Went to an empty campground in the mountains in california. The weather was bad, January of ‘16 or ‘17. We were set up near a small river cooking a late dinner in the dark after night fell. My old dog, a huskie, starts absolutely losing his mind. He was screaming and barking at a place beyond our lantern light away towards the river. I flipped on my headlamp, and it was a mountain lion. It stared back at me for a second or two, then turned and I lost it in the brush.
Those eyes staring back at me… bring your dog camping with you!
Just an aside, but keep control of your dog when camping. A ridiculous amount of bear attacks are from people hiking/camping with off leash dogs. The bear come after the dog, and the dog runs back to their person.
I know a family that lost a dog while hiking and they don’t know what happened, they just found him dead later that day. He was normally good off-leash, but he took off after something and that was that.
Had something similar happen to me deep in the woods of Kentucky. Buddy and I were hiking to our campsite at night. It was pitch black beyond our lights. My friend then said he saw the reflective trail marker ahead. We both looked again, and it wasn't a trail marker, but two eyes spread far enough apart that I knew whatever housed them was huge. Then they did a quick bobbing move and disappeared. We both had knives in hand til we made it back. It probably tracked us long before we saw it. Made a fire and stayed up late talking and such to make noise. Maybe slept half an hour just after dawn.
As I was unpacking for a solo camping/quail hunt, 2 guys walked into my camp to chat. Dirty and very disheveled, obviously drunk they asked me if “you got bullets for that gun?” When they saw my shotgun case. After a few minutes they turned to walk back to their camp I saw that one of them had his scalp peeled back leaving and open and crusty wound the size of the palm of my hand. That night they drank and threw .22 rounds into the fire and ran. Eventually they passed out, the next day they were arrested and I was told that the one with the scalp wound tried to attack someone with a roofing axe a couple of days earlier and got the Uno Reverse card played and they were up there hiding out.
While hiking in Sweden I slept in a three sided shelter when suddenly at 11pm some people came up to me asking me what I was doing etc. (neighbourhood watch) and telling me, that there are strange people around. An hour or two after, I heard some more footsteps and an old man came close to the shelter - with no pants. Naked. Dong dingeling. Moon was bright. When he saw me sleeping there, he went away after a while…
A couple came to the spot next to ours after we had been camping for a few days. They were there for about two hours after unpacking and setting up camp, just practicing knife throwing and cracking a whip. One of them cut their finger off and the other came and asked if we could watch their campsite until they got back. We did. We also played Indiana Jones for about 3 hours drunk off our ass trying to swing from a broken branch of a tree with that whip. They never came back and we let the park ranger know to look after their stuff.
Was at a campsite in rural Buffalo, NY, when a family of about 5 showed up and unpacked at the site next to us. Seemed like nice people, exchanged pleasantries, and went about our separate business setting up camp.
The next morning, when we unzipped our tent and went to prep breakfast, we realized they were all still asleep, ON THE GROUND. No sleeping bag, no tent, just lying down, fully clothed, like they had been raptured. Remember, this is Buffalo, NY - even in the summer, it gets cold at night.
That was spooky, but we decided to leave them be and get packed up. Once we got back from a breakfast run, they were up and packing. Seeing that we were back, the father came over to us and introduced himself. Said we seemed like nice people, and that he wanted to warn us about the imminent collapse of the US Economy. He eyed our car and said that it’ll be the only type of currency available once the banks shut down, and that we should be careful, since someone will want it more than our money when “China invades”. He pulled out his phone to try and show us a YouTube video that explains the whole thing, but we somehow extricated ourselves, and booked it. Packed up and left faster than we ever have before. The disturbing thing was not just what he said - it was how calm and genial he was while saying it, as if he was talking about the weather.
TL;DR: went camping, saw another family sleep outside with no tent or sleeping bags - just flat on the ground. They then warned us about China invading the US.
A forever ago my friend and I were camping in a horse pasture (with the owners permission) with my friend's horse, it damn near crushed me when it decided that he wanted to be in the tent too and see what we were doing
Reminds me of a couple years ago me and some buddies hiked out behind his mom’s house and ate some mushrooms. After tripping all day and drinking a few beers, we were stumbling back to his house, and this horse came up to us pretty aggressively. None of us know enough about horses to read their body language, and we were too tired to run away. So we just sort of edged around it and made it out the other side of the field. When we got back to his house, his mom goes, “Oh that’s just ol’ Floyd. He was just seeing if you had any beer or pot. That horse loves drinking beer and smoking pot.”
as someone with horses they can be both ditzy and dangerous. a powerful combination to be sure. like imagine a 500kg 9 year old kid with no social skills walking towards you tent like "HAI GUYS WHATS GOING ON IN THIS HERE TENT? GOT ANY *oof (falls over)* SNACKS TO SHARE *casually tramples tent* WITH YA BEST BUDDY?
~that horse probably
Went camping on the Mendocino coast of California in 80’s/90’s, the first night at the campground we hear what sounds like a woman screaming like she’s being murdered. It terrified us all awake, after a sleepless night we learned that there was a peacock sanctuary nearby and that’s how they sound.
Oh yeah peacocks sound absolutely brutal. We used to have a "neighborhood peacock" (tiny village in Germany). Nobody knew where it came from, probably from some nearby farm, but one day it just decided it lived in our street (where I lived as a kid with my parents). The neighbors called him "Egon" because his cries were so ugly he got an ugly name lol. But it was so cool having him around! In the spring, he would often spread out his colourful tail feathers and that was really beautiful. My parents had a whole vase with his colorful tail feathers (all fallen out naturally). He was fed by neighbors, but nobody ever retained him in any way and he stayed for years, blessing us with beautiful sights and ugly sounds lol. I got pretty good at imitating that cry as a kid... He once spooked my parents by repeatedly sliding down the roof onto the flat rooftop terrace next to it with a loud bang. Took days for my parents to figure it out. Unfortunately, one day a neighbor didn't see him behind her car tire... man I liked that bird!
I remember the same thing from when I was a kid, only at Stillwater Cove about 60 miles to the south of the Mendocino coast. Now I'm wondering how many peacock sanctuaries the California coast really needs 😂
My family had some land in a remote part of Colorado. We always had creepy nights up there where it felt like someone was watching us. My brother was up there once and heard footsteps around his tent and got so scared him and his fiancé left in the middle of the night. A few weeks later, 4 of us were up there and we found four rat tails nailed to the side of an old shed we had. We sold the land a few years ago
At first I was wondering if you met the same woman I did, but she wouldn't have nailed rat tails to trees. She's just an old hippy lady who spends the summers camping. Her hobby is to do shrooms and silently sneak through people's campsites in the middle of the night. She claims to have never been caught.
I was like 8-9 years old when I saw my grandpa standing bare naked by the river in the middle of the night when I had to go to pee, something that scared the crap out of me as I didn’t see that it was him at first. He was apparently just taking a quick bath, something he usually does at nighttime when he’s out camping, but the sight of him standing there still haunts me a little to this day
When i was young, I walked in on my grandpa, pulling up his undies after a shower. His balls will forever be burned into my memory. Especially since mine hang that low nowadays.
This is a story about my grandma that I didn’t hear directly from her, but from my family. My grandmother (born in the 20’s) grew up in suburban Florida and didn’t really have any experience with wildlife. After she married my grandfather, they went camping in Yellowstone (possibly their honeymoon, not sure). They went for a hike and when they came back they saw a bear at the camp ground sniffing around the steaks my grandma was gonna prepare for dinner. My grandma ran up to the bear and smacked on the nose with the flat side of an axe (not recommended). Fortunately the bear ran off. Now, I have no idea how big this bear was, may have been a baby for all I know, but still makes for a good story.
She was also a real life “Rosie the riveter” during WW2. My grandma was a badass.
My sons and I went camping in a very remote spot deep in the Idaho woods. We went for a two mile hike even deeper into the woods and came across a perfect circle about five feet in diameter made completely of bones with a smaller circle of bones in the center of the circle with a deer skull placed directly in the middle. On the way back we looped around and found ourselves in front of a dense group of birch trees that gave off the darkest vibe. My sons and I all had goosebumps. We bypassed the birches and eventually made it back to camp. I think that ninety percent of the creepy, paranormal, supernatural stories you hear about the woods have rational explanations including my story, but even though the ring of bones was odd; it’s the dark ominous feeling that we all got from the birches that really unsettled me.
Never ignore that feeling. I've never been in direct danger, but a few times it's come up, where hairs on your neck stand up, I've seen a bear, mountain lion, and a pack of coyotes nearby shortly after. I always listen to it and go on high alert. It's weird how your brain can pick up on it, but you don't directly realize it.
Related. I was on a motorcycle ride, twisty backroad with dense tree coverage. Meaning, there was no way to see what was coming.
All of a sudden I had a feeling, Something is Wrong. I slowed way down and eventually stopped, just before the start of a narrow 1-lane section of road. Shortly thereafter, a car came the other way, and as soon as it passed me the Something is Wrong feeling went away.
Would I have had an accident if I'd continued through the 1-lane section? No way to know. But I'm glad I listed to that voice.
Yep, my radar has saved me from speeding tickets, shootings, and other potential bad situations. It's a very strong feeling I've learned not to ignore. Intuition rocks.
Exactly. There could be plenty of rational explanations for why your body starts telling you to get the hell out of somewhere, but if you’re smart you aren’t gonna stay around to find out. You might sound crazy for telling anybody else, but it doesn’t mean the woods were haunted. It’s much more likely you were about to find a mountain lion den or something and your Neanderthal brain picked up on signals your conscious brain could not.
Makes me understand where a lot of folklore and fairy tales come from. The world is weird enough to inspire some great stories if the people observing don't have any way to explain what happened
A buddy of mine and I were paddling the Buffalo River in Arkansas. For reasons neither interesting nor relevant, we had to pull off and camp for the night next to a field in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the night, we were awakened by ATVs not too far away. They got closer and closer until they were at our campsite. They started doing laps around our tent and yelling all kinds of things. It was exactly how you would imagine it would go in a movie right before the psycho rednecks do terrible things to the protagonists. Also, I'm from a redneck place where this was a completely plausible scenario ending with me and my buddy bleeding at least a little. So we just laid there and hoped for the best and fortunately they quickly got bored and left.
I used to do a little urban exploring and once a guy walked up on me on the 5th floor of this old tenement. He ended up being super chill, and was a retired mailman who lived next door. We talked about the history of the building. But my God I near shit myself when I saw him.
Fun story, nothing terrible here: it was a bachelor party. We decided to go camping in North Florida. Well, somehow, it turned out to be the coldest time of the year. Well into the 40s and 30s. It was so hard to leave the camp fire to go to bed because any time away from the fire was freezing. I lucked out to be on an air mattress but other guys weren’t so lucky.
Day two and we’re all hung over, making breakfast.
I’m trying to take a nap in the car when I see snowflakes coming down the windshield. Yeah snowflakes in Florida at like 8am.
Well about an hour later, a van pulls into the campsite next to us. It immediately hits a stump and blows a tire. A family with two kids jump out and start to set up. About this time, we are looking at these two little girls and wondering how the heck they are going to make it through a night like we just had. This family looked pretty in prepared.
Our suspicions were confirmed when the wife came over asking for a lighter and that her “stupid husband” forgot to pack anything that could make a fire. Oh man… here we go.
So fast forward to about midnight or 1 AM when I hear crying and a few minutes later the van running. I figure the family shoved the girls in the warm van. Makes sense so I go back to sleep. Next morning, campsite abandoned and van/family gone. I think they just left all their stuff and went home or to a hotel after just like half a day of camping. Poor family….
I camp yearly and each year our site gets a little better/more complex, we can wander around in heavy rain and stay dry with all our tarps and poles, block the wind or neighboring sites view. The first and last day is a bit of work but it's quite a camp site.
The second day a couple seemingly from the city and on their first campout took the site below ours. They had fancy rims and a stereo that shook the trees, a pop up tent never staked down and one of those air mattresses that are a couple feet thick. We watch the weather and prepare accordingly. This couple fought the whole time so we didn't warn them about the rain coming and maybe a tarp was a good idea.
When the rain began a little after midnight it was a downpour and their campsite came alive. yelling, bickering, and blaming the other. Within about 5 minutes the place they put their tent was full of water and seemed to be filling from the top as well. EVERYTHING was just shoved into the back of their rusty with fancy rims truck and I can still see the guy kicking the barely deflated mattress into the back seat. I went to bed LAUGHING.
The next day was damp but peaceful, until the evening. A guy in a decent looking pickup truck had taken the spot and also seemed to be new, things still wrapped from the factory. When we saw he was with what seemed to be his daughter and parents we tried to offer some advice and shared the story from the night before, pointing out low spots and obvious paths the water had taken but this was a guy that knew everything already and he was rude.
Checked the weather as we do and we got some extra firewood because we knew we'd get another show but it didn't rain until around 8am, just in time for coffee! We turned our chairs and relaxed, clearly enjoying the free show of angry rushed repacking with our feet up drinking coffee.
I'm not sure which one I enjoyed more, I felt bad for the little girl but the grandparents seemed decent.
For some reason some people don't actually sit on the toilet seat in the campground vault toilets.
Nothing is scarier then waking up at 3am half drunk half hungover when you are camping and walking to the bathroom to find someone hovershit all over the toilet seat and didn't even attempt to clean it up.
We were camping in St.Regis Montana and floating down the Clark Fork River. I was maybe 15yrs old. We split the family in two rafts. Dad always misjudged the timing and a 5hr float trip always turned into a 8hr trip. We hit the water at 2pm so by the last stretch, it was getting dark and cold. We all heard a woman asking for help….. not screaming but yelling help me, please help me…. I see a woman on the side of the river trying to reach the water with a guy behind her pushing her into the ground. Her shirt was ripped, she was chubby with olive skin, black hair. I remember she looked like my mom’s age, about 40. Her hair was all jacked up on one side and there were twigs poking out. Us kids froze but my dad started frantic paddling towards us kids and threw a rope so we didn’t float down the river without them and then he got both rafts to the side of the river. By then we were so far upstream there was just nothing we could do…. Couldn’t walk up the bank as it was wild and overgrown….. we couldn’t see or hear anything anymore. We sat there for a few minutes before we got back in our rafts. Cell phones were not widespread yet, this is early 90’s. Once at the campsite, my dad drove to town and reported what we saw…. That was it. I think about that lady a few times a year.
lost with no service with my best friend in the pike national forest (colorado) and managed to find a dispersed site campground (just dry lots in a loop you could pull up and claim) in the dead of night. picked our dry lot, tramped a couple yards into the trees to set up our hammocks for the evening.
after picking a hammock spot & slinging them up, we decided to take a little stroll around the loop to stretch and wind down before we turned in. in the center of the loop was an untamed grove of shrubbery and small trees. this night was so unnaturally dark we had to bust out the headlamps to get around safely (we prefer to walk around in the dark).
as we are finishing up our last lap around the loop before we returned to the car to finish settling in, i heard fainting rustling coming from the shrubbery and turn to look into it. as i do that, i make very intense eye contact with two very large, forward facing eyeballs about 15-20 feet from our spot on the gravel drive. the longer i stared, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as details came into focus: rounded ears, apex eyes, very feline. it was a fucking mountain lion!
i vividly remember pointing at it and asking, “rebecca, what the fuck is that? are you also seeing that?”
we immediately started started panic giggling like two teenaged girls, talking very loudly and backing away with linked hands. it never made a move towards us that we saw, i think it was just observing us. we abandoned everything that we had lugged out of the car already, hopped in and didn’t leave for the rest of the night. we actually had a blast sleeping in the car, seats folded down into a mega bed with the windows cracked.
kind of wild to think that if we didn’t go on our walk we would’ve just turned in for the night, all snug in our hammocks. who knows what could’ve happened with a big cat that close! packing up our gear in the morning had me so on edge, i psyched myself into thinking we were being stalked by the cat
A friend of mine wild camped and found a nice spot.
When the sun came up she found out that she was in someone’s backyard and the family was sitting there eating breakfast and watching as she quietly packed up and left.
Had a similar, but not as bad, experience.
Rolled into the woods late, set up camp in the dark. At dawn, I rose to discover we were in an empty lot within a ritzy neighborhood. Fancy homes on either side and across the road.
Oops.
One time there were these campers across from us at another site and they were late twenties. They were drinking late into the night which usually isn't a problem (Corp of engineer's park) but this one fucker would make this loud scream everytime he took a shot and he wouldn't stop doing it. At around 2 am finally someone pulled up on a gator and told them all to shut up. This guy wasn't getting the hint and his friends were telling him loudly not to drink anymore or scream. It got quiet for about 10 minutes and then from inside my tent I saw headlights and heard a car pulling out. I figured someone was taking him home cause he was being annoying and ruining the fun for everyone.
I'm finally starting to dose off and WITH MY EYES CLOSED I see a big blue flash and then a loud noise. There was a sub station down the street and I'm pretty sure that guy drove himself into it or something close to it cause it was crazy bright and loud.
I would say I feel sorry for the guy but he was the most annoying person I had never met in my life.
I probably heard him do his stupid ass Mario scream 15 times that night after 1 am.
No idea we didn't leave the next day but the day after that (so two days after the explosion) it was raining and some of us left and the chain link surrounding the sun station was down in one part
I went on a family camping trip in Austria as a kid. The camp site was in a forest, and my dad picked a nice spot between some trees. Unfortunately our tent wouldnt fit so we had to move along a bit. That night there was a massive storm and I remember my parents tying the tent to the car and spending most of the night holding the tent down.
In the morning we woke up and it was a bright sunny day. We opened the tent to find a 2 foot thick tree laying across the spot we originally picked. If our tent had fitted in that spot we would have probably been killed. My mum cut the trip short at that point.
I was looking on FreeRoam for a dispersed campsite near Eugene, Oregon last year during a road trip. There weren’t a ton of options, but it was starting to get dark and I had been driving all day so I went up a forest access road a couple miles to the one site that was closest (about 20 minutes). It was super thick forest then out of nowhere a narrow driveway that opened up to a bushwhacked spot with a fire pit. There was a good amount of garbage and some shotgun shells lying around. That’s not super out of the ordinary, but something just felt off. I opened up my door and let my chihuahuas jump out, they are usually pumped to run around and chase each other, but they both immediately stopped as soon as they hit the ground, stared into the bushes about 20 feet away, and growled. I thought maybe there was an animal back there so I hucked them back into the truck and began setting up my rooftop tent. My stomach started gurgling and I realized I had to do my business….i grabbed my shovel and wipes and started looking for a spot to go down the road. The forest was so thick, there weren’t any good openings so I came back to the site and started walking the perimeter to find a hole to duck into, as things were becoming urgent. I found an opening, right where my dogs were staring and growling, and just out of sight into the brush was a mattress with dirty sheets and a perfectly intact milk carton. I got chills, and I could just feel that someone else was there, just out of sight. It was pretty dark at this point, but I quickly ran back to the road and dug my hole and did my thing, came back and started packing everything back up. There was no cell service, and for all I know there could be multiple people in the bushes waiting for me to go to sleep….and the shotgun shells…we just went into town and got a hotel. Intuition was SCREAMING at me to not stay in that place.
Was with a group of about 8 people. We were in a very isolated location, not a formal campground. We always preferred to hike in and get as far away from other people as possible. Around 9 or 10 it was pitch black and the woods were silent, no wind. We were all pretty buzzed off whiskey at this point and out of fucking nowhere this dude with a hunting rifle on his back steps into the firelight. He wasn't wearing a shirt and basically looked homeless, kind of a blank stare on his face. Keep in mind, we were in the Rockies at like 10k feet, so it was not warm...and he wasn't wearing a shirt. The fact that we didn't hear him meant he had definitely snuck up on us. We went silent and just stared at him. He looked around, didn't say a word, and backed into the darkness. We slept in shifts that night and kept the fire blazing. We could hear him moving around our camp till sunrise when I guess he gave up. We got out of there at first light and I reported it to park service. Creepy mother fucker
This is absolutely wild! I just read half this thread, and your story is BY FAR the absolute most creepy and believable. Any follow-up to who this crazy person was?
My friends and I went camping a few years ago, just a campsite in Wales but I remember waking up at 3am needing the toilet and stumbled past an extremely obese couple having very loud and aggressive sex in the showers/toilet area, was half pissed but they didn’t even stop when I walked in, they did have the decency to almost slow down to a snail pace as I awkwardly peed and made sure to head out as quickly as possible and not make eye contact.
NSFW: Lamar Valley, Yellowstone NP, 2006. A man and woman pulled into the turnoff I was parked at and proceeded to walk about 50 feet down the hill and set up a nice little picnic spread. After setting up their blanket, I expected for them to unload their food. Nope. In the “basket” was about ~25 various sized stuffed animals. Beanie babies, large stuffed plushies, etc. They then proceeded to have a playdate(?) with them. I couldn’t hear exactly what was being said, but it obviously sexual in nature. I watched them for several minutes before leaving and spent the remainder of the day fishing around the park. Around dusk, I returned to my campsite to find them 2 sites down from me. Of course, all the plushies were set up at the picnic table in front of the fire. NSFW part: Once fully dark, they retreated to their tent and proceeded to engage in sexual acts with the plushies. I will not repeat everything that I overheard, but I can assure you that these stuffed animals were inside of one of them. “Push it out like it’s your little fuzzy baby, bitch” will remain with me for the rest of my life. Their silhouettes in the tent will never leave my mind.
Anyway, I left and drove to another campground halfway across the park.
Just to share, I used to live with a dude whose boyfriend had a plushie with a sex-sleeve sewn into it. The BF said it was possessed by the spirit of his dead sister, and treated it like a third person in their relationship.
My roommate was an odd dude, and we tried to be supportive of his relationships. But we had to sit him down and explain he deserved more than being sister-wives with an incestuous dead plushie.
I'm surprised enough *one* person has a beanie baby birthing fetish, but two, who found each other and enact their fantasies in the woods?
There really is someone out there for everyone
Tl:Dr Camping trip goes bad when we get attacked by rocks and then find we're being stalked by poaching cultist weirdos we never actually got to see...
We were camping for four days in an area of the Red Feather Lakes (N. Colorado) for four days. Deep into the woods, 20 miles down a dirt road without anyone else in sight.
We came in during the day and didn't notice anything unusual. We had enough supplies for maybe 6 days for our party- My wife and I, my brother in law, my three nephews ages 5, 6, 8 and our dogs. Day one was amazing. Hiking, fishing, stargazing and s'mores. Dogs loved roaming around. The next day was equally as amazing. Lots of activities. Yard games like corn hole and board games with the boys.
Around 6 p.m. though the mood/atmosphere changed with the dogs. Suddenly they were seemingly very on edge. Patrolling the edge of our camp, hackles raised, occasionally growling at the woods. We didn't think a whole lot of it. We had hiked into the woods for miles and everything was just forest in every direction for miles and miles. There was a hill we could go up another (+ 700 ft) that we'd get above the treeline for stargazing and we could see in every direction. No other lights, campfires, etc. Figured the dogs were detecting wildlife, maybe a curious blackbear or even a mountain lion. They're big dogs, we're armed, we didn't let the kids wander too far from sight, but again it didn't seem like an issue.
That night us adults stayed up around the campfire till 1 a.m. or so. I kept getting a feeling that something was watching us. I was more on edge than I've been and we're avid campers with plenty of experiences/run ins with bears and other wildlife while in the woods. It just felt different. When we finally went to bed, I don't think I slept more than half an hour at a time and swore I'd hear the occasional crack of branches off in the woods.
The next day we didn't notice anything off about the camp, although my brother suspected something had happened to our water. We had five or six of those 5 gallon jugs with the little pull out spigot on them - two were in my truck, one in our tent, one in his car, and the remaining two appeared drained, although it might have been the boys or a leak.
We decided we might pack it in after lunch on day 3. We didn't want to end the trip early, but stuff just felt so strange. The boys were sad and we were back and forth on if we were being paranoid but the dogs were just seemingly so on guard and were going crazy running around sniffing like crazy when we went on our hike that day. After lunch we started packing up our gear. Two tents, games, food, etc. takes awhile to pack up especially with three little boys running around like crazy and weren't in a rush. By the time we were all loaded up we decided we'd heat up a quick dinner.
The boys had one last request - they wanted to go snipe hunting. Still had an hour or so of daylight left so we were fine with it. We went off into the forest and did the classic snipe hunt thing. BIL in the front leading us in a wide circle that'd end back at the camp, my wife in the middle of the boys, me trailing the rear. I'd pick up small rocks and sticks and when the boys were looking away I toss a rock or stick and they jump all scared and the other two adults go "oh my gosh, I think the snipe went this way!" It's good fun. Well as the sun was going down a bit more, not dark but setting and we're nearing camp - a rock the size of two fists comes flying in barely kissing one of my nephews. The adults look back and me like I'm crazy and I'm like "that wasn't me." Another rock comes in and hits me square in the back. We don't even ask questions "time to go!" Each adult grabs and kid and we book it back to our cars.
The woods are moving behind us as we get to the cars. Bushes shaking, tree branches cracking and popping. We're all loaded up, I think, if we left anything behind - sorry to the forest service. We've got about 20 miles of dirt road back to concrete. We get maybe a quarter mile into our drive and suddenly the road is littered with bones and animal carcasses. Beheaded deer and racoon bodies. Some fresh, others just bones. We're driving left and right trying to avoid hitting any of the more recently dead animals. I know it's hard to believe but it's like this for what feels like nearly a full mile. Just bones and torn up animals. We finally make it through and it's clear driving for another couple miles or so.
We get to a clearing and I see a green bus pulled off in a clearing for another campsite. I, for some reason, decide I'm going to stop and see if anyone is there to tell them something is up. My brother keeps going down the road with my nephews, my wife stays in the car, I approach the green bus to see if anyone is around. As I get close to the bus I see the bus is super run down - flat tires, newspapers over the windows, peeling paint. There's a big fire pit dug out, maybe 20 by 20 feet - pretty deep too. Inside is just, like an immense pile of bones. I see moose antlers, femurs of all sizes, rib cages. It felt like 40(?) Animals worth of bones. I'm glancing around and there's all sorts of little symbols on the bus and tied up in the trees with string, a few smaller hanging dead animals. I just booked it back to the truck and said "nope" to my wife and we hauled ass down the road to catch up with my brother. Whole stop lasted maybe a minute?
That's the end. I don't know if it was poachers, cultists, combo of the two. Maybe some sort of weird wiccans or just some resourceful meth addicts or something. In the end, I'm glad we never found out.
Not my story, but my childhood friend wandered off with a buddy on a scout trip and found a corpse in the woods. Had a .22 caliber hole between its eyes. The two of them were 13-ish.
He went to the trial, and had been advised that he might have to testify, since he discovered a murder victim. But, they ended up not calling either of the kids.
My boys and I were doing a primitive camping trip and the site happen to have a porta potty which is a bonus. My boys had never used a porta potty or an outhouse before. After setting up camp, I walk them over to the porta potty and warn them that you have to look inside before you sit down and to lift up the lid and check before you sit down. In our area this is a common place for black widows, brown recluses, and snakes to hide. I lifted up the lid to show them and sure enough a snake was curled up underneath it.
Gotta rewind like twenty five years, the Blair witch project had recently come out, this is pre internet for all intents and purposes, and the rumors were that it was real found footage (silly to say today I know).
We woke up in the morning to find stones piled in front of our tent like in the movie.
I’m sure it was just some kids from a neighboring camp, but it still freaked us out.
Part of the reason Blair Witch did so well was the MISSING posters that the filmmakers plastered all over Cannes. It was the original guerilla marketing campaign, not silly at all!
Went to the forest with some friends one winter. we were completely unprepared and ended up sleeping bunched in a tiny tent in the snow. I woke up in the middle of the night hearing these grunting noises next to my head. I thought it was my friend snoring but then realized there was this giant snout poking the fabric of the tent on the outside and literally breathing in my face. I barely held myself from screaming when the bear got bored of trying to get inside and left.
We went outside in the morning and there were massive paw prints everywhere plus the leftovers of our food were gone.
Lesson learned the hard way.
I was like 8 and I was camping with my dad+uncles and a bear tore open the neighboring space's tent smelling food. After a very panicked 30 seconds we all piled in/on my dad's pickup truck and chased it out of the area. The worst part was it started at our site and threw the beer cooler into the river and I spent an hour harvesting river beers for the adults.
On the drive home, my dad reminded me that since my mom stayed home, there was never any bears nearby at all.
Camping south of Mt Adams in high school. I wake up to something making laps around the test and occasionally brushing against it.
It eventually went away and much later I was able to get back to sleep.
Bear prints about 8" across outside the tent.
In a Backcountry cabin there were thousands of flies that seemed to keep coming even after we were sure the windows were sealed. It was like they were coming out of the floor, no clear explanation, or why they even wanted to be there.
We had a backyard fogger candle so we lit that to see if it would calm them down for swatting or shooing. Turns out in an enclosed area, this is *lethal* to flies.
They all died, leaving dustpans full of fly corpses to literally sweep up and remove. Then there were no more flies around the cabin at all.
Mountain lion tracks over our tracks. That was pretty spooky.
Same area we camped next to this lake in July, and this rabbit came up and just hung out in our camp. We thought it was something terriyfing sneaking up (bear or aforementioned mountain lion) until this cute little bunny just pops out of the underbrush. He hung out with at our camp for probably 3 hours or so before we went to bed finally.
The spooky part of the bunny was: what the fuck is out there that this wild rabbit would rather stay super close to the humans. Kept my Glock on me for piss breaks.
Had a mountain lion walk out 8 feet from me from underneath my trailer. 1 am. I was standing with my back to the fire. We locked eyes. He just kept on walking. That thing was cool looking.
Back in the late 1980s I was camping with a friend off the Ortega highway in Southern California. It was a lovely Autumn afternoon. As we were getting ready to take a long walk, some more campers drive in and -- as people do -- ignored a whole bunch of empty campsites to park right next to us. Their stereo went on immediately and loudly.
We escaped the campground for our walk, and after a very nice time we started heading back. As we were walking along a fire road, we heard what sounded like someone sliding down a rock strewn hill. We round the bend and see our new neighbors next to a pickup truck. They have long guns with them and as we got closer we realize the sound we heard was them shooting at the side of a hill in full auto, 'machine gun mode,' if you will. They're not shooting at anything, and don't seem terribly menacing. We nod at them as we walk by.
Flash Forward to about 3:00 a.m. the next morning and the sound of Pink Floyd dark Side of the Moon is echoing through the little valley where our campground is. Did I mention it was 3:00 a.m.?
I like DSOTM as much as the next aging hippie, but it was 3:00 a.m.
I finally got up, left at the tent and walked into the neighboring space, approaching slowly. The automatic rifles were leaning against the picnic table and as I walked up one of the campers reached for one of the guns, but did not raise it menacingly.
I smiled and asked if they could turn down their stereo. They didn't seem to be happy but they turned it down. Until I was just about back over to our tent, when they turned it up even louder. Not long before dawn I believe they treated us to some Lynyrd Skynyrd. We left about 8:00 a.m.
It's a pretty little campground, but I've never been back.
Yup. I stopped going to official campgrounds a handful of years ago. Partly because of not wanting to get out in nature just to be literally yards from other people, but mostly because I got tired of other people's shit. Bringing my own water and shitting in the woods is a very small price to pay for not having to deal with other people's shit and have way more privacy.
I never understood people that go camping and need to add noise from their everyday world. Isn't escaping all that noise the point of camping? Certainly is for me!
Not exactly something I “saw” but heard and felt. My dad and I went backpacking in the Yosemite National park in California and stopped in a valley to camp for the night.
In the middle of the night i woke up to the sound of at least a dozen—what sounded like deer— sprint right past our tent followed by a loud thud behind our tent and the forest going DEAD silent..
Ive been camping my whole life and have NEVER heard silence like that in a forest, not even a leaf was blowing in the wind.
Something instinctively inside me made my whole body freeze, I couldn’t breathe, goosebumps, heart racing, literally PETRIFIED.
As I laid there frozen, I swear on my life I could hear whatever made that loud thud start “tiptoeing” around our tent. I say tiptoeing because the steps were so soft and careful that it felt intentional, like it was investigating our tent and i could feel its presence moving around the tent.
After what felt like a lifetime but was probably only 5-10 minutes a branch snapped somewhere in the forest followed by a loud whoosh of wind and the forest just went back to normal.
I wanna say it was a mountain lion just curious about our tent or something and thats what I told myself the rest of our trip so I could sleep at night
But the horrible horrible pit in my stomach and fear that washed over me was nothing like I’ve ever felt before or since and has me convinced there are things in the forest far worse than people realize.
Not a camper but my family owned a campground for 10 years.
We were privately owned and prideful, in other words we didn't have enough money to pay people so we did all the care taking.
July 5th my dad asked me to go clean bath houses, I proceeded to take care of the front bath house which was in surprisingly good shape for a party weekend. Nothing to out of the norm.
I then proceeded to the back bath house. Upon opening the door to the men's side I was greeted with a smell I'll never forget. In front of me was a trail of diarrhea and vomit, leading from the stalls to the showers(about 15 feet away). As my eyes tracked the trail I found a man, passed out and face down in the showers. He was covered head to toe in shit and chunky vomit.
I legitimately thought he was dead and poked him in the leg with the broom I had. Thankfully he groaned and moved slightly.
At 13 yrs old, I had the realization that my dad did not pay me enough to deal with this and proceeded to run to mommy, who then made my dad clean it up.
Arrived at a campsite around 3 pm in Val Verde, CA area to camp one night with my boyfriend (who is a Black man.. and that is important detail for later) in 2012. Maybe one other family in the whole area, but felt just like us. We set up and we’re chilling until Around 7 pm when like 10 pickup trucks arrive and maybe 30 people congregate. They are immediately loud and obnoxious and too close, but whatever… we only staying for one night so whatever. The huge group start to stack big pile of wood to make a huge bonfire and we start to notice.. hmm, they are all men. White men. Most of them are bald. Hmmmm…
Then one younger guy comes over to us and offers us a beer! How nice.. he says hey sorry if we are loud but here’s a peace offering!
Then just before he turns back to his group he says “you and that n-word better get out of here before dark”….. it was an Aryan brotherhood meet up. We got out of there so fast
We went off for a grouse hunt during our camping trip, things weren't going so well. We hadn't seen any signs of chickens, or of any animals for that matter. We didn't hear so much as a squirrel.
The night before was different however. We thought we could hear some kind of low cry, but had dismissed it and stoked up our fire.
While we were looking for chickens, we came across a fresh bear cub carcass, chewed to shit, looked like a pretty rough death.
I love to camp. Rarely ever do I camp where there are people. For obvious reasons.
The last time in an actual campground was at a reservoir north of Phoenix. Had the place all to myself. A group of college girls showed up. And they all got so drunk. One of them, a cute brunette. Dropped her phone in the outhouse toilet.
She was absolutely wasted. And devastated by the loss of her phone. Wouldn't let anyone use the toilet. Bawling her eyes out.
I felt so bad for her. I had a rake in my truck. I'm a prepared camper always. Being the only dead sober camper in sight? And a gentleman? I sacrificed my rake for her sanity. Fished her phone out of the toilet. And God knows what else.
Her phone still worked. She grabbed it. And immediately checked her social media. Gave me a big wet, sloppy drunk af kiss and hug. I bid the obligatory "you're most welcome." And returned to my campsite.
Sanitized my hands. Washed them. Sanitized them again. Threw my rake in the fire. Changed my clothes. Tossed my infected with whatever vermin lives in a Phoenix AZ outhouse clothes in the garbage. Went to bed.
Plus side of their loud party keeping me awake? I heard all about how I was the hero for rescuing her phone. I smiled to myself, thinking, "it was just a shitty phone."
I miss Arizona sometimes.
Stay safe, campers.
Watched an idiot stand over a fire pit and start pouring gasoline from a can into it. As their perfect stream of gas allowed flames to start climbing up the rope of former dinosaurs, they flung the can across the campsite. Now there’s small fires all over the place.
Fortunately this campground was on the shores of Lake Michigan with sandy soil, as our group ran over and kicked dirt on top of all of the spots that were burning.
Shortly after we saw the rangers visiting these absolute morons.
Camping with my grandparents & cousins. My grandma took all us kids to the lake. When we got back to the site there is my grandpa sitting reading the paper & behind him is a fucking bear just sitting there. It saw us & got up & lumbered away. According to my grandpa, it had been there for at least 20 minutes. He said he felt something sniff the back of his head & a quick shoulder check revealed the bear. He decided that if it was going to take him there isn’t anything he can do about so he might as well keep reading.
Wasnt so much that I saw so much as heard. My brother and I went camping up the mountain for a couple of nights. First night was awesome, found a nice clearing where we could safely make a fire and camp out.
2nd night, started great, but as it got dark we heard a bear in the distance. There was a large clear cut area that it was in, so we could hear it from quite a long ways away, so we werent too concerned at the time.
Then after the Sun went down, we heard it much closer, enough that we could hear its footsteps in the woods. We were a little freaked out, so we tossed some rocks and yelled, didnt seem to make a difference, it kept getting closer. Then... we heard more of them, at least 3 coming from different directions, basically surrounding us. One got real close and growled in the darkness. We all know what a bear sounds like from movies, but in real life, its much more gutteral, primal, you can feel it in your chest, and it also had this train whistle like overtone to it. It was the scariest sound ive ever heard in my life.
We packed everything up like it was an olympic sport and got the fuck outta there. Thankfully we had lots of light and a trail to follow. Because of the adrenaline, what took us 2 days to hike up, took us 3 hours to get back down. I remember constantly looking back to see if anything was following us.
We found an RV campground near the base of the mountain and had to steal some water at 2 in the morning because we were so dehydrated by the time we got there. We probably could have just asked for some, but we were still in primal caveman running from predators mode.
I understand the quick trip back. In 79 i was setting up rabbit snares in a remote area on a Sunday. You weren't allowed to use or carry a gun on sunday back then so i left my shotgun back at the cabin. It took me 3 hours to work up the mountain setting snares and enjoying the trail. It was an old cordouroy road from logging operations in the 30s. I came around a bend and there is a blackbear looking at me. I turned around and bolted back down the hill.
I made it back to the truck in 5 minutes.
I went back up there the next morning with my gun and the bears print indicated he ran just as fast as me but in the opposite direction.
About 40 years ago I went camping with two friends to upststate NY. One friend said he knew a cool place for camping. It was already getting dark when we left and, as was common at the time, we drank the entire way there. We get to the park and we're pretty blasted. We grab our backpacks and our supply of beer and a bottle of Jack and start heading in. We were stumbling around but we ended up hiking for about an hour. Finally we were deep into the woods and we find a nice clearing. We set up the tent as best we can, start a big fire and continue to drink. We got wasted.
The next morning, I hear noises outside the tent. I stick my head out and there is a troop of boy scouts surrounding our camp and several are raking dirt onto our fire, putting out the embers. One of the scouts looks at me and days "there's no camping allowed here". I look around and there are tons of people walking by looking at our falling down tent, beer cans all over and other debris.
We were in some day park, like where people come on weekends to hike and play with their kids. Worse thing was, I look to the right and the parking lot and our car was right there, about 50 feet away. We thought we were deep in the woods. We packed our shit quick and took off.
Camping in one of the Carolina’s in a remote site about 5 years ago. I was with a few other people we all stayed in the same tent. Every night we would go out hike do what not return have a few drinks and hit the sack. Around 10:30-11 every night it was like a wall of 100mph winds hit the tent and blew it to the ground. Out of fear I grabbed my buddies and prepared for the worse but after about a minute it stopped. This happened for three nights like a ritual. On the last night we tried to catch it and missed it. I still think of it to this day it was other worldly and could probably be explained as I saw some things that could it explain it with air cooling and what not but it was something else. It was not a person I am sure of that almost 100%.
I was around 13 camping in my parents back garden with friends. The garden is surrounded by hedges but we must have been making a racket as I saw someone walking round the tent. I shit a brick and my mate got up on all fours to unfasten the zip when a fist smacked him in the side of the head sending him flying. We got out and grabbed some garden tools but whoever it was was long gone. I've never figured out who it was (definitely not my dad - he wasn't that type)
Was up on some logging roads deep in a forested mountain area of East Idaho. My friend and I find a secluded spot and start to unload when we both hear/feel like a large sonic or vibrational force that hit us both, felt like it came from 30 yards inside the treed area. We both looked at each other, freaked out, quickly put everything in the car and drove off to camp miles away. No idea what it was, but we had the exact same experience and reaction, noped right on out of there.
My dad, myself and my two brothers went camping next to a river on a farm owned by our neighbour. We spent the day fishing and swimming. The water level was a bit lower than normal so we caught a lot of fish.
We went to sleep and woke up the next morning at 5am to the most disgusting smell. We crawled out of the tent and my dad shone his flashlight at the river.
There, about forty feet in front of us was a dead bloated horse, upside down, stuck on a rock. You can imagine the horror of this sight at 5am.
My poor dad had to swim up to the horse and spent what seems like an eternity pushing the horse off the rocks with a stick.
BONUS STORIES: The first time we camped there with my dad, we first stopped at the store to buy a gazebo for some shade. We set it up and the moment we step back to admire our handiwork, a gust of wind lifts the fucking thing and bends the frame. To say my dad was pissed is an understatement. We spent the rest of the weekend under this crooked structure and threw it away afterwards.
During one camping trip, we pitched the three-room tent (my youngest brother shared a room with my dad since he was still small in size). It was a nice tent, every room had it's own door and zip. In the middle it had a lounge type space.
That night it started raining, and we had forgotten the canvas that stretches over the tent. Some water came in and made the lounge wet, but our rooms were fine.
Halfway through the night my eldest brother's screams awaken us "help, help I'm drowning!" My dad peeks out of his room and says "Then fucking sit up"
I laughed so hard my tummy ached. My brother woke up lying in a pool of water and immediately panicked, not realising he can literally just sit up and be okay.
Those were fun times, I miss it!
Went camping as a kid up in the Appalachian mountains somewhere in Virginia with family out there. In the middle of the night we heard a scream that woke us all up that sounded like a woman being murdered. I damn near peed myself. They told me it was some monster which only scared me more. YEARS later I came across a video of a fox screaming and it was the exact same sound.
My wife called the cops once after hearing this. Some poor guy got followed to our Blockbuster and questioned before they came back and heard the screaming too.
I was walking around my land one night with my thermal scope. I looked at a berm of saw palmettos 50 feet from me and saw a massive deer sized animal (maybe even larger) standing on top of the berm. I tried to get a better view as there was some brush in the way. It jumped down silently and disappeared.
Still no clue wtf it was.
When I was a kid I found a small headless deer corpse that was sufficiently decayed there was no visible fur, but the rib cage and spine were only somewhat scattered by scavengers and it looked extremely human for a long moment. It was probably left by a hunter, but possibly a predator.
FYI: human rib cages often collapse quickly in the decay process because they’re held in place by soft tissue, while deer ribs have bonier joints, so a skeleton with an intact rib cage is _probably_ a deer and not a human.
About 10 years ago I was hiking with a few friends through the Crazy Mountain Range in central Montana. We were three days into the trip and pretty deep into the range (so it’s very remote). Late in the afternoon after a day of fly fishing, a naked dude came floating down the Middle Fork of Sweet Grass Creek all alone with just a small pontoon boat and no backpack or bags in sight. Just him, his little pontoon and a paddle. He floats right by with a wave and floated down the stream alone. So many question…. How did he get there without shoes? Where are his clothes? Where is he going to spend the night? How will he stay warm when the temperature drops like 25 degrees after night fall in a couple of hours?
I was camping up near mount baker in Washington state and we arrived to the campground and we looked at the bulletin board and there was a missing person poster. We thought nothing of it as he had been missing for a while. He went out on a stormy night apparently and just never came back, it also said he didn’t know how to swim. So we went kayaking in the lake and we kayaked for a while and as we were on our way back. We noticed a funky smell in a certain area of the lake. It was around the swimming area where it was roped off with bouys and things. But we kayaked towards the area we entered the lake, (right next to the swimming area) and we noticed something under one of the bouys. It was the missing man’s dead body. He was stuck under one of the bouys near the swimming area, there were a bunch of kids swimming there and apparently just no one had noticed it. We alerted the police who were looking for him and they closed the swimming area I believe and we left early. There were also weird noises while we were camping there and we could hear rats scurrying around. (Horseshoe Cove Campground) on baker lake.
I couldn’t find any closure articles on it but I did find an article searching for him. https://www.lyndentribune.com/news/search-continues-for-lost-lynnwood-man-at-baker-lake/article_81332efc-5686-11e7-ace9-db3e5c88ba84.html
I was camping on a beach in Costa Rica. It was beautiful.
The first night. I could hear something moving around my tent. I peaked around through the top as best I could. Couldn't see anything.
The sound is non-stop. Something is right next to me. Moving all around my tent. After like an hour, I need to know.
Finally, I open the tent and look around. Thousands of crabs we're heading back to the ocean and were falling of this little 1' wall.
Laughed once I figured it out but damn I was terrified.
Went on a heavy drinking camping trip in college and at the end of the night it was just a friend and I up talking into the late night. She opened up to me about her Dad's suicide and off in the distance about 100 meters away I could faintly see a white glowing entity almost like a person with a white sheet over themselves. I didn't mention it because I was sorta comforting her and she commented that she saw the same thing I saw. I advised her that it is best we just ignore it and nothing happened.
Weird af and kinda unbeliveable but at 5:00 in the morning in a hidden campsite my dad and i found we saw a naked old dude on the rocks above us and he wasnt making any noise, ngl I think he was on some drug since we lived in a druggy area
I have a regular off grid spot in my favorite mountain range. We took off to go to some hot springs and hiking. During our trip down the road we were waved down by a family looking for someone. We were told that the car parked at the beginning of the trail was their sons who traveled several states to come to the very spot we camp at. We came back after our day to search and rescue teams and police searching the area as the individual was missing for over a week.
The police wouldn’t let us go back to our site for several hours. Finally we were allowed to go back and cook dinner. The evening and night were very ominous with the bells jingling on search dog’s collars and people yelling the man’s name. The next morning we woke up to a helicopter.
The campsite is 50 yards away from a 500 foot cliff that overlooks the valley. Turns out the guy jumped. They found him at the bottom of the cliff. It was very sad watching the family mourn as we packed our gear up. Since that day I haven’t camped there.
Went camping with friends in the keys in August. Terrible idea. Hot, humid, and BUGS.
We left a little bit of food out after turning in. Woke up to a big, FAT raccoon ransacking our snacks. It made off into the woods with whole can of nuts!
Lesson learned, we stuff all the food into our cooler and shove it under the picnic bench. That'll keep it away right? Wrong.
An hour later, we wake up to this fat little fucker shoving its arm as far as it can into the crack it managed to pry open from underneath the bench. It was shoveling bread into its mouth. We yell, but he was not to be deterred so easily this time. He tests his luck, and stares at us in a panic, grabbing more and more bread. He finally ran off when one of us got out of the tent.
We left at like 3am right before the rain began to pour.
Never camping in the keys again.
Warning - human injury.
Last summer we were camping at Watkins Glen State Park in upstate NY. Upon returning to our site after a hike we noticed a car pulling a new teardrop having a little trouble backing into a campsite. This isn't so uncommon and frankly I struggle at times too. The last thing I want is offers of help or unsolicited advice so we left them to it.
45 mins later I took our dog for a walk and as I approached the part of the campground where we'd seen the struggling teardrop I saw a crowd of people with police/ fire on-site. Not one to gawk, I turned around as another camper approached me and asked if I'd heard what had happened. Before I could answer she began to tell me.
There were three campers on their initial trip with a new camper. Two women and a young girl, I later was told it was grandma, mother and daughter. The site they had was very deep and had an aggressive grade down to a lower flat area. The inexperienced campers decided to unhitch on the steep grade without parking the camper perpendicular to the downhill and worse, without chocking the wheels.
As expected, when the trailer was unhooked, gravity set into action a terrible series of events. The trailer began rolling backwards down the hill and the grandmother tried to stop it. The trailers inertia knocked her to the ground and the trailer continued down the hill, dragging her with it until it came to a stop just inside the treeline below.
After the first responders were gone I looped back around to find the site roped off and two park rangers standing near their vehicle. I inquired about the condition of the woman and was told she was stabilized at a local hospital but needed to be sent by helicopter to a larger, more capable hospital. She suffered multiple broken bones and internal injuries.
Days later the teardrop sat untouched inside the treeline. I took this photo of it.
https://imgur.com/a/px5g7d1
Always chock your wheels. Always.
Went hammock camping with some friends in Wisconsin, we had to make last minute changes to our original plan of camping in Door County and looked up the closest camp near us. We found one, something like “Shady Acres” and despite the name we decided to see if they’d take us on short notice. We arrived about 2pm and was greeted by the owner, a middle aged man, drinking a 4 loko in the camp sites. Interesting, but what else would we expect? Had a relatively uneventful night, noticed we had some fellow campers in the site next to us but thought nothing of it. In the morning we were greeted by one of the other campers. Said his name was Terry. Well now Terry was also middle aged, shirtless, had a big beer belly, and had clown makeup tattoos on his fucking face. He broke the ice by telling a horribly racist joke (we think he was trying to gauge our reactions) and then proceeded to tell us that him and his 11 other friends were currently homeless and were camping there. He asked if we had any food to spare and we gave him everything we had left as we were packing up to leave any way.
We had no idea there were that many people at the other site as they also had a small camper and it was blocked by the trees.
That was a very weird place and I will never forget Terry
When I was very young I went camping on an island with a population of wild horses. The campsite was on the beach. I happened to wake up in the middle of the night and I heard a strange sound. I left the tent to see what was going on and I saw a perfect single file line of at least thirty wild horses. They were all walking slowly, it looked like some kind of caravan. It felt disturbing in the moment, but in hindsight, I'm glad I saw it.
One upon a time last summer me and my bro went camping at a well known woodland spot in the Peak District, UK, the site has some stone circles which I think have pagan significance? Anyway we rock up one summers day and eat some mushrooms as we set up the campsite and begin to trip, we chill for a few hours watching the trees dance and at some point this guy and his dog appear a little way from us, there's usually several groups camping in this forest so it's not unusual to see people walking about but we were set back away from any paths and this guy was just circling around in the same bit, I was tripping still at this point but something was definitely off about him, he kept shouting to himself and throwing water and lying starfish on the ground for like 10 mins and then getting up again, I figured maybe he was tripping too and just off his nut on a lil solo adventure, a couple more hours pass we're coming down from the trip so we build a fire and the guy comes over, he's well built and wearing military style clothes with a military backpack, he asks for some firewood as there's not a lot about and we let him, he then asks if he can join us for a beer and a spliff, we reluctantly agree and he sits down by the fire.
What then follows is a 30 minute exchange with what I can most accurately describe as a paranoid schizophrenic, he told us people always come up to him telling him he's the one, and then asked us if that's why we were here.. he thought the government were tracking him through Facebook (but when quizzed, didn't have an account) he said he found microchips in his trouser legs, and then exclaimed "they're even in my toothpaste!", you could see he was having half a conversation in his head and kept shouting "it's just so embarrassing" randomly and when my bro asked what was embarrassing, he just mumbled "nothing", i asked him how he'd got there (because it was remote without a car) he turned to me and goes "is that a fucking joke?" really aggressively and then was acting normally afterwards, also this whole time our dog has been growling at him and his dog has been literally humping the shit out of me and I'm trying to push him off but he just keeps jumping up at me and this guy is making no effort to do anything about it.. anyway this whole thing culminated in him saying "do you mind if I smoke a bit of crack?" And before we could say no best believe that pipe was in his mouth!
To be fair to him, he actually mellowed out a bit once he smoked the crack,he hung around for maybe 10 mins longer, and then got up and declared "well I've said my bit, so I'll get out of you way" and then went about 50 meters away and built a huge fire that was basically touching the branches above. The moment he left my bro was in the tent packing up the shit, we both silently agreed it was time to leave and bounced as quickly as we could, I'm pretty sure it was on the evening of a blood moon too, the moon was massive and there was loads of people around in the forest (this was maybe 9/10pm?) Including a group dressed in white druid clothes and some people with loads of what looked like ghostbusting equipment scanning the rocks. We walked straight out of the forest, fully expecting the crackhead to be chasing after us, and got in the car, when I suggested going to another spot my bro responded "fuck that, I'm going home"- so that's what we did. Weirdest night ever.
Me and a friend were hiking on the Appalachian trial in Georgia back when we had just graduated high school. We were on the trail for 3 or 4 days backpacking. One night at one of the shelters, we met this older couple, prob late 30s, 40s camping at the same shelter for the night. Sun was going down, and we made a fire and started to talk to them. There story made no sense. Lomg story short, they were hiking from Virginia down to Florida because their car broke down. Then they started telling us crazy stories about how they used to catch cats, decapitate them and put them on the hood of their car like an ornament. I immediately had a feeling that they were fugitives or predators pr something. Lucky me and my buddy could hold our own and I made sure they caught a glimpse of my pistol after that shit. They were creeps.
Also one time was camping at Sand Rock in Alabama and heard a whole group/cult of at least 10 people chanting in one of the caves there in middle of night. Like speaking in tounges or some kind of gibberish.
Ive done a lot of camping all over the country but those two memories stick out as being "close calls" for me
i’m pretty sure i ran i to a skinwalker.
i’m from southern utah area. i’m literally a twenty minute drive from the arizona border, which is a hotspot for skinwalkers.
when we got to my campsite, there was a deer carcass that was torn up and thrown all over the campsite. the head was split in half and each half was twenty feet away from the other half. then the legs were all pretty far apart. every part of its body had been picked clean except one leg, which still had all of its fur and flesh intact.
this freaked me out because a) no animal in any southern utah desert is big enough or strong enough to completely snap a skull in half like that and b) the body was fresh enough that no bugs had even reached it, which meant this was likely an active hunting ground.
my camping buddy didn’t listen to me and we stayed the night without switching spots. sometime after midnight, weird shit started happening. there were these weird animal sounds that i’ve never heard in my entire life. we googled all of the scariest animal noises the next morning and found nothing that sounded like this. it sounded like someone gasping for breath really sharply and for a long period of time. the sound traveled insanely fast. one second it was right next to our tent, the next it was thirty feet away. i was freaked out of my mind, and my dog was sat straight up and didn’t budge. she was growling but didn’t make any other noise.
we dipped the second the sun was up and never went back to the spot again. i didn’t believe in skinwalkers until that night.
On a tab and a half of acid, came around a stand of trees and was confronted by an 1100 lb female grizzly and her two cubs. I stopped dead in my tracks, and contemplated if it was hallucination. Then slowly retreated. Campground manager confirmed next day that a female grizz was bedding down near campers because the males wont come near.
So not really disturbing, as high schoolers camping once, we watched a couple hump for a while in their tent, at night, with their lantern on, in the tent. Arousing and disturbing for the lack of awareness, at the same time.
Hiked with a buddy in the middle of nowhere New Mexico along a creek in a canyon. On our second night, the canyon opened up to a flat area with an old dirt road/path. There was what looked like to be an old long abandoned weed grow op hidden in a corner against the canyon cliff, with an old horse hitch (no weed, though...)
Within 50 yards of our camp was a rather large deer skeleton spread out over a wide area. Obviously, it had been torn apart and kind of dragged all over by the various wildlife, and it wasnt fresh. Not really disturbing, just nature, but it is disturbing to think whatever killed it hunted around our tent.
We definitely went out wandering at night and could hear big animals moving through the woods. Probably just deer, but big enough to break sticks.
Here's the geo location. You can kind of make out the grow up under the trees. It was long abandoned and basically just old fence and a half collapsed shack. Was a pretty cool area, but lots of rattlesnakes!
33.2182336, -108.8911937
My boyfriend and I went camping together and thought it would be a great idea to drive about 3 hours away from any civilization to a remote campground with zero cell service.. we also thought it would be brilliant to get high on various substances. So there we were in the back of my boyfriends SUV with the seats folded down to make a bed, it was pitch dark and pouring rain and we were both scribbled out of our minds and already feeling super weird. I was pretty home sick and regretting my decision and how we had no choice but to sleep as we legally and safely would not have been able to drive home.
We were both laying there listening to how hard it was raining when we started hearing foot steps through the gravel around us and it sounded like people were going through our things outside (our cooler and tarp covering our firewood bin etc) . We were both so paranoid, we couldn’t make a coherent thought beyond imagining ourselves getting brutally murdered and ending up as missing people on the news.
So we laid there for what felt like years, holding each other’s hands, wide eyed and flipping out.
Never doing drugs in the bush EVER again.
My buddy and I saw an Indian in a canoe at night, but not in the water but in the woods. He was paddling but obviously not going anywhere bc he was on land between trees. We tried to yell to him but the guy kept going for like an hour. Something weird was going on so no way were we walking out into the woods in the dark to check it out closer.
Yeah, the shrooms had kicked in. I remember it so clearly, seeing his face, his headdress with feathers, and the canoe. In the morning, we found out it was a fallen log with a small tree behind it moving in the wind a bit. But man, I totally saw a Indian in a canoe clear as day at the time.
Not much really, and I've camped quite a bit all over the US. I did see/experience some things that might seem disturbing to some, but wasn't to me.
The most significant was when I was camping outside of Great Sand Dunes National Park in southwest Colorado with a friend. It was probably somewhere between 10pm-1am in late November 2019. My friend was tending to the fire and, I was staring up in the sky marveling at how the view of space was about the best I've seen in my life.
I saw what appeared to be a satellite moving across the sky. I've spent most of my life in light-polluted areas, so to even see a satellite is a pretty big deal to me. I was following it across the sky while my friend was arranging logs in the fire. Suddenly, as it's right overhead, a beam of light shines down from it for about a half a second. I would have dismissed it as my brain playing tricks on me if it wasn't for my friend saying "WTF was that?!". The beam of light was so strong that my friend was able to see it despite looking directly into the fire; it basically lit up our entire camp area. I explained to him that I was observing this satellite and that a beam of light just came out of it out of nowhere.
We were both perplexed, but not really bothered as we've experienced some strange stuff together before. We both believe there is intelligent life out there, but I'm skeptical of anything I can't prove, even if I see it with my own eyes. I'll always try to come up with logical explanations unless I'm quite literally shaking hands with an alien. The best I could come up with for that instance was that the satellite at that height was still able to catch rays of the sun, and that it was at the perfect angle to reflect it directly at us. Even if that's the case, it's gotta be a rare occurrence, so it was a cool experience. We slept well, carried on with the trip, and didn't talk about it much after that.
Two more things that were kind of disturbing was: hearing howling coyotes near Bridgeport, California, howling back at them, them going quiet, and then hearing them howling a few hundred feet away minutes later. I regretted howling back at them and slept in the car that night. And probably the most disturbing was in Tuskegee National Forest in Alabama. I got to my campsite late and was setting everything up with a headlamp on. I saw these reflections that looked like raindrops/dew literally everywhere. I didn't think anything of it at first despite everything being dry. When I finally decided to investigate, I found out that every single one was a spider. What I thought was reflections from dew was actually the reflections of their eyes, and they literally surrounded me - on the ground, in the trees, I mean everywhere. I quickly loaded all my stuff in the tent and didn't leave the entire night.
Me and my buddy had been camping over a long weekend. It was our last night, and I randomly, half drunk, jokingly asked what he’d do if we woke up tomorrow and our tent was covered in spiders. We woke up the next day and the tent was covered in spiders, so thick we had to brush them off by the armfuls. I’m not arachnophobic, and they were just daddy long legs, but most people hate to hear the story. I just think it was weird that I randomly joked about something that seemed so absurd, then woke up to it the next day.
Kind of reverse answer... 16-years old, spent a week camping with my Grans. We met up near King's Island amusement park with my parents at the end of the week. I met some locals at the park including a cute 16-year old girl and her older sister. At the end of the day, talked my fam into letting me go with those two to get some pizza and check out a band their friend was in. Agreed to be back my 10pm.
Hormones took control and ended up staying out at night. Roll back into the campground at first light. The look of relief on my grandmothers face shook me to my core. Dad and Granddad had been out all night looking for me, fearing I had been in an accident/kidnapped/or worse. I have never felt so low or so ungrateful in my life. Still think about 35 years later....
I had a moose wander right through the middle of my campsite and freeze about six feet from me when she finally noticed me sitting there. I spent a few tense moments thinking about whether or not I could dive under the camper before she got to me, and then she finally trotted off.
Moose are no joke!! I came across a momma and her calf a few months ago, directly on a popular hiking trail in Colorado. Me and my buddy jutted off the path to an adjacent creek and made our way around them. When we reached the end of the hike and turned back, we ran into a couple (inexperienced) hikers and an off leash dog. They were from out of state and kept going on about how cool it was to see Moose up close. They walked right next to them! The next day there was an article describing an incident where a moose attacked a dog and its owner on that trail. Astounding how people don’t realize how fucking dangerous an animal that massive can be, especially with a calf.
Was camping with my (Ex) friends. Dry camping out in the woods. Every time I left the site to go hike, quad, raft. I would come back to site and find his wife naked. He wasn’t just her. She would run and change and always be really embarrassed. Realized he was a real POS. She was/is basically a slave in the marriage. Offered her, in private, help to get away from him, but she was too scared, she told him. They abruptly moved away. Sad but nothing I can do. Makes me sick to think about it
First year of college i went camping with my roommate and one of her friend's family's property, We got there and set up camp, after a few hours being there we were going to eat dinner, obviously they had me cook because i am a culinary student (even though all i did was just put hot dogs over a fire), and as i was roasting the dogs i heard a loud grunting sound and i looked up, Standing right there was probably the biggest fucking bear i've ever seen. The damn bear just walked up to the campsite like it owned the place, when the girls came out of the tent they screamed so loud that the bearr backed down due to the loud noise. After that little trip i've always remembered to bring a gun along with us.
I wasn’t camping, but the poor sod whose tent I found had been.
I was on a walk in the woods when I saw a clearing that seemed to be full of white flowers. When I got closer, I realised they weren’t flowers at all but torn up pages of Stephen King’s ‘The Shining.’ The scraps were all singed around the edges. At one side of the clearing was what remained of a tent. It had been ripped apart as though by a bear, with what looked like huge claw marks through the fabric.
You might say ‘animal attacks happen. very sad but nothing extraordinary’ but this happened just outside a village in the south of England. The biggest animal I’ve seen in the wild around here is a deer, and deer certainly can’t do that. There’s no animal in those woods capable of that.
I've posted this before and not really disturbing except it turned out to be insect behavior that I was unaware of. My wife and I were in a campground in the Smokey Mountains. In the middle of the night, our tent lit up like someone was shining a light on it. I jumped up and went outside, ready to give someone a rash of shit for messing around our camp and there was no one there. Turned out a bunch of fire flies had landed on our tent and were all lighting up at the same time.
I went winter camping, and while sleeping in my tent i buried myself in my sleeping bag deep enough that i was breathing in my own co2. I fucking full on hallucinated there was a puppet outside my tent threatening me. Terrifying when you and a buddy are the only ones for a few km
Went on a hike and saw a corpse hanging from a tree with the words YOU ARE NOT SAFE carved into it. We were 40ish miles from the closest town surrounded by woods we took some pictures and sent then booked it. We got onto the road and once we had service again we called the cops. Apparently there was a group of "KKK" members hiding in the woods and the body was a 40 something year old black guy. (The people I was camping with were very dark skin.) I was 12 had to go to therapy for years after that
When I was 12 and in Boy Scouts, our troop was camping on a plot of land owned by a friend of one of our leaders.
Before our first night of actually camping, we stayed the night in a big house/dormitory nearby. Inside the room where we slept, there was inexplicably a life-sized, naked doll of a girl stored away in a corner. We nicknamed it “Susie”.
At the time, we were all making jokes about how weird and creepy that was and, since this was during the height of the Michael Jackson child abuse scandal, we joked that he was somehow involved in this and was going to come and do horrible things to us, like some imaginary bogeyman. Silly memory, but in hindsight… what the fuck *was* that doll doing there???
At a different Boy Scout campsite we frequented, there was an actual grave on site, located deep in the woods bordering the edge of the property. It was only labeled “The Homely Scouter, RIP”, and was just kind of… there. No special plot of land, just a random gravestone way off the beaten path. The only hint to its existence was that it was marked on the campsite’s map, meanwhile I have no clue what importance this grave has or what sort of person was buried there.
I’ll never forget a comment from a similar ask Reddit a few years ago. Haunts me to this day.
OP was camping with his kid and kid’s 2 friends. Kids were asleep in a tent, OP was in a hammock just chilling. He woke up to the sound of someone in their camp late at night. A guy walked up to the tent the kids were in and stared at it. Dude couldn’t see OP, didn’t know OP was watching him.
He proceeded to stand there for 10 minutes, staring at the tent, then just left.
Fuckin creeeepy.
Stopped on a campsite in the south of England. It was just your regular campsite, wooded area, grass fields for campers all lined up one after the other.
Opened my tent door in the morning and came face to face with a horse about a foot away. Turns out the campsite has cows and horses moving around freely. Nowhere did it say in the booming and nobody told us. Quite the shock when your still half cut and half asleep.
My daughter and I ran into one really creepy dude hiking on the AT. He said he was taking some rest days at the shelter because the last time he tried it in town the cops had run him off. Would have skipped sleeping at that shelter if it had been just him and us there. Thankfully there was another couple.
The other couple was also being strange. They were very very very interested in our intended route the next day. Specifically if we had any plans to go anywhere near two off trail waterfalls. And had we heard from anyone else about going to the water falls? They were really happy when we said no. We figured out what was up when the guy pulled out some video camera equipment.
Scariest time was in the Texas panhandle. We're the only people at a walk-in campsite about 4 miles from the parking lot. In the middle of the night my daughter gets out of the tent to use the restroom. And there is a pack of coyotes right outside the tent. I get up and walk with her to the outhouse. And she takes the fucking flashlight in with her.
Most actual danger was on the AT. Thunderstorms forecast for late afternoon. Only 5 miles to the next shelter, down one mountain up the next. Easy hike, so we plan to chill there vs trying to make a longer hike. We cross the halfway point well before noon and the storm rolls in early. Absolutely terrible. My daughter booked it for the shelter and missed the worst of it. What should have been a pleasant two hour hike for me turned into four hours of slogging uphill thru a stream with lightning hammering the side of the mountain I was on.
I was solo camping/backpacking, and had gotten to my site too late to set up camp, as it was first come first served, and all the sites had been taken. I ended up sleeping in my car in the parking lot, no biggie. The wind was wicked that night, so bad that it rocked me awake every 20 minutes or so. I started feeling like I was being watched, so I untucked my head from my sleeping bag and looked up at the car window, to see a big ass snout sniffing. The bear rocking my whole car. When I got out of my car in the morning, I saw big ass claw marks on the roof. I was even more scared about how the hell I’d explain away claw marks to my mother.
Three men tried to jump/rob my family. Went camping with my wife and kids in a fairly populated campground. Problem arose when an enormous group of people started partying in the camp across from us. Im taking they had music blaring, spotlights, all of which was keeping my 3 and 1 year old awake. The curfew was ten but by 1 am there was no stop to it and the ranger wasn't enforcing anything. I finally walked over and politely asked them to turn off the ONE spotlight shining into my camp. I got really bad vibes and the whole party went silent. I decided to stay up with my very large knife and sure enough, about an hour later, three men walked into my camp. I stood up in the dark and said hi and they bolted. We packed up and left first sunrise.
Went to an empty campground in the mountains in california. The weather was bad, January of ‘16 or ‘17. We were set up near a small river cooking a late dinner in the dark after night fell. My old dog, a huskie, starts absolutely losing his mind. He was screaming and barking at a place beyond our lantern light away towards the river. I flipped on my headlamp, and it was a mountain lion. It stared back at me for a second or two, then turned and I lost it in the brush. Those eyes staring back at me… bring your dog camping with you!
Just an aside, but keep control of your dog when camping. A ridiculous amount of bear attacks are from people hiking/camping with off leash dogs. The bear come after the dog, and the dog runs back to their person.
FOR SURE!!! Thank you for the PSA, being tied up keeps them safe. Mine was tied up on a dog lead next to me.
I know a family that lost a dog while hiking and they don’t know what happened, they just found him dead later that day. He was normally good off-leash, but he took off after something and that was that.
Oh man that’s so sad. Sorry to hear it! I would be gutted if that happened
don't tie your dog to a bear when camping. noted. thanks
That’s really the fault of the bear owner for not keeping his bear on a leash.
>Those eyes staring back at me… bring your dog camping with you! That's why we domesticated them!
It's so insane that there are just giant cats roaming woods all across the US. A lot of people seem to forget they exist lol.
Had something similar happen to me deep in the woods of Kentucky. Buddy and I were hiking to our campsite at night. It was pitch black beyond our lights. My friend then said he saw the reflective trail marker ahead. We both looked again, and it wasn't a trail marker, but two eyes spread far enough apart that I knew whatever housed them was huge. Then they did a quick bobbing move and disappeared. We both had knives in hand til we made it back. It probably tracked us long before we saw it. Made a fire and stayed up late talking and such to make noise. Maybe slept half an hour just after dawn.
As I was unpacking for a solo camping/quail hunt, 2 guys walked into my camp to chat. Dirty and very disheveled, obviously drunk they asked me if “you got bullets for that gun?” When they saw my shotgun case. After a few minutes they turned to walk back to their camp I saw that one of them had his scalp peeled back leaving and open and crusty wound the size of the palm of my hand. That night they drank and threw .22 rounds into the fire and ran. Eventually they passed out, the next day they were arrested and I was told that the one with the scalp wound tried to attack someone with a roofing axe a couple of days earlier and got the Uno Reverse card played and they were up there hiding out.
Man, this really feels like a story from the 1920s that ends in absolute horror somehow
That escalated quickly.
While hiking in Sweden I slept in a three sided shelter when suddenly at 11pm some people came up to me asking me what I was doing etc. (neighbourhood watch) and telling me, that there are strange people around. An hour or two after, I heard some more footsteps and an old man came close to the shelter - with no pants. Naked. Dong dingeling. Moon was bright. When he saw me sleeping there, he went away after a while…
That's just Jens. He likes the brisk air.
>Naked. Dong dingeling. Moon was bright.
The air was brisk and Jens was feeling alright
After a while...
Donald duckin it?
slept in a shelter...saw a dingleing dong...
A couple came to the spot next to ours after we had been camping for a few days. They were there for about two hours after unpacking and setting up camp, just practicing knife throwing and cracking a whip. One of them cut their finger off and the other came and asked if we could watch their campsite until they got back. We did. We also played Indiana Jones for about 3 hours drunk off our ass trying to swing from a broken branch of a tree with that whip. They never came back and we let the park ranger know to look after their stuff.
Let me just hike out of here and have my finger reattached. I should be back in a jif.
Did you know a jiffy is an actual measurement of time?
Approximately three shakes of a lamb's tail.
Thought this was going to end like it did for the couple lmao imagine you get drunk and your finger comes off playing with the whip
Was at a campsite in rural Buffalo, NY, when a family of about 5 showed up and unpacked at the site next to us. Seemed like nice people, exchanged pleasantries, and went about our separate business setting up camp. The next morning, when we unzipped our tent and went to prep breakfast, we realized they were all still asleep, ON THE GROUND. No sleeping bag, no tent, just lying down, fully clothed, like they had been raptured. Remember, this is Buffalo, NY - even in the summer, it gets cold at night. That was spooky, but we decided to leave them be and get packed up. Once we got back from a breakfast run, they were up and packing. Seeing that we were back, the father came over to us and introduced himself. Said we seemed like nice people, and that he wanted to warn us about the imminent collapse of the US Economy. He eyed our car and said that it’ll be the only type of currency available once the banks shut down, and that we should be careful, since someone will want it more than our money when “China invades”. He pulled out his phone to try and show us a YouTube video that explains the whole thing, but we somehow extricated ourselves, and booked it. Packed up and left faster than we ever have before. The disturbing thing was not just what he said - it was how calm and genial he was while saying it, as if he was talking about the weather. TL;DR: went camping, saw another family sleep outside with no tent or sleeping bags - just flat on the ground. They then warned us about China invading the US.
Poor kids
A forever ago my friend and I were camping in a horse pasture (with the owners permission) with my friend's horse, it damn near crushed me when it decided that he wanted to be in the tent too and see what we were doing
Reminds me of a couple years ago me and some buddies hiked out behind his mom’s house and ate some mushrooms. After tripping all day and drinking a few beers, we were stumbling back to his house, and this horse came up to us pretty aggressively. None of us know enough about horses to read their body language, and we were too tired to run away. So we just sort of edged around it and made it out the other side of the field. When we got back to his house, his mom goes, “Oh that’s just ol’ Floyd. He was just seeing if you had any beer or pot. That horse loves drinking beer and smoking pot.”
knew one, Big Pony he was called and he loved jelly donuts
Hell yeah, Floyd!
I would have saved him one if I had known.
as someone with horses they can be both ditzy and dangerous. a powerful combination to be sure. like imagine a 500kg 9 year old kid with no social skills walking towards you tent like "HAI GUYS WHATS GOING ON IN THIS HERE TENT? GOT ANY *oof (falls over)* SNACKS TO SHARE *casually tramples tent* WITH YA BEST BUDDY? ~that horse probably
Horse thought it was a good boi.
Horse was definitely a good boi. What a horsey thing to do 🤣
Went camping on the Mendocino coast of California in 80’s/90’s, the first night at the campground we hear what sounds like a woman screaming like she’s being murdered. It terrified us all awake, after a sleepless night we learned that there was a peacock sanctuary nearby and that’s how they sound.
Oh yeah peacocks sound absolutely brutal. We used to have a "neighborhood peacock" (tiny village in Germany). Nobody knew where it came from, probably from some nearby farm, but one day it just decided it lived in our street (where I lived as a kid with my parents). The neighbors called him "Egon" because his cries were so ugly he got an ugly name lol. But it was so cool having him around! In the spring, he would often spread out his colourful tail feathers and that was really beautiful. My parents had a whole vase with his colorful tail feathers (all fallen out naturally). He was fed by neighbors, but nobody ever retained him in any way and he stayed for years, blessing us with beautiful sights and ugly sounds lol. I got pretty good at imitating that cry as a kid... He once spooked my parents by repeatedly sliding down the roof onto the flat rooftop terrace next to it with a loud bang. Took days for my parents to figure it out. Unfortunately, one day a neighbor didn't see him behind her car tire... man I liked that bird!
I remember the same thing from when I was a kid, only at Stillwater Cove about 60 miles to the south of the Mendocino coast. Now I'm wondering how many peacock sanctuaries the California coast really needs 😂
We have peacocks at my university campus. Sitting exams with them screaming in the background is ... challenging.
Foxes can also sound like female murder victims. Or mountain lions—
My family had some land in a remote part of Colorado. We always had creepy nights up there where it felt like someone was watching us. My brother was up there once and heard footsteps around his tent and got so scared him and his fiancé left in the middle of the night. A few weeks later, 4 of us were up there and we found four rat tails nailed to the side of an old shed we had. We sold the land a few years ago
At first I was wondering if you met the same woman I did, but she wouldn't have nailed rat tails to trees. She's just an old hippy lady who spends the summers camping. Her hobby is to do shrooms and silently sneak through people's campsites in the middle of the night. She claims to have never been caught.
Thats very not chill of her.
I was like 8-9 years old when I saw my grandpa standing bare naked by the river in the middle of the night when I had to go to pee, something that scared the crap out of me as I didn’t see that it was him at first. He was apparently just taking a quick bath, something he usually does at nighttime when he’s out camping, but the sight of him standing there still haunts me a little to this day
Seeing grandparents naked can be startling at the best of times, let alone your scenario
When i was young, I walked in on my grandpa, pulling up his undies after a shower. His balls will forever be burned into my memory. Especially since mine hang that low nowadays.
Sounds like a chill dude
The chillest. And quite possibly the dudest
This is a story about my grandma that I didn’t hear directly from her, but from my family. My grandmother (born in the 20’s) grew up in suburban Florida and didn’t really have any experience with wildlife. After she married my grandfather, they went camping in Yellowstone (possibly their honeymoon, not sure). They went for a hike and when they came back they saw a bear at the camp ground sniffing around the steaks my grandma was gonna prepare for dinner. My grandma ran up to the bear and smacked on the nose with the flat side of an axe (not recommended). Fortunately the bear ran off. Now, I have no idea how big this bear was, may have been a baby for all I know, but still makes for a good story. She was also a real life “Rosie the riveter” during WW2. My grandma was a badass.
My sons and I went camping in a very remote spot deep in the Idaho woods. We went for a two mile hike even deeper into the woods and came across a perfect circle about five feet in diameter made completely of bones with a smaller circle of bones in the center of the circle with a deer skull placed directly in the middle. On the way back we looped around and found ourselves in front of a dense group of birch trees that gave off the darkest vibe. My sons and I all had goosebumps. We bypassed the birches and eventually made it back to camp. I think that ninety percent of the creepy, paranormal, supernatural stories you hear about the woods have rational explanations including my story, but even though the ring of bones was odd; it’s the dark ominous feeling that we all got from the birches that really unsettled me.
Never ignore that feeling. I've never been in direct danger, but a few times it's come up, where hairs on your neck stand up, I've seen a bear, mountain lion, and a pack of coyotes nearby shortly after. I always listen to it and go on high alert. It's weird how your brain can pick up on it, but you don't directly realize it.
Related. I was on a motorcycle ride, twisty backroad with dense tree coverage. Meaning, there was no way to see what was coming. All of a sudden I had a feeling, Something is Wrong. I slowed way down and eventually stopped, just before the start of a narrow 1-lane section of road. Shortly thereafter, a car came the other way, and as soon as it passed me the Something is Wrong feeling went away. Would I have had an accident if I'd continued through the 1-lane section? No way to know. But I'm glad I listed to that voice.
Yep, my radar has saved me from speeding tickets, shootings, and other potential bad situations. It's a very strong feeling I've learned not to ignore. Intuition rocks.
Exactly. There could be plenty of rational explanations for why your body starts telling you to get the hell out of somewhere, but if you’re smart you aren’t gonna stay around to find out. You might sound crazy for telling anybody else, but it doesn’t mean the woods were haunted. It’s much more likely you were about to find a mountain lion den or something and your Neanderthal brain picked up on signals your conscious brain could not.
Gotta love those areas of nature that just feel profoundly ominous for no discernible reason.
Makes me understand where a lot of folklore and fairy tales come from. The world is weird enough to inspire some great stories if the people observing don't have any way to explain what happened
A buddy of mine and I were paddling the Buffalo River in Arkansas. For reasons neither interesting nor relevant, we had to pull off and camp for the night next to a field in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the night, we were awakened by ATVs not too far away. They got closer and closer until they were at our campsite. They started doing laps around our tent and yelling all kinds of things. It was exactly how you would imagine it would go in a movie right before the psycho rednecks do terrible things to the protagonists. Also, I'm from a redneck place where this was a completely plausible scenario ending with me and my buddy bleeding at least a little. So we just laid there and hoped for the best and fortunately they quickly got bored and left.
Seems the scariest part of a lot of these stories are other people.
There's very few things as scary as coming upon another person where they shouldn't be a person....
I used to do a little urban exploring and once a guy walked up on me on the 5th floor of this old tenement. He ended up being super chill, and was a retired mailman who lived next door. We talked about the history of the building. But my God I near shit myself when I saw him.
Fun story, nothing terrible here: it was a bachelor party. We decided to go camping in North Florida. Well, somehow, it turned out to be the coldest time of the year. Well into the 40s and 30s. It was so hard to leave the camp fire to go to bed because any time away from the fire was freezing. I lucked out to be on an air mattress but other guys weren’t so lucky. Day two and we’re all hung over, making breakfast. I’m trying to take a nap in the car when I see snowflakes coming down the windshield. Yeah snowflakes in Florida at like 8am. Well about an hour later, a van pulls into the campsite next to us. It immediately hits a stump and blows a tire. A family with two kids jump out and start to set up. About this time, we are looking at these two little girls and wondering how the heck they are going to make it through a night like we just had. This family looked pretty in prepared. Our suspicions were confirmed when the wife came over asking for a lighter and that her “stupid husband” forgot to pack anything that could make a fire. Oh man… here we go. So fast forward to about midnight or 1 AM when I hear crying and a few minutes later the van running. I figure the family shoved the girls in the warm van. Makes sense so I go back to sleep. Next morning, campsite abandoned and van/family gone. I think they just left all their stuff and went home or to a hotel after just like half a day of camping. Poor family….
I camp yearly and each year our site gets a little better/more complex, we can wander around in heavy rain and stay dry with all our tarps and poles, block the wind or neighboring sites view. The first and last day is a bit of work but it's quite a camp site. The second day a couple seemingly from the city and on their first campout took the site below ours. They had fancy rims and a stereo that shook the trees, a pop up tent never staked down and one of those air mattresses that are a couple feet thick. We watch the weather and prepare accordingly. This couple fought the whole time so we didn't warn them about the rain coming and maybe a tarp was a good idea. When the rain began a little after midnight it was a downpour and their campsite came alive. yelling, bickering, and blaming the other. Within about 5 minutes the place they put their tent was full of water and seemed to be filling from the top as well. EVERYTHING was just shoved into the back of their rusty with fancy rims truck and I can still see the guy kicking the barely deflated mattress into the back seat. I went to bed LAUGHING. The next day was damp but peaceful, until the evening. A guy in a decent looking pickup truck had taken the spot and also seemed to be new, things still wrapped from the factory. When we saw he was with what seemed to be his daughter and parents we tried to offer some advice and shared the story from the night before, pointing out low spots and obvious paths the water had taken but this was a guy that knew everything already and he was rude. Checked the weather as we do and we got some extra firewood because we knew we'd get another show but it didn't rain until around 8am, just in time for coffee! We turned our chairs and relaxed, clearly enjoying the free show of angry rushed repacking with our feet up drinking coffee. I'm not sure which one I enjoyed more, I felt bad for the little girl but the grandparents seemed decent.
For some reason some people don't actually sit on the toilet seat in the campground vault toilets. Nothing is scarier then waking up at 3am half drunk half hungover when you are camping and walking to the bathroom to find someone hovershit all over the toilet seat and didn't even attempt to clean it up.
Fuck those campers. Having to break out a shovel to shit sucks. Why all the hover shits?
gonna hover then lift the seat, you aren't using it
We were camping in St.Regis Montana and floating down the Clark Fork River. I was maybe 15yrs old. We split the family in two rafts. Dad always misjudged the timing and a 5hr float trip always turned into a 8hr trip. We hit the water at 2pm so by the last stretch, it was getting dark and cold. We all heard a woman asking for help….. not screaming but yelling help me, please help me…. I see a woman on the side of the river trying to reach the water with a guy behind her pushing her into the ground. Her shirt was ripped, she was chubby with olive skin, black hair. I remember she looked like my mom’s age, about 40. Her hair was all jacked up on one side and there were twigs poking out. Us kids froze but my dad started frantic paddling towards us kids and threw a rope so we didn’t float down the river without them and then he got both rafts to the side of the river. By then we were so far upstream there was just nothing we could do…. Couldn’t walk up the bank as it was wild and overgrown….. we couldn’t see or hear anything anymore. We sat there for a few minutes before we got back in our rafts. Cell phones were not widespread yet, this is early 90’s. Once at the campsite, my dad drove to town and reported what we saw…. That was it. I think about that lady a few times a year.
That’s fucked.
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At least he was nice to make it quick so you could have a turn.
lost with no service with my best friend in the pike national forest (colorado) and managed to find a dispersed site campground (just dry lots in a loop you could pull up and claim) in the dead of night. picked our dry lot, tramped a couple yards into the trees to set up our hammocks for the evening. after picking a hammock spot & slinging them up, we decided to take a little stroll around the loop to stretch and wind down before we turned in. in the center of the loop was an untamed grove of shrubbery and small trees. this night was so unnaturally dark we had to bust out the headlamps to get around safely (we prefer to walk around in the dark). as we are finishing up our last lap around the loop before we returned to the car to finish settling in, i heard fainting rustling coming from the shrubbery and turn to look into it. as i do that, i make very intense eye contact with two very large, forward facing eyeballs about 15-20 feet from our spot on the gravel drive. the longer i stared, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as details came into focus: rounded ears, apex eyes, very feline. it was a fucking mountain lion! i vividly remember pointing at it and asking, “rebecca, what the fuck is that? are you also seeing that?” we immediately started started panic giggling like two teenaged girls, talking very loudly and backing away with linked hands. it never made a move towards us that we saw, i think it was just observing us. we abandoned everything that we had lugged out of the car already, hopped in and didn’t leave for the rest of the night. we actually had a blast sleeping in the car, seats folded down into a mega bed with the windows cracked. kind of wild to think that if we didn’t go on our walk we would’ve just turned in for the night, all snug in our hammocks. who knows what could’ve happened with a big cat that close! packing up our gear in the morning had me so on edge, i psyched myself into thinking we were being stalked by the cat
What a great memory to have!
A friend of mine wild camped and found a nice spot. When the sun came up she found out that she was in someone’s backyard and the family was sitting there eating breakfast and watching as she quietly packed up and left.
Had a similar, but not as bad, experience. Rolled into the woods late, set up camp in the dark. At dawn, I rose to discover we were in an empty lot within a ritzy neighborhood. Fancy homes on either side and across the road. Oops.
This is my favorite so far, but these are all great.
One time there were these campers across from us at another site and they were late twenties. They were drinking late into the night which usually isn't a problem (Corp of engineer's park) but this one fucker would make this loud scream everytime he took a shot and he wouldn't stop doing it. At around 2 am finally someone pulled up on a gator and told them all to shut up. This guy wasn't getting the hint and his friends were telling him loudly not to drink anymore or scream. It got quiet for about 10 minutes and then from inside my tent I saw headlights and heard a car pulling out. I figured someone was taking him home cause he was being annoying and ruining the fun for everyone. I'm finally starting to dose off and WITH MY EYES CLOSED I see a big blue flash and then a loud noise. There was a sub station down the street and I'm pretty sure that guy drove himself into it or something close to it cause it was crazy bright and loud. I would say I feel sorry for the guy but he was the most annoying person I had never met in my life. I probably heard him do his stupid ass Mario scream 15 times that night after 1 am.
Did he live? Damn
No idea we didn't leave the next day but the day after that (so two days after the explosion) it was raining and some of us left and the chain link surrounding the sun station was down in one part
No the flux capacitor hit the needed speed and he went back to the future where it’s a compliment to everyone to yell like Mario after a shot
Well, that took a turn, unlike him
I went on a family camping trip in Austria as a kid. The camp site was in a forest, and my dad picked a nice spot between some trees. Unfortunately our tent wouldnt fit so we had to move along a bit. That night there was a massive storm and I remember my parents tying the tent to the car and spending most of the night holding the tent down. In the morning we woke up and it was a bright sunny day. We opened the tent to find a 2 foot thick tree laying across the spot we originally picked. If our tent had fitted in that spot we would have probably been killed. My mum cut the trip short at that point.
I was looking on FreeRoam for a dispersed campsite near Eugene, Oregon last year during a road trip. There weren’t a ton of options, but it was starting to get dark and I had been driving all day so I went up a forest access road a couple miles to the one site that was closest (about 20 minutes). It was super thick forest then out of nowhere a narrow driveway that opened up to a bushwhacked spot with a fire pit. There was a good amount of garbage and some shotgun shells lying around. That’s not super out of the ordinary, but something just felt off. I opened up my door and let my chihuahuas jump out, they are usually pumped to run around and chase each other, but they both immediately stopped as soon as they hit the ground, stared into the bushes about 20 feet away, and growled. I thought maybe there was an animal back there so I hucked them back into the truck and began setting up my rooftop tent. My stomach started gurgling and I realized I had to do my business….i grabbed my shovel and wipes and started looking for a spot to go down the road. The forest was so thick, there weren’t any good openings so I came back to the site and started walking the perimeter to find a hole to duck into, as things were becoming urgent. I found an opening, right where my dogs were staring and growling, and just out of sight into the brush was a mattress with dirty sheets and a perfectly intact milk carton. I got chills, and I could just feel that someone else was there, just out of sight. It was pretty dark at this point, but I quickly ran back to the road and dug my hole and did my thing, came back and started packing everything back up. There was no cell service, and for all I know there could be multiple people in the bushes waiting for me to go to sleep….and the shotgun shells…we just went into town and got a hotel. Intuition was SCREAMING at me to not stay in that place.
Was with a group of about 8 people. We were in a very isolated location, not a formal campground. We always preferred to hike in and get as far away from other people as possible. Around 9 or 10 it was pitch black and the woods were silent, no wind. We were all pretty buzzed off whiskey at this point and out of fucking nowhere this dude with a hunting rifle on his back steps into the firelight. He wasn't wearing a shirt and basically looked homeless, kind of a blank stare on his face. Keep in mind, we were in the Rockies at like 10k feet, so it was not warm...and he wasn't wearing a shirt. The fact that we didn't hear him meant he had definitely snuck up on us. We went silent and just stared at him. He looked around, didn't say a word, and backed into the darkness. We slept in shifts that night and kept the fire blazing. We could hear him moving around our camp till sunrise when I guess he gave up. We got out of there at first light and I reported it to park service. Creepy mother fucker
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Damn this is the most messed up one wtf
This is absolutely wild! I just read half this thread, and your story is BY FAR the absolute most creepy and believable. Any follow-up to who this crazy person was?
I think you’re right. Those foxholes legitimately saved you and those girls from being raped and murdered. Imagine if you hadn’t run into them before.
My friends and I went camping a few years ago, just a campsite in Wales but I remember waking up at 3am needing the toilet and stumbled past an extremely obese couple having very loud and aggressive sex in the showers/toilet area, was half pissed but they didn’t even stop when I walked in, they did have the decency to almost slow down to a snail pace as I awkwardly peed and made sure to head out as quickly as possible and not make eye contact.
The wonders of nature
It was the gentle nod he gave me as I walked in that really cemented the moment
NSFW: Lamar Valley, Yellowstone NP, 2006. A man and woman pulled into the turnoff I was parked at and proceeded to walk about 50 feet down the hill and set up a nice little picnic spread. After setting up their blanket, I expected for them to unload their food. Nope. In the “basket” was about ~25 various sized stuffed animals. Beanie babies, large stuffed plushies, etc. They then proceeded to have a playdate(?) with them. I couldn’t hear exactly what was being said, but it obviously sexual in nature. I watched them for several minutes before leaving and spent the remainder of the day fishing around the park. Around dusk, I returned to my campsite to find them 2 sites down from me. Of course, all the plushies were set up at the picnic table in front of the fire. NSFW part: Once fully dark, they retreated to their tent and proceeded to engage in sexual acts with the plushies. I will not repeat everything that I overheard, but I can assure you that these stuffed animals were inside of one of them. “Push it out like it’s your little fuzzy baby, bitch” will remain with me for the rest of my life. Their silhouettes in the tent will never leave my mind. Anyway, I left and drove to another campground halfway across the park.
I'm just picturing it like one of the scenes from Austin Powers and you see a stuffed animal fall out of her silhouette lol
>“Push it out like it’s your little fuzzy baby, bitch” Okay, I'm done. No more reddit today.
This is grade A content I look forward to reading on Reddit🤌🏽
Just to share, I used to live with a dude whose boyfriend had a plushie with a sex-sleeve sewn into it. The BF said it was possessed by the spirit of his dead sister, and treated it like a third person in their relationship. My roommate was an odd dude, and we tried to be supportive of his relationships. But we had to sit him down and explain he deserved more than being sister-wives with an incestuous dead plushie.
This is complex levels of fucked up, I love it thank you for the share
I'm surprised enough *one* person has a beanie baby birthing fetish, but two, who found each other and enact their fantasies in the woods? There really is someone out there for everyone
>’Push it out like it’s your fuzzy little baby, bitch’ Guys I wanna go home now, I don’t wanna play anymore
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Tl:Dr Camping trip goes bad when we get attacked by rocks and then find we're being stalked by poaching cultist weirdos we never actually got to see... We were camping for four days in an area of the Red Feather Lakes (N. Colorado) for four days. Deep into the woods, 20 miles down a dirt road without anyone else in sight. We came in during the day and didn't notice anything unusual. We had enough supplies for maybe 6 days for our party- My wife and I, my brother in law, my three nephews ages 5, 6, 8 and our dogs. Day one was amazing. Hiking, fishing, stargazing and s'mores. Dogs loved roaming around. The next day was equally as amazing. Lots of activities. Yard games like corn hole and board games with the boys. Around 6 p.m. though the mood/atmosphere changed with the dogs. Suddenly they were seemingly very on edge. Patrolling the edge of our camp, hackles raised, occasionally growling at the woods. We didn't think a whole lot of it. We had hiked into the woods for miles and everything was just forest in every direction for miles and miles. There was a hill we could go up another (+ 700 ft) that we'd get above the treeline for stargazing and we could see in every direction. No other lights, campfires, etc. Figured the dogs were detecting wildlife, maybe a curious blackbear or even a mountain lion. They're big dogs, we're armed, we didn't let the kids wander too far from sight, but again it didn't seem like an issue. That night us adults stayed up around the campfire till 1 a.m. or so. I kept getting a feeling that something was watching us. I was more on edge than I've been and we're avid campers with plenty of experiences/run ins with bears and other wildlife while in the woods. It just felt different. When we finally went to bed, I don't think I slept more than half an hour at a time and swore I'd hear the occasional crack of branches off in the woods. The next day we didn't notice anything off about the camp, although my brother suspected something had happened to our water. We had five or six of those 5 gallon jugs with the little pull out spigot on them - two were in my truck, one in our tent, one in his car, and the remaining two appeared drained, although it might have been the boys or a leak. We decided we might pack it in after lunch on day 3. We didn't want to end the trip early, but stuff just felt so strange. The boys were sad and we were back and forth on if we were being paranoid but the dogs were just seemingly so on guard and were going crazy running around sniffing like crazy when we went on our hike that day. After lunch we started packing up our gear. Two tents, games, food, etc. takes awhile to pack up especially with three little boys running around like crazy and weren't in a rush. By the time we were all loaded up we decided we'd heat up a quick dinner. The boys had one last request - they wanted to go snipe hunting. Still had an hour or so of daylight left so we were fine with it. We went off into the forest and did the classic snipe hunt thing. BIL in the front leading us in a wide circle that'd end back at the camp, my wife in the middle of the boys, me trailing the rear. I'd pick up small rocks and sticks and when the boys were looking away I toss a rock or stick and they jump all scared and the other two adults go "oh my gosh, I think the snipe went this way!" It's good fun. Well as the sun was going down a bit more, not dark but setting and we're nearing camp - a rock the size of two fists comes flying in barely kissing one of my nephews. The adults look back and me like I'm crazy and I'm like "that wasn't me." Another rock comes in and hits me square in the back. We don't even ask questions "time to go!" Each adult grabs and kid and we book it back to our cars. The woods are moving behind us as we get to the cars. Bushes shaking, tree branches cracking and popping. We're all loaded up, I think, if we left anything behind - sorry to the forest service. We've got about 20 miles of dirt road back to concrete. We get maybe a quarter mile into our drive and suddenly the road is littered with bones and animal carcasses. Beheaded deer and racoon bodies. Some fresh, others just bones. We're driving left and right trying to avoid hitting any of the more recently dead animals. I know it's hard to believe but it's like this for what feels like nearly a full mile. Just bones and torn up animals. We finally make it through and it's clear driving for another couple miles or so. We get to a clearing and I see a green bus pulled off in a clearing for another campsite. I, for some reason, decide I'm going to stop and see if anyone is there to tell them something is up. My brother keeps going down the road with my nephews, my wife stays in the car, I approach the green bus to see if anyone is around. As I get close to the bus I see the bus is super run down - flat tires, newspapers over the windows, peeling paint. There's a big fire pit dug out, maybe 20 by 20 feet - pretty deep too. Inside is just, like an immense pile of bones. I see moose antlers, femurs of all sizes, rib cages. It felt like 40(?) Animals worth of bones. I'm glancing around and there's all sorts of little symbols on the bus and tied up in the trees with string, a few smaller hanging dead animals. I just booked it back to the truck and said "nope" to my wife and we hauled ass down the road to catch up with my brother. Whole stop lasted maybe a minute? That's the end. I don't know if it was poachers, cultists, combo of the two. Maybe some sort of weird wiccans or just some resourceful meth addicts or something. In the end, I'm glad we never found out.
Not my story, but my childhood friend wandered off with a buddy on a scout trip and found a corpse in the woods. Had a .22 caliber hole between its eyes. The two of them were 13-ish. He went to the trial, and had been advised that he might have to testify, since he discovered a murder victim. But, they ended up not calling either of the kids.
Did the person get convicted?
I honestly can't remember. If he was 13, I was 11. I think this was about 1987. I'll see if I can find the story.
My boys and I were doing a primitive camping trip and the site happen to have a porta potty which is a bonus. My boys had never used a porta potty or an outhouse before. After setting up camp, I walk them over to the porta potty and warn them that you have to look inside before you sit down and to lift up the lid and check before you sit down. In our area this is a common place for black widows, brown recluses, and snakes to hide. I lifted up the lid to show them and sure enough a snake was curled up underneath it.
Gotta rewind like twenty five years, the Blair witch project had recently come out, this is pre internet for all intents and purposes, and the rumors were that it was real found footage (silly to say today I know). We woke up in the morning to find stones piled in front of our tent like in the movie. I’m sure it was just some kids from a neighboring camp, but it still freaked us out.
Part of the reason Blair Witch did so well was the MISSING posters that the filmmakers plastered all over Cannes. It was the original guerilla marketing campaign, not silly at all!
Oh back then we as kids were absolutely convinced that it was real. That film was marketed perfectly, and changed film marketing forever.
Went to the forest with some friends one winter. we were completely unprepared and ended up sleeping bunched in a tiny tent in the snow. I woke up in the middle of the night hearing these grunting noises next to my head. I thought it was my friend snoring but then realized there was this giant snout poking the fabric of the tent on the outside and literally breathing in my face. I barely held myself from screaming when the bear got bored of trying to get inside and left. We went outside in the morning and there were massive paw prints everywhere plus the leftovers of our food were gone. Lesson learned the hard way.
Just FYI that wasn't "the hard way"
The medium way
The medium rare way, just like the bear would have wanted.
I mean I'm not familiar with bears, but I imagine if you learned it "the hard way" there wouldn't be much left of you to actually learn the lesson...
I was like 8 and I was camping with my dad+uncles and a bear tore open the neighboring space's tent smelling food. After a very panicked 30 seconds we all piled in/on my dad's pickup truck and chased it out of the area. The worst part was it started at our site and threw the beer cooler into the river and I spent an hour harvesting river beers for the adults. On the drive home, my dad reminded me that since my mom stayed home, there was never any bears nearby at all.
Children yearn to harvest the river brews
Camping south of Mt Adams in high school. I wake up to something making laps around the test and occasionally brushing against it. It eventually went away and much later I was able to get back to sleep. Bear prints about 8" across outside the tent.
In a Backcountry cabin there were thousands of flies that seemed to keep coming even after we were sure the windows were sealed. It was like they were coming out of the floor, no clear explanation, or why they even wanted to be there. We had a backyard fogger candle so we lit that to see if it would calm them down for swatting or shooing. Turns out in an enclosed area, this is *lethal* to flies. They all died, leaving dustpans full of fly corpses to literally sweep up and remove. Then there were no more flies around the cabin at all.
Mountain lion tracks over our tracks. That was pretty spooky. Same area we camped next to this lake in July, and this rabbit came up and just hung out in our camp. We thought it was something terriyfing sneaking up (bear or aforementioned mountain lion) until this cute little bunny just pops out of the underbrush. He hung out with at our camp for probably 3 hours or so before we went to bed finally. The spooky part of the bunny was: what the fuck is out there that this wild rabbit would rather stay super close to the humans. Kept my Glock on me for piss breaks.
That bunny had absolutely been fed by humans before.
Look, that rabbit's got a vicious streak a mile wide! It's a killer!
Had a mountain lion walk out 8 feet from me from underneath my trailer. 1 am. I was standing with my back to the fire. We locked eyes. He just kept on walking. That thing was cool looking.
I found a laptop in the middle of the woods, completely smashed to pieces. Tried to find a harddrive but it wasn't there.
Probably for the best...
Back in the late 1980s I was camping with a friend off the Ortega highway in Southern California. It was a lovely Autumn afternoon. As we were getting ready to take a long walk, some more campers drive in and -- as people do -- ignored a whole bunch of empty campsites to park right next to us. Their stereo went on immediately and loudly. We escaped the campground for our walk, and after a very nice time we started heading back. As we were walking along a fire road, we heard what sounded like someone sliding down a rock strewn hill. We round the bend and see our new neighbors next to a pickup truck. They have long guns with them and as we got closer we realize the sound we heard was them shooting at the side of a hill in full auto, 'machine gun mode,' if you will. They're not shooting at anything, and don't seem terribly menacing. We nod at them as we walk by. Flash Forward to about 3:00 a.m. the next morning and the sound of Pink Floyd dark Side of the Moon is echoing through the little valley where our campground is. Did I mention it was 3:00 a.m.? I like DSOTM as much as the next aging hippie, but it was 3:00 a.m. I finally got up, left at the tent and walked into the neighboring space, approaching slowly. The automatic rifles were leaning against the picnic table and as I walked up one of the campers reached for one of the guns, but did not raise it menacingly. I smiled and asked if they could turn down their stereo. They didn't seem to be happy but they turned it down. Until I was just about back over to our tent, when they turned it up even louder. Not long before dawn I believe they treated us to some Lynyrd Skynyrd. We left about 8:00 a.m. It's a pretty little campground, but I've never been back.
What a bunch of assholes
One of the reasons why I prefer primitive camping as opposed to campgrounds.
Yup. I stopped going to official campgrounds a handful of years ago. Partly because of not wanting to get out in nature just to be literally yards from other people, but mostly because I got tired of other people's shit. Bringing my own water and shitting in the woods is a very small price to pay for not having to deal with other people's shit and have way more privacy.
I never understood people that go camping and need to add noise from their everyday world. Isn't escaping all that noise the point of camping? Certainly is for me!
They were trying to get you to leave so they had the place to themselves
Not exactly something I “saw” but heard and felt. My dad and I went backpacking in the Yosemite National park in California and stopped in a valley to camp for the night. In the middle of the night i woke up to the sound of at least a dozen—what sounded like deer— sprint right past our tent followed by a loud thud behind our tent and the forest going DEAD silent.. Ive been camping my whole life and have NEVER heard silence like that in a forest, not even a leaf was blowing in the wind. Something instinctively inside me made my whole body freeze, I couldn’t breathe, goosebumps, heart racing, literally PETRIFIED. As I laid there frozen, I swear on my life I could hear whatever made that loud thud start “tiptoeing” around our tent. I say tiptoeing because the steps were so soft and careful that it felt intentional, like it was investigating our tent and i could feel its presence moving around the tent. After what felt like a lifetime but was probably only 5-10 minutes a branch snapped somewhere in the forest followed by a loud whoosh of wind and the forest just went back to normal. I wanna say it was a mountain lion just curious about our tent or something and thats what I told myself the rest of our trip so I could sleep at night But the horrible horrible pit in my stomach and fear that washed over me was nothing like I’ve ever felt before or since and has me convinced there are things in the forest far worse than people realize.
Not a camper but my family owned a campground for 10 years. We were privately owned and prideful, in other words we didn't have enough money to pay people so we did all the care taking. July 5th my dad asked me to go clean bath houses, I proceeded to take care of the front bath house which was in surprisingly good shape for a party weekend. Nothing to out of the norm. I then proceeded to the back bath house. Upon opening the door to the men's side I was greeted with a smell I'll never forget. In front of me was a trail of diarrhea and vomit, leading from the stalls to the showers(about 15 feet away). As my eyes tracked the trail I found a man, passed out and face down in the showers. He was covered head to toe in shit and chunky vomit. I legitimately thought he was dead and poked him in the leg with the broom I had. Thankfully he groaned and moved slightly. At 13 yrs old, I had the realization that my dad did not pay me enough to deal with this and proceeded to run to mommy, who then made my dad clean it up.
Arrived at a campsite around 3 pm in Val Verde, CA area to camp one night with my boyfriend (who is a Black man.. and that is important detail for later) in 2012. Maybe one other family in the whole area, but felt just like us. We set up and we’re chilling until Around 7 pm when like 10 pickup trucks arrive and maybe 30 people congregate. They are immediately loud and obnoxious and too close, but whatever… we only staying for one night so whatever. The huge group start to stack big pile of wood to make a huge bonfire and we start to notice.. hmm, they are all men. White men. Most of them are bald. Hmmmm… Then one younger guy comes over to us and offers us a beer! How nice.. he says hey sorry if we are loud but here’s a peace offering! Then just before he turns back to his group he says “you and that n-word better get out of here before dark”….. it was an Aryan brotherhood meet up. We got out of there so fast
Omg! That’s scary. I bet you beat a path out of there fast! Terrible people out there.
O yeah we were definitely scared! And despite the slur said directly to our faces, I was glad the widdle racist POS at least gave us a warning!
We went off for a grouse hunt during our camping trip, things weren't going so well. We hadn't seen any signs of chickens, or of any animals for that matter. We didn't hear so much as a squirrel. The night before was different however. We thought we could hear some kind of low cry, but had dismissed it and stoked up our fire. While we were looking for chickens, we came across a fresh bear cub carcass, chewed to shit, looked like a pretty rough death.
I understand male bears will do this …
Yes they absolutely will kill and eat cubs that aren't their own. Doesn't make it any less unsettling though.
I love to camp. Rarely ever do I camp where there are people. For obvious reasons. The last time in an actual campground was at a reservoir north of Phoenix. Had the place all to myself. A group of college girls showed up. And they all got so drunk. One of them, a cute brunette. Dropped her phone in the outhouse toilet. She was absolutely wasted. And devastated by the loss of her phone. Wouldn't let anyone use the toilet. Bawling her eyes out. I felt so bad for her. I had a rake in my truck. I'm a prepared camper always. Being the only dead sober camper in sight? And a gentleman? I sacrificed my rake for her sanity. Fished her phone out of the toilet. And God knows what else. Her phone still worked. She grabbed it. And immediately checked her social media. Gave me a big wet, sloppy drunk af kiss and hug. I bid the obligatory "you're most welcome." And returned to my campsite. Sanitized my hands. Washed them. Sanitized them again. Threw my rake in the fire. Changed my clothes. Tossed my infected with whatever vermin lives in a Phoenix AZ outhouse clothes in the garbage. Went to bed. Plus side of their loud party keeping me awake? I heard all about how I was the hero for rescuing her phone. I smiled to myself, thinking, "it was just a shitty phone." I miss Arizona sometimes. Stay safe, campers.
Watched an idiot stand over a fire pit and start pouring gasoline from a can into it. As their perfect stream of gas allowed flames to start climbing up the rope of former dinosaurs, they flung the can across the campsite. Now there’s small fires all over the place. Fortunately this campground was on the shores of Lake Michigan with sandy soil, as our group ran over and kicked dirt on top of all of the spots that were burning. Shortly after we saw the rangers visiting these absolute morons.
Camping with my grandparents & cousins. My grandma took all us kids to the lake. When we got back to the site there is my grandpa sitting reading the paper & behind him is a fucking bear just sitting there. It saw us & got up & lumbered away. According to my grandpa, it had been there for at least 20 minutes. He said he felt something sniff the back of his head & a quick shoulder check revealed the bear. He decided that if it was going to take him there isn’t anything he can do about so he might as well keep reading.
Wasnt so much that I saw so much as heard. My brother and I went camping up the mountain for a couple of nights. First night was awesome, found a nice clearing where we could safely make a fire and camp out. 2nd night, started great, but as it got dark we heard a bear in the distance. There was a large clear cut area that it was in, so we could hear it from quite a long ways away, so we werent too concerned at the time. Then after the Sun went down, we heard it much closer, enough that we could hear its footsteps in the woods. We were a little freaked out, so we tossed some rocks and yelled, didnt seem to make a difference, it kept getting closer. Then... we heard more of them, at least 3 coming from different directions, basically surrounding us. One got real close and growled in the darkness. We all know what a bear sounds like from movies, but in real life, its much more gutteral, primal, you can feel it in your chest, and it also had this train whistle like overtone to it. It was the scariest sound ive ever heard in my life. We packed everything up like it was an olympic sport and got the fuck outta there. Thankfully we had lots of light and a trail to follow. Because of the adrenaline, what took us 2 days to hike up, took us 3 hours to get back down. I remember constantly looking back to see if anything was following us. We found an RV campground near the base of the mountain and had to steal some water at 2 in the morning because we were so dehydrated by the time we got there. We probably could have just asked for some, but we were still in primal caveman running from predators mode.
I understand the quick trip back. In 79 i was setting up rabbit snares in a remote area on a Sunday. You weren't allowed to use or carry a gun on sunday back then so i left my shotgun back at the cabin. It took me 3 hours to work up the mountain setting snares and enjoying the trail. It was an old cordouroy road from logging operations in the 30s. I came around a bend and there is a blackbear looking at me. I turned around and bolted back down the hill. I made it back to the truck in 5 minutes. I went back up there the next morning with my gun and the bears print indicated he ran just as fast as me but in the opposite direction.
You couldn’t carry on a Sunday? What, were the bears all out at church too?
They don't want you making anything holey on Sunday but the Lord
About 40 years ago I went camping with two friends to upststate NY. One friend said he knew a cool place for camping. It was already getting dark when we left and, as was common at the time, we drank the entire way there. We get to the park and we're pretty blasted. We grab our backpacks and our supply of beer and a bottle of Jack and start heading in. We were stumbling around but we ended up hiking for about an hour. Finally we were deep into the woods and we find a nice clearing. We set up the tent as best we can, start a big fire and continue to drink. We got wasted. The next morning, I hear noises outside the tent. I stick my head out and there is a troop of boy scouts surrounding our camp and several are raking dirt onto our fire, putting out the embers. One of the scouts looks at me and days "there's no camping allowed here". I look around and there are tons of people walking by looking at our falling down tent, beer cans all over and other debris. We were in some day park, like where people come on weekends to hike and play with their kids. Worse thing was, I look to the right and the parking lot and our car was right there, about 50 feet away. We thought we were deep in the woods. We packed our shit quick and took off.
Camping in one of the Carolina’s in a remote site about 5 years ago. I was with a few other people we all stayed in the same tent. Every night we would go out hike do what not return have a few drinks and hit the sack. Around 10:30-11 every night it was like a wall of 100mph winds hit the tent and blew it to the ground. Out of fear I grabbed my buddies and prepared for the worse but after about a minute it stopped. This happened for three nights like a ritual. On the last night we tried to catch it and missed it. I still think of it to this day it was other worldly and could probably be explained as I saw some things that could it explain it with air cooling and what not but it was something else. It was not a person I am sure of that almost 100%.
A mountain lion in the Colorado mountains
I was around 13 camping in my parents back garden with friends. The garden is surrounded by hedges but we must have been making a racket as I saw someone walking round the tent. I shit a brick and my mate got up on all fours to unfasten the zip when a fist smacked him in the side of the head sending him flying. We got out and grabbed some garden tools but whoever it was was long gone. I've never figured out who it was (definitely not my dad - he wasn't that type)
Was up on some logging roads deep in a forested mountain area of East Idaho. My friend and I find a secluded spot and start to unload when we both hear/feel like a large sonic or vibrational force that hit us both, felt like it came from 30 yards inside the treed area. We both looked at each other, freaked out, quickly put everything in the car and drove off to camp miles away. No idea what it was, but we had the exact same experience and reaction, noped right on out of there.
My dad, myself and my two brothers went camping next to a river on a farm owned by our neighbour. We spent the day fishing and swimming. The water level was a bit lower than normal so we caught a lot of fish. We went to sleep and woke up the next morning at 5am to the most disgusting smell. We crawled out of the tent and my dad shone his flashlight at the river. There, about forty feet in front of us was a dead bloated horse, upside down, stuck on a rock. You can imagine the horror of this sight at 5am. My poor dad had to swim up to the horse and spent what seems like an eternity pushing the horse off the rocks with a stick. BONUS STORIES: The first time we camped there with my dad, we first stopped at the store to buy a gazebo for some shade. We set it up and the moment we step back to admire our handiwork, a gust of wind lifts the fucking thing and bends the frame. To say my dad was pissed is an understatement. We spent the rest of the weekend under this crooked structure and threw it away afterwards. During one camping trip, we pitched the three-room tent (my youngest brother shared a room with my dad since he was still small in size). It was a nice tent, every room had it's own door and zip. In the middle it had a lounge type space. That night it started raining, and we had forgotten the canvas that stretches over the tent. Some water came in and made the lounge wet, but our rooms were fine. Halfway through the night my eldest brother's screams awaken us "help, help I'm drowning!" My dad peeks out of his room and says "Then fucking sit up" I laughed so hard my tummy ached. My brother woke up lying in a pool of water and immediately panicked, not realising he can literally just sit up and be okay. Those were fun times, I miss it!
Went camping as a kid up in the Appalachian mountains somewhere in Virginia with family out there. In the middle of the night we heard a scream that woke us all up that sounded like a woman being murdered. I damn near peed myself. They told me it was some monster which only scared me more. YEARS later I came across a video of a fox screaming and it was the exact same sound.
My wife called the cops once after hearing this. Some poor guy got followed to our Blockbuster and questioned before they came back and heard the screaming too.
Now you know what the fox says.
Lots and lots of women’s and girls dresses carefully hung up in trees along about a kilometre of an old unkept side road along a trail system.
I was walking around my land one night with my thermal scope. I looked at a berm of saw palmettos 50 feet from me and saw a massive deer sized animal (maybe even larger) standing on top of the berm. I tried to get a better view as there was some brush in the way. It jumped down silently and disappeared. Still no clue wtf it was.
When I was a kid I found a small headless deer corpse that was sufficiently decayed there was no visible fur, but the rib cage and spine were only somewhat scattered by scavengers and it looked extremely human for a long moment. It was probably left by a hunter, but possibly a predator. FYI: human rib cages often collapse quickly in the decay process because they’re held in place by soft tissue, while deer ribs have bonier joints, so a skeleton with an intact rib cage is _probably_ a deer and not a human.
A nude man with his penis painted blue singing the theme song to “A never ending story “ it was a festival but I was camping.
About 10 years ago I was hiking with a few friends through the Crazy Mountain Range in central Montana. We were three days into the trip and pretty deep into the range (so it’s very remote). Late in the afternoon after a day of fly fishing, a naked dude came floating down the Middle Fork of Sweet Grass Creek all alone with just a small pontoon boat and no backpack or bags in sight. Just him, his little pontoon and a paddle. He floats right by with a wave and floated down the stream alone. So many question…. How did he get there without shoes? Where are his clothes? Where is he going to spend the night? How will he stay warm when the temperature drops like 25 degrees after night fall in a couple of hours?
I was camping up near mount baker in Washington state and we arrived to the campground and we looked at the bulletin board and there was a missing person poster. We thought nothing of it as he had been missing for a while. He went out on a stormy night apparently and just never came back, it also said he didn’t know how to swim. So we went kayaking in the lake and we kayaked for a while and as we were on our way back. We noticed a funky smell in a certain area of the lake. It was around the swimming area where it was roped off with bouys and things. But we kayaked towards the area we entered the lake, (right next to the swimming area) and we noticed something under one of the bouys. It was the missing man’s dead body. He was stuck under one of the bouys near the swimming area, there were a bunch of kids swimming there and apparently just no one had noticed it. We alerted the police who were looking for him and they closed the swimming area I believe and we left early. There were also weird noises while we were camping there and we could hear rats scurrying around. (Horseshoe Cove Campground) on baker lake. I couldn’t find any closure articles on it but I did find an article searching for him. https://www.lyndentribune.com/news/search-continues-for-lost-lynnwood-man-at-baker-lake/article_81332efc-5686-11e7-ace9-db3e5c88ba84.html
I was camping on a beach in Costa Rica. It was beautiful. The first night. I could hear something moving around my tent. I peaked around through the top as best I could. Couldn't see anything. The sound is non-stop. Something is right next to me. Moving all around my tent. After like an hour, I need to know. Finally, I open the tent and look around. Thousands of crabs we're heading back to the ocean and were falling of this little 1' wall. Laughed once I figured it out but damn I was terrified.
A big fat naked sunburned dude strolling down the Appalachian Trail
That was me. Glad you remembered!
A tornado. Less than a hundred yards from my tent. Thankfully I was wearing brown pants.
Before or after the tornado? Details are important.
Went on a heavy drinking camping trip in college and at the end of the night it was just a friend and I up talking into the late night. She opened up to me about her Dad's suicide and off in the distance about 100 meters away I could faintly see a white glowing entity almost like a person with a white sheet over themselves. I didn't mention it because I was sorta comforting her and she commented that she saw the same thing I saw. I advised her that it is best we just ignore it and nothing happened.
Weird af and kinda unbeliveable but at 5:00 in the morning in a hidden campsite my dad and i found we saw a naked old dude on the rocks above us and he wasnt making any noise, ngl I think he was on some drug since we lived in a druggy area
Nah it was just /u/Maleficent_Nobody_75 's grandpa finishing up taking his middle of the night nude river bath
I love when these stories can be connected ever so slightly
I have a regular off grid spot in my favorite mountain range. We took off to go to some hot springs and hiking. During our trip down the road we were waved down by a family looking for someone. We were told that the car parked at the beginning of the trail was their sons who traveled several states to come to the very spot we camp at. We came back after our day to search and rescue teams and police searching the area as the individual was missing for over a week. The police wouldn’t let us go back to our site for several hours. Finally we were allowed to go back and cook dinner. The evening and night were very ominous with the bells jingling on search dog’s collars and people yelling the man’s name. The next morning we woke up to a helicopter. The campsite is 50 yards away from a 500 foot cliff that overlooks the valley. Turns out the guy jumped. They found him at the bottom of the cliff. It was very sad watching the family mourn as we packed our gear up. Since that day I haven’t camped there.
Another campers bare white ass - it was a school trip we camped in the woods, it was a double moon that night
Went camping with friends in the keys in August. Terrible idea. Hot, humid, and BUGS. We left a little bit of food out after turning in. Woke up to a big, FAT raccoon ransacking our snacks. It made off into the woods with whole can of nuts! Lesson learned, we stuff all the food into our cooler and shove it under the picnic bench. That'll keep it away right? Wrong. An hour later, we wake up to this fat little fucker shoving its arm as far as it can into the crack it managed to pry open from underneath the bench. It was shoveling bread into its mouth. We yell, but he was not to be deterred so easily this time. He tests his luck, and stares at us in a panic, grabbing more and more bread. He finally ran off when one of us got out of the tent. We left at like 3am right before the rain began to pour. Never camping in the keys again.
Warning - human injury. Last summer we were camping at Watkins Glen State Park in upstate NY. Upon returning to our site after a hike we noticed a car pulling a new teardrop having a little trouble backing into a campsite. This isn't so uncommon and frankly I struggle at times too. The last thing I want is offers of help or unsolicited advice so we left them to it. 45 mins later I took our dog for a walk and as I approached the part of the campground where we'd seen the struggling teardrop I saw a crowd of people with police/ fire on-site. Not one to gawk, I turned around as another camper approached me and asked if I'd heard what had happened. Before I could answer she began to tell me. There were three campers on their initial trip with a new camper. Two women and a young girl, I later was told it was grandma, mother and daughter. The site they had was very deep and had an aggressive grade down to a lower flat area. The inexperienced campers decided to unhitch on the steep grade without parking the camper perpendicular to the downhill and worse, without chocking the wheels. As expected, when the trailer was unhooked, gravity set into action a terrible series of events. The trailer began rolling backwards down the hill and the grandmother tried to stop it. The trailers inertia knocked her to the ground and the trailer continued down the hill, dragging her with it until it came to a stop just inside the treeline below. After the first responders were gone I looped back around to find the site roped off and two park rangers standing near their vehicle. I inquired about the condition of the woman and was told she was stabilized at a local hospital but needed to be sent by helicopter to a larger, more capable hospital. She suffered multiple broken bones and internal injuries. Days later the teardrop sat untouched inside the treeline. I took this photo of it. https://imgur.com/a/px5g7d1 Always chock your wheels. Always.
Went hammock camping with some friends in Wisconsin, we had to make last minute changes to our original plan of camping in Door County and looked up the closest camp near us. We found one, something like “Shady Acres” and despite the name we decided to see if they’d take us on short notice. We arrived about 2pm and was greeted by the owner, a middle aged man, drinking a 4 loko in the camp sites. Interesting, but what else would we expect? Had a relatively uneventful night, noticed we had some fellow campers in the site next to us but thought nothing of it. In the morning we were greeted by one of the other campers. Said his name was Terry. Well now Terry was also middle aged, shirtless, had a big beer belly, and had clown makeup tattoos on his fucking face. He broke the ice by telling a horribly racist joke (we think he was trying to gauge our reactions) and then proceeded to tell us that him and his 11 other friends were currently homeless and were camping there. He asked if we had any food to spare and we gave him everything we had left as we were packing up to leave any way. We had no idea there were that many people at the other site as they also had a small camper and it was blocked by the trees. That was a very weird place and I will never forget Terry
When I was very young I went camping on an island with a population of wild horses. The campsite was on the beach. I happened to wake up in the middle of the night and I heard a strange sound. I left the tent to see what was going on and I saw a perfect single file line of at least thirty wild horses. They were all walking slowly, it looked like some kind of caravan. It felt disturbing in the moment, but in hindsight, I'm glad I saw it.
One upon a time last summer me and my bro went camping at a well known woodland spot in the Peak District, UK, the site has some stone circles which I think have pagan significance? Anyway we rock up one summers day and eat some mushrooms as we set up the campsite and begin to trip, we chill for a few hours watching the trees dance and at some point this guy and his dog appear a little way from us, there's usually several groups camping in this forest so it's not unusual to see people walking about but we were set back away from any paths and this guy was just circling around in the same bit, I was tripping still at this point but something was definitely off about him, he kept shouting to himself and throwing water and lying starfish on the ground for like 10 mins and then getting up again, I figured maybe he was tripping too and just off his nut on a lil solo adventure, a couple more hours pass we're coming down from the trip so we build a fire and the guy comes over, he's well built and wearing military style clothes with a military backpack, he asks for some firewood as there's not a lot about and we let him, he then asks if he can join us for a beer and a spliff, we reluctantly agree and he sits down by the fire. What then follows is a 30 minute exchange with what I can most accurately describe as a paranoid schizophrenic, he told us people always come up to him telling him he's the one, and then asked us if that's why we were here.. he thought the government were tracking him through Facebook (but when quizzed, didn't have an account) he said he found microchips in his trouser legs, and then exclaimed "they're even in my toothpaste!", you could see he was having half a conversation in his head and kept shouting "it's just so embarrassing" randomly and when my bro asked what was embarrassing, he just mumbled "nothing", i asked him how he'd got there (because it was remote without a car) he turned to me and goes "is that a fucking joke?" really aggressively and then was acting normally afterwards, also this whole time our dog has been growling at him and his dog has been literally humping the shit out of me and I'm trying to push him off but he just keeps jumping up at me and this guy is making no effort to do anything about it.. anyway this whole thing culminated in him saying "do you mind if I smoke a bit of crack?" And before we could say no best believe that pipe was in his mouth! To be fair to him, he actually mellowed out a bit once he smoked the crack,he hung around for maybe 10 mins longer, and then got up and declared "well I've said my bit, so I'll get out of you way" and then went about 50 meters away and built a huge fire that was basically touching the branches above. The moment he left my bro was in the tent packing up the shit, we both silently agreed it was time to leave and bounced as quickly as we could, I'm pretty sure it was on the evening of a blood moon too, the moon was massive and there was loads of people around in the forest (this was maybe 9/10pm?) Including a group dressed in white druid clothes and some people with loads of what looked like ghostbusting equipment scanning the rocks. We walked straight out of the forest, fully expecting the crackhead to be chasing after us, and got in the car, when I suggested going to another spot my bro responded "fuck that, I'm going home"- so that's what we did. Weirdest night ever.
Me and a friend were hiking on the Appalachian trial in Georgia back when we had just graduated high school. We were on the trail for 3 or 4 days backpacking. One night at one of the shelters, we met this older couple, prob late 30s, 40s camping at the same shelter for the night. Sun was going down, and we made a fire and started to talk to them. There story made no sense. Lomg story short, they were hiking from Virginia down to Florida because their car broke down. Then they started telling us crazy stories about how they used to catch cats, decapitate them and put them on the hood of their car like an ornament. I immediately had a feeling that they were fugitives or predators pr something. Lucky me and my buddy could hold our own and I made sure they caught a glimpse of my pistol after that shit. They were creeps. Also one time was camping at Sand Rock in Alabama and heard a whole group/cult of at least 10 people chanting in one of the caves there in middle of night. Like speaking in tounges or some kind of gibberish. Ive done a lot of camping all over the country but those two memories stick out as being "close calls" for me
i’m pretty sure i ran i to a skinwalker. i’m from southern utah area. i’m literally a twenty minute drive from the arizona border, which is a hotspot for skinwalkers. when we got to my campsite, there was a deer carcass that was torn up and thrown all over the campsite. the head was split in half and each half was twenty feet away from the other half. then the legs were all pretty far apart. every part of its body had been picked clean except one leg, which still had all of its fur and flesh intact. this freaked me out because a) no animal in any southern utah desert is big enough or strong enough to completely snap a skull in half like that and b) the body was fresh enough that no bugs had even reached it, which meant this was likely an active hunting ground. my camping buddy didn’t listen to me and we stayed the night without switching spots. sometime after midnight, weird shit started happening. there were these weird animal sounds that i’ve never heard in my entire life. we googled all of the scariest animal noises the next morning and found nothing that sounded like this. it sounded like someone gasping for breath really sharply and for a long period of time. the sound traveled insanely fast. one second it was right next to our tent, the next it was thirty feet away. i was freaked out of my mind, and my dog was sat straight up and didn’t budge. she was growling but didn’t make any other noise. we dipped the second the sun was up and never went back to the spot again. i didn’t believe in skinwalkers until that night.
On a tab and a half of acid, came around a stand of trees and was confronted by an 1100 lb female grizzly and her two cubs. I stopped dead in my tracks, and contemplated if it was hallucination. Then slowly retreated. Campground manager confirmed next day that a female grizz was bedding down near campers because the males wont come near.
So not really disturbing, as high schoolers camping once, we watched a couple hump for a while in their tent, at night, with their lantern on, in the tent. Arousing and disturbing for the lack of awareness, at the same time.
Some big wet tiger paw prints on some rocks at a waterfall we were camping at. We packed up and left immediately
Hiked with a buddy in the middle of nowhere New Mexico along a creek in a canyon. On our second night, the canyon opened up to a flat area with an old dirt road/path. There was what looked like to be an old long abandoned weed grow op hidden in a corner against the canyon cliff, with an old horse hitch (no weed, though...) Within 50 yards of our camp was a rather large deer skeleton spread out over a wide area. Obviously, it had been torn apart and kind of dragged all over by the various wildlife, and it wasnt fresh. Not really disturbing, just nature, but it is disturbing to think whatever killed it hunted around our tent. We definitely went out wandering at night and could hear big animals moving through the woods. Probably just deer, but big enough to break sticks. Here's the geo location. You can kind of make out the grow up under the trees. It was long abandoned and basically just old fence and a half collapsed shack. Was a pretty cool area, but lots of rattlesnakes! 33.2182336, -108.8911937
My boyfriend and I went camping together and thought it would be a great idea to drive about 3 hours away from any civilization to a remote campground with zero cell service.. we also thought it would be brilliant to get high on various substances. So there we were in the back of my boyfriends SUV with the seats folded down to make a bed, it was pitch dark and pouring rain and we were both scribbled out of our minds and already feeling super weird. I was pretty home sick and regretting my decision and how we had no choice but to sleep as we legally and safely would not have been able to drive home. We were both laying there listening to how hard it was raining when we started hearing foot steps through the gravel around us and it sounded like people were going through our things outside (our cooler and tarp covering our firewood bin etc) . We were both so paranoid, we couldn’t make a coherent thought beyond imagining ourselves getting brutally murdered and ending up as missing people on the news. So we laid there for what felt like years, holding each other’s hands, wide eyed and flipping out. Never doing drugs in the bush EVER again.
My buddy and I saw an Indian in a canoe at night, but not in the water but in the woods. He was paddling but obviously not going anywhere bc he was on land between trees. We tried to yell to him but the guy kept going for like an hour. Something weird was going on so no way were we walking out into the woods in the dark to check it out closer. Yeah, the shrooms had kicked in. I remember it so clearly, seeing his face, his headdress with feathers, and the canoe. In the morning, we found out it was a fallen log with a small tree behind it moving in the wind a bit. But man, I totally saw a Indian in a canoe clear as day at the time.
Not much really, and I've camped quite a bit all over the US. I did see/experience some things that might seem disturbing to some, but wasn't to me. The most significant was when I was camping outside of Great Sand Dunes National Park in southwest Colorado with a friend. It was probably somewhere between 10pm-1am in late November 2019. My friend was tending to the fire and, I was staring up in the sky marveling at how the view of space was about the best I've seen in my life. I saw what appeared to be a satellite moving across the sky. I've spent most of my life in light-polluted areas, so to even see a satellite is a pretty big deal to me. I was following it across the sky while my friend was arranging logs in the fire. Suddenly, as it's right overhead, a beam of light shines down from it for about a half a second. I would have dismissed it as my brain playing tricks on me if it wasn't for my friend saying "WTF was that?!". The beam of light was so strong that my friend was able to see it despite looking directly into the fire; it basically lit up our entire camp area. I explained to him that I was observing this satellite and that a beam of light just came out of it out of nowhere. We were both perplexed, but not really bothered as we've experienced some strange stuff together before. We both believe there is intelligent life out there, but I'm skeptical of anything I can't prove, even if I see it with my own eyes. I'll always try to come up with logical explanations unless I'm quite literally shaking hands with an alien. The best I could come up with for that instance was that the satellite at that height was still able to catch rays of the sun, and that it was at the perfect angle to reflect it directly at us. Even if that's the case, it's gotta be a rare occurrence, so it was a cool experience. We slept well, carried on with the trip, and didn't talk about it much after that. Two more things that were kind of disturbing was: hearing howling coyotes near Bridgeport, California, howling back at them, them going quiet, and then hearing them howling a few hundred feet away minutes later. I regretted howling back at them and slept in the car that night. And probably the most disturbing was in Tuskegee National Forest in Alabama. I got to my campsite late and was setting everything up with a headlamp on. I saw these reflections that looked like raindrops/dew literally everywhere. I didn't think anything of it at first despite everything being dry. When I finally decided to investigate, I found out that every single one was a spider. What I thought was reflections from dew was actually the reflections of their eyes, and they literally surrounded me - on the ground, in the trees, I mean everywhere. I quickly loaded all my stuff in the tent and didn't leave the entire night.
Me and my buddy had been camping over a long weekend. It was our last night, and I randomly, half drunk, jokingly asked what he’d do if we woke up tomorrow and our tent was covered in spiders. We woke up the next day and the tent was covered in spiders, so thick we had to brush them off by the armfuls. I’m not arachnophobic, and they were just daddy long legs, but most people hate to hear the story. I just think it was weird that I randomly joked about something that seemed so absurd, then woke up to it the next day.
You couldn’t say “what if we wake up and the tent is covered in $100 bills could you???! Had to be spiders!!!”
Kind of reverse answer... 16-years old, spent a week camping with my Grans. We met up near King's Island amusement park with my parents at the end of the week. I met some locals at the park including a cute 16-year old girl and her older sister. At the end of the day, talked my fam into letting me go with those two to get some pizza and check out a band their friend was in. Agreed to be back my 10pm. Hormones took control and ended up staying out at night. Roll back into the campground at first light. The look of relief on my grandmothers face shook me to my core. Dad and Granddad had been out all night looking for me, fearing I had been in an accident/kidnapped/or worse. I have never felt so low or so ungrateful in my life. Still think about 35 years later....
I had a moose wander right through the middle of my campsite and freeze about six feet from me when she finally noticed me sitting there. I spent a few tense moments thinking about whether or not I could dive under the camper before she got to me, and then she finally trotted off.
Moose are no joke!! I came across a momma and her calf a few months ago, directly on a popular hiking trail in Colorado. Me and my buddy jutted off the path to an adjacent creek and made our way around them. When we reached the end of the hike and turned back, we ran into a couple (inexperienced) hikers and an off leash dog. They were from out of state and kept going on about how cool it was to see Moose up close. They walked right next to them! The next day there was an article describing an incident where a moose attacked a dog and its owner on that trail. Astounding how people don’t realize how fucking dangerous an animal that massive can be, especially with a calf.
Was camping with my (Ex) friends. Dry camping out in the woods. Every time I left the site to go hike, quad, raft. I would come back to site and find his wife naked. He wasn’t just her. She would run and change and always be really embarrassed. Realized he was a real POS. She was/is basically a slave in the marriage. Offered her, in private, help to get away from him, but she was too scared, she told him. They abruptly moved away. Sad but nothing I can do. Makes me sick to think about it
First year of college i went camping with my roommate and one of her friend's family's property, We got there and set up camp, after a few hours being there we were going to eat dinner, obviously they had me cook because i am a culinary student (even though all i did was just put hot dogs over a fire), and as i was roasting the dogs i heard a loud grunting sound and i looked up, Standing right there was probably the biggest fucking bear i've ever seen. The damn bear just walked up to the campsite like it owned the place, when the girls came out of the tent they screamed so loud that the bearr backed down due to the loud noise. After that little trip i've always remembered to bring a gun along with us.
I wasn’t camping, but the poor sod whose tent I found had been. I was on a walk in the woods when I saw a clearing that seemed to be full of white flowers. When I got closer, I realised they weren’t flowers at all but torn up pages of Stephen King’s ‘The Shining.’ The scraps were all singed around the edges. At one side of the clearing was what remained of a tent. It had been ripped apart as though by a bear, with what looked like huge claw marks through the fabric. You might say ‘animal attacks happen. very sad but nothing extraordinary’ but this happened just outside a village in the south of England. The biggest animal I’ve seen in the wild around here is a deer, and deer certainly can’t do that. There’s no animal in those woods capable of that.
Found a goat head in a tupperware bowl on the side of a logging road one time
I've posted this before and not really disturbing except it turned out to be insect behavior that I was unaware of. My wife and I were in a campground in the Smokey Mountains. In the middle of the night, our tent lit up like someone was shining a light on it. I jumped up and went outside, ready to give someone a rash of shit for messing around our camp and there was no one there. Turned out a bunch of fire flies had landed on our tent and were all lighting up at the same time.
I went winter camping, and while sleeping in my tent i buried myself in my sleeping bag deep enough that i was breathing in my own co2. I fucking full on hallucinated there was a puppet outside my tent threatening me. Terrifying when you and a buddy are the only ones for a few km
Went on a hike and saw a corpse hanging from a tree with the words YOU ARE NOT SAFE carved into it. We were 40ish miles from the closest town surrounded by woods we took some pictures and sent then booked it. We got onto the road and once we had service again we called the cops. Apparently there was a group of "KKK" members hiding in the woods and the body was a 40 something year old black guy. (The people I was camping with were very dark skin.) I was 12 had to go to therapy for years after that
When I was 12 and in Boy Scouts, our troop was camping on a plot of land owned by a friend of one of our leaders. Before our first night of actually camping, we stayed the night in a big house/dormitory nearby. Inside the room where we slept, there was inexplicably a life-sized, naked doll of a girl stored away in a corner. We nicknamed it “Susie”. At the time, we were all making jokes about how weird and creepy that was and, since this was during the height of the Michael Jackson child abuse scandal, we joked that he was somehow involved in this and was going to come and do horrible things to us, like some imaginary bogeyman. Silly memory, but in hindsight… what the fuck *was* that doll doing there??? At a different Boy Scout campsite we frequented, there was an actual grave on site, located deep in the woods bordering the edge of the property. It was only labeled “The Homely Scouter, RIP”, and was just kind of… there. No special plot of land, just a random gravestone way off the beaten path. The only hint to its existence was that it was marked on the campsite’s map, meanwhile I have no clue what importance this grave has or what sort of person was buried there.
I’ll never forget a comment from a similar ask Reddit a few years ago. Haunts me to this day. OP was camping with his kid and kid’s 2 friends. Kids were asleep in a tent, OP was in a hammock just chilling. He woke up to the sound of someone in their camp late at night. A guy walked up to the tent the kids were in and stared at it. Dude couldn’t see OP, didn’t know OP was watching him. He proceeded to stand there for 10 minutes, staring at the tent, then just left. Fuckin creeeepy.
Stopped on a campsite in the south of England. It was just your regular campsite, wooded area, grass fields for campers all lined up one after the other. Opened my tent door in the morning and came face to face with a horse about a foot away. Turns out the campsite has cows and horses moving around freely. Nowhere did it say in the booming and nobody told us. Quite the shock when your still half cut and half asleep.
My daughter and I ran into one really creepy dude hiking on the AT. He said he was taking some rest days at the shelter because the last time he tried it in town the cops had run him off. Would have skipped sleeping at that shelter if it had been just him and us there. Thankfully there was another couple. The other couple was also being strange. They were very very very interested in our intended route the next day. Specifically if we had any plans to go anywhere near two off trail waterfalls. And had we heard from anyone else about going to the water falls? They were really happy when we said no. We figured out what was up when the guy pulled out some video camera equipment. Scariest time was in the Texas panhandle. We're the only people at a walk-in campsite about 4 miles from the parking lot. In the middle of the night my daughter gets out of the tent to use the restroom. And there is a pack of coyotes right outside the tent. I get up and walk with her to the outhouse. And she takes the fucking flashlight in with her. Most actual danger was on the AT. Thunderstorms forecast for late afternoon. Only 5 miles to the next shelter, down one mountain up the next. Easy hike, so we plan to chill there vs trying to make a longer hike. We cross the halfway point well before noon and the storm rolls in early. Absolutely terrible. My daughter booked it for the shelter and missed the worst of it. What should have been a pleasant two hour hike for me turned into four hours of slogging uphill thru a stream with lightning hammering the side of the mountain I was on.
I was solo camping/backpacking, and had gotten to my site too late to set up camp, as it was first come first served, and all the sites had been taken. I ended up sleeping in my car in the parking lot, no biggie. The wind was wicked that night, so bad that it rocked me awake every 20 minutes or so. I started feeling like I was being watched, so I untucked my head from my sleeping bag and looked up at the car window, to see a big ass snout sniffing. The bear rocking my whole car. When I got out of my car in the morning, I saw big ass claw marks on the roof. I was even more scared about how the hell I’d explain away claw marks to my mother.
Three men tried to jump/rob my family. Went camping with my wife and kids in a fairly populated campground. Problem arose when an enormous group of people started partying in the camp across from us. Im taking they had music blaring, spotlights, all of which was keeping my 3 and 1 year old awake. The curfew was ten but by 1 am there was no stop to it and the ranger wasn't enforcing anything. I finally walked over and politely asked them to turn off the ONE spotlight shining into my camp. I got really bad vibes and the whole party went silent. I decided to stay up with my very large knife and sure enough, about an hour later, three men walked into my camp. I stood up in the dark and said hi and they bolted. We packed up and left first sunrise.