Let's hear your stories of creepy things that happened to you while hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, working in the wilderness, etc.  Military guys, please include your stories too.

The theme of the thread can be "anything weird, unusual, or creepy that happened to you in the wilderness."

Bring on your Sasquatch, your Skinwalker, or what have you.

Me, I don't have a whole lot.

But once, while I was camping in the wilderness in Washington State many years ago, I woke up around 2 in the morning with the weirdest feeling that something was watching my campsite from the nearby woods.  You know how you just get that feeling sometimes?  Pretty spooky feeling, as I recall at the time.

Now since I don't have much else from personal experience to start the thread with, here's a link to some strange audio tracks recorded in the woods, to set the proper mood for this thread.

Weird Sounds

Creepy stories about the wilderness.  We know you got 'em, and we want to hear 'em.

Let's roll.

Sasquatch lives. He's just misunderstood....

I got sick and shat myself once. That's pretty terrifying miles from civilization.

tag

Nothing crazy here.

Hearing a pack of coyotes fight over a meal 50 yards from my tent was a little disconcerting.

These threads have some good stuff. I like to read them in the dark around 2am

http://www.ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=1&f=5&t=762310&page=1

http://www.ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=1&f=5&t=1047961

The creepiest I have had so far is hammocking and hearing something move right underneath me..

Neither creepy nor scary, once I realized what it was, but a group of javelina came into my camp about 1 AM once, when I was camping in southwest Texas. They bumped into my canvas tent a few times while snuffling around searching for food.  

I wish I had a cool story,I've been around brown bear,black bear,mountain lion,bobcat,javalina,rattler and I've got nothing.

I was 22yo and I was out in the San Juan National Forest in Colorado all by myself, no one around for at least 10 miles(no shit).  I had a topper on my truck and was sleeping on a mattress in the bed.  I woke up to something, two legged, swear to God, pacing around my truck and breathing hard. I could hear the footsteps on the gravel around my truck and I was scared shit-less.  I never sat up to look out for fear it would fuck my world up.  That experience gives me goose-bumps to this day.  Something was out there and it wasn't a raccoon.  

There's a place a couple of hours fromm here where we camp every fourth of July. We always set our tent up next to this little creek. Not every night, but sometimes while I'm trying to fall asleep, I start to hear things mingled into the sound of the creek, if that makes sense. It usually sounds like voices and sometimes like a party with drums or music. It's really wierd. It doesn't frighten me really, it's just bizarre. My wife says she notices the same thing sometimes. It's a pretty remote area at the end of a dirt road. Sometimes people camp near us, but it's not them. I've gotten up and checked around before and there is nothing nearby making the noises.

I was attacked by a bear.  Looked like this:

The creepiest thing I've had happen to me while in the woods was a bear encounter.  I saw a bear lumbering down the heavily wooded hill I was hiking up.  It must have been about 200 yards to my left and in front of me, and I didn't get a very good look at it.  I had my M91/30 shouldered, and I unslung it very quickly when I realized what I had just seen.  

Not so creepy I guess, and yeah, I'm a city boy.  



I love these threads though.

I used to be in Army ROTC and was tasked with border security for our camp one night (we were out on an FTX).  We did it in shifts, and mine was from 3:30am to 4:00am or something like that.  Anyways, I'm walking around in the middle of the woods, alone, and I hear this ungoldy loud banshee like scream.. it sounded like maybe a couple hundred yards away, but still was unbelievably loud against a quite night.  It did not sound like anything an owl or hawk could have made, it was much too loud and the sound wasn't right.  I mean, it sounded exactly like what I would imagine a banshee screaming sounds like..


Anyways, I was creeped out by that.  Years later I hear from someone that there is a random-ass animal that makes such a noise, but I can't recall what it was.

Was on a pipeline right of way on someone's ranch a while back doing some work and for the first time I saw a swarm of bees.  I was a fairly long way back from the road on foot in some woods by the pipeline cut where they had set up some deer stands etc and at first assumed I was hearing some kind of machine.  Then I saw a black swarm of bees flying around and it was terrifying to behold, but they went along their merry little way and I did not see them again.  Scared some cattle by a stream though which was almost as alarming as the bees themselves because I had not seen the cows in the shade until they started running off.

I think the whole thing was very surreal and more unnerving than the big critters.

Chubacabra.  Very active during the very early morning hours.

Went camping at Camano Island state park with some friends and my new Gen3 night vision. Late at night when all the fires and lights were out I went for a little stroll down a trail then flicked on the the NV and illuminator. Saw two pair of eyes looking back at me. Swept my forward 180 and found six more pair of eyes looking at me. End of trek. Went back to tent and crawled into sleeping bag.

I was backpacking with my brother through Aravaipa canyon in Az. We hiked in on the first day in mid-October and the stream was pretty bare on the banks. During the summer it's covered in thick green grasses and bushes etc. We took particular note of all the different animal tracks along the muddy banks, seeing some large mountain lion tracks several different times. Late that night after a few beers it was pitch black and cloudy inside the canyon... no star or moon light.

The noise from the stream stays pretty consistent and we're talking and getting tired. After a while I start to hear some irregularities in the stream, like something is walking in the water. We both sit and listen and agree that something is most definitely walking through the stream about 100-200 feet away from our camp. Now we start remembering those massive mt. lion tracks... After a minute or so, the stream is sounding regular again... I've used my failing headlamp to see what I could see but couldn't find anything out of the ordinary out near the water.

So I sit back down, and not hearing any more noises we start to talk again. Until a stick breaks 30 feet behind me in the blackness. I immediately start regretting not bringing flamethrowers and grenades with me on the trip and get out my knife (Yeah - like that's gonna do me any good against a full grown mt. lion) My brother grabs a big stick and we both stand up and turn around. My nearly dead headlamp is enough to illuminate a glowing eyeball not 20 feet from where I had been sitting.

My brother then pulls out some crazy portable sun flashlight that he had been carrying and not thinking to use, I guess. About 12-14 javalina start sprinting through our campsite... No scary mt. lions after all. At least not that we saw, I'm sure they were watching us.

Was out camping and I heard a pack of wolves not 100 yards from my camp fighting over something. Later that night I heard them a lot closer to where I was at.

Another time I was deer hunting in Kansas and the sun just went down and I was making my way back to the house. I heard this unholy piercing screech come through the woods. To this day I have no freaking clue what it was but I had my 270 in hand from that point to when I walked through the door.

love creepy stories

I was out hunting antelope down in West Texas once when I came up on a group of pickups. Looked like some sort of shootout happened, with a pickup bed full of cocaine and bodies lying everywhere. I wondered a bit and found a dead body under a tree with a case full of money. Still not sure what I'm going to do with it.

 

You really should go back and help the wounded. Maybe give em some water after dark.

That's a good idea. I'll go back in a bit and post an update in the morning.





 

Myself and 5 others were sitting around a campfire and were about to call it a night. It was one of my first ventures really way into the woods There wasn't a moon and it was dark due to it being near a hardwood bottom. I have always appreciated the security a dog offers, so My female Doberman, Shadow, was there. I notice that something caused her to pick up her head and point her ears.
  After a couple of sniffs, her ears go back and she starts to give a low growl. This low growl turns into a  mad dog snarl and she begins to slowly turn her head to the left as if what ever is out there is circling our campfire. By this time pistols have been drawn and a long arms taken off of safe. My dog walks to a point a couple of feet from our circle and continues to growl and and slowly swivel her head, tracking whatever it was.   After "it" made its circle she stopped. To this day I don't know what was out there.   Scared me , that's for sure.

In the late 1980's I was at Subic Bay naval base in the Phillipines attending a jungle survival course. I stayed in the Marine barracks. There were three US Marine security force companies that protected the base. At the time it had the distinction of being the only location in the world where the U.S. military was regularly conducting live combat patrols, in this case against the Communist New People's Army who regularly performed incursions into Subic and dropped mortar rounds onto the Charlie Company outpost in the hills.

When I was there I overheard some security force company Marines talking about the "Red eye". Over the next few days I heard this term several times. I finally asked one of them about it. This is what he told me. Back then there were very isolated clearings in the jungle on the perimeter of the base where guard towers were located. Each guard tower was manned by a Marine with a rifle and PRC-77 radio. There was one additional Marine on the ground at the base of the tower.

One night about a month earlier the Sergeant of the Guard recieved a radio call from one of the isolated posts. The tower Marine reported that he has seen possible movement in the jungle near his tower, The Sergeant instructed him to dispatch his ground sentry for a closer look. A short time later the tower Marine called back and said his ground sentry described what looked like a "Red eye" approaching the clearing from the jungle.

A minute later the tower Marine called frantically and reported his ground sentry was down and his position was being observed. The Sergeant dispatched the Corporal of The guard with the security alert team in a Humvee and asked who was in the towers perimeter. The Marine responded he didn't know and that he could just see one red eye approaching his position. A short time later one last frantic radio call came in from the tower. The Marine screamed "It's climbing the fucking ladder". The Sergeant responded who is climbing the ladder. The last transmission from the guard tower was a screaming message "I Just See One Red Eye!". The radio went dead. A few seconds later the Sergeant of the Guard heard M-16 rifle fire from deep in the jungle.

When the Security alert team arrived to the tower about 15 minutes later they found the tower clearing deserted. The floor of the tower post was covered in blood, bits of uniform, and several expended 5.56 cartidge cases. The was another spot near the edge of the clearing covered with blood next to a M-16A2 rifle laying on the ground. There was a blood trail leading into the jungle but no sign of the two Marines. At daylight  Negrito indian trackers were brought in to follow the trail and search for the Marines. After a short time the trail just vanished. The Negrito indians said the demon that lives in the jungle took them. They had a name for it. I cannot recall the name but their legends describe it as a beast with one red eye. The Two Marines were never seen again.

'When I was little, we found a man. He looked like - like, butchered. The old woman in the village crossed themselves... and whispered crazy things, strange things. "El Diablo cazador de hombres." Only in the hottest years this happens. And this year, it grows hot. We begin finding our men. We found them sometimes without their skins... and sometimes much, much worse. "El cazador trofeo de los hombres" means the demon who makes trophies of men. '

double tap

We're all gonna die.

Bump

Had a deer lease down near Alice, TX.
We kept a re-supply trailer at the camp area with some barrels of corn on it. Would use the corn to load the feeders around the lease. Corn got spilled during transfers.
At night this huge ass herd of javalinas (peccaries) would invade the camp to eat the spilled corn.
Not really a problem unless you had to go outside to pee.
Little motherfuckers sounded like ARFCOM at a free food buffet.

I heard a sound like the one at the Ohio part on the video when I grew up in Ohio.  Camping at Blue Bank Lake in Preble (?) county.  Thought it was a fire station a long way off but hearing that video brought back the hair raising memory.



Like a mournful wail.
 

This has happened to me a few times while hunting in northern MN. I could hear drums beating and what sounded like indians singing / chanting. Different areas on different times, usually in mid-afternoon on partly cloudy to sunny days in the fall (Oct-Nov). I know that there are no Indian pow wows going on in the areas. One of the times my buddy was hunting with me, but about 1km away from me, and he heard it also.

Doing some wetlands delineation on company property. There was an area we called "tunnel town" due to the deer paths created over probably decades through the thickest rhododendron patch where sunlight never fully touches the ground. It was a huge forest of this stuff and I've had to track arrow shot deer down in there twice. It's an eerie place with the most clean cut 3 ft. ft tunnels through this stuff giving everything 100% cover and protection. It's a freaky place.

I'm working, dragging myself sideways on the ground, trying to go @400 yds to my next point. My S&W 686 is hanging up on everything and I can see about 5 ft in front of me. The smells of earth, the muskiness of deer crap when crossing tunnels and the stuffiness of no air moving down in there was heavy. These rhodos were 10 ft high and just a tangled mess. Everything was constantly wet. I found the little hidden creek in there, 4 ft wide with shallow pools full of native brown trout. I fish it further down stream where you have to hack your way into it. I had never seen this part for good reason. So, because this is work and I should be done by 3:00pm, I don't have a light or any real supplies. I'm 1/4 mile or less off the main road behind my office in a area I hunt.

While sweating, cussing and untangling myself, I busted something out twice. I believe it was the same animal. I was as close as 5 ft away from it twice and belly crawling with no access to my firearm. Bear I thought to myself with the smell that was left behind. The muskiness seemed heavier and I found kick marks in the mud. Big ones. It happened again after about another 75 yards too. Scared the shit out of me. That means something because I spent 6 years on PA's bear program. I've been around hundreds of bears. It's like this one was waiting for me and wouldn't move until I was right up on it. I hate habituated bears, but this one might have just wanted to see what it was that was stupid enough to come in there after it. Being in that situation and that position made me feel very vulnerable. I did not like that.

I did get severley turned around and very pissed off because I knew I was less than 1/4 mile from the main road but couldn't hear cars due to the dense rhodos. I had to wait until nightfall because I knew that they would turn on the lights to our ski area for maintenance gearing up for the upcoming season. With the glow of those lights, I should be able to go that direction and hit the main road.

So there I sat, listening to this "thing" move around me all the while stuck deep in "tunnel town". It was unnerving to say the least because he wasn't about to leave his cover and it's now getting dark. I sat in the middle of a tunnel with pistol out, just listening to this bear move through the rhodos. The sound down there made it seem a lot louder than it should have been.

Once it got dark and the lights came on, I felt and dragged my way out towards the light struggling for every foot of ground. The only break was when I crossed a tunnel or found one running the length for a while. This patch is so small, it seems almost silly to get stuck in it. I got out to the road all pissed off at 10:30pm.

All these many years backpacking and wilderness paddling and the freakiest thing I ever had happen was right behind my offic, 1/4 mile off a main road.

Same here.  The first time I heard a pack of coyotes in the middle of the night it was pretty freaky.



 

Same here.  Heard it nearing dark on the Buffalo River in AR.  Sent a chill up my spine.





 

Anybody in Florida have any stories about witches around the middle to middle east part of the state?

Well, I went out with a couple in college, but other than that...

ETA:  Oh wait, you said Witches!

 What good is a dead body going to do you?

I was in S. Texas this January deer hunting (way up in a 15ft stand on a rise), and watching a doe through some binos about 40 yards off. She bolts, and a few seconds later, another doe appears right where the other one was, looks back, and takes off. At this point, I am thinking "WTH" so I come off the binos for a look around. I see something blue moving about 30 yards to my right where the does were. I glass the area with the binos, and the blue thing is a big mexican dude wearing a Dallas Cowboys jacket. I watch him for a couple seconds, and it turns out that he is a member of a group of about  illegals.
     
They're probably 50 yards off me at this point, and they haven't noticed me yet. When they get to about 40 yards, one of them sees me in the deer stand, and *YELLS* for them all to get down. Big dumb Cowboys fan just freezes, and continues to stand looking at the stand with a deer in the headlights look. (I speak spanish, and I could understand what they were yelling at him). A couple seconds later, a small guy grabs him and drags him down.

It's something of a standoff at this point, and it lasts for a minute or so. We were just staring at each other, and I decided something had to give. I shout "OY!! I SEE YOU!" pause "PASALE!!! Get the fuck outta here!" They took a moment to mull it over, all stood off, and started walking northeast.

It was at this point that the small guy that had pulled Cowboys fan down got mouthy and said (rough translation) "Don't you dare turn us in". The told him to shut up, and kept moving.


Lessons learned:

Don't leave the pistol at home next time.
4 rounds of .30-06 didn't feel nearly adequate.
Don't leave the HAM radio in the truck.

Try hearing that pack 80 yards away between you and the road at around dark+30 when you are about to climb out of you tree, pack your climber, and have to walk 300 yards through river swamp back to your 4 wheeler when you are bowhunting. I didn't shit for 2 days.

 

My parents house is located on Potowatomi ceremonial grounds, supposedly there are burial mounds in the woods. When they were kicked off the land by settlers they cursed the land. I never had any outright weird experiences there, but once the sun goes down the woods have such an ominous feel. It feels like you're being watched, and the woods grow so dark that they almost seem to swallow the yardlights. During the day it isn't so bad, but there is still acertain stillness to them. Out of all the places I've ever been, that is the one place that puts me on edge.

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HINT:  LOOK AT YOUR AVATAR!!!!!!!!

I was out in the woods one day and saw TRG.  I ran for my life.

I'm sleeping sound as a log when a blood curdling scream sends me halfway to the ceiling. I landed with my .45 in my hand and went outside to check it out. I live at a 66 acre botanical gardens next to a lake. Between is the access road for the lake, which sometimes attracts various scrotes.
I start creeping around and hear the scream again. I crept in the direction of the sound and noticed movement just ahead.
When I got to within about 30 feet I heard another horrific scream and the figure burst from the bushes at my feet...
It was a motherfuckin' peacock some wise guy had decided to let loose in the gardens. I don't know how I kept from:
1. Shittin' myself.
2. Blowing the fucking bird into scraps.
3. Having a major aneurism.
Peacocks make some of the most spine twisting sounds you'll ever hear in the dead of night.
Fuckers. They're fuckers.

P.S. I hate those fucking fuckers. Fuckers.

a screech owl busting loose close to you, in the woods at night, will certainly get your attention. if you've never heard one, it sounds like a cross between a cougar, and a woman that's been stabbed. scary as crap, if you don't know what it is.––possib ly what some of the above posters have heard. it's definitely blood curdling.

Word in red.

Translate from "Texan" to English please.

This isn't a tag.

SO in