few minutes.

Still no idea.

I was camping on the Deschutes River by myself one night. It was middle of the week so I had the campground to myself. There isn’t another human being within 5 miles. I drink a few beers as the sun goes down in the canyon. Cloudy night so no stars and no moon. No campfires since it was well into fire season. Combined with the clouds this made it essentially pitch black.

Its dark and and no one can see me so I put on some headphones and start dancing around my campsite like a Woodstock hippie when my nose catches a faint whiff of something awful. I take off my headphones and hear nothing, and before I can turn my headlamp on I hear big thundering of hooves/feet/paws, feel a huge WHOOSH of wind about 2ft in front of my face, then a loud crash into the bushes next to my campsite. Before whatever had jumped through the bushes even hit the ground, I had ran to my truck, laid down in the trunk and locked all the doors. I didn’t move for the rest of the night. Slept in my vehicle, held like 5 beers worth of pee until daylight.

When I wake up in the morning all I can see is a small bit of blood on the tongue of my boat trailer, some sort of prints in the dirt, and a giant 5′ diameter hole in the bushes next to my camp.

To this day my I have no idea what happened. My hypothesis is that a deer wandered into the campsite and saw me being oblivious dancing like a fool, but when I stopped moving it got spooked and tried to run into a bush. Must have nicked itself on the trailer as it jumped over it.

I don’t think my life was ever in danger but it was terrifying and not knowing what it was makes it even worse.

Don’t turn your back.

I work in the bush and sometimes spend months out there…most terrifying was seeing a bear start to circle me right as the helicopter pilot radioed me to say he couldn’t get to my location because of the weather.

Luckily I had a shotgun with me, and eventually the pilot got down to me, but yeah, sitting there in the sleet while watching that grizzly slowly and sneakily try to cut around my position in the fading light was absolutely terrifying.

The whole time I was trying to come up with possible ways to keep from being outflanked and to keep visual contact with it in case I had to shoot it.

This was in the late fall, so the bear probably hadn’t put on enough fat for the year and was looking to supplement it. Spooky stuff!

What a nut.

Hunted with my dad and his buddy he grew with and his buddies son once. I was about 15 or so and so was the other kid. The other kid was straight jacket crazy.

When our dad’s weren’t around he would make comments about killing us all before the trip was over. Anytime I told my dad he would just tell me he was just bullying me.

He finally got caught loading his rifle and pointing it at his own dad. I told my dad I would quit hunting if we ever went with them again. We never did.

A lasting mystery.

A few years ago, a teenager on the next road over went missing. They said he was autistic, and ran away from home on foot. We’re in a very rural area, they had cops and people walking in the woods for a couple weeks looking for the kid, never found him.

The following summer, I found a jacket, some empty pepsi cans, a knife, and a lighter, at the base of a tree in the woods on our property. They came and looked again, didn’t find anything else. It was confirmed to be his jacket.

A close call.

14 years old, moose hunting in northern British Columbia, Canada with my dad. Feet got cold,, so I got down from the tree stand to walk around, get the blood flowing, etc.

Not 30 seconds later, my dad, very calmly says “Mike, get back up in the stand.” Being a teenager, naturally, I was defiant.

10 seconds go by, I hear “Mike. Get your f**king a$$ back in this tree stand, right f**king now.”

Now…. To that point in my life, I hadn’t heard my dad say “f**k” like…. Ever. So I figured, hey, maybe I should listen, and climbed back up the stand.

My dad grabbed my face, and jerked my head to the right, where I saw an absolute goddamn unit of a silver tip grizz charging down the trail towards where I was standing. Another 10 seconds, and I could’ve been chow, depending on how good a shot my dad would’ve been.

What a good doggo.

I was backpacking with my dog and about 12 miles from the road and trailhead – so pretty far from people though popular enough that other hikers might be around – though we saw no-one all day.

About 2 a.m. my dog started this really low deep growl and wakes me up. Turn on my headlamp and see his teeth showing and he’s right on top of me. I hear heavy footsteps (black bear / moose?) near the tent. I leash my dog so he doesn’t tear thru the tent and the footsteps move further away, but keep circling my tent. All of my food and toiletries are hung in a tree in a bear bag – nothing in the tent to draw a bear’s attention. I clap my hands – something is still slowly circling – not something a moose would do, and a bear might if he wanted food – but I’ve got nothing and a really big dog with me. I decide to step out of the tent with the leash in one hand and bear spray in the other – yelling “hey bear”…

The footsteps stop – dog’s nose is in the air telling me to look right – but nothing in my headlamp that I can see. Didn’t hear anything run off, but it’s quiet. I give it 5 minutes or so, get back in the tent, and it starts up again – slowly circling maybe 50 feet from me. Maybe an hour later, I hear the footsteps wander off into the woods.

At dawn, I take the dog, and the bear spray, and start looking for tracks. I find a clear path in the leaves that had been trampled, but no tracks. The dogs nose is on the ground, and I follow his lead – and he follows the loop around our campsite. We final see a few human footprint – not shoe tracks – a regular size (not bigfoot) bare human foot. Plus – yup a human turd and toilet paper. Some ahole was wandering around the middle of nowhere, near the tent and circling my tent for an hour or more, and left a dump for me to find.

ETA to reply to common questions. / themes in the comment replies:

1: Hiking and backpacking is incredibly safe. I’ve been doing this for decades, and this is the only weird experience I’ve ever had. The hiking community is incredibly friendly. The trails have become more crowded since covid, and your definitely seeing more people on trails, and less trail courtesy (litter – leaving dog poop bags, pooping too close to the trail and not burying you poop). Also – I was very far away from civilization. Bad guys don’t hike 12 miles to do harm, and I’m pretty sure they don’t carry toilet paper. The only incident that I know of was of an emotionally disturbed person stabbed 2 hikers in a Adirondack shelter somewhere in the southern part of the Appalachian trail 5 or 6 years ago. I’ve hiked thousand of miles without a single dangerous human interaction.

2: I don’t hike with a gun. They are too much weight to add for me on long multi day hikes. I’m hiking in the northeast – the biggest predator to fear are black bear, coyote and bobcats. All of those are afraid of humans, especially this far from civilization. If I were in Mt Lion, grizzly of wolf territory – I would carry a gun, Moose are scary and huge, and are not afraid of anything, especially in the fall rut period when testosterone kicks in. You need a really big big caliber gun to stop a moose from charging, and that’s a heavy gun. I’ve crossed paths with a moose 3 or times, but they are so big, you can usually hears them crashing around long before you see them. I’ve never had a stare down – but my plan has always been that bear spray would disorient them enough for me to find someplace safe. The biggest predator – humans. But see point 1 above.

3. What I think happened? Much as I’d love to say it was a young sasquatch, a skin walker or a wendigo – I’m guessing it was a disoriented backpacker that left their tent to crap, and got confused. I was hiking a somewhat popular long loop trail, and I believe someone was probably hiking the opposite way, and stopped somewhere of trail ahead of me. I was backwoods camping – not at a campground. Regulations are that you need to be 200 feet off the trail and into the woods to set up a camp. So they could have been a quarter mile ahead on the trail and I wouldn’t have known unless they were noisy (or smelly enough for my dog to let me know). The most likely explanation is that they were heavily under the influence, got up to crap, and got lost on their way back to their tent, and found my site. They approach my tent and realized they were wrong, and tried to find their way back to their camp. Then they heard my dog, and me yelling to scare off a bear, and either thought we were a risk to them, or too lit to answer back. The circle around my camp was several hundred feet – and my tent wouldn’t be visible for most of the loop – I was camping between several spruce trees.

4. I didn’t get back to sleep! I couldn’t get back to sleep. It was late Sept and sunrise was around 6 a.m. When we found the poop pile, I relaxed – I really didn’t think there would be anyone nearby as we were in a very tough area to get to – requiring going over 2 mountain summits from my direction, and 6 other mountains in the other direction. The total hike was about 40 miles IIRC. We were going to be out for 3 nights, and 4 days. After I realized it was a human, my first assumption was that there was a lost hiker. I texted a friend that does Search and Rescue in the area t see if there were any reports of lost or overdue hikers. If there had been, I would have had my dog try to follow that trail to see if I could have found their campsite. As no one was missing, we broke camp and went on our way.

5. Yes – he was the best dog ever. I lost him about 5 years ago. I knew that dog would die for me. Several years after this incident, I got diagnosed with cancer. **(**ETA – I’ve been in remission for several years and things look good) This dog was so in tune with me that he knew how shitty I was going to feel before I did. He would walk with me to the bathroom, and sit right next to me as a puked my guts up. He’d walk me back to bed and let me rest my hand on his back if I needed a little help walking. Everyone has a heart dog – he was mine. I swear he knew I had cancer before I did. He used to sniff me right where my tumor was located. I still get teary eye’d thinking of him. Rest in peace big guy.

It was intense.

I was hunting in a small rustic log cabin out in the woods. The cabin was like a semi-detached house and could accommodate two small groups of hunters. Basically two 10×10 rooms including a diner table and two twin beds. No water or electricity, only a small propane lamp as the light source.

I arrived alone late in the afternoon. I saw a car parked already so I figured my neighbors were already there. I started unpacking everything and then cracked a cold beer sitting on the front porch. The sun was almost gone. I noticed there was no light coming out of my neighbors only door so I though they weren’t back from their hunting day yet.

Then it started… I heard a grown ass man starting to cry. He was crying really loudly like he lost some family member or like his wife left him. I stared to feel really bad and did not know what to do. Then I realized we were in the middle of nowhere and the only reason to be here was to hunt which meant he was surely armed.

The crying was intense and was not stopping. It lasted for a good fifteen minutes. I thought the guy was going to commit suicide as some point. It even crossed my mind that he may go on a killing spree. I went back in my room, closed the door and started to make noise so that he would hear someone and maybe stop crying loudly. It worked. I

started to cook supper and went I started to eat, I started to hear new noises from my neighbor. I then realized he was not alone, he was with a girl. They started to have really loud sex but it wasnt sounding really sexy, more like someone that tries to kill a boar with his bare hands.

I really felt uncomfortable as I knew they knew I was there and did not care at all. So I took off with my camera and tripod and walked a while trying to take pictures of the starry night to change my mind.

Fortunately at that time another vehicle arrived. It was the hunters from the other unoccupied camp that were arriving late. That third camp was another single building a few yards away from mine and my next door neighbors. They invited me in for a drink and I told them what just happened to me. They invited me to stay with them for the night.

The next day the weird neighbors were gone. A maintenance employee I met told me they left. He also told me he was the one who registered them and gave them the key. He told me he never saw such an odd couple…

Y’all, just say no. Seriously.

The fresh air is not worth the PTSD (or worse).